Job 24 Summary - 5 Minute Bible Study

Job 24 Short Summary:

Job asked his friends why God didn’t distribute justice on a regular basis, and why God’s people often didn’t get to see Him judge the wicked? If his friends were right about the way God judged people, Job expected to see God act against sinners on a regular and timely schedule. He challenged them to prove their view of God’s justice, which he knew they couldn’t do.

Job 24 Bible Study

SHORT OUTLINE OF THE BOOK OF JOB

• Job 1-2 – Job is Persecuted by Satan

• Job 3-37 – Job and His Friends Discuss the Reason He is Experiencing Persecution

• Job 38-41 – God Speaks with Job and Reveals His Greatness to Him.

• Job 42 – God Restores What Job Lost

WHEN:

• The date of the writing of Job is unknown and still debated. Some believe it was written during the time of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) or even earlier, while others suspect it was written during the time of Judah’s Babylonian captivity (607-537 B.C.).

• I take the earlier date. The description of Job as the “greatest of all the people of the east” (1:3) and an absence of references to Israel, Jerusalem, and the Temple suggests to me that this book was written early.

KEY CHARACTERS:

• Job – A blameless and upright man who Satan persecuted in an attempt to turn his heart away from God.

• Job’s Friends – Three men who were determined to accuse Job of sin. They were convinced Job’s suffering was God’s judgement on him for his hidden sin.

WHERE:

• Job lived in the land of Uz. Most scholars surmise the land of Uz was in northern Saudi Arabia, either immediately south of the Dead Sea, I the land that would become known as Edom, or immediately east of the Dead Sea, which is today the country of Jordan.

OUTLINE:

• JOB CHALLENGES HIS FRIENDS TO PROVE HE IS WRONG (24:1-25):

  • Job wondered why God didn’t distribute justice on a regular basis, and why God’s people often didn’t get to see Him judge the wicked. If his friends were right about the way God judged people, Job expected to see God act against sinners on a regular and timely schedule.

  • Job brought this up to tear down his friend’s argument. The reality was that judgement didn’t always befall the wicked in a predictable way.

  • There were evil men who cheated people out of their property, stole livestock, and abused the poor, yet no obvious sign of God’s judgement afflicted them.

  • Job asked his friends where justice was for the poor who were forced to serve evil men, for those who went hungry, those who were without clothes, those who worked in the fields of evil men, for those who suffered while their evil employers lived in luxury. Why didn’t God fix those situations immediately if He was as predictable as Job’s friends supposed?

  • What about the rebels against God who walked their streets?

  • What about the murderous thieves who escaped capture?

  • What about the adulterers who concealed their identity to commit their immoralities?

  • What about those who were friends of the darkness and hated the light?

  • According to Job’s friends, they should all be experiencing observable punishments and visible humiliation from God, yet that wasn’t the case.

  • Their lives were as long as everyone else’s, they were as secure on earth as the rest of their rich friends, and they died alongside their righteous contemporaries, all of them being harvested together, as if there was no distinction between them.

  • Job concluded with a challenge to his friends, saying, “If it is not so, who will prove me a liar and show that there is nothing in what I say?” (24:25).

APPLICATION

• Job’s friends and their adherence to the “wisdom” of the day is a good lesson for us about the value and limits of human philosophy.

• The best human reasoning was blind to some very important details in the spiritual realm (see Job 1 and 2) and its blindness led its adherence into many wrong conclusions.

• I know many people, even many Christians, who are enamored with the “great thinkers” of history. They spend as much or more time reading the words of men as they do the words of God.

• While I think great value can be gleaned from some of those men and women, I think it’s equally important to remember that they were blind to many things (as are we). They can’t always be trusted as a source of truth because of their lack of vision into spiritual realities. They may have drawn conclusions that seemed rational in our physical world, but their observations could only extend so far.

• For this reason, I would encourage people to spend more time reading the inspired words of God than the sometimes-uninformed words of men.

• Only God can reveal the true and full nature of things to us.

• I suspect many of us, if we hadn’t been pre-informed by Job 1 and 2 of the cause of Job’s suffering, would also have drawn wrong conclusions about Job’s situation and his character, which should show us how easy it is to be led astray without divine revelation.