Episode Transcript
All but one of the servants tending them had been burned up by what the messenger called the fire from heaven.
And now the last messenger is about to bring the worst news of all.
So let's get right into that.
I'll start by reading verse 18.
There in Job chapter 1 and go all the way through 19, then we'll comment on verse 19.
While he was yet speaking.
There came also another and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
It says it was a great wind.
Where the word wind is actually from a Hebrew word that's translated spirit in the Old Testament.
And the Spirit of God moved across the face of the waters.
There in Genesis.
Same word And there are other similar words into which this Hebrew word is translated, but I want to draw your attention to one in particular.
That's used four times in the Old Testament.
And it's the English word blast, B-L-A-S-T.
And let's look at a prime example of the use of that word blast, which is great wind or wind in our text.
And it's found in Exodus chapter 15.
Where the children of Israel were singing praises to God.
They actually had a song.
And they were singing praises to God for delivering them from the Egyptian army there at the Red Sea.
And I'll read verse 8.
It's Exodus 15, verse 8.
And in this song, as they praise God, they sing to him, and with the blast of thy nostrils.
The waters were gathered together.
The floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea That was the blast of God's nostrils that gathered those waters together and caused them to stand upright as a heap.
And that blast also did two other things in that scenario.
And they're found in Exodus chapter 14.
Where it describes what the blast of God's nostrils did.
Exodus 14, 8 Where Moses is commanded, but lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea and divide it.
And the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through the midst of the sea.
So the blast of God's nostrils not only gathered the waters together, parted them, but it also dried up the ground on which they would walk.
If you just move the waters aside and you leave the ground wet, you can't go anywhere.
You get stuck in the mud.
And God knew that, and so he made that provision for them so they could walk.
And even though God told Moses to lift up his rod and stretch out, stretch it out over the sea, it wasn't Moses' rod.
That the children of Israel praised in their song.
They didn't say, Oh Moses, oh Moses, what a great man you are.
You've dried up the sea, and you know, we want to take you for a pizza.
It was the blast of God's nostrils, or in our text the word wind, that gathered those waters together.
It was the blast of God's nostrils that dried up the seabed to allow the children of Israel to cross over it.
And another thing that blast or wind did is found in Exodus chapter 14, verse 21.
Exodus 14, 21.
And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea.
And the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.
Now the blast that saved the children of Israel by dividing the waters and drying the ground. was also from the nostrils of the blast that gathered those waters back together and drowned the Egyptian army, as we know we're familiar with that story And so even though Moses stretched out his hand over the sea after the children of Israel were safe on the other side, It was God who caused those waters to go back together and to swallow up those Egyptians.
God created the wind.
God created all things.
And Satan, the God of this world, had access to it.
During these times we're reading about in the book of Job.
And because the four corners of the house in which Job's children were feasting.
Because those four corners were smitten, they were struck.
There have been some who've speculated that may have been a tornado.
And whether it was or not We do note if if you smite the four corners of a building, it's going to collapse on itself And verse 19 tells us about this building, and it fell.
So it wasn't swept away, it wasn't picked up and tossed aside, it fell, it collapsed.
And it fell, look back in the text, upon the young men, and they are dead.
Now, this does not mean when you see that word that phrase young men, this does not mean that only the seven sons were killed We're going to look at this where young men, it's translated young men, but the Hebrew word is also translated some other ways that let us know it's not always males only.
That are being described here.
And we have three pieces of evidence to look at in order to prove that in this case it was not only the males who were killed.
Look at verse 18.
Who was inside the house?
It said Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house.
So all of Job's children were inside the house when it fell.
And we also don't see any mention of his daughters escaping the house and the sons only staying inside A second piece of evidence is that the Hebrew word translated young men is found 238 times in the Old Testament.
On 110 of those occasions, it is translated distinctly as a male.
And it's translated either as young man.
Or lad or boys.
The other 128 times its translation is not distinctly male.
Because it's translated as the word servant and child, the word young, children. youth and babe.
And none of those are distinctly male.
So they could be male and they could be female.
And third, just look at the words in our current text.
What did the servant say?
He said, I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
There was not anybody left alive except for this one servant.
And the servant tells us explicitly he was the only one to escape that weather catastrophe alive.
Now what we just did right there is what I want you to do when you study your Bibles.
That means there's much more to Bible study. than doing a devotional where where someone else tells you what he or she thinks a passage means.
Now I'm not against devotionals.
Anytime you can get in God's word you get after it.
But be careful what you hear about it, what you read about God's Word.
