Chapters 12—20
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Scripture Reading: Job 12; Job 13
In this message we will begin to consider Job's superiority complex, accusation against his friends, and arguments with God. This is followed by Eliphaz's rebuke and warning.
In 12:1—13:2 we see Job's superiority complex in the matter of knowing God.
Considering himself the righteous man, the perfect man, who called out to God, Job claimed that he was not inferior to his friends, who had made him a laughingstock. They were at ease and contemned calamity, not knowing that the tents of robbers prosper and that those who provoke God and carry their god in their own might have security (12:1-6). This word is about the supposed prosperity in doing good and suffering in doing evil.
Job contemned his friends and asked them to learn of the beasts, of the birds of heaven, of the earth, and of the fish of the sea, all of which know that Jehovah made them and that in His hand is the life of every living thing and the spirit of all flesh of man. Yet his friends were inferior to the ear that tries words and to the palate that tastes food (vv. 7-11).
Finally, Job boasted of his superior and broader knowledge of God (12:12—13:2). Job declared that with God are wisdom and might, that God controls what happens on earth, and that God rules over the nations, making nations great and destroying them. His speaking in 12:12-25 indicates that he was quite knowledgeable. Then as a concluding word he said to his friends, "Behold, my eye has seen all this;/My ear has heard and understood it./What you know, I also know;/I am not inferior to you" (13:1-2). This surely is a sign of Job's superiority complex.
In 13:4-19 Job accused his friends of being false. He called them plasterers of lies and physicians of no value and urged them to be silent (vv. 4-5).
In 13:3, 20—14:22 we have Job's arguments with God. In 13:3 he declared, "I would speak to the Almighty,/And I desire to argue with God."
In 13:20-28 Job contended with God for his case. In verse 28, referring to himself, Job said, "Such a one is like some rotten thing that wastes away,/Like a garment eaten by moths." On the one hand, Job recognized that he was something rotten, something that would waste away. On the other hand, Job continued to feel that he was not wrong in anything. Realizing that God had marked his paths and had set limits for him (v. 27), Job wanted God to explain the situation to him. As we have pointed out, Job did not know God's purpose concerning him, although he believed that there was a purpose hidden in God's heart.
The Bible, which consists of sixty-six books, begins with God and His creation in Genesis and consummates with the New Jerusalem in Revelation. Between these two ends of the Bible, there are history, teachings, prophecies, and types. But if we understand the Bible only according to these things, we still do not know the Bible. We need to see the eternal economy of God, which is God's eternal intention with His heart's desire to dispense Himself in His Divine Trinity as the Father in the Son by the Spirit into His chosen people to be their life and nature that they may be the same as He is for His fullness, His expression.
The word economy is an anglicized form of the Greek word oikonomia, which means "house law, household management, or administration," and derivatively, "administrative dispensation (arrangement), plan, economy." This Greek word implies the notion of dispensing. A dispensing is different from a dispensation. The word dispensing denotes an imparting of something, whereas the word dispensation, as it is commonly used by Christians, refers to the way God deals with people during a particular age. Today many talk about God's dispensations without seeing the crucial matter of God's dispensing.
An economy is an arrangement to carry out a plan for dispensing. God's economy is God's plan, God's arrangement, for God to dispense Himself in His element, life, nature, and attributes, and all that He has achieved and attained into His chosen people that they may be rebuilt by being constituted with the divine essence in the divine element of the divine source to be something divine. Before receiving God's dispensing, we were merely human. After God's rebuilding with the divine constitution we, like the Lord Jesus, become divinely human and humanly divine. Before incarnation Christ was only divine, but after His incarnation He became a God-man, a man with the divine nature. Now He is divinely human, and He is also humanly divine. Having been regenerated by Christ, we have become a part of Him, and now we are the same as He is — divinely human and humanly divine.
The regenerated ones, who are divinely human and humanly divine, spontaneously become an organism, the Body of Christ, which is the church of God as the new man in God's new creation to carry out God's new "career," that is, to build up the Body of Christ for the fullness, the expression, of the Triune God. This fullness as the organism of the Triune God will consummate in the New Jerusalem. The Bible begins with God in His creation as the initiation and ends with the New Jerusalem, which is the mingling of the Triune God and all His chosen, redeemed, regenerated, transformed, conformed, and glorified tripartite people. The New Jerusalem is thus a constitution of God with man to express God for eternity.
To see this is to have an overview of the entire Bible. In our reading of the Bible, we need to focus our attention on God's eternal economy for the divine dispensing. Unless we know God's economy we will not understand the Bible.
Christ is not only the center of the Bible but also the centrality and universality of God's economy. It was in this economy that Christ became incarnated, that He went to the cross to pass through crucifixion, that He came out from death and entered into resurrection, and that in resurrection He was begotten of God to be God's firstborn Son and as the last Adam became the life-giving Spirit to regenerate all His believers to make them the same as He is in life and nature that they might become His brothers and the sons of God. These sons plus the Firstborn all become a new man, with Him as the Head and with the church as His Body, to carry out God's eternal purpose to consummate in the New Jerusalem.
If we see this revelation concerning God's economy, then we will be able to understand the book of Job. Job suffered God's stripping and consuming, but he did not understand what was happening to him. Job could say, "You have hidden these things in Your heart;/I know that this is with You" (10:13). He knew that God had a purpose, but he did not know what God's purpose was.
Job and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, were in the realm of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Even though Job was on a somewhat higher level than his friends, he and they were still in the same realm. God was trying to rescue them from that realm and put them into the realm of the tree of life. The first thing God had to do was to strip Job, consume him, and tear him down so that he would become nothing as a person under suffering. This became the base for God to rebuild Job with the Divine Trinity, that Job could be a new man, a part of God's new creation, to fulfill God's eternal economy for God's expression.
