One of many reasons we should prioritise hearing the word, not studying and reading

'...preaching in its essence is an authorized human being speaking the words of God to listening human beings; and every culture understands that.

An interactive Bible study is not culturally-neutral. To sit around drinking coffee with a book open, reading and talking about that book in a way that forces me to keep looking at that book and finding my place and showing a high level of mental agility, functional literacy, spoken coherence and fluency, that is something that only some of the human race are comfortable doing. Not everyone feels comfortable when the bright spark in the corner pipes up, "Ah, yes, but I was wondering about the significance of the word "However" in verse 3b. What do you think about that?" Some of us love that kind of seminar interaction, but many do not. For those who can do it, it may way be profitable; but many people can't, and just feel daunted or excluded by the exercise.

In some churches we have slipped into assuming that personal Bible reading and one-to-one Bible studies and Bible study groups are the normative way for Christian people to hear the Word of God. This, we say, is what a healthy Christian life looks like. But in redefining the Christian life like that we may unwittingly have alienated the illiterate, the functionally illiterate, the less-educated, those less confident in studying a text. I wonder if, quite unintentionally, we may have contributed to making some of our churches more monocultural than they might otherwise be. Paradoxically it is not that preaching is culturally outmoded, but rather that the study of written Biblical texts is culturally narrow.'

(HT Ed Shaw, Christopher Ash, The Priority of Preaching, p.28)

Taming Leviathan

Christopher Ash's Out of the Storm is a great straight-forward companion to reading Job. In explaining God's speeches at the end of the book he challenges an interpretation of chapters 40-41 which sees Leviathan and Behemoth as just powerful creatures that God created, i.e. an extension of 38:1-40:2 where God shows himself as the Almighty Creator.

There are a number of problems with seeing Leviathan and Behemoth as just plain vanilla creatures like the ox, hawk, ostrich, horse and donkey of chapter 39:

1. The description doesn't seem to fit any animal we know of. Not hippos, crocodiles or even dinosaurs!
2. The second speech from God (40:6-42:6) provokes a "stronger reaction of worship and penitence in Job than the first"
3. While Job never provides a complete answer to the 'problem of evil', a reminder that God is our Almighty Creator is a very partial answer indeed. As Ash quotes George Bernard Shaw:

God really has to do better in explaining the problem of evil than to say, "You can't make a hippopotamus, can you?"

Instead there is a promise contained in this second speech of God, if you really understand who Leviathan and Behemoth are:

Leviathan in biblical imagery is the arch-enemy of God, the prince of the power of evil, Satan, the god of this world (as Jesus calls him). Here is the embodiment of beastliness, of terror, of undiluted evil [...]

The Lord has sung the praise of Leviathan's terrifying strength. But why has he done so? Why has he filled Job's mind with the awesome terrors of evil? Answer: so that Job may understand that he, the Lord, is stronger still [...]

Even Satan, the Leviathan, is God's Satan, God's pet - dare we put it like this. And that means that as we suffer, and as we sit with others who suffer, we may with absolute confidence bow down to this sovereign God, knowing that the evil that comes may be terrible, but it cannot and will not ever go one tiny fraction beyond the leash on which God has put it. And it will not go on forever. For the One to whom we belong is God.

(pp. 95-97)