And I know many people who have, probably people in here too, who have daily devotionals or short lessons. that they listen to and they're given by somebody on the radio or maybe an internet personality and it may be a pastor, a teacher. an influencer or some public figure.
And you need to be careful about relying on those people for your knowledge of the Bible And you don't really know their background.
You don't know their qualifications.
Most importantly, you don't know what they believe.
Now, if you've researched what that person believes, if Joe Bob is your go-to podcaster.
And you're listening to him teach you through the book of Philemon, that's wonderful.
But you better know what he believes because it's going to dictate how he teaches that book.
And I don't I think most of them mean well and they're trying to help people, but I also think some of them are looking for clicks and follows. and uh donations to their ministries.
So we have to be careful.
And what we did was to read a passage that left us with some questions Young men, does that mean the sisters escaped?
It left us with that sort of question.
And rather than just running away from it and saying, well, it's not important.
We are just giving the best guess.
We examine the scriptures to see where the evidence led us.
I love doing that.
And uh imagine if someone were to listen to this message and say, well, Brother Andy, and I have people who have done this before in my ministries.
I think the words young men refer only to the male children.
Okay.
Well what I'm going to ask them to do is to show me in the Bible.
Where they found the evidence to make that determination.
I'm not telling them they're right or wrong, but I'll ask them, can you show me in the Bible where it says that it was only the sons, the male children, who died.
And what I'd usually hear from somebody like that who didn't do their homework would be, well, I just don't think God would allow all the children to die.
Okay, well that's not the case.
Or I've always been taught that it was just the sons who died Well, that's not evidence.
That's conjecture.
It's opinion.
But I want evidence.
And if I can't find evidence.
I'm not I'm I'm content to tell you I'm not sure, but I don't want to just make up a wild guess, especially as a teacher, because people are listening to you, and they often go with what you say.
So let's move on here to verse 20 now, that this terrible thing has happened.
Verse 20, then Job arose and rent his mantle.
Now what does this imply here?
He was probably sitting down when he heard the news from this last messenger We don't know what his posture was when each of the first three messengers came to him.
I don't know if he was standing up, walking, sitting down, lying down.
But we and we don't know what his reaction was.
We didn't get to see that, did we?
Because before the first messenger finished delivering his news, the second one came in right on top of him.
And said, I have something to say too.
And then the third one.
And we never got to see what Job's reaction was.
He was being bombarded with bad news.
But we know this fourth messenger in the news he brought caused Job to arise, to stand up.
And it says, he rent his mantle.
Now to rend is to tear, so rent is the past tense of that word, and we don't use it. in that fashion today, not normally.
I think we should, but we uh we speak a little different vernacular, don't we?
We'd say tore it.
And his mantle was a robe, it was an outer garment.
And so Job stood up and tore his robe at the hearing of the news about his children being killed.
Now in the Bible, this act of tearing the clothes is associated with grieving, with intense grieving And the first time we see it mentioned in the Bible is in Exodus chapter 37 And in Exodus thirty-seven, Joseph's brothers had conspired They didn't like him.
They didn't like the attention that he got from his dad.
They didn't like this coat of many colors that his dad had made for him.
And so they had thrown him into a pit, the brothers did.
And when the Ishmaelites came by, They said, well, let's just sell him as a slave to them.
And we'll make up a story about him, how the wild beast killed him, and we'll go home and tell Dad.
Now after Joseph was thrown into the pit, his eldest brother Reuben must have gone away from the area.
Either he went and took a nap or he walked off, I don't really know.
But he didn't realize that his brother had already been sold out of the pit.
And when he returned, Listen to what Exodus 37, verses 29 through 30 tell us about him rending his clothes as an expression of grief.
It said, And Reuben returned unto the pit.
And behold, Joseph was not in the pit, and he rent his clothes.
And he returned unto his brethren and said, The child is not.
And I, whither shall I go?
And in verse 34 through 35 of that same chapter.
We see what happened when Joseph's father Jacob Heard from the brothers, from his sons, that Joseph had been killed by wild beasts.
And of course, we know that was a lie made up by the brothers.
He hadn't been killed at all.
But that's what Jacob's father was believing.
And it says, and Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days.
And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted.
And he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning.
Thus his father wept for him Now from these two passages in Exodus 37, we learn that the rending of the clothing, the tearing of the clothing During intense grieving was not an unusual thing.
It was a custom.
And just like Jacob, Job's grieving was over the loss of his children, all of them.
And it was a grief for which there is no earthly comfort.
In fact, it said Jacob refused to be comforted by all of his sons and daughters, even though they tried.
When someone is grieving.
Don't think that there's something you can say or do that will take away their grief.
