Was Job’s Blamelessness Enough?

Transcript:

EG = Eric Gagnon

WB = Wendy Blight

Wendy Blight: Hello, friend. Welcome to Week 6 of our Job study, When the Hurt Feels Hopeless: How God Meets Us in Our Pain Even When We Don’t Know the Answers. And today I’m joining you from our Proverbs 31 studio in Charlotte, North Carolina. And, y’all, I’m extra excited because today, my teammate, mentor and friend Eric Gagnon is here with me. Eric and I work together on a lot of projects. And what I love is that I always gain fresh insights on God’s Word when I sit under his teaching. I know it’s gonna happen again today, Eric, as you teach us about righteousness in a fresh and creative way, focusing on Job and his clothing. And I’m especially excited that you’ll share how we’ll see Jesus in this part of Job’s story. But before we begin, I’ll share our Week 6 Major Moments.

● Job 26 | Job denounced his friends’ counsel.

● Job 27 | Job defended his innocence and integrity.

● Job 28 | Job reflected on the nature of wisdom and where one finds it.

● Job 29 | Job gave his final defense.

● Job 30 | Elihu rebuked the three friends for not giving Job an adequate explanation.

OK, Eric, we’re ready for your lesson.

Eric Gagnon: Thank you, Wendy. And thanks again for that generous intro. You all are always very kind to me. Thanks for having me. And I want to start out with a question. Is it just me or have you ever put on a big new coat or jacket in the wintertime and felt like it boosted your confidence a little? Maybe because of how much you liked it or how much you felt like it helped your appearance?

WB: Well, Eric, I was gifted my grandmother’s fur coat. And it’s so beautiful. And when I was a little girl, I remember her wearing it to church and to these fancy parties. And so, it means so much for me to have it. But not just because of the beauty of it and how I feel pretty in it. But because she is the one in our family who prayed for me to know Jesus from the time I was a little girl. And I can remember sitting at her feet, literally, when she sat in this rocking chair. And she would read me stories from the Bible. And she would always share with me answered prayer. And so that coat reminds me … and I remember that the call God has in my life now, I truly believe, is because of those prayers she prayed. And that time she spent with me at the feet of her rocking chair.

EG: Wow, that is a far better illustration than I expected. It plays really well into this. I have a nice black wool jacket my dad bought me. And I wear it on the coldest days in the wintertime. It has a big collar in the back, and I kind of feel like Sherlock Holmes or something when I’m wearing it. And I gotta be honest, sometimes it’s given me a little confidence boost. But really, it’s a poor source … I mean, mine’s the opposite kind of illustration. It’s a poor source of confidence, because really, that coat is gonna fade away. There’s no special meaning behind it. But today we’re going to discuss this topic, really, of what it means to be clothed in righteousness and how that is what should bring us confidence. This past week, we covered Job Chapters 26 through 32. And in these seven chapters, I counted and the word “righteousness” is used seven times. Which is a cool thing … you know, seven – number of completion. And today, I want us to zoom in on one verse. It’s from Job 29:14. And Job says, “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban.” So Job here is reminiscing about life before God allowed him to be afflicted in the way that he was. And many scholars believe, from these passages, that Job was probably an actual legal judge of some kind.

Job 29:7-9 says, “When I went out to the gate of the city, when I prepared my seat in the square, the young men saw me and withdrew, and the aged rose and stood; the princes refrained from talking…” It says in this chapter also that he gave counsel and that he delivered the poor and things like that. So, Job was likely an honorable legal judge of some kind. But here in verse 14, Job’s actually defending his own righteous standing. And the question is, is he talking about his righteous standing before men or before a holy God?

