As my pastor, Richard Jordan, pointed out in his sermon last Sunday, “Think about what science does to God. Science has degraded Him to a creeping thing from the primordial ooze. Religion degrades Him to a piece of bread handed out—‘Here’s you Savior.’ Education degrades Him to just a superstitious folly.”

Over the course of the last 6,000 years, every philosophy that’s been developed in human viewpoint has been lifted out of the Word of God, plagiarized from the Wisdom Literature of Scripture.

“Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Euripides —whoever they are, you can find their philosophy already written on the pages of the Bible and debunked,” says Jordan. “It’s fascinating! What the Book of Job wants you to see is human viewpoint and how, in the wisdom of God, He destroys it.”

A professor of archaeology at Vanderbilt University recently postulated that Job is the oldest book known to man, meaning it’s older than any other writings in book form.

A professor at the University of Iowa talks about Job representing the “commencement of the philosophical quest.”

“As the educators and philosophers of the world read Job, they see it as a quest to develop a philosophy or system of trying to think about, ‘Here’s how life works,’ ” explains Jordan. “Job has three friends, or ‘miserable comforters,’ as they’re called, and they represent three different viewpoints of life. Every philosophy man’s developed can literally be summarized under one of three headings. They will either work under one or a blend, but it’s always these three guys right here in Job.”

There’s realism, pragmatism and idealism. The realist, or materialist, goes by what can be felt, sensed and seen as real. Experience is the big issue. He recognizes that some ideas have validity because he goes by what’s natural.

Pragmatism is just the idea that, “It’s good if it works. If it works, well, then that’s good.”

In Idealism, things need to work, not just because you materially see them or because they practically have effect, but because there are some good ideas behind them.

Eliphaz, the Realist, reasons in Job 4:7, “Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off? Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.”

Jordan explains, “Why does he say that the law of the harvest is what a man sows he’s going to reap? Does he say it because God says it? No, he says, ‘I’ve seen this happen.’ ”

Indeed, in Job 5:3, Eliphaz even says, “I have seen the foolish taking root: but suddenly I cursed his habitation.” It’s all about what he knows from his experience.

“Lo this, we have searched it, so it is; hear it, and know thou it for thy good,” Eliphaz summarizes in Job 5:27, in essence saying, “Hey, this stuff’s real; there’s life out there. You can see it and experience if you can feel it, touch it, experiment with it. It’ll produce this every time. And we’ve studied the way life works, and there’s a reality out here that you can’t be divorced from.”

In Job 15, in the second round of advice-giving, Eliphaz argues with Job, “It has nothing to do with how you order a thing. It just works that way. A farmer goes out and plants a crop of corn and he always gets corn. So when you get this result, it’s because of that experience. I know that because of experience; observation.”

For friend Bildad’s part, he talks about things from his perspective, “We’ve got a body of tradition and scholarship that teaches us. We’ve got tradition from our fathers, and they’re true because what this body of scholarship has taught us is that this is what works. These are the things that work in life and they work this way.”

Then you come over to Zophar in Chapter 11, who reasons with Job, “You’re just full of the east wind. You’re just a blowhard.”

Jordan explains, “In the second round, this stuff degenerates into name-calling and really vicious stuff. The book of Job is one of my favorite books just to sit and read for the enjoyment of watching these guys go at each other. And by the time they get to the second round, they’ve got the knives out, the claws. . . They’re hot at one another.”

As an idealist, or moralist, Zophar pulls out the religion card, chastising Job, “Hey, there’s some ideas you’re violating; there’s some morality and some ethics and God gives those things.”

He believes in a “higher good”; ideas that are superior and he’s going to say, naturally, that God gave them.

When these three guys get through ripping into Job, there’s a fourth guy who comes in named Elihu, and he’s actually the one who recorded the conversations found in the Book of Job.

