For the Church

The One Gift Every Pastor Must Have

By Web Dev / Feb 16

In the midst of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, Warren Buffet famously observed, “It’s when the tide goes out that you see who’s skinny dipping.” Buffet was reflecting on the banks and investment firms that had insufficient capital to meet their financial obligations during the great recession.

Buffet’s observation applies to the ministry as well. When you stand before God’s people with Bible in hand, the tide goes out. It is in those moments, when you attempt to speak on behalf of God, that all will see the veracity of your calling.

For pastors, preaching and teaching God’s Word has a way of stripping us all bare; it exposes us and puts our gifting on public display. You can’t finesse your way through a sermon with polished appearance, warm people skills, or seminary credentials alone. In the moment of truth, your ability—or lack thereof—to teach and preach God’s Word reveals much about your calling.

This is the way it should be because the one called to the ministry is called to a ministry of the Word. God sets him apart to teach and preach His Word. This clarifying stipulation both challenges and reassures us. Those whom God has truly called; he has truly gifted for the task. Every pastor must be gifted to teach the Word; and every qualified pastor is.

“Able to Teach”

In I Timothy 3:1-7, the ability to teach is the distinguishing mark between the elder and the deacon. Both are expected to be godly, but only the office of elder requires an ability to teach. There are a thousand ways a minister can serve the church, but he has one indispensable and nonnegotiable responsibility—to preach and teach the Word of God.

Since the pastor’s primary duty is to preach and teach God’s word, he who would hold the office must be equal to the task. Literally, lives are at stake. The health of the church rises or falls with the pulpit.

Preaching includes teaching, but teaching may or may not include preaching. Both convey biblical truth, but the latter includes public proclamation—heralding the truth of Scripture to the gathered congregation.

Preaching and teaching are not distinct categories, but rather distinct venues or distinct outlets. As a wise professor once told me, “Preaching should never be anything less than teaching the Bible, but it should always be more than a Bible study.”

It is interesting that the “ability to teach” is the only qualification related to the pastor’s gifting or ability. I’m struck by what God left out of this list. In addition to sterling character, the would-be pastor isn’t required to be a gifted leader, a competent manager, a creative genius, or possess a magnetic personality—all of which come in handy in ministry. There is one gift, and only one gift, the pastor must possess. He must be able to teach.

Why Preaching?

Preaching is God’s divinely ordained means of communicating his Word, of nourishing his church, and of redeeming a people for himself. Other ministerial activities may compliment preaching, but no ministerial activity should displace preaching.

As Spurgeon warned:

“I do not look for any other means of converting men beyond the simple preaching of the gospel and the opening of men’s ears to hear it. The moment the church of God shall despise the pulpit, God will despise her. It has been through the ministry that the Lord has always been pleased to revive and bless his churches.”[1]

God only had one Son, and he made him a preacher. Scripture tells us, “Jesus came preaching,” and then he sent his disciples out to preach.[2] From the prophets of old, to Pentecost, to the end of the age, preaching is God’s appointed means to convey his message.

“Preach the Word,” a Simple Command

Every preacher can readily identify with the Apostle Paul’s binding charge to Timothy, “Preach the Word.” This charge is situated at the end of Paul’s final letter to his son in the faith, Timothy, and it encapsulates the broader biblical expectation that ministers faithfully discharge their responsibilities of faithfully preaching and teaching the Word.

As Paul is writing II Timothy, he knows his death is near. Christians are being persecuted. False prophets are plaguing the church. Many who named Christ as Savior have fallen away. Timothy himself is vacillating in the faith and questioning his call. Paul is writing his final letter, as the dying words of a dying man, to a distressed church and a discouraged son.

In this salutary charge, he tells Timothy, “Preach the Word.” This exhortation occurs—explicitly and implicitly—throughout Scripture, but nowhere more conspicuously than here. And it appears with added momentum, because of its context in this book, and in the lives of Paul, Timothy, and the church. There is a degree of narrowing earnestness, of focused deliberateness from Paul to Timothy, to us.

In II Timothy 3, Paul documents the catastrophic affects of man’s sinfulness, and presents the ministerial antidote—preaching God’s Word—which is inspired, inerrant, authoritative, and sufficient. We are called to “Preach the Word” because the days are evil, and the Scriptures are powerful. For preachers, II Timothy 4:2 has a certain romance to it—a magnetic pull, calling us back again and again and again to our central responsibility.

