With this message we begin the life-study of Job. My burden in these messages can be expressed by the following four sentences:
1)God deals with His saints for the purpose that they may gain Him as life.
2)God strips His seekers of their possessions so that they may inherit Him in full.
3)God works out for His overcomers through affliction an eternal weight of glory.
4)God is bringing His lovers into Himself as glory through all things and will glorify them with Himself.
The book of Job is named after its writer, Job, whose name means "hated" or "persecuted," signifying what Job suffered of Satan, the enemy of God. Job surely suffered Satan's hatred and persecution.
In this book Satan as the enemy of God is a mystery to us. We cannot understand in full why Satan still has not only the freedom but also the "civil right" to go to God's place and attend one of the councils held by God with His angels. Of course, what is described in Job 1 and 2 took place two thousand years before Christ died on the cross to destroy the devil, who has the might of death (Heb. 2:14). Since Christ destroyed Satan on the cross, we may think that Satan no longer has the "civil right" to go into the presence of God. However, according to Revelation 12:10, Satan still accuses us in the presence of God day and night. This right will be taken away from Satan at the beginning of the great tribulation. When the overcomers arrive in the heavens, Satan will be cast down from the heavens to the earth. From that time onward, Satan will no longer have the right to come into the presence of God.
The writer of the book of Job was Job. This is confirmed by Ezekiel 14:12, 14, 20 and James 5:11. These verses are a proof of the authenticity of this book.
According to the way of Job's nomadic living (Job 1:3) and the way he offered the burnt offering for his children, this book should have been written at the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (v. 5; Gen. 22:13; 31:54), about 2000 B.C. This means that Job was written five hundred years before Moses wrote the Pentateuch.