Hank Smith: 00:01 Welcome to Follow Him, a weekly podcast dedicated to helping individuals and families with their Come, Follow Me study. I’m Hank Smith.

John Bytheway: 00:09 And I’m John Bytheway.

Hank Smith: 00:10 We love to learn.

John Bytheway: 00:11 We love to laugh.

Hank Smith: 00:13 We want to learn and laugh with you.

John Bytheway: 00:15 As together, we follow him.

Hank Smith: 00:19 Welcome everyone to another episode of FollowHIM. My name is Hank Smith. I’m your host. I am here with my co-host. There is none like him in the Earth, a perfect and upright co-host, one that fears God and escheweth evil. He holds fast to his integrity. That is my co-host, John Bytheway. John, welcome to another episode of FollowHIM. John, when I read that verse, you’re the first person who came to mind.

John Bytheway: 00:52 No comment. Yeah, but then the trials followed. The trials came after, so tone it down a little bit.

Hank Smith: 00:56 Sorry. I should watch out for that. Because you’re like, don’t give me that.

John Bytheway: 00:59 Don’t set me up.

Hank Smith: 01:03 John, we’re going to be in the Book of Job today. Job chapter two, verse three is where that phrase came from. And we had to bring on someone who could help us understand this book. And to be honest, I’m a little bit, I’m nervous, John. Sometimes I’m not nervous because we bring on people I’ve talked to many, many times, and others I’ve only seen on TV. And this is someone I’ve only seen on TV, only on YouTube, when I’ve watched things where he is speaking. And I’ll be honest, John, it’s a home run every time. Can you tell our audience who’s here?

John Bytheway: 01:35 We have Dr. Adam S. Miller here today. I am holding Original Grace, for those of you who can see on YouTube, his newest book, which is so new, it’s on deseretbook.com and it takes a little while for them to get all the processing stuff so that it will be on Amazon, but it will be. Adam S. Miller is a professor of philosophy at Collin College in McKinney, Texas. He earned a bachelor’s in comparative literature from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in philosophy from Villanova University. He’s the author of more than 10 books, including Letters to a Young Mormon, An Early Resurrection, and Mormon: A Brief Theological Introduction. He and his wife, Gwen, have three children. And also, as we were talking before, he served a mission in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He loves basketball.

John Bytheway: 02:28 And Hank, you know and I know that publishers like to say things about the books they publish, but when someone that you know says something about it, it makes a huge difference. And you and I both have a love and respect for Dr. Robert L. Millet. He has been on our program before. In this book, Letters to a Young Mormon, this is what Brother Robert L. Millet said at the beginning. He said, “Adam Miller’s Letters to a Young Mormon frustrated me. Not that I didn’t like it, because I enjoyed it immensely. No, it frustrated me because I only wish I had had such a book to read when I was a 1960s teenager with racing mind and hormones.”

John Bytheway: 03:09 And when Robert Millet says, “I wish I had had this book,” you’ve got my attention immediately because of our love and respect for him. I just love your writing style. It’s beautiful and it’s fresh and honest. We’re really excited to have you here, Brother Miller. I had no idea about the basketball thing. So maybe if we ever get in the same space, instead of spread out over Zoom, we can play a game of horse and then you’ll see how upright and perfect I really am.

Dr. Adam Miller: 03:38 That would be great. I’d love it.

John Bytheway: 03:40 So welcome, Dr. Miller. We’re so glad to have you.

Dr. Adam Miller: 03:43 I am very happy to be here. I have never met either of you in real life before, but I’ve been looking forward to this. And if you’d like to hear it, I do have a John Bytheway story, even though John Bytheway and I have never met.

John Bytheway: 03:56 No way. Oh, I hope it’s a-

Dr. Adam Miller: 03:58 Are you interested?

Hank Smith: 03:59 This makes my day because I love John Bytheway stories.

Dr. Adam Miller: 04:03 I was a graduate student at Villanova working on my PhD and I was writing my doctoral dissertation and I came out to BYU to spend the summer teaching a New Testament class for religious education. Because the topic of my dissertation had to do with the use of Paul’s epistles in contemporary French philosophy. All the Marxists and the Freudians and the atheists, Paul was a hot topic among them. And John Bytheway figures into this story because while I was there at BYU for that summer writing this dissertation, I was alone. My family wasn’t with me. I tried to avoid my apartment as much as I could. And religious ed, they housed me in John Bytheway’s empty office in the Testing Center at BYU. A big chunk, John, of my dissertation on contemporary French philosophy in Paul’s epistles was written in your empty office in the Testing Center.

Hank Smith: 05:00 Wow.

Dr. Adam Miller: 05:02 So thanks.

John Bytheway: 05:03 Probably the best thing that ever happened in that office, because I’m sure my writing doesn’t compare. And that’s a beautiful metaphor, because isn’t life just kind of a big Testing Center?

Hank Smith: 05:14 Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 05:15 Indeed.

Hank Smith: 05:16 Hey, that’s a perfect lead in to what we’re going to talk about today. Trials test difficulties. In fact, the name of the lesson in the manual this week is, Yet Will I Trust in Him? So Dr. Miller, Adam, here’s what we’d like to do. John and I are just here for the ride. First question is what do our listeners need to know before jumping into the Book of Job? What background do they need in order to get the most out of this book?

Dr. Adam Miller: 05:43 I think a little background here is especially helpful with the Book of Job because in lots of ways, it’s not like anything else in the Old Testament. In some ways, a little bit like the Book of Ecclesiastes, it’s a miracle that it’s in the Old Testament.

Hank Smith: 06:00 Okay.

Dr. Adam Miller: 06:02 Because the Book of Job spends a lot of time calling into question and undercutting and rewriting some of the basic assumptions that we tend to take for granted about God and religion and the nature of suffering. But it does that all as part of its project of faithfully engaging us with God. I think it’s an especially powerful and unusual book in the Old Testament in that respect.