Well, we know Job was blameless, meaning he had an outstanding reputation before men. He couldn’t be blamed for anything. We also know from passages like 1 John 1:8 that reveal to us today that Job wasn’t sinless. First John 1:8 says, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” And then Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” So to figure out what Job means when he says he put on righteousness like clothing, we first have to look at this word “righteousness.” Because righteousness has a twofold meaning: It has to do with doing the right thing. But it also has to do with a state of right standing before a judge. These really are two distinct parts of righteousness, but they are also inseparable from one another. Doing right is what gives the right standing before the judge. So before his fellow men, Job was righteous. The problem is the context of Job’s situation here. We’re not talking about right standing before any judge; we’re talking about true and right standing before a holy God.

When Job’s friends stop addressing, Job says this in Job 32:1, “So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes.” That’s an ominous phrase that he was righteous in his own eyes. Proverbs 21:2 says, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the heart.” It also reminds me of the chaos and evil that we find in the book of Judges and that repeated refrain, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6; Judges 21:25). And that wasn’t a good thing.

But Job is unique in that he actually has a lot of good reason to think that he’s righteous on his own merit. Because God Himself, twice, calls him “blameless and upright” in Job 1 and 2. And you could read through Job 29 here and agree with everything that Job upholds here is really the good character that he has, that we should follow. And he even rightly says that punishment for doing evil is a good thing. He says that, if he was unfaithful to his wife, for example, in verse 12 of Job 31, “that would be a fire that consumes as far as Abaddon, and it would burn to the root all [his] increase.” In other words, he’s not rejecting that men should be punished for sin. He just doesn’t think he has any sin.

And Job isn’t being punished here, either. That’s the other part of this. He’s being tested, really, for our benefit and God’s own glory because we get to see Job still loves God through it all. But Job was still at least partly counting on his own righteousness to give him right standing before God. And this is really where Job went wrong. Job was blameless, but he was a son of Adam, and therefore a sinner. God made this world very good, and all of us have gone astray and committed what we could call “cosmic treason” against the holy God. And being a good and just judge then, the punishment for our crimes against this eternal judge, he says, is eternal death. That God wouldn’t be a good judge if He just turned a blind eye to our sin.

So actually, everything that happens to Job and his family is justifiable because Job is a sinner at his core, like all of us before turning from sin and turning to Christ. And really each moment that God withholds eternal death from Job, and any of us, God is being gracious. And this is why when God answers Job, Job actually repents. It’s amazing. We might ask ourselves, Why would Job repent if he was blameless? And the answer is, because he finally saw himself as a sinful man in contrast to a holy God. Listen to what he says – this is Job 42:5-6 –“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” And then God doesn’t correct Job. But He tells his [Job’s] friends that Job spoke rightly and that they didn’t.

So nobody on the planet has ever had righteous standing before God apart from faith in Christ. Righteous standing comes from faith in Christ; we’re actually told that in 2 Corinthians 5:21. And actually, this is where Job’s own righteousness came from. He did have faith in Christ. “Christ” is a Hebrew word, which means “Messiah” or “the Anointed One.” Jesus is that promised seed from Genesis 3 who had crushed the serpent’s head, defeated evil and death, and saved us from our sin. So Hebrew men and women have known this since the Garden of Eden. There’s a clue for us, even here in Job 26:13, that Job believed this, as he says, the Lord’s “hand pierced the fleeing serpent.”

That’s an allusion to Genesis and the serpent in the garden. The promised seed, that Jesus would come one day to destroy evil, is the only way that Job and everyone else on the planet is alive today. It’s by His grace. 1 John 2:2 says that Jesus’ death was the turning away of God’s wrath “for the sins of the whole world.” So the way anyone has ever been saved from eternal death has been [through] faith in Christ.

We just look back to faith in Christ. But Noah, Abraham, Job, they all looked ahead to faith in Christ. Jesus said to the Jews, about Abraham, who by the way was dead long before Jesus walked the planet. He says, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day … and [he] was glad” (John 8:56). Jesus is saying that Abraham looked forward to Jesus. And also, the author of Hebrews said that Moses, thousands of years before Jesus, “considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward” (Hebrews 11:26).