The call to preach—in light of so many problems in the society and the church—appears simplistic, but those are God’s instructions. To preach means “to herald, to lift up one’s voice, to proclaim.” It is to speak boldly, even loudly, without fear, and to make truth known.

Again, there is simplicity in Paul’s charge, “Preach the Word” There is a beautiful simplicity, an unmistakable clarity to this instruction. There is no need to clarify which word, or whose word. Rather, we are called to preach the Word—God’s Word. In fact, the premise of preaching the Word is built upon the entire canon of Scripture, and it roars throughout this book.

If you are not convinced of Scripture—its truthfulness, authority, relevance, and power—then you will be disinclined to preach the Word. You may look to it for sermon points because that is what evangelical preachers are to do, but you’ll never let the Word be the point and points of your sermon.

Essential Ingredients of Preaching and Teaching

While a quick wit, booming voice, and strong self-presentation are helpful elements, the key ingredients of faithful preaching should be preset. Faithful preaching has two essential ingredients, and he that is called to preach should cultivate both.

These two components are study of the Word and proclamation of the Word. To emphasize either to the de-emphasis of the other is error. Here we must maintain intentional balance.

Some more naturally enjoy the process of preparing sermons. They enjoy digging into the text of Scripture, rightly interpreting it, constructing an exegetical outline and stitching together a sermon. This is good, and no one should enter ministry without intending to delve into the text.

Others more naturally enjoy presentation. The act of preaching itself animates them. They enjoy delivering the goods to God’s people. Great preachers excel at both, and you should cultivate both strengths in your own ministry.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones famously observed that preaching is “the highest, the greatest, and the most glorious calling to which one can ever be called.”[3] In fact, it is too high and too glorious of a calling for just anyone to preach just anything for just any reason in just any way.

Like any other ability, teaching and preaching God’s Word is an acquired skill. Gifted by the Spirit of God, yes. But practice makes perfect, and it might take quite some time to clarify your gifting to preach. Don’t expect to sound like a veteran preacher your first time in the pulpit. In fact, you may not ever become an accomplished preacher.

Seminaries can grant a degree and churches can hire a pastor, but only God can make a preacher. Preaching is to be done by a man, called of God, who is compelled to herald the Bible with full conviction and faithful interpretation. The Bible details many character expectations of the pastor, but there is only one gift he must have—he must be able to preach and teach the Word of God.

—

[1] C. H. Spurgeon, Autobiography, Volume 1: The Early Years (London: Banner of Truth, 1962), v.

[2] Mark 1:14; Matthew 28:16-20.

[3] Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1972), 9.

Originally published at JasonKAllen.com

The Pastor’s Calling

By Web Dev / Feb 13

1 Timothy 3:1 “The saying is trustworthy: if anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.”

God has used few men more in my life than “The Doctor,” Martyn Lloyd-Jones. If you’re not familiar with MLJ let me encourage you to familiarize yourself with him. He was a pastor who loved the Bible and believed in preaching. I have been shaped by him in countless ways. But, as anyone who is familiar with the Doctor knows, Lloyd-Jones could be quite opinionated. Some would say he was too opinionated. However, because of his love for the Word and his grit, his rare disagreements don’t bother me much. It does not distract me because I am driven to the Word to find answers. Let me explain.

Recently, as I was re-reading his book Preaching and Preachers, I came across one of his famous quotes on the call of preaching. He says “The work of preaching is the highest and greatest and more glorious calling with which anyone can ever be called.” The first time I read that quote I loved it! In a world that devalues preaching, here was a prophetic voice calling us back to the Biblical priority. As I reread that sentence, I started to disagree with him a bit. The calling to preach is a great calling. For a man to be qualified to preach it requires that he be a certain kind of man. The preacher has a few prerequisite callings. As best as I can tell, God calls the pastor to great and noble callings that are higher and greater and more glorious than the work of preaching.

I have four callings that come before my calling to preach. God clearly says that the task of pastoring is noble. It would be right, then, for us to assign greater nobility to the tasks that are prerequisites for that great calling. What are these greater and more noble callings?