It takes time.
A lot of time.
And during that time, it's God through his word, by his spirit, that slowly eases that heavy burden of grief.
And some people seek that.
Others turn to to alcohol, to drugs, to suicide, other things, or they just get swallowed up.
With the depression so badly they can't function.
But as God is trying to ease this burden of grief for us, We rend our clothes.
Not physically.
We don't do that in this country.
But for Job, this was a time to tear his mantle.
And it said also, look back in the text, and shaved his head.
Now the rending of the mantle, the tearing of the robe was spontaneous.
It was immediate.
It wasn't pretty.
It wasn't organized.
And the shaving of the head followed the rending of the mantle.
Now the shaving of the head required a little less brute force, didn't it?
You gotta be careful running a razor over that dome.
I know.
And so it was a little more careful, deliberate action And we also see the shaving of head, of a head, as a response to grieving in other parts of the Bible.
And in fact, God commands Jerusalem and Judah to do this in Jeremiah chapter 7, verses 29 through 30.
Jeremiah 7, 29 through 30.
For God said through the prophet Jeremiah, Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away.
And take up a lamentation on high places.
For the Lord hath rejected and forsaken the generation of his wrath For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the Lord.
They have set their abominations in the house which is called by my name to pollute it.
Now God wanted Judah to grieve over their sin, over their broken fellowship with him.
And the command to shave the head of Jerusalem was to precede, it went before the lamentation.
That word lamentation is a mournful song.
It's a sad song.
There's a whole book. written called Lamentations.
And it's associated with grieving, whether it's earthly or spiritual.
And we also see God forbidding that practice of shaving the head for Aaron, the high priest, and for his sons.
In that high priestly line, listen to Leviticus chapter 21, verse 1.
Leviticus 21, verse 1.
And the Lord said unto Moses, Speak unto the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say unto them, There shall none be defiled for the dead among his people.
And if you skip down to verse 5, it says, they shall not make baldness upon their head.
Neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh.
So the shaving of the head, as Job did, Was uh a custom in those days for a man who was grieving, and that explains why Job did it.
Looking back in our text in Job 1, it says, and he fell down to the upon the ground.
And that means just that.
He stood up.
He said he arose.
He ran his mantle and shaved his head, and then he fell down.
Now, none of those things would be unusual For a person who was experiencing tremendous and sudden sorrow like he did.
And while we can hardly imagine the distress he must have felt and the intensity of the emotions that were coursing through his body.
In his mind.
We are told that at this time, if you look back in the text, he worshiped.
That's striking, isn't it?
It says he worshiped.
Now we if we go around and ask each person, what do you think worship is?
You might have several different answers, but probably most of them would have to do with expressing some sort of thanks to God or admiration of Him, adoration.
Whatever it may be in that context, that the Hebrew word for worship does not always mean what we think it means.
In fact, a lot of Hebrew words don't mean exactly what we think they mean.
That's why we study them.
It doesn't mean that Job lifted up his hands to the sky.
Some people, especially some of the more contemporary churches, will say that that's worship when you lift your hands up like that.
Well, no, that's not worship.
You may be worshiping.
Whether your hands are up or not is a different matter.
It doesn't mean Job danced all over the auditorium.
Or swayed to the rhythm of some repetitive shallow song.
It means he bowed himself down.
It means he lay prostrate, flat on the ground.
The word worshiped is more about humility.
It's about sinking down. in the presence of one whom you honor, one to whom you submit yourself.
Now that can happen in a religious sense.
It can also happen in an earthly sense.
We first see the word used in Genesis chapter 18.
Genesis chapter 18, where three men came to visit Abraham.
And they came when he was in the sitting outside his tent there in the heat of the day.
And verses 2 and 3, this is Genesis 18, verses 2 and 3, say, About Abraham, and he lifted up his eyes and looked.
And lo, three men stood by him.
And when he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door.
And bowed himself toward the ground.
Bowed himself, that's our word, or our words, toward the ground, and said, My Lord, If now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant.
So in order to rightly understand the Hebrew word for worship, We have to understand what it was Abraham was doing in that Genesis passage.
He was not worshiping these men because it said he he bowed down, bowed himself.
That's the same Hebrew word as the word worship.
And so he wasn't worshiping these three men as though they were God.
He wasn't doing it in that sense at all.
He was physically lowering himself, bowing himself in their presence, because he placed them above himself in honor.
He considered them more honorable than he was.
Or look at it another way, here they were, and here Abraham was.
And he placed his importance as secondary to their importance.
