Mon May 26

Listen up, little ones

Especially for the littles in your household.

Listen for the names Jesus and Pilate.

Reading

Job 38:1-15—Who?

Keys for kids

Also for the littles. Young households might choose, after Keys for Kids, to go directly to praise and prayer.

God speaks to Job from a whirlwind.
God tells Job to get ready to answer Him.
God then asks Job a whole bunch of questions.

Questions

(Some read the ?s before the notes/ ask them after.)

What do you think the whirlwind was?
What were some of the questions God asked Job?
What did Job answer?

Notes

(Today’s Notes are from a commentary on Job by Derek Thomas) A storm is brewing from which God speaks (38:1). This is a favourite way by which God makes himself known in the Old Testament. Elihu has already anticipated it (37:1–5, 22). More importantly, it is in response to Job’s cry, ‘Let the Almighty answer me’ (31:35). And what strikes us immediately is not so much what God says, but what he does not say. There is no attempt to answer Job’s questions [re:] his suffering, and no hint that Job has been caught up in a cosmic struggle with Satan. Instead we are taken on a tour of the created order: the heavens and then the earth. And in what at first seems a gross trivialization of the problem, Job is asked to consider the hippopotamus! [The Behemoth in many translations.]

Here is a man who has lost his money, his children, his health, whose marriage is now in serious trouble and his social standing at rock-bottom, and he is told to think about the hippo! Is God serious? Would any of us dare to treat one so needy and in pain with such detachment? But a more careful study reveals a gracious mind at work.

For the first time since the opening prologue, the text of Job includes God’s covenant name, Jehovah, or more accurately ‘Yahweh’ (38:1, ‘LORD’). Whatever else may be true, God wants us who read this book to be aware that he has not abandoned Job, nor will he, nor can he. And why not? Because he is bound by a covenant which he has made.

Swedish Method questions

See the Monday reading for meaning of the symbols.

Praise

Psalm 99b, 84a

Prayer

Ask God to help you trust him in all things.
Pray for a specific application from yesterday's sermons.
Pray for a member of our church, for your family, and for a non-Christian friend/family member.

Notes this week are drawn in part from commentaries by John Calvin, William Hen-driksen, Kent Hughes, Derek Thomas, Philip Graham Ryken, Christopher Ash, the Theo-logical Dictionary of the Old and New Testaments (TDOT, TDNT) and notes from the CSB Study Bible, and the Reformation Study Bible (RSB).