1. God has called me to sonship. God saved me when I was a little boy and I have been walking with him ever since. He has been so gracious to me. I never want to lose my first love. Paul calls Timothy a man of God in 1 Tim 6:11 and that is what every pastor must be. Before I am anything else, I am a man who has been saved and sustained by the God of the gospel. My identity must be rooted deep in the truth that I belong to God. Too many pastors have “pastor faith” and not childlike faith. A pastor is a Christian growing in Christlike humility. This is my first and greatest calling!

2. God has called me to the noble task of husbandry. It’s true that not every pastor is married. Most, however, are. Two becoming one flesh is in fact a profound mystery. As Eph. 5:32 says, “And I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” Marriage is a prerequisite calling because it is a demonstration of sort, of the message the qualified pastor preaches. If a pastor cannot love his bride well he will not love Christ’s bride well.

3. God has called me to fatherhood. Being a good father requires that I learn fatherhood from God. It is a great privilege to have God not only as the sovereign God of the universe but as our sovereign Father. The pastor doesn’t learn about God from looking to his own love for his kids. Rather, the pastor learns what good fatherhood is by looking to God the Father. 1 Tim. 3:4 makes it clear, the pastor who fails at home does not get to preach. The fatherhood of God and the fatherhood of our own children are the training ground for becoming a father to the flock.

4. God has called me to friendship. Anyone who aspires to the calling of Christian friendship aspires a noble task. Jesus was a good friend. It was he who said in John 15:13 “Greater loves has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” Almost everyone has met the professional “pastor.” You know the type. He is always around but no one seems to know him. He is really good at helping people build structures but really bad at making friends. It is impossible to “shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:2) without being friends with the flock. It is impossible to be held accountable at the heart level by surface-level business associates and elders. Failure at Christian friendship is the failure of pastoral ministry.

After these callings of greater nobility comes the calling of pastor. The pastor must fight the urge to confuse the first calling and the fifth calling. The title “pastor” can easily become the primary calling in which the called man finds his identity. That is a recipe for disaster. What would happen if something were to happen to your vocal chords and you never get to preach again? If your identity is in the right place, you would be fine. Oh yes, being a pastor and preaching the Bible is a high, great, and glorious call. But, it is not the highest, greatest, and glorious call of all.

Episode 302: Megachurch vs. Microchurch

By ddickerson / Feb 12

Sometimes small church folks are overly critical of big churches. Sometimes big church folks are uncharitable towards smaller churches. We’re here to settle the scores! Well, kind of. In this ep of the FTC Podcast, Jared and Ross discuss the pros and cons of big churches versus smaller churches and discuss ways we can encourage and think the best of each other.

From January to March, you’ll have the opportunity to hear from Midwestern Seminary professors about their areas of expertise, and ask them any questions you want! Completely online and FREE, you can sign up for any and all FTC Talks below to reserve your spot. We hope these conversations will spur you on in your service to the local church and help you connect with even more ministry leaders and friends across the country. We’ll see you soon!

What about ministry gives you joy? – Greg Belser

By emangalagiu / Feb 10

FTC.co asks Greg Belser, “What about ministry gives you joy?”.

Is Your Calling Causing an Identity Crisis?

By Web Dev / Feb 8

When getting to know someone, it’s common to ask: So what do you do? We’ve all been asked this question when being introduced to someone at a social gathering or when sitting next to a stranger on an airplane. Most often, it’s an implicit inquiry about your career or lifestyle. In response, you’re expected to say something like: “I’m a stay-at-home mom” or “I’m a marketing consultant.”

More than simple curiosity, though, this familiar question reveals that, for most of us, what we do tends to define our sense of who we are. To get to know a person, you must learn about what they do. Our career, lifestyle, ambitions, or relationships are our way of saying to the world, “I matter! I’m significant! I’m consequential!” And that’s not entirely wrongheaded; after all, it’s not a bad thing to derive an appropriate level of meaning and fulfillment from the things we do.

But without a strong sense of our true identity we are setting ourselves up for discouragement. For instance, the stay-at-home mom becomes disheartened when one of her kids enters a difficult stage. As her parenting attempts fall short, she begins to wonder, “Am I a total failure?” Her identity hangs in the balance of that question. Or what about when the marketing consultant is asked to resign because his firm is “taking things in a different direction?” What then becomes of his identity?