Moses, the Bible says, was looking forward to Christ. There are lots of other verses like this in the Bible. But back to our clothing analogy. Job said, “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban” (Job 29:14). Job’s own justice, his righteousness and goodness, he thought, clothed and protected him. How many of us are the same way?

You know, I think most people believe in God, and they know God is good. Everybody everywhere is always talking about how good and gracious God is, because that’s easy to do. So people also trust that God is fair. And because God’s fair, they think that they’re all set. So they have no interest in studying God’s Word in the Bible or meeting with other Christians at church or knowing God deeper each day. Because why would they? It seems like a big waste of time.

The entire world, in large part, is united and in agreement that nobody is perfect; we even have a slogan for it: “to err is human.” We can always look around and compare ourselves to others and see someone doing a little worse than us. So we think to ourselves, Since God is fair, I generally am an honest person. I don’t lie. I’m not stealing or cheating on my spouse. I love my family. I’m all set. But really, that’s part of the same kind of self-righteousness that Job had in part.

See, some are self-righteous in that they think that being religious and devout is what gives them right standing before God. But some are also self-righteous without even knowing it. Because they think that as long as you’re basically a good human, they think this is a humble attitude and that God’s going to be fair to them. But see, that’s a problem. Because God will be fair to us. And if God is fair to us, we ought to be very much afraid. Because if God is fair, what we have waiting for us, according to Him, is eternal death. That’s what God says is fair. So we don’t want fair actually; we want grace. This is why Romans 13:14 says to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ.” We’re not to just stop doing wrong things; we’re to put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

By the way, that’s a really odd phrase, because Jesus is a person. And we don’t usually talk about putting people on like clothing. But, of course, Jesus is no ordinary person. Scripture teaches that without ceasing to be God, God became the man Jesus Christ and gave His life on a Roman cross as the only satisfactory payment for our wrongs. So that all would return and trust and would have eternal life. We put on Christ by faith, like we put on [an] armor. Because it’s the only way to protect ourselves from a certain and eternal death. So I’d like to pause just right here and ask you, Wendy, about that curious phrase, in what ways do you “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”?

WB: Well, one way I do it is … I love Colossians 3:12-14. It’s a verse I’ve memorized, and it says, “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves…” (NIV), and then it lists “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.” But it goes on … it’s more. It says, “Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you” (NIV). And then there’s more: “Over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (NIV). And so obviously, there’s no way I can put all those things on every day. But with that in my mind, I can think of those words, Eric, and I can remind myself, OK, I need patience with this person. I need compassion. That’s what I need to be like Jesus for them, or for myself with them.

EG: Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Wendy. That’s awesome. Yeah. It makes me think of a couple other verses too. In Revelation 7, we know it speaks metaphorically of clothing ourselves by counting the work of Jesus and says that those in heaven “have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14b). And that’s really an odd phrase too, because blood doesn’t make clothes white. And that’s the point. This analogy really should catch our attention. It’s saying that counting on Jesus’s blood is our only hope for being pure before God.

And then in Matthew 22:12-13, Jesus gives an illustration of what God, our King, will say to those who meet God without these clothes. It says the king said, “‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment? ‘ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot and cast him into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ‘” Those are really heavy words. But I didn’t say them, right? Our loving and gracious Lord Jesus said them. And he said them because He loves us, and we ought to be concerned as to whether or not we have these clothes on. Whether or not we’re clothed in his righteousness or not. And our attitude shouldn’t be, Well, I think I’m doing pretty good. I guess we’ll find out when I die. Because if that’s our attitude, I can tell you, we have no reason to think that things are gonna go well for us when we die. If we don’t know that we have right standing before God, then we don’t have right standing.

