Job 27 Summary - 5 Minute Bible Study

Job 27 Short Summary:

After his friends finished speaking, Job remained entirely convinced that he was right and his friends were wrong, not because he was arrogant, but because he felt his arguments bested theirs. They had tried to teach him, but he became their teacher on the nature of God. He said he would go to his grave with his convictions before he admitted they were right. He was convinced agreeing with them would be a great evil, because their view of things warped the nature of God.  

Job 27 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 REFUSED TO AFFIRM SOMETHING HE KNEW WAS WRONG (27:1-12):

  • Job remained completely unconvinced by his friend’s arguments.

  • He remained completely convinced of his own innocence and said he would go to his grave before allowing his friends to guilt him into acknowledging he was being punished by God.

  • “As long as my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils, my lips will not speak falsehood, and my tongue will not utter deceit” (27:3-4).

  • Job felt like the greatest sin and injustice he could commit at this point was to say that his friends were right and to affirm their warped view of God’s justice.

  • He strongly rebuked his friends, calling them the wicked and unrighteous ones. They were false accusers, which was a sin God took very seriously.

  • Up to this point, Job’s friends had assumed the role of teacher, but now Job tells them he is going to teach them and enlighten them on the true nature of God’s justice.  

• THE FATE OF A WICKED MAN WITH GOD (27:13-23):

  • In this section Job describes how God deals with wicked men.

  • This section is tricky to understand because in it Job almost appears to be agreeing with his friends that God always punishes wicked people. It’s almost as if Job had converted to the viewpoint of his friends, but we know that can’t be the case because of what he said previously.

  • Job talks about how God will crush the wicked, destroy their houses, take their riches, afflict them with disease, plague them with terrors, and sweep them away to be remembered no more.

  • I think the best way to understand this section is to see it as Job acknowledging that he could agree with his friends in a sense. Yes, absolutely, God sometimes sends these kinds of punishments on the wicked, and in the end, no wicked person will escape their due judgement. But underlying this acknowledgement is Job’s previous contention that God doesn’t always distribute judgement the way that we expect to see it or on the timeline we expect.

  • Job’s friends spoke of God’s judgements being distributed according to a universal rule. Job denied that uniform distribution, acknowledging that it sometimes happened that way, but not always, and it certainly wasn’t the case that everyone who suffered was under the judgement of God.

  • He had no problem acknowledging the fate that God had stored up for the wicked, he just wouldn’t accept an oversimplified view of how it happened.  

APPLICATION

• Sometimes the worst response to conflict is to go along to get along.

• Job absolutely refused to accept his friend’s viewpoint because he thought it warped God’s nature, and he wasn’t willing to come to a compromise with them just to end the conflict.

• Some people are so conflict-averse that they will do almost anything to end an argument and get back to peace.

• Some people will forfeit almost any position when someone opposes them because they consider conflict to be the worst thing in the world.

• In recent years, we’ve seen churches compromise key tenants of the Gospel because the culture has deemed them controversial.

• It isn’t uncommon for members of churches fall in line with unbiblical doctrines that distort God’s church because they don’t want open conflict with other members who support the erroneous doctrines.  

• We’ve been trained to think conflict is the opposite of virtue, when in fact, conflict is often the guardian of virtue.

• God isn’t described as being at war with Satan because conflict is a bad thing.

• When Christians refuse to embrace necessary conflict, they hand Satan ground that God called them to fight for. Imagine an army that refused to engage the enemy army but instead just surrendered to avoid conflict at all costs.

• Jesus was a man of peace, but that didn’t mean His ministry was free of conflict. He was always at odds with those who opposed the truth.

• Blessed are the peacemakers (Mat 5:9) but blessed also are the soldiers who engage in the necessary personal conflicts to put the good fight of faith to Satan when he tries to take what belongs to the Lord.