Such questions, though painful, have a way of leading us back to the knowledge of who we are in Christ. In Him, we find that being a marketing consultant or a stay-at-home mom are actually callings, not identities. A calling is something you fulfill through words and actions for a greater purpose. An identity, on the other hand, is strictly based on God’s words and actions—what He says about you and what Hehas done to make you His beloved child. Your identity therefore is true of you all the way down to the deepest level of your being. If all else were stripped away—your career, your earthly relationships, your plans—your identity as a beloved child of God would still remain. Unlike our callings, which are temporary, our identity in Christ is eternally fixed and irrevocable.

And yet, our identity is nonetheless inextricably linked to our callings. Through our identity in Christ, God sources our callings with His love for the purpose of expressing that love to others. This is why Paul told the Ephesians that in the various areas of their lives they were to imitate God “as beloved children” (Eph. 5:1, quoted above). Notice that believers are not told to imitate God as parents, employees, or whatever calling they may receive. Paul will allow these aspects of life to come to the foreground later (Eph. 6:1-9), but not until he has first hammered home the reality of our identity. Why? Because we cannot fulfill our callings as God desires until our hearts are fully integrated under the reality of who are in Christ.

So let’s be clear: we are to imitate God throughour callings as beloved children. For this to occur, we must develop a functional understanding of what it means to be a “beloved child.” This type of knowledge operates “under the hood” of our life; it is subconscious and reflexive, requiring a “re-wiring” of our inner life. And developing it can take a lifetime.

There is no magic formula or silver bullet to instantaneously transform our self-perception and our knowledge of God. Sure, there are encouraging moments along the way where things really “click” for us, but most of the time God transforms us gradually through the slow, ordinary, patient work of the Christian life: searching the Scriptures, abiding in prayer, silence and solitude, serving and giving, worshiping with our church family, and the like. To be clear, such work does not in any way secure our identity, for life in Christ is a free gift of God (Rom. 6:23). However, how our identity gets worked out in our day-to-day lives is, in many ways, a matter of us devoting ourselves to the right practices. This is critical for how we operate in our callings.

Therapist Edwin Friedman says that, in order for people to thrive as parents or employees, they must “focus first on their own integrity and on the nature of their presence rather than on techniques.”So often we seek to fulfill our callings by focusing almost exclusively on techniques. Parents comb through books to find the best techniques for motivating their children to behave; employees consult with industry experts to find ways to become indispensable in their field. And such things can certainly be useful.

However, the key to thriving in our callings is ultimately found in our identity as beloved children of God, not in whatever life-hacks and techniques happen to be trending. When our hearts are integrated under the reality of who we are in Christ, when God’s love develops in us an “under the hood,” functional understanding of our identity, we won’t live and die by how our callings seem to be going at the moment. Every calling has its ups and downs, and people who have a deficient sense of their identity tend to be energized when things are up and discouraged when things are down. But what the world really needs is for us to be Christians who can remain stable through it all because “we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us”(1 Jn. 4:16).

So, what do you do?

Next time you answer that question, remember that you are dearly loved by your Heavenly Father—not because of what you do, but because of what Christ has done.

“Lest We Drift”

By Michaela Classen / Feb 6

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is taken from Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel by Jared C. Wilson. Copyright © 2025 by Jared C. Wilson. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.harpercollinschristian.com

Lest We Drift is now available wherever Christian books are sold.

Theological drift is always a danger within evangelicalism. When Reformed evangelicals are not drawing their polemical passion from the rise of Protestantism beginning in the early sixteenth century, they are inspired by the cautionary guidance of more recent historical episodes like the Downgrade Controversy in the late 1800s of Victorian England, the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy of the 1920s–1930s, the Southern Baptist Convention’s “conservative resurgence” in response to liberalizing influences in the denomination in the late 1970s–1980s, and the concerns in the mid-1990s over Evangelicals and Catholics Together. If the early history of Christianity was fraught with the codification of orthodoxy, late Christianity has been about the enforcing of it.

We are well acquainted with the danger of drift; we seem less acquainted with our own susceptibility to it. And while we are accustomed to noticing the drift of others, we are woefully blind about noticing it among ourselves.

