The main focus of this podcast episode is on the foundational teachings derived from the Book of Genesis and the Book of Job, particularly their significance in understanding key questions about life. We explore the authorship of both books, attributing them to Moses, and emphasize the importance of reading these texts in chronological order. This approach not only clarifies the narrative but also enhances our comprehension of God's overarching story and His sovereignty. Throughout the episode, we address crucial questions about existence, suffering, and divine authority, establishing a framework for deeper spiritual understanding. As we embark on this journey through the Bible, we aim to equip listeners with insights that are both profound and practical for their lives.

Takeaways:

1. This podcast offers a historical and thematic commentary on the Bible's readings.
2. Understanding the chronological order of the Bible enhances comprehension of God's redemptive plan.
3. The relationship with God is based on grace, not on transactional expectations or demands.
4. Genesis and Job address foundational questions about existence, suffering, and spiritual realities.
5. Moses is acknowledged as the author of both Genesis and Job, emphasizing their historical context.
6. The story of Job serves as an insight into the spiritual conflict between God and Satan.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. youtube.com/bible805
2. bible805.com

Welcome to through the Bible in chronological order from Bible 805 and Yvon Prehn. This podcast is a somewhat unique and, I trust, a helpful historical and thematic commentary on the readings in the Bible.

It's not a verse by verse study, but one that I pray you'll find thoughtful and challenging.

New episodes are released each Wednesday and today our Lesson is Lesson 1 of the Bible 805 through the Bible In Chronological Order Series. Our lesson today is Genesis and answers to the big questions of life. This is an introduction to the authorship and dating of both books.

Now, before everything else, we're introduced to the protagonist of the story that fills the Bible when it says in the beginning, God. In Genesis 1:1. From beginning to end, it's His story. The world begins with God creating a parenthesis in eternity to carefully craft a world.

He then fills this world with living creatures and ultimately with one created in his image, mankind, male and female, to whom he assigns fulfilling work and with whom he will walk in a perfect world. But an enemy was also there. Satan, the antagonist. Almost immediately he enters the scene and God's beloved creation turn against him.

They believe Satan's lie and that sets up the plot, the storyline of the rest of the Bible. Now, before we move on with the plot, the storyline, I want to acknowledge that much has been written about the details of creation.

If those details are important to you, there are many resources online where you can check them out, but we won't be talking about them because for our study, the emphasis is not so much about the when and the how of creation, but about the who. The God who created is the God who, as the story goes along, cares for, redeems, and ultimately restores his people and creation.

As has been said, history is truly his story and it's a long story. So let's get started.

As you start reading through the Bible, you'll begin the reading plan that you, I trust, will have downloaded and have started into with Bible 805. You'll begin reading in Genesis, which is what most people expect when they start reading the Bible.

But then, oh my goodness, after three days, you jump into Job. What's going on? You might ask. In most Bibles, the Book of Job is close to the middle of the Bible, just before Psalms.

However, in most chronological Bible reading plans, Job is placed near the beginning of the Book of Genesis.

Now this chronology is extremely important because instead of unrelated Bible stories, hopeful promises, and upbeat snippets, when you read the Bible in chronological historical order, or put another way, in the order that the events truly happened in the entire story of God's redemptive plan for his creation will make much more sense when you understand the correct chronological order of God's revelation to his people. God's actions in response to them are much more understandable.

That's why it's extremely important to date and read Job correctly very early on, because it teaches foundational truths that are important for our understanding of the Bible and the big questions in life, that if we aren't solid in an understanding of them, we will always have problems. I'll get specific on them as we go into the questions, but let's first establish the timeline and authorship of Genesis and Job.

Reading the Bible with any system is better than not reading it at all.

But when you read it with Genesis and especially Job at the start, and you correctly understand how to interpret Job, which you're going to learn in this lesson series, you'll learn three incredibly important lessons.

The first one, and I cannot emphasize this enough, God's absolute right to do things, his control over all things in heaven and on earth, people, Satan and his demons. This right is also known as his sovereignty. Put another way, he is King.

Number Two.

A foundational reality we must grasp, and that is our relationship with him is not a transactional one where we can put expectations and demands on him based on what we want or we think we deserve. Now, you'll see this worked out more as I talk through the next one on Genesis and Job, and I'll explain it in more detail.

But just keep in mind that our entire relationship with God is one based on grace. We will talk about that more in the New Testament.

It is not one where we just make demands and expect God to jump and do exactly what we want him to do.

The third foundational truth that's very important is that there's a lot more going on in the spiritual world than we're aware of in ways that are both terrifying and ultimately very comforting.

And with this emphasis on the importance of what we'll learn in this lesson, let's get into it by first establishing the authorship of both Genesis and Job. Now, a corrective, just in case.

