Study Questions - Bible Discovery [20]

Date: August 15, 2004
Passage: Job 28:12-28
Message: How Then Shall We Suffer
Series: Bible Discovery [20]

One of hardest things to take in life is when things don’t make sense. We understand toothache because the dentist tells us we have an abscess. But what we find difficult is when we work hard and fail, when we take care and suffer, when we love and still lose, when we do right and it all goes wrong, when the good guys lose and the bad guys win!

1. Share a time when you struggled with the unfairness, injustice, or what seemed like, the sheer stupidity of something.

2. Christians want to handle suffering in a way that glorifies God. What does that really mean? What do we do with our anger, our fears and our sense of God’s abandonment?

3. Read – Job 3:3-5, 11-12, 16-17, 20-26 What do you make of Job’s outburst of self-pity?

4. Job had some friends who didn’t help him at all.

# ELIPHAZ – he claimed a secret word from a dream. [Job 4:12]
# BILDAD – he was a traditionalist. He knew how God always acted. [Job 8:8]
# ZOPHAR – he was a religious bigot. He just made Job feel lower than a worm. [Job 11:3-6]

What is your experience of these kinds of people? How can we learn to receive what is helpful from them and remain unaffected by what is not?

5. Read Job 16:1-8, 11-12; 23:1-10; 30:20-27
“Job is not protesting his personal INNOCENCE, he is protesting against God’s seeming IMPOTENCE.’ Discuss.

6. Read Job 28:12-23 I have always thought the hardest thing in life is to live with unanswered questions….but I’ve discovered that the hardest thing is to live with unexpected and unwanted answers……we can hold back because of our questions but answers demand that we step out on the basis of what IS rather than on the basis of what OUGHT to be. Discuss.

7. To all of Job’s gut wrenching questions, God replies with a series of his own questions. Many of them seem so unrelated to what Job is asking. [See Job 38-41]. Job is asking questions about suffering and God asks him questions about ostriches and horses and mountain goats. What message was God trying to get across to Job?

8. Read Job 42:1-6 God did not answer Job’s questions, he answered his need. Discuss.