Hank Smith: 06:28 I’m a Victor Hugo fan. I wouldn’t call myself a reader anywhere near you, Dr. Miller.

Dr. Adam Miller: 06:34 If you’ve read a thousand page Victor Hugo novel, then you’re a reader.

Hank Smith: 06:38 Okay. Yes.

John Bytheway: 06:38 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 06:39 I have. Both Hunchback and Les Miserables.

Dr. Adam Miller: 06:42 Wow.

Hank Smith: 06:42 And I always tell people, the unabridged version. You just have to tell people it was unabridged. I have this written in my scriptures. The Book of Job is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the human mind. That’s Victor Hugo. That is quite an endorsement, wouldn’t you say, from quite an author?

Dr. Adam Miller: 06:59 A blurb from Victor Hugo for the Book of Job.

Hank Smith: 07:03 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 07:04 I’ve read it once, but Elder Bruce R. McConkie was going through books of scripture once and all he said about Job was, “And Job is for people who like the Book of Job.” That’s all he said. Throw that away.

Dr. Adam Miller: 07:17 Yeah. Well, guilty as charged.

John Bytheway: 07:19 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 07:19 Yeah. Me too. I’m interested in this because we’re breaking away, right, from the story that we’ve had, which has been Israel, the monarchs. We’ve talked about the exile, we’ve talked about Ezra, Nehemiah, we’ve talked about Esther. And now Job and none of that, right?

Dr. Adam Miller: 07:37 Yeah. None of that is involved here in the Book of Job. One of the interesting things that makes the Book of Job an outlier has to do with the way that Job is not an Israelite. It’s unclear who Job was as a historical figure. It’s been speculated that he fits somewhere into the chronology of the Book of Genesis. May have been associated with Egypt in some way. But the book at the bare minimum makes clear that he’s not an Israelite, right? The Israelite story, the story of the Israelite covenant, he falls outside of that main branch of the story. He’s more like you and I, he’s a Gentile in many respects. But he still has this remarkable relationship with God, the best we can tell much later is fashioned into the version of the story that we get in the Book of Job included in the Bible.

Hank Smith: 08:28 That’s fantastic. One thing I’ve told my students is Latter-day Saints don’t have a corner on God. We don’t have him to ourselves. Sometimes there might be a tendency to think, oh, true and living church, we’re the only ones God is interested in or talking to. And yet you find out people like Job, we might say he’s not a member of our church. He has a fantastic relationship with God. And we could say that in our day. People who are not members of our church have a fantastic relationship with God.

Dr. Adam Miller: 08:57 Yeah. I think that’s right. And I think that’s also one of the reasons why it’s unusual and perhaps surprising that Job made it in to the Old Testament cannon, is that he’s not part of the covenant family in that technical sense.

Hank Smith: 09:11 Okay. Any other background before we jump in?

Dr. Adam Miller: 09:14 Yeah. I’d like to say, I think that in my estimation, the Book of Job may be the most important book in the Old Testament. Opinions are going to vary about this. Tastes, preferences, interests will play a role. But for me, one of the things that’s really striking and unusual about the Book of Job in comparison to the rest of what we get in the Old Testament has to do with the way that the Book of Job is essentially an argument. It’s a long series of arguments. Mostly what we get in the Old Testament are stories, narratives, detailed descriptions of the law of Moses. We get prophecy, right? We get wisdom books like Proverbs. We get collections of prayers like Psalms.

Dr. Adam Miller: 10:02 But the one thing that we hardly ever get in scripture is long, extended versions of arguments, of explanations, of reasonings, of back and forth. And Job in that respect I think really stands out, because it’s an example of someone trying really hard to think about God. And we see that thinking unfolding live in real time, especially in conversation with Job’s friends, and I think that’s quite remarkable. And as a philosopher, that kind of thing especially appeals to me. I like actual explanations.

Hank Smith: 10:31 I love that. I’m writing this down in my scriptures. It’s an argument. Would you say it’s a philosophical discussion?

Dr. Adam Miller: 10:37 Yeah. I think the Book of Job, more than any other place perhaps in all of scripture, directly addresses as questions, as questions, not just as answers, but as questions, the basic problems at the heart of human experience. What’s the nature of human suffering? Why do we suffer? What relationship does our suffering bear to justice? And what do both suffering and justice have to do with our relationship to God? Those are at the heart of what it means to be a human being and to try to live a religion. And Job may be our best and clearest and most extended and rawest example of what it means to try to think about those questions.

Hank Smith: 11:15 Oh, that’s beautiful. It’s not fair, just on the side note, it’s not fair that someone can write and speak this well, just so you know. You better not be able to shoot threes. Because if you can, then you’re a trifecta. You can speak right and shoot threes.

John Bytheway: 11:30 I love that kind of introduction because it is such a question that is ongoing, it seems we are constantly asking. The very first line in the official manual, “It’s natural to wonder why bad things happen to good people. Or for that matter, why good things happen to bad people. Why would God, who is just, allow that? Questions like these are explored through the experience of Job, one of those good people to whom bad things happen.” And the reason I like what you said is the question, it’s not we’re just all done with that question when we’re done with the Book of Job. It will go on in each of our lives. We’ll still be asking that question. So I like the way you put that. It’s a long argument. It’s a long philosophical discussion. That question will persist I think for all of us as we go through life.

Dr. Adam Miller: 12:21 We get to witness, I think in a really raw and unfiltered way that’s unusual for scripture, what it looks like to wrestle with God, not knowing what God is doing or why. And to see that as part of your religion, rather than as a kind of departure from your religion.