In going over what I just said, in an effort to help us understand, as the popular saying goes, and this is really important, that God is God and we are not, that I may have given you the impression that God's control is that of a sort of an unfeeling despot. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And we must always be assured that God's control over all events in Our lives comes from a God who, in his very best nature, personifies love and who has our eternal best always in mind for us. He isn't just sitting up there in heaven waiting to see how he can pound on us. That's not it at all. He loves us.

No matter how challenging our current circumstances might be, we have a good God who will ultimately right all wrongs, heal all pain, wipe away all tears, bring us safely home. With that clarified, let's get into the lesson by first establishing the authorship of both Genesis and Job.

Genesis and Job have one author, Moses.

However, in both cases, Moses is more of an editor than how we normally think of an author. Now, he, he didn't make it all up. Instead, as we know, an author creates a content. But of course, in Genesis and Job, the words aren't originally his.

The content was revealed from God in addition to what God directly revealed to him.

And we see later on in Exodus and how when Moses actually wrote these things down, he literally sat face to face with God and God told him what to tell the people on the laws and all this sort of thing. But in addition to this direct revelation from God, Moses had access to oral and written records of what happened prior to his life.

We'll next look at a chart, and for those of you that are watching the video, you'll see the chart.

For those of you that are listening to the podcast, I'll describe it. But one of the resources that he had, again were written records.

And we might think, well, how could there be records of what happened, like at the beginning and all this kind of stuff? Well, it's very interesting when you look at timelines, which we'll do in just a minute, you'll see how this could happen.

Now, after we look at the timelines and some of the resources that he most likely had access to, we're then going to look at geographical and additional historical details that affirm Moses as the author of both books.

Now, for again, for those of you that are looking at the video, and please go to the YouTube channel www.youtub Bible 805 and you'll see this timeline of the Old Testament patriarchs. Now, we all know that the Bible tells us they lived for very long periods of time. But what's really interesting is how the timeline works out.

That when you have everything all lined up together, that Adam was still alive when Noah's father was born. Can you imagine that Noah's son Shem would have, his grandfather would have actually known the first man created.

And I don't know about you, but I have a lot of great stories from my grandmother that I remember on on our family history. Can you imagine being having it passed down to you the actual history of the creation of the world and of what it was like to actually walk with God?

Now we don't know exactly when this was written down, but all of ancient history shows that by the time Noah came around his son Shem, who would have heard the stories, etc etc, writing was very possible and used during those ancient times then. Very interesting. Shem, Noah's son was still alive when Abram was born, or as we know him later as Abraham.

So we have just a couple of links of people living really that could go back to the time of creation. Now, in addition to this being written down somewhere, and I'll talk about that in just a minute.

Traditional confirmation of Moses authorship also runs counter to many of the contemporary anti supernaturalist views that you'll come across today that dispute that Moses was the author of the Book of Job. And they refer to it instead as some sort of fictional allegorical story by an unnamed author.

Though there's actually no evidence whatsoever for this. No evidence of any author, no evidence that it was fiction, none of that kind of thing.

However, there are thousands of years of history and tradition that support that Moses was the author.

This quote from irc.org summarizes it where it says--

"Uniform Jewish tradition ascribed the Book of Job to Moses and also accepted it as part of the true canon of scripture. This ascription seems quite reasonable if Moses is regarded as the editor.

Moses most likely came into possession of Job's record during his 40 year exile from Egypt in the land of Midian not far from Job's own homeland in Uz, and quickly recognized its great importance.

It was probably similar to how he compiled and organized the primeval or these are the works relating to the earliest ages records from which he also has given us the Book of Genesis. That being the case, the Book of Job is probably the oldest book in the Bible.

It contains more references to creation, the flood and other primeval events than any book of the Bible except Genesis and provides more insight into the age long conflict between God and Satan than almost any other book."

Again, this is from the IRC website.

This is the view that I believe is true.

Just as later books in the Bible refer to other accounts of contemporary history being written using various sources and and since we have ancient writings from other civilizations at that time and earlier, for example the Gilgamesh epic that we have in the cuneiform and I have a picture of that on the website. And Moses had access to all the learning in Egypt.

It makes sense that he would have read works available to him when he fled to Midian and afterwards. Now, following are some additional evidence of Moses as the author of Job and an early date for its content.

First of all, the geographical evidence for Moses authorship, biblical archaeology and geography places us where the book takes place.

And again, I have a map that you can see on the video near midian as the IRC, the previous IRC quote reminded us where Moses spent 40 years after he fled Egypt.