“He’s a young man and he’s sitting there and finally he blows his stack,” says Jordan of Elihu. “He says, “Wait a minute! ‘I am young, and ye are very old; wherefore I was afraid, and durst not shew you mine opinion.
[7] I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom.
[8] But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.
[9] Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgment.
[10] Therefore I said, Hearken to me; I also will shew mine opinion.
[11] Behold, I waited for your words; I gave ear to your reasons, whilst ye searched out what to say.
[12] Yea, I attended unto you, and, behold, there was none of you that convinced Job, or that answered his words:
[13] Lest ye should say, We have found out wisdom: God thrusteth him down, not man.
[14] Now he hath not directed his words against me: neither will I answer him with your speeches.’

“What all this in the end winds up being is they all are saying the same thing. They wind up condemning Job—arguing, bickering, fussing—and it all degenerates into a mass of arguing and there’s no answer in anything these guys have to say.”

Finally, in Job 38, God Himself shows up and says, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” The message is that all of their human viewpoint has only served to hide the truth.

In Job 42:7, God informs them, “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.”

Jordan explains, “These guys don’t get it. It all winds up just being the same mish-mash. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians many, many centuries later, he said, ‘Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.’

“Paul’ saying, ‘Here’s the divine viewpoint, here’s real, true wisdom. The princes of this world have a form that looks good, but when you put it to the nitty-gritty of life it doesn’t answer a thing. It only gives you words without knowledge, and it darkens the ability to think. It actually takes away the ability to come to real conclusions about life.’ ”

As Paul sums it up in II Timothy 3:7, “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

And why is that? Because they’ve rejected the revelation of God. The people in Paul’s day were obviously very familiar with philosophy and Paul makes repeated references to their philosophers and poets.

In Acts 17, for example, author Luke reports about Paul’s visit to Athens, “Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.
[19] And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?
[20] For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean.
[21] (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.)”

In Acts 17:28, Paul argues on behalf of God, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said.”

Jordan says, “Philosophies were fundamental to the Greek culture and when Paul says in I Cor. 2:8, ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ,’ for those people philosophies were the working models of the worldview of their day, but there was no Christian view before Paul. The first people to be called Christians were called so in Antioch in Acts 11:26.”

After the Greeks developed these philosophies, the Romans took them over and through them developed the foundation thinking of Western civilization. spread it all over the known world as the basis of Western culture.

In the Third Century when Constantine amalgamated Rome with Christianity, Christianity was impregnated with the Greek philosophies, and it wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation that the church returned to a more biblical viewpoint. Hence, it was through the Reformation that Christian philosophy began to be applied to the culture.

Paul argues in I Cor. 1, “Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?
[21] For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
[22] For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:
[23] But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness.”

Jordan explains, “You know what it is that destroys the wisdom of man? The preaching of the Cross. And every time the Cross is preached, it literally destroys man’s ideas that by his own thinking he can come up with answers. God demonstrates through the gospel that you and I cannot do anything to please Him.

“Every time the gospel’s preached it brings to naught the noble thinking in the mind of the hearer that says, ‘I can do something to please God on my own. I can figure this thing out. I can make sense of life. I can have solutions.’

“The gospel points out that you can’t; that only God can do that and you have to receive it as a free gift. And when you moved from relying on your wisdom to the wisdom of God was the day you got saved. When you quit thinking you could figure it out and you realized, ‘Only God can because I’ve come to the end of myself. I’ve come to place where Job’s friends brought me without any answer, and I got mad enough at my own stupidity to abandon it for the truth of God’s love and grace in Christ.

“It’s the Cross of Christ that says, ‘Here’s the answer for you.’ And that’s the wisdom of God right there because you’d have never thought about asking God to do that, would you?

“What human viewpoint says is, ‘Give me some experience, give me some time to develop some ideas, give me some ethics to live by and I’ll make myself happy.’ And what you realize is you just keep falling short. And God says, ‘I’m going to commend my love toward you; I’m going to show you my wisdom, and my love, and my provisions for you—all the things you couldn’t do for yourself.’ And the Cross eviscerates all of that human viewpoint.”