John Bytheway: 12:40 I love the word wrestle in there because I just think that, who was it? Enos in the Book of Mormon, let me tell you the wrestle that I had before God. And I took in high school a wonderful class just called sports for life, and we played football and then we played basketball and then we played volleyball and then we wrestled. And wrestling was the most strenuous thing. You use every muscle. You’d be sore. You’d walk off the mat going, I feel like I just ran a marathon or something. But wrestling made you stronger everywhere. And so I love the idea of a spiritual wrestle and the outcomes that can come from a spiritual wrestle.

Dr. Adam Miller: 13:21 So intimate, wrestling. You’re right in there with the other person’s body as close as you’d ever like to get to another human being.

Hank Smith: 13:28 Yeah. This is just for me. To see the wrestle, to see suffering, to see the questions and the back and forth with the Lord as part of your religion.

John Bytheway: 13:42 As soon as I get this answer, I’ll be fine. Yeah. It’s an ongoing. Yeah.

Hank Smith: 13:48 Yeah. That was very touching.

Dr. Adam Miller: 13:50 I don’t want to spoil the ending, but though God does show up at the end of the Book of Job in a quite remarkable way, he doesn’t answer any of Job’s questions.

John Bytheway: 14:00 Right. That’s one of my favorite parts, is he still doesn’t get his questions answered except that God is there. I love that part.

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:08 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 14:09 God is there.

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:09 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 14:10 God is aware. But I’m just going to tell you how grand my creations are and ask you, where were you when I did all this? That’s one of the parts that I love too because it’s open ended at the end.

Hank Smith: 14:21 Don’t tell me my questions are not going to be answered you guys. That’s an interesting thing, that when I see God, he’ll give me all my answers. And he says, at least in this book, no. No, you’re not going to get all your answers right now. This has been great so far. Are you ready to jump in?

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:39 I have two other notes I think that might be-

Hank Smith: 14:41 Okay. Let’s do it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:42 Helpful in terms of readers approaching the Book of Job.

Hank Smith: 14:48 Okay.

Dr. Adam Miller: 14:49 One has to do with the fact that because Job is such an unusual book, it’s also pretty hard to read. Just at the level of individual sentences, it can be hard to read. And I think this is partly a function of the fact that it’s poetry and people in general aren’t very good at reading poetry. And it takes a little bit of practice and is partly a product of the fact that we try to read it in King James English, which when you layer that on top of the difficulty of the Hebrew poetry together with the fact that the King James English, especially in our edition of the scriptures, hides the fact that it is poetry, right? Presenting it as if it were prose rather than a poem, it makes it really hard to read.

Dr. Adam Miller: 15:36 And so one thing that I would recommend to people who are really interested in trying to dip their toes into the Book of Job is to take it slow and to read that King James translation with a contemporary translation in hand. So that you can get over the hump of just trying to understand what’s being said, and you can get a feel for the way that it is a poem and you can see it structured as a poem. That goes a long way all by itself.

Hank Smith: 16:09 Do you have one that you use?

Dr. Adam Miller: 16:11 Any contemporary translation in modern English would be fine, especially if it presents it as verse.

Hank Smith: 16:18 Okay.

Dr. Adam Miller: 16:19 The new revised standard edition is fine. The new English translation is fine. I think anything that presents it in modern English as poetry, that’ll work.

Hank Smith: 16:28 I direct my students to a website called biblehub.com, in which you can look up a verse and it gives you any number of translations, up to 25 or 30 different translations. And I’ve told them, if you stumble across a verse you don’t understand, which sounds like it’s going to happen a lot in the Book of Job.

Dr. Adam Miller: 16:45 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 16:45 Go over to the website and read the different ways other translators have rendered that and you’ll find yourself going, oh, okay. I get it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 16:54 Yeah. I tend to use on my phone an app called The Blue Letter Bible, that also gives you multiple parallel translations. And if you’re interested in that kind of thing, it also gives you links through to the original Greek and Hebrew, along with concordances and translations of key terms, stuff like that.

Hank Smith: 17:14 Fantastic. Yeah. And I’ve found in my reading of the Bible, those to be an immense help.

Dr. Adam Miller: 17:19 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 17:19 Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 17:19 Me too.

Hank Smith: 17:20 I mean, yeah.

John Bytheway: 17:21 I’m glad we’re talking about this because I feel like some are a little hesitant, like, oh no, that’s not the official version. Well, we do have an official version, but what a blessing to have these others. And go back to your King James, but go look at those others. I was at education week in Hawaii, Hank, had to be 30 years ago, something. Brother Dr. A. David Thomas was lecturing and he said in his class that he read some Old Testament, couldn’t understand it. He looked both ways and said I bought myself a contemporary version and I understood it for the first time.

John Bytheway: 17:54 And I laughed and ever since then, I think you saw me hold this up. I got this one and this says kids’ application, but the translation is called The Living Bible. Sometimes I’ll use this to prepare for this podcast. Tell me the storyline. Okay, now I can hear it in King James. And sometimes the King James is hard to understand. Sometimes it’s beautiful, the King James. But at least I can see both of those and say, oh, now I get what’s going on. I just hope people aren’t thinking, is it wrong for me to look at another translation? No, it’s helpful. And the King James, as far as I know, will remain our official one, but really helpful.

Dr. Adam Miller: 18:31 Well, the church of course uses contemporary translations in all of the other languages except for English. My understanding is that we stick with it in English, the King James, because that’s the language of the restoration. Right? If you want to see the parallels between the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants, which is crucial, you need to stick with the King James, because we don’t have the alternate translations of the Book of Mormon or Doctrine and Covenants in English. But the authoritative version doesn’t do you much good at the end of the day if you didn’t understand what it said.

Hank Smith: 19:04 Exactly right.

John Bytheway: 19:05 Yeah. And the Book of Mormon sounds like King James English and the Doctrine and Covenants does, so it’s nice to have those kind of having that same sound.

Dr. Adam Miller: 19:14 Yeah. They’re married together in a way.