Now that's humility Brother Fulton and I, in our younger days, and I'm that's a long time ago, if you're trying to calculate it But we both studied and practiced martial arts.
And when we entered the training hall, the first thing we did was to bow As a sign of respect to the training hall, the instructor, our fellow students.
Now, we didn't honor any of them as God.
That wasn't what we were doing.
But when you see the word worshiped in the Bible, you need to look at the context to determine whether it's being used toward God spiritually. or toward man societally.
And as we look at the next few verses, we're going to be able to see in which way Job worshiped.
Look at verse 21, and he said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither.
What a strange thing to say.
That would not have been the first thing that came out of my mouth at such a time as that.
I'm not sure what I would have said.
If I could even speak at all.
If somebody told me all of my children have been killed.
I think it would be more like, oh God help me, I'm dying inside.
My children are gone, my servants are gone.
But Job's first words referred to the time when he came out of his mother's womb.
In fact, he described himself as naked.
The same word used to describe Adam and Eve in the garden before sin entered into the world.
Now every one of us can relate to Job right here.
Every one of us came from our mother's womb.
That's a scientific revelation for some, isn't it?
Nobody came from a father's womb as the some of the perverts today would like to imagine possible.
And apparently we have a Supreme Court justice who forgot what she was taught in seventh grade health about the differences between males and females.
In fact, she even invented some new words for us for the urban dictionary, cisginger and transginger.
But Justice Brown Jackson, whether she realizes it or not, came out of her mother's womb naked, just like we did.
And so what's the significance of this statement that Job makes?
Naked came I out of my mother's womb.
Well, when you're born, you're unclothed until someone clothes you.
You're a mess until someone cleans you up You're hungry until someone feeds you.
And when you have needs, they have to be met by somebody else When you're a newborn.
You come into this world without any ability or any resources to help yourself.
And that's why we have mothers and fathers.
And upon this statement, naked came I out of my mother's womb, Job added, look back in your text, and naked shall I return thither.
Or as another translation has it, naked shall I return there.
In John chapter 3, verse 4, John chapter 3 verse 4.
Because you should have been asking yourself a question.
Wait a minute.
How's Job going to return to his mother's womb?
Why would he say that?
Well, we're going to look at it.
In John chapter 3, Jesus was speaking with a ruler of the Jews.
His name was Nicodemus.
And he told Nicodemus that he had to be born again And Nicodemus saith unto him in verse 4, How can a man be born when he is old?
Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born?
Now, the answer to that question is of course no.
It's impossible.
And by asking this question, Nicodemus showed that he wasn't making the spiritual application to what Jesus was saying.
He wasn't really getting the picture.
He was limiting his understanding to the physical, to the earthly.
But he asked the question.
That is similar to what we might be asking about our text in Job.
Can a man enter a second time into his mother's womb and die?
Now the word womb in our text means belly.
And And follow me here.
Don't cut the message off halfway and say, oh, Brother Andy says males have wombs.
No, I'm not saying that.
They don't.
We don't.
But the word womb means belly here.
And to be applied to the female, there has to be a Hebrew word that accompanies it that means mother.
So it would if it's the mother's womb from which we are all born, it has to have a Hebrew word that goes with the word that's translated womb or belly.
It's got to say. basically mother's belly in Hebrew.
And what it appears that we have in our text, in Job, is a double reference here.
And that is, that second womb he's talking about is the belly of the earth, which is where the grave would be.
Now Job can't literally return to his mother's womb, but he can return to the belly of the earth.
Remember, it was from the dust of the earth that God created man.
And then from that man, God created woman.
And then from that man and woman, all of us have been born down the line.
Now listen to what Jesus taught his disciples about how he would be resurrected.
He used the example of Jonah.
In Matthew chapter 12 and verse 40.
See, Jesus taught from the Old Testament an awful lot, in fact, all the time.
Matthew chapter 12, verse 40.
I wonder what the Church of Christ does with that.
They think the Old Testament's for someone else and the New Testament's for us.
I wonder if you asked them, how do you explain Jesus' teaching from the Old Testament?
What do y'all do with that?
They just they don't.
Matthew 12, 40.
For as Jonas, that's Jonah, was three days and three nights in the whale's belly.
So shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Do you see what Jesus did there?
He compared the whale's belly to the heart or the belly of the earth.
So the belly of the whale was a literal physical part of a creature.
It wasn't the womb, it was the belly.
He swallowed the whale, the great fish, swallowed Jonah.
And then you have the belly of the earth of the heart of the earth Now remember, the New Testament was translated from the Greek language, so let's look at the meaning of the word translated belly in that verse there in Matthew.
Let's look at what it means in the Greek language.