Now, how can I say that? Well, because we don’t have to wonder, for example, if we have affection for our mom or our dad or kids or the people that we miss. We know that we love them. We have no doubt. It’s the same with faith. We’re either trusting in ourselves or we’re trusting in God. There really is no in between. How can we know without a doubt, then, that we have right standing? It’s faith in Christ. We know that Christ truly lived and died and rose again as a payment for sin. And we love Him for it. Because it’s His sacrifice that bought us, not our sacrifices. If salvation is dependent on the sacrifices we make, then we’re doomed, right! But if our salvation is dependent on God, our hope is certain. Because God already accomplished it on the cross.

I have so many friends in mind when I’m talking this way, because I think, you know, if we think we’re gonna wait until the day when we’re old or claim ignorance or just hope for the best, that God will just be fair to us in the end, without truly knowing Jesus, then God really will be fair. And that will look like what He described, being cast into outer darkness. So for those of us who do trust in Christ, though, trust in Christ for our protective clothing on the day we meet our Maker. This not only gives us hope for the future, but really this should give us confidence and boldness right now – today.

I’m friends with a Christian woman who had been involved in some shameful things that she regrets. And now she’s too ashamed to attend a church. But if we know that we are clothed in the righteousness of God alone, then we can come boldly into our churches, no matter where we’ve come from, knowing we’re all sinners before holy God and in need of His grace. And God alone, not us or anyone else, gives us right standing before Him. It should also give us confidence in our workplaces, to be bold, to speak up in meetings, to share ideas, to chat with others, because we have right standing before God based on our trust in the sufficiency of God’s work. And when life gets hard, we keep going because His work is trustworthy. So we’re able to keep our joy because we’ve been given eternal life. We have God’s own armor on. When it comes to my own righteousness, it’s like I have filthy rags for clothing. Or even like today, I have a polo shirt [and] some blue jeans. But, you know, I also have some armor on, and you can’t see it with your eyes. It protects me from evil. It guards my heart and my mind from believing insults, from believing lies; it gives me confidence for the day that I am going to stand before God. And, you know, God will accept me on that day. Because He’s the One who made the armor for me. And it’s His own armor. It’s His own righteousness, not mine. So let’s put on Christ and His righteousness today and every day. Wendy, that’s all I have for today. I hope this has been a blessing.

WB: Oh, Eric, absolutely. And I want to thank you for first … I mean, it’s just a beautiful lesson. There’s not much to add, except to just thank you for explaining righteousness to us in a way that’s understandable because it’s such a hard concept to grasp. And then talking about the armor of God. And I thought the very best way to close today … God laid this on my heart last night as I was looking over this lesson, that I’ll just close this today praying the armor of God (Ephesians 6:14-17).

Father, strengthen us with Your helmet of salvation so that we can stand against the culture and the lies of the evil one. Father, cover our hearts with the breastplate of righteousness. Jesus defeated the power of sin and death at the cross, and it no longer has power over us. We stand in His sacrifice. Father, gird us with the belt of Truth. Your Word is Truth. We choose to believe Your Truth and reject the lies of the enemy in the world. We stand centered and strong against his temptations, deceptions, schemes and accusations. Father, we put on the shoes of the gospel of peace. We choose to be an instrument of Your peace and stand ready to live out and give an account for the faith we have in You today. And, Father, we hold up the shield of faith. We trust and believe You are the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the great I Am, the Author and Perfecter of our faith. We reject a spirit of fear; we stand in the spirit of Your power and love and a sound mind. And finally, we take up the sword of the Spirit. We choose to believe Your Truth over the enemy’s lies. Pour out Your Truth. Pour out Your Spirit over us because we choose this day to stand on Your living, active, penetrating Word. Oh, Father, thank You for these mighty weapons of warfare. Thank You that You’ve already won the battle we’re fighting. Thank You that we are victors because greater are You who lives in us than he who lives in this world (1 John 4:4). So today we come under Your power and Your authority. Fill us with the fullness of Your Spirit. Use us to do Your Kingdom work as we march onward as sons and daughters of the living God. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.