Hank Smith: 19:16 Our friend, John Hilton III, on his website has just a little blog entry called, Is it Okay to Use Bibles Besides the King James? And in this, he says, “Recently people have been asking why I sometimes use versions of the Bible besides the KJV. Some have even asked if it’s okay to use alternate versions, like the new revised standard version. Personally, I love the KJV, have used it through all my life and continue to do so. At the same time, I’ve found that my understanding of passages is expanded as I read alternate translations.”

Hank Smith: 19:48 If you read a little further, he quotes the church’s handbook, 2021 Church Handbook, “When possible, members should use a preferred or church published edition of the Bible in church classes and meetings. This helps maintain clarity in the discussion and consistent understanding of doctrine.” Then this sentence, “Other editions of the Bible may be useful for personal or academic study.” It’s very clear that we are in, what would we say, John? We are in the safety of the church’s guidelines.

John Bytheway: 20:16 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 20:16 I just don’t want anyone to go, “This is apostasy. What are they doing?”

Dr. Adam Miller: 20:19 You guys pushing the boundaries here.

Hank Smith: 20:20 Yeah. Pushing the boundaries.

John Bytheway: 20:22 A good example that helped me was when the theme for the youth a number of years ago in the New Testament was First Timothy four, “Let no man despise thy youth.” And I didn’t know what that meant. Oh, that means don’t let them look at your life as a teenager. I didn’t know what that meant. I found another translation that said, “Don’t let others look down on you because you are young.” I thought, oh, this is about, don’t worry about your age, worry about your call type of a thing.

Hank Smith: 20:49 Exactly right.

John Bytheway: 20:49 And it changed the meaning for me, because I looked at another one and then I understood, oh, Paul was saying to Timothy, don’t worry about your age. Which was different than what I thought let no man despise thy youth meant. So I benefited from those other translations.

Hank Smith: 21:04 That’s perfect.

Dr. Adam Miller: 21:05 So I think on the one hand, it’s difficult to read just at the level of individual sentences because it’s mostly a poem and it’s really high, difficult poetry. But at the larger scale, it can also be difficult to read because the Book of Job doesn’t present us with one single clear voice. It gives us Job’s voice. It gives us God’s voice. It gives us the voice of the heavenly council. It gives us the voice of Job’s three friends in conversation with Job. And it gives us the voice of a fourth friend who shows up at the last moment before God’s theophany.

Dr. Adam Miller: 21:39 And all those voices overlap and agree and disagree with one another in ways that allow you to see that they’re all making good, useful, powerful points, even as the Book of Job itself resists the temptation to reduce that to one single answer for you. And that can also make it difficult to read as well, especially the first time through, right? If you’re taking your first real crack at the Book of Job, you should go in knowing that you’ll probably want to read it three or four times in a couple different translations. And you should go in knowing that the Book of Job will reward that kind of effort in a way that few books in the Bible will.

Hank Smith: 22:20 Well said. Well said.

John Bytheway: 22:22 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 22:22 And what was your third point?

Dr. Adam Miller: 22:24 I think it’s also useful for people to have just a feel for the basic structure of the book.

John Bytheway: 22:30 Do a big picture and yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 22:32 Well, the structure of the Book of Job as a whole breaks into a kind of a frame and then an internal section. You get kind of a narrative frame that’s delivered in prose at the beginning that describes God’s conversation with the tester or the accuser or what gets translated as Satan. And then the description of Job’s trials. And then you get similarly at the end of the Book of Job, a kind of prose frame that describes in narrative fashion, how he’s restored to health and wealth and new children. The whole middle of the book unfolds in poetry as a conversation between Job and his three plus one friends. They speak in rounds. Job speaks and then his friend speaks and then Job replies and then another friend speaks and then Job replies and then another friend speaks. And it goes through these rounds in poetry, as Job tries to figure out why all these terrible things have happened to him and his friends also try to explain to him why they think all these terrible things have happened to him.

Dr. Adam Miller: 23:37 The most important thing to recognize about that long conversation that unfolds in poetry is that Job’s basic strategy in the conversation is to build a kind of court case against God. He imagines that he’s going to call God to account for all of his suffering in court and he lays out all of the evidence for this position. And he keeps asking God to show up and defend himself in this kind of courtroom scenario that he’s imagining in his head. And at the end of the book, then God shows up to defend himself, without answering any of his questions. He offers this kind of defense of himself.

Dr. Adam Miller: 24:15 And at the end of the book, then I think the most fascinating thing about it is the way that God comes out in favor of Job. In terms of all of his impious, raw, unfiltered questioning of God, God sides with Job and not with Job’s friends, who were defending a more common sense notion of religion. And he tells Job’s friends to repent. And then Job is restored. That’s the basic structure of the book. And having that in mind too can make working from sentence to sentence an easier job.

Hank Smith: 24:45 Absolutely. My friend Tyler Griffin calls that like a 30,000 foot view. Now we can go down and get into it. When you talked about the friends, I was thinking, as I read the manual this morning, because of Job’s trials, his friends wondered if he really was good after all. Right? Wow. When really bad things happen to you, you must have been sinning secretly.

Dr. Adam Miller: 25:08 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 25:09 I mean, what a fascinating idea. It reminds me of when Jesus is in Jerusalem and his apostles ask, “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

John Bytheway: 25:17 Yeah. There’s got to be a reason. Something has to make sense of why this guy is suffering. For them, it’s these two alternatives. It was either him or his parents, right? And what’s Jesus’ answer, Hank?

Hank Smith: 25:28 Jesus responds with, “Neither did sin this man or his parents, but that the works of God may be made manifest.” So maybe we’re getting a version of that here, Adam, in Job?

Dr. Adam Miller: 25:38 I think we’re getting a book length version, a kind of book length explanation there of Jesus’s response to that question. Yeah.