While the bulk of this book is concerned with the kinds of drift threatening our fidelity to the gospel—and our unity around it—it is important to establish first (and reestablish throughout) how such drift occurs. And this is the implicit claim of gospel-centrality as an ideology: that the moment we take our eyes off the center is when we begin to move away from it.

After expounding the wonders of Christ’s glory in the gospel (and the prophetic freight with which it culminates), the author of Hebrews warns us, “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (2:1). One primary implication is clear: Drift from the gospel is possible, and it happens when we stop paying ever-closer attention to it.

And since we are people constantly distracted by a million things inside and outside of ourselves, the potential for drift is constant in our lives. Every movement, no matter how faithful, remains vulnerable, and we fool ourselves if we think we’re the first to finally exorcize our institutions and organizations of this temptation. The shifts are subtler than we usually realize, but they have widespread ramifications.

D. A. Carson remarks thusly on the generational impact of drift:

I have heard a Mennonite leader assess his own movement in this way. One generation of Mennonites cherished the gospel and believed that the entailment of the gospel lay in certain social and political commitments. The next generation assumed the gospel and emphasized the social and political commitments. The present generation identifies itself with the social and political commitments, while the gospel is variously confessed or disowned; it no longer lies at the heart of the belief system of some who call themselves Mennonites.

Whether or not this is a fair reading of the Mennonites, it is certainly a salutary warning for evangelicals at large. [1]

It absolutely is.

I have sensed a parallel phenomenon in the generational succession of the gospel-centered movement as well. With the increased speed of information transfer, the full descent of the internet age, and the reality of globalization, what once might have taken generations can now transpire in the span of a few decades. For a great many of us who came of age at the height of the seeker-sensitive church movement—initially influenced by and trained in ministry to emulate pastors like Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Andy Stanley—the rediscovery of Reformed theology provided a canvas upon which to work out our growing angst with the attractional ministry paradigm. In the beginning, younger Boomers and older Gen Xers set about cherishing—or at least enjoying the newness of—gospel-centrality, especially in reaction to what we were rebelling against. From this interest arose the young, restless, and Reformed phenomenon, but in just ten short years, what was new to us had become the established norm for the next generation.

Many younger Gen Xers and Millennials effectively grew up with the gospel-centered movement as the wallpaper of their church experience. This was the generation of “assumption,” for which the implications proved more interesting than the gospel itself. It didn’t help that many of the “cherishers” pastoring and influencing them turned out merely to be dabblers.

The watchword of the Reformation was semper reformanda—“always reforming”—which for its originators meant always returning to the gospel of grace, always and ever conforming to the centrality of Christ. In the spirit of Luther’s first thesis, the whole life of the Christian is to be one of constant repenting, which means constantly turning from sin and constantly turning to Christ.

Gospel-centrality, in other words, is not something you can set to autopilot.

This is true even if your doctrinal fidelity is to the true gospel! The true gospel may be de-centered, placed in the lockbox of our theological basement, or simply hung on the wall of the church website. Accordingly, it provides the background for all manner of functional, ministerial, and cultural drift. For instance, nearly every mainline church where Christ and his gospel are not preached biblically or with conviction claims to affirm the historic creeds. And nearly every conservative church where political rants and legalistic tirades dominate the pulpit maintains an orthodox statement of faith in their church documents.

Drift does not usually begin at the places of doctrines and documents but at the places of discourse and disposition.

Tim Keller writes:

Both the Bible and church history show us that it is possible to hold all the correct individual biblical doctrines and yet functionally lose our grasp on the gospel. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones argues that while we obviously lose the gospel if we fall into heterodoxy, we can also operationally stop preaching and using the gospel on ourselves through dead orthodoxy or through doctrinal imbalances of emphasis. Sinclair Ferguson argues that there are many forms of both legalism and antinomianism, some of which are based on overt heresy but more often on matters of emphasis and spirit. It is critical, therefore, in every new generation and setting to find ways to communicate the gospel clearly and strikingly, distinguishing it from its opposites and counterfeits. [2]

We will examine some of these alternate emphases in subsequent chapters, but as the urban legend tells us, the best way to spot counterfeits is to become familiar with the real thing. Since part of our tendency toward gospel drift is in fact a pervasive gospel confusion, it behooves us to establish and constantly refamiliarize ourselves with the true gospel and the substance of what is meant by “gospel-centrality.”

