Somebody Loves You

Somebody Loves You, announced on air as Somebody Loves You Radio, is the Bible teaching ministry of Raul Ries in Diamond Bar, California, and it runs entirely on listener gifts. The program lives in the text. Ries reads a passage aloud, pauses with a quick 'notice that,' and restates what he has just read in everyday conversational terms. That habit is what sets the show apart. Figures from Scripture end up talking like contemporaries, so Job answers his critics with 'Look, you guys, I'm not in sin,' and dares them, 'If there's no day of judgment, prove me.' The humor is dry rather than showy. Job's accusers become his 'three beautiful friends that constantly are putting him down,' and Ries sums up the patriarch's state bluntly: Job is down, man, really down. A sequence of episodes titled Job 11-15 pt2, Job 16-20, Job 21-27 pt1 and Job 21-27 pt2 keeps the teaching inside the book of Job, chapter after chapter. Across those excerpts the same questions keep coming back: why a man of integrity suffers, why friends add blame to pain, and why God allows hardship for someone who belongs to Him. Ries answers without hedging. Suffering, he teaches, reaches believers and non-believers alike because of the fall of Adam and Eve in Eden. Satan can test a person only by God's permission, a point he says brings him great comfort. The introduction to one episode adds that adversity does not always come from guilt; sometimes it is simply part of living in a fallen world. The teaching is just as plain about judgment. Ries cites the white throne judgment of Revelation 20 for those who never received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and says that without Christ, people are doomed. To Job's old question, 'If a man dies, shall he live again?', his reply is a flat yes: the body has to die, and the spirit goes to be with the Lord. Reassurance sits right beside those warnings, in the insistence that the Lord loves, cares for and has compassion on whoever is facing hardship, which is the promise the program's title carries. He also reads a short devotion on Job, with its wry line that the only thing many people know about patience is how to spell the word. Not everything here is Job. God's Wisdom Unites moves to 1 Corinthians, where Ries sets the Corinthians' attachment to worldly wisdom, and the grand vocabulary the Greeks expected, against Paul's simple delivery. The same episode stresses that the gospel is about a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, not about church. A good way in is the Job run, heard in order, where the method and the message build on each other; God's Wisdom Unites shows how Ries handles a New Testament letter.