I am beginning an undertaking which I hope to finish in a few months, which will be a commentary on one of my favorite books of the Bible, Job. Some of the material will be recycled from previous articles here, even updates as God continues to lead me by His Spirit. Most of it is original material, particularly after chapter one.

It is my goal here by expounding upon the Book of Job that Christians have a better understanding of why they suffer, how God is good regardless of the existence of evil, and to see how the whole of the Bible is the word of God and interconnected.

The commentary is written from a presuppositionalist viewpoint, where I work from what the Scripture says on a subject and build from there. I do not seek to logically substantiate or otherwise prove any of the notions put forward in the commentary apart from citing the Scripture. When I find the comments and commentaries of other thinkers useful, everyone from Augustine to the band The Police I will cite them, but this is not a scholarly work full of citations.

Concerning citations, the commentary is specifically indebted to four specific commentaries on Job. Silas Durand (Reformed Baptist), Joseph Caryl (Puritan), Matthew Henry (Puritan), and Thomas Aquinas (Catholic) were consulted whenever my mind pulled a blank or my personal interpretation appeared novel to me, and I wanted to make sure I was not the first person to come up with it. God is not inventing new truths, and so we do not want to be propagating new ideas.

Further, I cannot make the claim that I, or any other writer, has definitively offered the final interpretation on the Book of Job. Augustine writes in his Confessions, “A great variety of interpretations, many of them legitimate, confronts our exploring minds as we search among these words to discover your will” (Book XII, Chapter 33). I just offer another interpretation of the book, one that I pray is legitimate, that would be edifying to the Church in uncovering the will of God as revealed in the Scripture.

This commentary is meant to be useful and understandable to an average Christian. It is my expectation that the average Christian has a pretty firm grasp on the whole of Scripture, but not an extensive background in scholarship. Being that I don’t aim to compete with scholars, this work is not made to cite other works nor come across as scholarly, though it is my contention that much of what I will put forward here are much more satisfying and profound answers to very big questions, that great philosophers and minds have bungled because they do not have the Scripture nor the Spirit to interpret it.

May God make the following observation from Prosper of Aquataine true for all of us:

Whenever, then, the word of God enters into the ears of the body through the ministry of the preachers, the action of the divine power fuses with the sound of a human voice, and He who is the inspirer of the preacher’s office is also the strength of the hearer’s heart (Call of the Nations, Book 1, Chapter 8).