After a few weeks off for Easter and pastors being out of town, we’re back in the book of Job with another length chunk of text.  We’ve got 6 chapters this week: 32-37.  Again, I encourage you to read the passage ahead of Sunday worship.  I won’t have the chance to read all of it during the sermon.  I also encourage you to flip back a few chapters, read some subheadings, and get a feel for where we are in the story of Job.  The context will play a role in how we understand these chapters.

As I consider how to prepare ourselves for the sermon, I keep coming back to the idea of examining outrage in our own hearts.  There is a lot of outrage in our culture today.  Outrage over injustice, over gun violence, or over the impotence of our political system to actually effect meaningful change.  There’s outrage over anything and everything.  In some ways that outrage is good and right.  We ought to be appalled by school shootings for example.  But in a lot of other ways, outrage often becomes an excuse to be jerks.  The Fruit of the Spirit often goes out the window as our sense of righteous anger rises.  What do you look like when you’re outraged or so confident in your rightness that it leads to contempt?

I think that’s what we’re going to see happen in these chapters.  Here, we are introduced to Elihu, a young man who has been listening while Job and his friends have gone back and forth over the last almost 30 chapters.  And as he listens, his anger over Job’s words about God grows until finally it bubbles over in this 6-chapter, 4-speech tirade against Job.  While he makes some good and right points, he ends up simply rehashing old territory from a different angle.  By the end, we are yearning for the Lord to finally step in and end the parade of failed human wisdom.  I think that this will be instructive to contrast Elihu’s approach to Job with the Lord’s approach to sinners like us.  Do we, as a denomination, look more like Elihu or Jesus when we deal with sinners?  What about as a local church?  What about individually?  Meditate on how the Gospel enables a humble engagement amid a culture of outrage.  See you Sunday!