Our book for February, Job, has been said to be a drama, a play, if you will. Thinking about Job like this, we can identify a number of characters in the play, including Job, God, the Devil, and Job's array of friends (or "friendly" thoughts perhaps). We can situate the play in a time distant from our own, in a country far from where we live; or we could re-position it to our own times and in our own community. This is how I've read this book in the past.
Tonight, however, I've picked up a little book I've had on my shelf for some time but never opened until now. It's Job His Spiritual Value by Irma Stewart. You might have it on your bookshelf.
In introducing "The Approach" (pp. 7-8) to reading Job, Ms Stewart suggests that:
"...Job should not be to us a person buffeted about by unprecedented external calamities, nor a man emotionally devastated by dogmatic persecutions. Job is far more than a member of a dramatic cast and far higher than a symbol of the human mind in all its ramifications, frustrations, and final self-surrender.
"The essential Job is a type of integrity, indeed a spiritual value, expressing its own self-completeness.
"The reader, therefore, is invited to proceed from an impersonal premise, thus to discover and enjoy the ascendancy which so universal an approach must inevitably reveal. To this end let him not think in terms of writer and reader, but acknowledge the omnipresent activity of God, the one and only Mind."
So, dear readers, off we go.
Julie Swannell
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