Hank Smith: 25:45 Wonderful. With that, I’m now more excited. I was excited before, now I’m even more excited to jump in.

John Bytheway: 25:52 One of the things that intrigues me about the Book of Job is the way that it starts off this day where the sons of God came together and Satan came also. And it’s like, I don’t know, this introduction of how are we going to test Job? What would you have to say about that kind of a strange thing where the Lord would say, “Have you considered my servant Job?”

Dr. Adam Miller: 26:14 It’s a striking setup for the story and conversation that follows. The narration that we get of a kind of heavenly council where the sons of God come together to meet with God, reporting back in, and among them is this figure that the Book of Job refers to as the ha Satan, what gets transliterated really into English as the Satan. It’s easy for us I think to just associate that straightforwardly with who you and I call Satan. But in the context of the Book of Job, I’m not sure how strong that identification should be. The figure here described as the Satan is a member of the heavenly council, in some respect. His name translates as something like the accuser or the tester. So he plays this kind of role in the divine economy of testing people to see whether or not they really are made of what they claim to be made of. Clearly he’s not a friend of Job, as the story lays it out. But as the story tells it, I’m not sure that we should identify him straightforwardly with who you and I think of as the devil.

Hank Smith: 27:21 Yeah. I think that’s wise too. What word did you say that that became? Satan? What word was there originally?

Dr. Adam Miller: 27:28 Yeah. Satan is more or less a transliteration of the Hebrew word. Just ha Satan, but it means… My Hebrew pronunciation is terrible, but it means something like the tester or the accuser.

Hank Smith: 27:39 The accuser or the tester. I like that.

Dr. Adam Miller: 27:41 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 27:41 Well, in the Book of Revelation, it talks about the accuser of the brethren.

Dr. Adam Miller: 27:46 Yeah. And so this develops into, I think, especially over the course of the New Testament, into an idea about the devil that’s much closer to how you and I would think about it. But especially at this point in the Old Testament and in Israelite history, there doesn’t seem to be any strong, clear notion of the devil as you and I think of it.

Hank Smith: 28:02 I’ve had students ask me before, “Why is God having this conversation with Satan?” I’ve said, “Well, whether it’s Satan or not, I doubt this conversation is taking place.” The writer… Who would we say is the narrator? Do we even know? It’s an unknown narrator?

Dr. Adam Miller: 28:17 Yeah. We don’t have any idea who the author of the Book of Job is. Probably much, much later than the historical time period Job would’ve lived in. I think even on historical grounds, just purely historical grounds, it’s totally plausible that there’s a kind of root historical figure here. Even if that’s the case, I think it’s important to recognize that the Book of Job as we have it is carefully fashioned high literature that’s written much, much later, reflecting on Job’s life experiences.

Hank Smith: 28:47 Excellent.

Dr. Adam Miller: 28:47 I might say one other thing about the Satan before we move on from that, if you want?

Hank Smith: 28:52 Yeah. Please do.

Dr. Adam Miller: 28:53 For me, as I’ve tried to think more carefully about the Book of Job and what it’s saying about the human experience, I think one useful way to read the figure of the Satan, of the tester, of the accuser, is to read him as something like the embodiment of loss. The way that loss and suffering are an inevitable part of the human experience. Everyone is going to get sick. Everyone is going to suffer. Everyone is going to lose people that they love. Everyone is going to lose the things that they tried so hard to acquire. And in some ways, this figure is kind of the embodiment of that basic dimension of human experience across the board.

John Bytheway: 29:31 I like that.

Hank Smith: 29:33 See it as this part of life that questions, because isn’t that the role of this accuser? He’s saying, “Look, Job is great because he has all these blessings. If he didn’t have all those, he wouldn’t be so great.” And that’s life’s question for us sometimes, is how faithful are you going to be with loss? How are you going to deal with loss?

Dr. Adam Miller: 29:56 Yeah. What are the grounds for your faithfulness? Are you faithful to God because you hope to get something out of it? Is it a kind of quid pro quo? Or is your faithfulness to God grounded in a kind of love that’s not conditional on God giving what you thought you wanted?

Hank Smith: 30:12 Yeah. Elder Christofferson called that the cosmic vending machine, didn’t he?

Dr. Adam Miller: 30:16 That’s the danger, right? Is the perpetual danger is to treat religion as if it were a kind of cosmic vending machine. And you can’t make a stronger case I don’t think than the Book of Job does, that that’s not how life works. Thinking about religion that way comes pretty naturally to us though. It’s the natural man’s way of thinking about religion in terms of using God to get what we want out of reality, out of life. A lot of learning how to live your religion involves growing out of that natural way of thinking about God and religion.

Hank Smith: 30:47 It goes back to what you said earlier about this is going to rewrite the basic assumptions that we have about God, the natural man’s assumptions about God.

Dr. Adam Miller: 30:57 Exactly. And that’s what we get kind of a front row seat here to seeing Job undergo that transformation live in real time.

Hank Smith: 31:06 And I like how you said that, that everyone is going to experience, maybe not Job’s type loss, but loss.

Dr. Adam Miller: 31:11 Yeah. Maybe not dramatic and all at once, but for all of us, inevitably.

Hank Smith: 31:16 I can imagine how many people are listening, going, “That’s me, I’ve experienced serious loss.” John, you already know this. Adam, I doubt you do, but my brother passed away and my father passed away and it was within 90 days of each other. And it definitely wasn’t Job like, but there were moments where those are very real moments where you have to self-analyze. You have to turn inward and say, do I believe? What do I believe? Why do I believe? And to say that that’s happening here in the Book of Job is an exceptional experience we can have.

Dr. Adam Miller: 31:54 Yeah. I think we could say too that Job is a kind of case study in what it looks like to mourn with those who mourn. Or to fail to mourn with those who mourn, depending on how we evaluate how Job’s friends are doing in mourning with him.

