Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job at those who are anything but patient, and they quote the ending at people who are nowhere near it. Let me try to read it…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 1179. Wisdom literature occupies a strange and wonderful middle section of the Old Testament, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon, and it is read badly more often than almost any other part of Scripture, precisely because readers bring the wrong expectations to it. Proverbs gets treated as a set of ironclad promises…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 01154. Wisdom literature, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes chief among the poetic and reflective books of the Old Testament, can feel like an odd fit within the larger redemptive story running from Genesis to Revelation, because none of these three books mentions the promised offspring of Genesis 3:15, the covenant with Abraham, or the coming…