That word is normally translated as, guess what?
The word womb.
Isn't that neat?
Jonah being in the belly of the whale was a type of him being buried.
Jesus being in the heart of the earth was definitely a result of his burial.
So for Job to say that he came out of his mother's womb naked, which is physically true And would return there naked means he would return to the womb of the earth, the belly of the earth, naked.
Now, getting very practical here.
Your next question might be: okay, when we bury people, they're not naked.
We put clothes on them.
There are different burial customs in the world.
And in ours and many others, we do put clothes on the body of a dead person.
As a matter of preserving the dignity of the family and being decent, and that's okay.
So the person's body is not literally naked as we might imagine it.
So what could that mean?
Well, here we go again.
We have a verse in Ecclesiastes that explains this concept to us a little more deeply.
And it's speaking of a man who dies, so it definitely applies.
Ecclesiastes chapter 5, verse 15.
Says, As he came forth of his mother's womb, naked shall he return to go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labor which he may carry away in his hand.
There you go.
When a man dies, he returns as he came.
He's naked.
Meaning, and what that means, and Ecclesiastes explains that to us.
That he takes nothing of his labor.
Solomon taught us there that when a person dies, He's naked in the sense that he does not take any of the fruits of his labor with him.
That's absolutely true, isn't it?
When my uh grandmother died, well both of them are dead, but one in particular I'm thinking of, she had an old car sitting out in the front of her house.
And she had the privilege of dying in her own home.
She never had to go to a nursing home like my other one did.
But when she died, that car stayed right there.
And she bought that car with her money.
And that car stayed right there in that parking lot.
She couldn't take it with her.
Very plain example there.
But you can't take the fruits of your labor with you when you die.
And so we can apply this conclusion from our study to ourselves as well.
When we're born, we're born physically naked from our mother's womb.
And we brought no works, no fruits of any labor with us into this world.
We brought absolutely zero accomplishments into this world.
We die naked in the sense that what we carry out of this world is nothing.
We carry zero works out of this world.
And of course we're talking about the fruits of our earthly works.
When Warren Buffett dies, he will not take one dollar or one share of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the grave with him.
He'll die naked in that sense.
In Job's case, we read that he was a man of great substance His household of servants was great.
His family was large.
He had a lot of livestock and servants there.
But you know, Job wasn't foolish.
If you asked him, Job, were you born with all that?
Did you bring any of that into the world?
He'd say, not any of it.
I didn't bring anything into the world.
And he's already told us that when he leaves, he's going out naked to his mother's womb, which we now understand means he'll return to the heart of the earth with nothing that he did on this earth.
Now what a great truth for us to learn so we can put our eyes what's really important here I mentioned a moment ago that dying naked means dying without taking any of your earthly labors with you.
Solomon taught that to us in Ecclesiastes.
However, as we close, there are some fruits.
That you may take with you when you die.
1 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 11 through 15.
1 Corinthians 3, 11 through 15.
For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Now if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire, and the fire shall try every man's work Is labor, of what sort it is.
If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, meaning If his work abides that he built on Jesus Christ, he shall receive a reward.
If any man's work shall be burned.
He shall suffer loss, but he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire.
The Apostle Paul here makes the case for us that any work built on Jesus Christ. will last after death in the form of a reward.
There will be a reward for the saint who dies and who has those labors.
However, the saint, that is the Christian, saint and a Christian are the same thing.
Don't let the Catholics fool you.
If you're a Christian, you're a saint.
If you're a saint, you're a Christian.
The saint who dies, but who has not built his works upon the foundation of Jesus Christ will still be saved.
But he'll go as one who is naked of rewards.
He sa the Bible says he suffers loss.
He shall suffer loss.
That means he takes no fruits of labor in the Lord because he didn't have any.
He doesn't receive any reward for his works because they didn't pass the fire test.
And as a Christian, our lives ought to reflect The gifts and the talents that God's given us.
And those talents and gifts are not for you to flaunt.
But they are for us to glorify God.
Matthew five sixteen Jesus said, let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.
And by obedience to this command, you don't go naked into the heart of the earth without rewards.
Job was not spiritually naked, so that's not what he was talking about here.
But he confessed that he would be naked, meaning without the earthly fruits of the earthly labors.
He accomplished, and that's how he would die.
And with that we'll close.
Father, thank you for the word of God.
Thank you for the Spirit who teaches us and for those who desire to learn your truths.
And as you've taught us today, Lord, we've just felt your presence and we're so thankful for that.
And pray that you would give us that same liberty.
And help us as we worship you in spirit and truth during this next hour.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
