The Answer of Jesus to Job
The book we are focusing on for this month's POST is The Answer of Jesus to Job by G. Campbell Morgan. Morgan wrote during the early 1900s. His book is a rare and hidden gem surrounded by the writings of late 1800s and early 1900s liberal authors.
Liberal writers during Campbell's era were pioneering naturalistic interpretations of Scripture with a Darwinian flare, focused on the human redactors of Scripture in opposition to the traditional Christian view that the divine author superintended over the human authors to write the biblical books with the purpose of displaying Christ's person and work through prophecy and typology. Morgan's commitment to Christian doctrine, particularly that Christ is the theme of all of Scripture, is underscored heavily in his approach to the interpretation of the book of Job.
While many modern commentaries on Job tend to focus on Job's suffering, his pseudo-friends’ attribution of Job's suffering to his particular sin, Satan's opposition to believers, and the sovereignty of God, Morgan takes a stark turn by emphasizing Job's unanswered questions that in fact are answered only in the person and work of Jesus.
Morgan writes, "The general thesis of our meditations is that of the answers of Jesus to Job. If there be no New Testament, or if we take away from it its essential value in its presentation of Christ, then we still have the Book of Job; it will remain in literature, but it will be the record of an unanswered agony. There is no answer to Job until we find it in Jesus. But we find an answer to every such cry of Job in Jesus" (6).
After providing an overview of Job's questions to God regarding the perplexity of his suffering, our author continues, "Then I shut the book and find no answer to one of them. It is a great thing to have heard them. It is a great thing to have had that unveiling of human need, but there is no answer. Then I turn to the New Testament, and I see one Jesus, Who began without any wealth, Who went through life largely devoid of the things that others depend on. But before I am through with Him I find He has answered every question Job asked, and supplied every need that Job revealed. So we will consider the answer of Jesus to Job" (21).
Each chapter then begins with a statement or question of Job regarding his suffering-need followed by a meditation on the answer offered through the New Testament's answer in Christ. For example, in Job 9:33, the patriarch says, "There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both." 1 Timothy 2:5 answers: "There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus."
As a second example, Morgan meditates on Job's question, "If a man die, shall he live?" (Job 14:14), followed by the answer of Jesus, "He that believes on Me, though he die, yet shall he live" (John 11:25). Let's observe one more example: Job says, "Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he who testifies for me is on high" (Job 16:19). Morgan points to the answer offered by the writer of Hebrews: "For Christ entered ... into heaven itself, now to appear before... God for us" (Hebrews 9:24).
G.C. Morgan offers for his reader's meditation, a Christ-centered poem in the words of Browning's great poem on Saul. It provides a fitting conclusion for the theme of the answer of Christ's comfort for the question of Job's suffering:
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh that I seek in the Godhead!
I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever; a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand! (58)
In summary, Morgan points us through the suffering of Job to see Christ who is especially fit to satisfy our deepest questions. He is both God and Man united in one person. Jesus represents God to man as God and Jesus represents man to God as man. He is a qualified Savior!
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