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Job's likeness to Christ
Within the book itself there are clear illustrations, through Job and the circumstances that he was in, which are reflections of the Lord Jesus. e.g.
1. God watched his movements from morning till night. (See notes on Isaiah ch. 53 “He shall grow up before Him”)
2. He was the target of Satan, not because of his sinfulness, but because of his sinlessness.
3. He was considered to be “smitten of God and afflicted.”
4. He challenged his accusers to convince him of sin.
5. Job’s self portrait -” Bound as guilty in court, mocked, hit, spat upon.”
6. He prayed and sacrificed for his friends. (John 17)
7. He was God-forsaken, and questioned “Why?”
8. His Previous Glory. - the “unrecognisable” Christ
9 Ultimate exaltation and reward.
Other studies in the life of Christ, clearly point out that the only real significance of Job, or any other character or incident in the Old Testament, is to point us to Christ. Within the gospel narrative we read very little of the human life of Jesus. We know most about his public life. Of his private human life we know comparatively little. John said that all the libraries of the world would not contain what could have been written. In the chart previous you can to see just how little detail we have recorded of the Life of Christ. Thirty years are covered by 6 chapters This is not because the Holy Spirit does not want us to know, but that essentially we are to know Christ after the spirit and not after the flesh. In other words we need not know how he dressed his hair, or the cereal he had for breakfast, but rather are we to know his humility, love, faith, dedication, commitment, obedience etc. You can imagine what would have happened had we known what hair style he preferred or what he ate for breakfast. We would have had a thousand “Holy Orders” of people imitating such natural traits and habits and thinking that to imitate was a spiritual exercise. But true spiritual exercises in the christian life are the work of the Spirit and they are produced from within.
However, the Holy Spirit delights to show us the pictures of Christ in the Old Testament, and quite often those things hidden in the new are revealed in the old. Nothing is told in the gospels of the eighteen years that Jesus spent in Nazareth, living within a family environment and enduring the daily trials and temptations of everyday life. It is certainly not because those years were not important, for the quality of the offering on Calvary depended upon the result of the trials and testings of those very years. At His baptism, as he emerged from those hidden years into the public gaze, His father shouted from Heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” For no doubt He had watched every step that his Son took. As surely as he marked the soles of the feet of Job, (according to Job) so more surely would He have marked the soles of Jesus. If Job could say “He knoweth the way that I take”, how much more could Jesus have said it.
God has not blazoned it on placards in the gospels, the full extent to which Jesus suffered during those years, but even if the Old Testament did not contain the hidden experiences of Jesus, one thing we could be sure of is that Hell would have thrown everything it had at the carpenter’s son.
A clear understanding of the book of Job, leaves one, with the obvious thought that if Job went through the kind of testing that he did then there is more than every possibility that Jesus was tested in no lesser way. To see this truth reflected further, we could have a quick look at some other studies in the Life of Christ.
1. God watched his movements from morning till night. (See notes on Isaiah ch. 53 “He shall grow up before Him”)
2. He was the target of Satan, not because of his sinfulness, but because of his sinlessness.
3. He was considered to be “smitten of God and afflicted.”
4. He challenged his accusers to convince him of sin.
5. Job’s self portrait -” Bound as guilty in court, mocked, hit, spat upon.”
6. He prayed and sacrificed for his friends. (John 17)
7. He was God-forsaken, and questioned “Why?”
8. His Previous Glory. - the “unrecognisable” Christ
9 Ultimate exaltation and reward.
Other studies in the life of Christ, clearly point out that the only real significance of Job, or any other character or incident in the Old Testament, is to point us to Christ. Within the gospel narrative we read very little of the human life of Jesus. We know most about his public life. Of his private human life we know comparatively little. John said that all the libraries of the world would not contain what could have been written. In the chart previous you can to see just how little detail we have recorded of the Life of Christ. Thirty years are covered by 6 chapters This is not because the Holy Spirit does not want us to know, but that essentially we are to know Christ after the spirit and not after the flesh. In other words we need not know how he dressed his hair, or the cereal he had for breakfast, but rather are we to know his humility, love, faith, dedication, commitment, obedience etc. You can imagine what would have happened had we known what hair style he preferred or what he ate for breakfast. We would have had a thousand “Holy Orders” of people imitating such natural traits and habits and thinking that to imitate was a spiritual exercise. But true spiritual exercises in the christian life are the work of the Spirit and they are produced from within.
However, the Holy Spirit delights to show us the pictures of Christ in the Old Testament, and quite often those things hidden in the new are revealed in the old. Nothing is told in the gospels of the eighteen years that Jesus spent in Nazareth, living within a family environment and enduring the daily trials and temptations of everyday life. It is certainly not because those years were not important, for the quality of the offering on Calvary depended upon the result of the trials and testings of those very years. At His baptism, as he emerged from those hidden years into the public gaze, His father shouted from Heaven, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” For no doubt He had watched every step that his Son took. As surely as he marked the soles of the feet of Job, (according to Job) so more surely would He have marked the soles of Jesus. If Job could say “He knoweth the way that I take”, how much more could Jesus have said it.
God has not blazoned it on placards in the gospels, the full extent to which Jesus suffered during those years, but even if the Old Testament did not contain the hidden experiences of Jesus, one thing we could be sure of is that Hell would have thrown everything it had at the carpenter’s son.
A clear understanding of the book of Job, leaves one, with the obvious thought that if Job went through the kind of testing that he did then there is more than every possibility that Jesus was tested in no lesser way. To see this truth reflected further, we could have a quick look at some other studies in the Life of Christ.
