An ancient African proverb imparts wisdom about tackling huge projects: “How does one person eat a whole elephant? One bite at a time.” The Genesis & Job Series is the first bite of Eyewitness Bible Series in tackling the Old Testament.
The most casual reader soon recognizes the majority of the writings of the Old Testament have to do with the history of the Israelites (also known as Hebrews or Jews). Embedded in the Old Testament is a wealth of knowledge about God and his character, books of poetry and proverbs, and a host of prophecies.
In Bibles used by most Protestant Christians, the Old Testament consists of 39 writings, called books. The Eyewitness Bible Series groups these books into three different series:
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Causation or correlation? When you rely on your own experience and judgments, you are always at risk of coming to the wrong conclusion. Job and his friends could see that he had fallen from his high position. Now they wanted to explain why. Without a good explanation, they could not fix his problem. Nor could they protect themselves.
Bildad’s comments in Job 8:3-6 are an example of how he correlated righteousness with prosperity and unrighteousness with punishment. “Does God pervert judgment? Or does the Almighty pervert justice? When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin. But if you seek God earnestly and plead with him, if you are pure and upright, even now he will rouse himself on your behalf and restore you to your prosperous state.”
Bildad and his friends were on very dangerous ground and did not realize it. They were blind to the fact that they had very little information about very important things. They misunderstood the nature of God and even ignored or misinterpreted reality to fit their own views. For instance, Eliphaz started his discussion with this observation, “Consider now: who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?” If Eliphaz had been able to understand, he would have realized he was talking to an upright man who was being destroyed. Surely, they had all seen innocent people perish because of war or other circumstances beyond their control.
Paul – Brian Shoop Japheth – Bryan Chatlien Satan – Christian Heep Job’s Wife – Leticia Magaña Job – Bob Reed Lot – Patrick Arnez Isaac – Tod Upchurch Esau – David Burkhart Rachel – Magdalen Vaughn Reuben – John Ruegsegger Joseph – Blake McNamara Benjamin – Jackson Kelly