Hank Smith: 32:12 The manual doesn’t put it very closely, right, when it says, “Because of Job’s trials, his friends wondered if he was really good after all.” Doesn’t sound like their first thought was, I need to mourn with those that mourn.

Dr. Adam Miller: 32:23 We get some contrast between the prose frame and the poetic core of the Book of Job in terms of how they treat Job’s friends. And also in terms of how they treat Job, but especially how they treat Job’s friends. In the prose frame to the book, the friends are initially described as coming from a long way to come and comfort Job. And when they see him at first from a distance, he’s such a wreck, they don’t even recognize him. And when they finally come to greet him, they can’t find anything to say. And all they do is sit in silence with Job for seven days. That’s probably a pretty good example I think of what it looks like to mourn with those who mourn. That when the conversation kicks off, then the accusations begin to unspool, especially in terms of those assumptions about a cosmic vending machine version of religion. And then things get a little ugly.

Hank Smith: 33:16 John, I’ve heard you say this before, things were going well until they started talking. Haven’t you said that before?

John Bytheway: 33:23 I feel like it was wonderful that they came and they just sat with him. They couldn’t explain it and they shouldn’t have tried. But just the comfort of somebody else there, as the mourn with them that mourn, as Alma the Elder put it to those who were about to be baptized. And as soon as they tried to explain things or tried to make sense of it, that’s when everything went south. But at first they just came and sat with him and I had loved that part. And it teaches me, things happen I cannot explain, but if I can just be there, sometimes that’s the only thing I have to offer. And trying to explain it might only not be an error. I might be wrong and hurtful by trying to explain it. When they try to explain it, that’s when everything goes bad.

John Bytheway: 34:09 So that’s exactly what I was thinking. They come and they sit with him. It reminds me of a talk I heard in general conference where somebody had a loss in their family and a neighbor came over and just took everybody’s shoes and shined all the boys and everybody’s shoes. Does that story ring a bell? And just did that quietly and left. And this person giving the talk, talked about what a blessing it was that someone would just come and care and shine their shoes for them so they could be ready for the service. But they didn’t come in and, “Well, let me try to make sense of everything that just happened.” You know? It was just, “I’m going to be here.”

Hank Smith: 34:47 I love it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 34:48 There’s certainly kind of powerful beauty to the silence, especially when it’s shared and especially for such a long time. And there’s certainly a kind of messy ugliness that ensues once the conversation begins and that verbal wrestle starts to unfold. But it’s also the case that at the end of the day, that that messy, sometimes ugly verbal wrestle was really powerful and it results in God showing up, right? God doesn’t show up when they’re sitting in silence there. He only shows up after that long, messy conversation. And at the end of the day, not only is Job vindicated for having asked those difficult questions out loud, Job’s friends repent.

John Bytheway: 35:25 They’re educated. Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 35:27 Yeah. They’re educated in the process as well. And so the silence is beautiful and in lots of ways necessary. But also, lots of times, despite the difficulty and the trouble of the talking, that can get us to where we need to be too.

Hank Smith: 35:40 Yeah. It can propel us forward.

John Bytheway: 35:42 Let’s talk about Job chapter one. I’m intrigued that the book is like 42 chapters long, but everything that happened to Job happened in about six verses in chapter one. And then we spend the rest of the book trying to figure it out and wrestle with it.

Dr. Adam Miller: 35:56 Yeah.

John Bytheway: 35:57 So what happened to Job in the first place?

Dr. Adam Miller: 35:59 So Job, as Hank described, is an upright and just man. God doesn’t disagree with that assessment of Job.

John Bytheway: 36:08 He would of me, but of Job, yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 36:10 When the tester asks God for permission to see why Job is a perfect and upright man, God gives him permission and Job goes on to experience a series of devastating losses. He loses his wealth, he loses his servant, he loses his children, and eventually he loses his own good health.

John Bytheway: 36:35 And it happens so rapidly. It’s like one messenger comes in and says the oxen were plowing, the asses feeding, the Sabaeans fell upon them and took them away. I only am escaped alone to tell thee. While he was yet speaking there came another, and that phrase happens what, three times. While he was yet speaking, another guy comes in and says, oh, and another thing. You just lost all of this. Oh, and another thing. You just lost all of this. And I think there’s a different type of a trial, maybe I’m jumping ahead, with I lost material things. Then it gets kind of… And you lose your health, but then it becomes, and another thing, Job, you’re not worthy. That’s even worse. While all of this happens and then they, okay, all of this happened because of a flaw in you. That’s even another hard thing to go with all of this.

Dr. Adam Miller: 37:21 Yeah. Well, that’s the question that follows hard on the heels of all that loss, is what it means. And that’s the question that Job and his friends wrestle back and forth about, as Job adamantly insists that he did nothing to deserve any of this. And his friends just as adamantly insist that it wouldn’t have happened if he didn’t.

John Bytheway: 37:41 Yeah. And I think for all of us today, in our time dealing with stuff, because so many things do make sense in the gospel, we want everything to make sense. I just think sometimes it doesn’t. So that’s what they are trying to do, make sense of this now. And maybe it’s because of you, Job, that all this has happened.

Dr. Adam Miller: 38:03 Yeah. There’s a kind of deep background assumption there about suffering, that suffering is inherently a moral judgment.

John Bytheway: 38:12 Deserved.

Dr. Adam Miller: 38:12 That suffering is in some sense, inherently punishment. Whereas I think the lesson for me that I take from the Book of Job at the end of the day is that we’re always wrong when we think that suffering equates straightforwardly with punishment.

Hank Smith: 38:28 Excellent. And there’s also a loss here with his wife. His wife says in chapter two, verse nine, “Does thou still retain thine integrity? Curse God and die.” So can I add here that my loved ones have lost their faith to another type of loss, in me, in God?