__________

D. A. Carson, The Cross and Christian Ministry: Leadership Lessons from 1 Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 63.
Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), 21.

Episode 301: Gospel Drift

By ddickerson / Feb 5

Hebrews 2:1 warns us to pay closer attention to what we have heard “lest we drift away from it.” In this episode of the podcast, Jared and Ross talk about the concept of gospel drift — what it is, what are the signs, and how to avoid it. Relevant to the discussion is Jared’s brand new book Lest We Drift: 5 Departure Dangers from the 1 True Gospel, now available from Zondervan Reflective wherever Christian books are sold.

Episode 300: FTC Mailbag

By ddickerson / Jan 29

It’s Jared and Ross’s 100th episode together(!) and another installment in the FTC Mailbag feature, where they answer listener-submitted questions. This week’s topics include church membership processes, should pastors tithe?, the church in the Northeast, small groups, stewardship campaigns, using quotes in sermons, and resources on hospitality.

Gaslighting Job

By Michaela Classen / Jan 23

“It sort of seems like God is gaslighting Job?”

A friend of mine raised this concern after I preached on Job 38–41. I hadn’t considered the question in my sermon prep, but especially in our therapized and therapeutic culture, it’s worth considering.

I’d like to look at the question in three phases. First, we’ll broadly consider the pastoral implications of reading clinical mental health dynamics into the Scriptures. Second, we’ll consider what exactly gaslighting is and how one could in good faith map the concept onto what God does at the end of Job. And, third, we’ll take a fresh look at God’s speeches in Job and consider how the label “gaslighting” fails to summarize Job’s encounter with God.

Pastoral Considerations

Living in the context of what Philip Rieff called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, followers of Jesus need to be aware of a few key dynamics.

First, relational and power dynamics are top of mind for young Bible readers. From labeling biblical characters as “toxic” to reading between the lines to look for internal motivations that don’t show up in the text, people will encounter the stories of Scripture as though they are watching a counseling session unfold. One of the things that, for C.S. Lewis, makes something a children’s story is the “absence of a close psychology.” Modern adult readers will intuitively supply a close psychology even when one isn’t offered in the text.

Second, in biblical application and in preaching, it’ll be tempting to speak far beyond the Scriptures in this arena to tickle the ears of listeners. There is a lot we might want from Scripture that it doesn’t give us; like Job, we must learn to perceive God’s silence as God’s wisdom.

Third, we ought to demonstrate awareness of pop-psychological thought processes. The next generation is incredibly online, and pastors have two options for how to minister into that arena: be incredibly online themselves, or be immersed in relationships with people who are incredibly online and learn from them. The overwhelming majority of people we are seeking to evangelize are people with a digitized sense of self. If we can’t speak their language, we’ll fail to contextualize.

This doesn’t mean we adopt the assumptions that come with the pop-therapeutic worldview. But if we can’t say, “You’ve heard it said, but I say unto you,” we can’t preach like Jesus did. That being said, let’s look at the terrifying encounter Job has with God.

The Whirlwind

Gaslighting, an increasingly common term, speaks to the “crazy making” dynamic that exists in some abusive relationships. The term comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight in which a controlling husband makes his new wife doubt her memories and perceptions, over time convincing her that she can’t trust herself and that she’s imagining things.

There are a few elements in the Job narrative that might tempt a good-faith reader to see gaslighting in the way that God deals with the suffering Job.

First, there is a power imbalance. The show of force God makes in appearing in a whirlwind combined with the overwhelming metaphors for God’s power over the earth, the stars, the Behemoth, and the Leviathan could be read as attempts to silence and stifle rather than engage; who are you to question me, when I can do all these great things?

Second, God seems, at a first read, to ignore the questions Job asks regarding God’s justice and fairness; his real grievances seem dismissed or ignored. God doesn’t answer Job’s questions and instead redirects the conversation toward His own questions and emphasizes Job’s smallness, limited nature, and inability to comprehend God’s infinite activity. Job’s questions are framed as being invalid; who are you to question me, when you don’t have the mental capacity I have?

