Jobine Theology Part 1 -- By: Ralph Rogers Hawthorne

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 101:401 (Jan 1944)
Article: Jobine Theology Part 1
Author: Ralph Rogers Hawthorne


Jobine Theology
Part 1

Ralph Rogers Hawthorne

Introduction

There is a common conception among casual Bible students that the Old Testament consists of history, poetry, ethics, and prophecy, and that vital doctrines are presented in the New Testament. The Old Testament pictures the shadow of coming events while the New Testament contains systematic statements of doctrine. Because of this idea, messages on doctrinal subjects are taken from the Epistles chiefly and occasionally from one of the Gospels.

We are familiar with Pauline theology as contained in the seven church letters: Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. There is what is known as Petrine theology, those doctrines comprised in Peter’s two letters. Also John’s Gospel, his three general letters in particular, and the Revelation comprise Johannine theology. These three forms of theology are familiar terms.

Perhaps no one book in the entire Bible contains more separate doctrines than does the account of Job’s life suffering. From a study of each verse in the forty-two chapters a momentous number of vital doctrinal statements have been culled. When all such verses are classified and minor doctrines are placed in their proper setting with their major doctrine, one hundred and eleven doctrines are enumerated. Certainly a study of Jobine theology is worth while.

Little is known of the personal life of this citizen of Uz. He is introduced (Job 1:1) as if he had not heretofore been known. Ezekiel mentions three personages, Noah, Daniel, and Job, whose representative righteousness would presumably avail to redeem Israel (Ezek 14:14, 20).

Dr. Genung very vividly gives us the setting: “The story of the Book of Job is laid in the far-off patriarchal age, such a time as we find elsewhere represented only in the Book of Genesis; a time before the Israelitish state, with its

religious, social and political organization, existed. Its place is ‘the land of Uz,’ a little-known region southeast of Palestine, on the borders of Edom; a place remote from the ways of thinking peculiar to Israelitish lawgivers, priests and prophets. Its scene is in the free open country, among mountains, wadies, pasture-lands, and rural towns, where the relations of man and man are more elemental and primitive, and where the things of God are more intimately apprehended than in the complex affairs of city and state.”1 Job in his tortuous misery was advise...

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