Dr. Adam Miller: 38:48 Yeah. At the very least she’s lost her faith in him. She doesn’t die with the children. She’s the one person left at his side. But in lots of ways, it’s maybe more salt in the wound that though she survives, she repudiates him in this sense.

Hank Smith: 39:03 Oh, loss after loss after loss. In all this, Job sinned not nor charged God foolishly. That’s Job 1:22. So at least here on the outside, his response to his wife, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God and not receive evil?” So on the outside, I think the rest of the book, right, Adam? Is going to kind of show us what’s happening inside of Job, but on the outside, his grief is very great, but he is staying the course. He is staying faithful.

Dr. Adam Miller: 39:33 Yeah. And those very famous lines, “The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away. Shall we receive good at the hands of the Lord and not receive evil?” Those are the things that Job says in the narrative frame. Those are what he says in the prose part of the book. Commentators have often suggested that you have kind of two versions of Job in the Book of Job. You have Job from the narrative part of the Book of Job that’s called the patient Job. That’s also a famous biblical phrase, right? About having the patience of Job.

Dr. Adam Miller: 40:04 But then once you get to the poetry part and the conversation unfolds, the commentators refer to that side of Job as the impatient Job. On the one hand you have Job demonstrating his faith to God by his extreme patience under extreme duress. And on the other hand, you have Job expressing his faith in God by way of his extreme impatience with all of this loss and suffering and demanding answers and looking for connection and looking for God to come and be involved and answer and account for this. But I think both of those, both the patient Job and the impatient Job, we’re best to see those as manifestations of his faith.

John Bytheway: 40:42 I love the idea here of time passing because I think his reaction at first is so… These are some of the most memorable lines to me in the whole Old Testament. “The Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord,” in Job 1:21. And then in Job 2:10, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, shall we not receive evil?” At first, you can see him, okay. And then as time goes on, then the impatient Job, as you call it. I like you put it in that way, because patience implies a passage of time. And as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to make sense perhaps.

Dr. Adam Miller: 41:19 Yeah, I think that’s right.

Hank Smith: 41:21 And maybe there’s a public and private here too. So after the first two chapters, then we get into the dialogue, right?

Dr. Adam Miller: 41:30 Yeah. Then the poetry kicks in.

Hank Smith: 41:33 I wanted to mention just really quick, in Job chapter two, verse 13, you already mentioned this, Adam, but I just wanted to say how important this is.

John Bytheway: 41:42 Oh, I love this. Yeah.

Hank Smith: 41:42 So his friends come. They sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights and none spake a word unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great. We’ve already mentioned this, but I’ll just add a story. When my mother-in-law died, Sarah’s mom, it was devastating for us. And I remember, me and my wife and our children were sitting together and all of a sudden we can hear the lawnmower. And I’m like, who’s mowing the lawn? Right? Because there’s seven of us. We’re all sitting in the house. So who’s mowing the lawn? And I look out and there’s my dad. He didn’t even come to the door. He just went over and mowed the lawn and pruned the trees. And I’ll always remember that. It was him, I think, coming over, not speaking a word for he knew our grief was very great. So he just decided to, what does Mosiah 18 say?

John Bytheway: 42:39 Mourn with those that mourn.

Hank Smith: 42:41 Yeah. I think in this one, he was, bear up their burdens that they may be light. I think for a long time, maybe both of you can comment on this. For me, when I read Mosiah 18, perhaps as a missionary, it all just kind of sounded the same. Bear up another’s burdens that they may be light. Mourn with those that mourn and comfort those that stand in need of comfort. I think 20 years ago, I would’ve said, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s all just kind of repeating the same thing. But if you take those apart, they actually all play different roles at different times. To bear up someone’s burdens is different than mourning with them. Can be the same, but can be different, as also comforting those that stand in need of comfort. Perhaps I have to be a good judge of when to use those parts of the covenant.

John Bytheway: 43:25 Elder Jeffrey R. Holland called that Alma the Elder’s invitation to be baptized as the most complete list of what the newly baptized commit to do and be, he said. And I love how others centered that is. There’s some parts that are about us, but some are about others. When they’re mourning, when they need comfort, when they need to bear their burdens. And I hadn’t thought of that, Hank, but I like that idea that people may be in different places. I love that your dad came and did that. That was just a, I’m here, type of a thing.

Hank Smith: 43:56 Yeah. And he wasn’t trying to cheer up those that mourn.

John Bytheway: 43:56 He couldn’t fix it. Yeah.

Hank Smith: 43:57 He wasn’t trying to comfort those that mourn. He couldn’t fix it, so he decided at that moment to bear up another’s burdens.

John Bytheway: 44:07 I’m here.

Hank Smith: 44:08 Because the lawn was looking bad and no one had mowed it for quite some time because we were so sad. So that was a bear up another’s burdens moment for us. Adam, back to you.

Dr. Adam Miller: 44:22 Yeah. That’s really powerful. I appreciate your sharing that. You mentioned that when you were young, you didn’t notice this about that description of the covenant there in Mosiah 18. But yeah, I think part of this story has to do with the way that when you’re young, especially if you grow up in the kind of extraordinarily privileged circumstances that you and I likely did, you’re just not very acquainted with loss.

Hank Smith: 44:46 Yeah.

Dr. Adam Miller: 44:46 It happens mostly in the margins to other people off stage. You have very little experience of it yourself personally. I think it’s really only as you start to get older that you begin to get a feel for the way that that experience of loss is just core to what it means to be a human being. Such that the very practice of religion is not so much at the end of the day of finding a way to get God to give you what you want, which is mostly how I thought about it as a kid. But instead, the very essence of it is to mourn. The very essence of religion is to find a way to handle loss and to handle that loss together in a way that can redeem it, even if it can’t roll it backwards.

