A few thoughts on the first of the nine:

Job 9:33 vs. 1 Tim 2:5

Probably the most obvious pairing of Job with Jesus is this one. This verse in Job comes in the middle of Job's response to Bildad's first rant (chapter 8). Notice especially verse 4 in chapter 8. Here, Bildad gets on Job's good side right off the bat by outright damning his dead kids. Job, earlier, has stated that what happened to him was what he feared most. I believe that he was referring to his practice of making sacrifices after each of his kid's parties in case they had sinned during them. Obviously, Job believed it was highly probable that they were in fact sinning, and obviously they were killed before he could perform his priestly duty. Bildad piles on.

Amazingly, (although we know already that Job was a fine upstanding man!) Job pretty much ignores Bildad and gets on with chapter nine, which mostly features a man stripped of his vain imaginations about God and who is left with the fact of God's transcendence. To wit: 1) he doesn't answer your questions 2) he works all the marvels of nature but is completely indiscernable by humans in any direct way (Job knows God is both immanent and transcendent at the same time!) 3) in a courtroom scenario things go poorly for man even to the point that Job seems to be accusing God of being unjust.

In 9:22 Job nails the negative side of Mt 5:45. Whereas Jesus points out common grace in the sermon on the mount, Job is accutely tuned into the common curse.

In 9:27-28 Job lays waste to the notion that death ain't so bad; I'll just choose to be joyful and lay aside my grief.

In 9:30-31 Job assures us that our attempts at works righteousness (which surely has to include climbing the spiritual ladder) not only fail but leave us in a worse condition than if we hadn't even bothered. Note the reference to the repeated theme in scripture of being clothed as a symbol of imputed righteousness here, and here, and here and here.

All this leads up to Job's plea for that which would solve many of the forgoing problems.

Rather than go any further, I leave you to ponder the great unity in scripture which is so strongly hinted at in just one chapter of one book in the Bible.

What do you think?:
a) Job 9:33 vs. 1 Tim 2:5
b) Job 14:14 vs. John 11:25
c) Job 16:19 vs. Heb 9:24
d) Job 19:25 vs. Heb 7:25
e) Job 23:3 vs. John 14:9
f) Job 31:35 vs. Heb 12:22-24
g) Job 40:4 vs. Mt 16:26
h) Job 42:5-6 vs. Mt 4:17
i) Job 23:10 vs. James 1:12

This is a test
to shake up blogger. My site has been down for about a week.

Here is the fine work of my
unemployed most significant wife. The problem was wanting a photo of four sisters with no fellow tourist around (they usually botch it anyway) and no tripod. This is what Big D came up with:

We interrupt the steady
stream of annoying posts on religious themes to bring you a rare political update. Normally I refrain from this kind of stuff but this time I just can't stop myself. The reason is that the subject matter is just too close to home.

This will be brief though. I asked Big D what she thought of the photoshopped images coming out of the latest mid-east skirmish. She said they were hack jobs. I said that if she had been in charge of doctoring those photos, no one would have caught on.

I've been trying to get her to bring down the big bucks with her photo editing skills so I can retire but, no go so far. Maybe Reuters can hire her to screen all the edited photos that come through their bureau and fix them up so they can continue their fine reporting. She could telecommute.

This reminds me that I am way overdue for posting a photo. Stay tuned.

Here is an excerpt from
a book I have on my bookshelf. Before copying this excerpt, here is the text the author refers to: "Mark 1:14-15 And after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."

Here, in blue, are the paragraphs I want to bring to your attention. I will be leaving some of it out and adding bracketed words in black for the purpose of making things flow a bit and to make it easier to understand without having the whole book in front of you:

Jesus' opening challenge as reported in the gospels was that people should "repent and believe". This is a classic example of a phrase whose meaning has changed over the years. If I were to go out on the street in my local town and declare that people should "repent and believe", what they would hear would be a summons to give up their private sins (one suspects that in our culture sexual misbehavior and alcohol or drug abuse would come quickly to mind) and to get "religion". But that is by no means exactly what the phrase "repent and believe" meant in first century Galilee.

How are we to unlearn our meaning for such a phrase and hear it through first century ears? It helps if we can find another author using it around the same place and time as Jesus. Consider, for example, the Jewish aristocrat and historian, Josephus, who was born a few years after Jesus' crucifixion and who was sent in A.D 66 as a young army commander to sort out some rebel movements in Galilee. His task was to persuade the hot-headed Galileans to stop their mad rush into revolt against Rome and to trust him and [other diplomats that they could be doing wiser things with their energies]. So, when he confronted the rebel leader, he told him to give up his own agenda and trust him, Josephus, instead. And the word he uses are [sic] remarkably familiar to readers of the gospels: He told the brigand leader to "repent and believe in me".

-Skipping ahead a bit-

Even if we end up suggesting that Jesus meant more than Josephus did - that there were indeed religious and theological dimensions to his invitation - we cannot suppose that he meant less. He was telling his hearers to give up their agendas and trust him for his way of being Israel, his way of bringing the kingdom, his kingdom-agenda. In particular, he was urging them, as Josephus had, to abandon their crazy dreams of nationalist revolution.

Thus endeth the reading of the commentator on Mark 1:14-15.

While some of you might know who wrote the above excerpts, I am not going to divulge the author's name, at least not now. My questions are these: 1) what do you think of that hermeneutical method? 2) what do you think of the conclusions drawn by one who used that method? 3) what did Jesus mean in Mark 1:14-15? I will give you 45 minutes and at that time a proctor will come around and collect your papers. (Welcome to seminary!)