Third, God withholds key information. Job never learns about the deal God makes with the satan in Job 1. Why does God not tell Job the whole endeavor was a test? That He bet on his righteousness against the evil one and won? How is Job expected to live his life in soberness if God isn’t going to let him have all the facts? Job’s agency seems to be undermined.

If we had a husband interacting with his wife like this, we’d rightly support her and rebuke him. “You’re going to complain about my inattentiveness when I bring the bacon home? You’re going to raise concerns about how I treat the kids when my SAT score was 500 points higher than yours? You’re tracking my location? Mind your own business!” It looks manipulative and demeaning.

So, how are we to answer in defense of the Holy One of Israel?

Job’s Encounter

First, just to get clear on the concept of gaslighting, it’s about making someone question their sanity over time. Someone could be manipulated or lied to in one interaction, but they can’t be gaslit, per se. Gaslighting requires a pattern. The story of Job doesn’t technically meet the criteria for gaslighting in the proper sense. But what about in the sense that Gen Z and the TikTokers use it? In which it’s more of a synonym for manipulation or being sketchy?

God’s presence in the whirlwind isn’t intimidation; it’s revelation. Job is a wisdom book, and the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Fearing God is about reverence, respect, and mindfulness. When you’re afraid of birds, you’re constantly on the lookout for them. When you’re afraid of God, you’re looking for Him in the nooks and crannies of your life. The whirlwind is powerful and attention-capturing, as is the Lord. Yahweh is revealing Himself in a palpable and compelling way.

Job’s primary angst and question are not dismissed, but are answered with God’s very presence. Whole chapters of Job are devoted to him wrestling with questions about whether God has abandoned him, whether God can hear him, and whether God will ever answer him. God showing up in the lightning-snow-tornado is God definitively answering, not in words but in deed, Job’s central question: No, I’ve not abandoned you. Yes, I can hear you. And, yes, I’ll respond to your questioning.

God’s response is not a dismissal of Job’s perspective, but a contextualization of his perspective. Job isn’t told “you haven’t suffered” or “your experience isn’t valid” or even “you are wrong.” Job’s speech and conduct are commended and blessed by God. What Job is told is “you are limited.” Job isn’t getting new information here; he’s getting a new experience. “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5).

Job’s questions about God’s justice were rooted in his belief in God’s goodness and the struggle to reconcile that belief with his lived experience of suffering. When Job is captivated by God’s power, he’s able to locate his experience more tangibly in the context of the world which is governed by the God who holds Leviathan’s leash. The incomprehensible power of calamity is as mere pet canary to the Lord. Job “knew” this; now he “knows” it differently.

Job isn’t left questioning his sanity. He’s left in a state of wonder and awe. Recognizing afresh the Over-and-Aboveness of the majesty of God. He levels up his wisdom not because his theology of God has changed but because his proximity to God has changed.

Let’s now consider the argument that God doesn’t tell Job about the bet He placed in letting Satan destroy what was most precious to him. First, in a sense, God does generally tell him what happened behind the scenes; Leviathan, the great agent of chaos, Job is told, is under the control of Yahweh. Yahweh does take ultimate responsibility for all that happens in the cosmos.

Second, God gives Job the perspective he needs to grapple with the reality he’s living in. Job is brought into further alignment with reality, not separated from it like what happens when someone is gaslit. If we are in fact living in God’s world, then awareness of and respect for God’s sovereign providence over all things is sobriety. The fear of the Lord truly is the beginning of wisdom.

Students of the Scriptures

People can’t really help seeing what they initially see or hear when reading the Scriptures. What we bring to the text is our whole selves: our sociological context and our theological assumptions are both a part of that. Yet, the temptation and tendency to see what isn’t there is something we should be conscious of and concerned about as students of the Scriptures. God is not an abuser of Job.

In fact, He’s the opposite. God is good. He invites Job into reality, out of chaos and confusion, and blesses him afresh.

Job’s grief remains, but his crisis of faith dissipates when his core question (“Where is God?”) is answered with God’s very presence.

Episode 299: Church Fights

By ddickerson / Jan 22

From throwing microphones to walking out of meetings, we’ve seen (and done) some unfortunate things in the midst of church conflict. Listen in as Jared and Ross discuss the roots and rationales of church conflicts — and how to respond when fights take over a church.