Now, it was not an accident that God sent Moses to the specific place where he would have heard the oral history and perhaps had access to written documents of Job's story. His father in law, remember, was a priest of Midian, and presumably he would have been one of the learned, educated class.

And if anyone would have had access to these documents, we can, I think, assume that he would have had that. Now, some historical evidence on the dating of the book.

For Moses to be the author, the book needs to take place prior to the time of the Exodus, during the time of the patriarchs. And that is exactly what we see through the historical details of internal evidence.

Because it describes in the Book of Job, that is because it describes a time that was similar to the patriarchal society described elsewhere in the Bible. A nomadic lifestyle of living in tents and wealth measured in herds of various kinds.

It was pre law, as evidenced by Job's personal sacrifices for his family if they sinned. There was no formal priesthood or temple structure. None of these things are mentioned or referred to in any way.

It was a time without overall strong central government. None is mentioned.

Our overall picture of Job is similar to how we would picture the world of Abraham, which would be consistent with the world presented in the accounts of both of their lives.

More important than the historical trivia, however, is reading Job out of historical context or reading it as part of the poetical books has a very dangerous result.

And that is for people, not only biblical critics, but casual readers, to perhaps without thinking, make Job into a fictional character who just represents unjust suffering. That is not how the Bible presents Job. And to think of him in that way robs the book of much of its power.

Here's how the Bible confirms Job as a real individual.

The Old Testament biblical confirmation that he was a real person takes place first in Ezekiel, who was a priest and an exile from Israel when Israel was deported to Babylon prior to the fall of Jerusalem.

Because Daniel was his contemporary, he was a fellow exile to Babylon.

Ezekiel places Job as a real individual alongside these other two, clearly taking him out of the realm of being a fictional character.

In addition, on dating, the quote about Job from Ezekiel also refutes a common falsehood about Job that it was written along with many other prophetic books, according to the anti supernaturalistic critics, after the Babylonian exile. And that's just wrong. This couldn't be the case.

As Ezekiel is unambiguously clear from his writings, it was written during the Babylonian exile, not after during it. So Job had to be written before it for Ezekiel to refer to him. This is not a trivial issue.

Proper dating is a key factor that distinguishes between our view of the books of the Bible as true history of God's dealings with people and just fanciful musings on spiritual questions.

He's not just some fictional character who was having a bad day and we can learn different things from him. No, he was a real person. And in his story we get insight into spiritual realities that we don't really see in any other place in the Bible.

Ezekiel isn't the only biblical author who verifies that Job was a real person. The New Testament also adds biblical confirmation that Job was a real, not fictional person.

In James 5:11, it says, "As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy."

James cites Job in a way that assumes he's talking about a real person. His assertion would not have any meaning if Job was simply a Jewish folktale written by an unknown person.

In addition to this specific example, please note the Bible is the best commentary on itself. Because of that, we should expect that the various parts of the Bible agree with and comment on each other, as these varied passages of Job do.

Now, a summary and review of what we know about Job so far, based on tradition, biblical confirmation and the historical and geographical evidence we have, we will read Job believing that he was a real person who lived about the time of the Patriarchs. What took place in the book were true events experienced by Job. The finished book was supernaturally revealed to and perhaps using other records was then finally compiled into its final form by Moses.

For us it, follows in that Job, as with all the Bible, was given to us by inspiration from God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It straightens us out and helps us do what is right.

That is why we can use the books of Job and Genesis to answer the big foundational questions of life. And what are these big foundational questions I'm referring to?

Number One-How did we get here?

Number Two-What went wrong?

And a sub question of that is who is Satan and what power does he have?

Number Three-Is there life after death?

Number Four-What about people who never heard about Jesus?

Number Five-Why do innocent people suffer?

And Number Six-How can we help people who are suffering?

We will cover the first three questions in Part Two of this lesson series and then the second three in Part Three of our journey through the Bible in chronological order.

One thing to remember as we start.

These books give us answers, but we must acknowledge and I want to forewarn you, not every answer will be the answer we want.

It won't be for questions we ask and answer in Genesis and Job, and it won't be for many of the remaining books we look at in the remaining lessons.

And it isn't for our lives. But what we do get? What Job got at the end of the book isn't perhaps the answers we think we want or need.

But better than that, God shows up.

He did for Job and He will for us in every step we take in this life and forever.

That's all for now. For notes from this lesson, related resources and links to teaching materials, go to www.

Bible805.com in closing, I'm Yvon Prehn, your fellow pilgrim, writer and teacher for Jesus, and I'd like to close with this benediction.

May you know the invitation of God to move from confusion to clarity, from wandering to rest, from loneliness to knowing you are loved. From turmoil to peace, from wherever you are on your spiritual journey to a growing knowledge of God's Word and in your personal relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.