Hank Smith: 45:27 Mike Wilcox taught us something that I think you would appreciate and probably want to comment on. He says the problem in Western religions is sin, but the problem in Eastern religions is suffering. You’re very well read. Would you say that there is a part of religion we need to make sure addresses suffering, not just sin?

Dr. Adam Miller: 45:46 Yeah, I think that’s right. I feel like I really started to get a handle on what was at stake in sin, why I was sinning, when I understood that my sinning was a response to my experience of suffering, right? That the bad choices I was making, the selfish desires that were driving my choices, those were grounded in my experience of suffering. And they were an attempt to escape from my experience of suffering, but they were a bad way to do it. What makes sin sinful is the way that it makes suffering worse rather than redeeming it. And if we can start to connect those two things together and see the way that our own poor choices are grounded in our experience of suffering, then we can get our heads around I think the way that Jesus makes it possible for us to overcome sin by changing our relationship to our suffering.

Hank Smith: 46:34 What do you remember as your first introduction to suffering? For Joseph Smith, it came so early with that leg surgery. I mean, that is just when… As I’ve read the descriptions from his mother, the suffering is so intense. It feels like it changes his very personality almost, his nature. Either of you have any thoughts on that, when was your first exposure to real suffering? John?

John Bytheway: 47:00 My dad, as a teenager, stated his post and fought for his life on an aircraft carrier while suicide attackers were hitting his ship. And he was a teenager. He wasn’t a member of the church. That whole thing I think began a bunch of really deep and important questions about life and everything. And because of some buddies that joined the Navy with him on the same time started grabbing him and literally pulling him to church with them, he was introduced to the gospel. And I think about those friends, I think more in the way of the story in the New Testament of four friends carried a man in a bed who was taken with the palsy.

John Bytheway: 47:44 My dad, through luck, through blessing, through design, had friends that took him to the Savior and helped him figure out how to survive the kind of things he saw. Some of them he explained to us what he saw, the death and burning, death and everything on the ship that I won’t explain. That changed him. I think you’re right about that, that changed him and maybe made him ask some really deep questions that perhaps is partly why I’m sitting here today.

Hank Smith: 48:16 Excellent, John. Adam, let’s go back to you.

Dr. Adam Miller: 48:20 To be honest, in my experience, all of my suffering has been of the most ordinary baseline level of I’ve enjoyed good health and enormous privilege all of my life. It’s a mistake to think that that means that people haven’t suffered. Because there’s a kind of shared suffering that’s involved just in being a human being period. But my own acquaintance with grief has been relatively soft and marginal in those respects.

Hank Smith: 48:50 Yeah. The family that started our podcast, the Sorensen family, experienced a deep loss with the loss of their father, Steve, in just a sudden loss. Much like the Book of Job, everything was fine and then in one day, the happiness was gone. When you see someone in that much grief, it’s hard to even find the words. In fact, there are no words. I wanted to say something that would take the pain away. I’ve had this experience many times where you’re thinking, okay, what’s the right scripture verse that can fix this? What’s the right quote or thought or general conference talk? There’s got to be something that can fix this. When it finally comes down to it, you realize there are not words.

Dr. Adam Miller: 49:35 Yeah. It’s tempting to think that religion is about always making sure we know what everything means. Always being able to assign meaning to everything that happens. But the older I’ve gotten, the more it seems to me that I would prefer to describe religion as the ongoing business of grappling with some things that simply lack meaning.

John Bytheway: 49:56 Yeah.

Hank Smith: 49:57 In fact, John, you wrote a book called, When it Doesn’t Make Sense. Is that right?

John Bytheway: 50:04 I did.

Hank Smith: 50:05 Now, I want to make sure that everybody knows John did not ask me to bring this up, but-

John Bytheway: 50:09 This is what the publisher said to me when they looked at the manuscript, “This doesn’t make sense.”

Hank Smith: 50:14 So you’re like, “That’s a great title.”

Dr. Adam Miller: 50:17 There you go.

Hank Smith: 50:17 When it Doesn’t Make Sense. But John, you did a chapter on Job. What did you learn in that study?

John Bytheway: 50:23 Well, I’m just loving this because this is exactly what we’re talking about. I think there’s something that some theologians have called it, the doctrine of retribution. And we see it in scriptures. If you do this, you will get this. There’s if then statements in the scriptures, and they work sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. There’s the law of the harvest. And we want to say, if I sow this, I will get this. And Hank, you brought up the example in John nine, because I think that’s where the 12 were at. Hey, well, who sinned? This man or his parents that he was born blind, because they had that mindset of the doctrine of retribution. There’s got to be an explanation for this. And Jesus brought up, hey, you think that that tower in Siloam that fell, do you think those people were sinners above all? And he would bring up these examples to try to say no, that’s not always the case. Jesus brought up a lot of those.

John Bytheway: 51:14 So I loved the Book of Job for the Lord allowing space for suffering that we can’t explain. And you know, Hank, that a pivotal experience in my life was to try to go talk to a bunch of young people after a school shooting way back in 1999. And how I wrestled, and I finally thought, I cannot explain this. So my approach is going to be, I don’t know, but what do we know? From a source where the answers don’t change. And Nephi helped me so much. I know that God loves his children, but I do not know the meaning of all things. And it was such a great starting point for Nephi to lead with what he knows, but say, I don’t know the meaning of all things. And to leave some questions unanswered. We know some things, some things we don’t, was a helpful thing for me and I hope it was helpful for them. And as I see the Book of Job, we know some things and some things we might not know yet.

Hank Smith: 52:12 Yeah. That was perfect. And I do know that you went out to Colorado to speak that year because four years ago I went to Florida to speak and I called you, if you remember. I said, “John, what do I say?” And you said, “There’s just no words. There’s just no words.”

John Bytheway: 52:34 Please join us for part two of this podcast.