Lessons from Job

SERMON: 2006-07-09--js0623--lessons-from-job SOURCE DURATION: 00:35:22.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 2 concludes the theological exposition regarding Job's surrender. Candidates 7 through 16 transition into lyrics that sound like a hymn or song ('God moves in a mysterious way...'), marking the start of non-sermon musical material. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:33:02.900-00:35:19.740 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- We saw last week that James points to the Old Testament prophets as an example of those who inherited the blessings of God by remaining faithful during times of testing. He now begins to narrow his focus and he draws our attention to one single Old Testament figure, the person of Job. Here again is what he says in verse 11 of chapter 5, "You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy." And what I'd like for us to try to do this morning as we look at the story of Job is to try to learn three lessons from what that story teaches us about perseverance and about receiving God's crown of life. Here's lesson number one, life can turn on a dime. When we first meet Job in Job chapter one, he is one happy, contented and rich man. Here is how scripture describes him, "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright. He feared God and shunned evil. He had seven sons and three daughters and he owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen and 500 donkeys and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East." Now scholars tell us the land of Uz was probably in what is southern Jordan today and Job, it is thought, was a contemporary all the way back to the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It's a story that goes back a long ways. It fits that milieu and as this scripture tells us so clearly, he was not only a godly man but a man who enjoyed extraordinary material blessings from the hand of God. That's how the chapter begins but then suddenly because of a conversation that has taken place in heaven between God and Satan, tragedy upon tragedy overcomes him. In rapid succession he loses everything that he has. First, the Sabaeans carry off his oxen and his donkeys. Then lightning strikes and kills his sheep. Chaldeans raid and take his camels and then a sudden wind comes out of the desert, destroys the house in which his children are partying and all his children are killed. And by the time chapter one ends, Job cries out, "Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. May the name of the Lord be praised." Helpful sometimes when you and I think life is hard to reflect on what Job must have felt like when messenger after messenger, one upon the other, came to him to inform him that all his possessions had suddenly been taken away. And that of course is not the end of the story because he still has his health. Chapter two goes on to say the conversation between God and Satan continues. God asks Satan again, "Have you seen my servant Job how he is upright in heart and blameless and has not turned against me in spite of all the trouble you brought into his life?" And the devil responds by saying, "Skin for skin, life for life, take away his health and then he will curse you and die." And once again God says, "You go ahead and try." And so by the time chapter two ends, Job has been reduced to having his body covered with boils, scratching himself with potsherds, sitting outside the city on a garbage dump made fun of by all people and told by his wife to curse God and die. And again without getting into the question of why this all happened, it illustrates does it not how quickly life can take a turn for the worse. It can turn indeed on a dime. It was after a routine cat skin as a follow-up to his earlier cancer that Michael was informed that his cancer had returned. Now maybe we were naive but it took us completely and totally by surprise, pulled the rug right out from underneath us, turned our lives upside down. As I've told you earlier, my brother Gerard went for a routine blood test only to discover that he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer that attacks the bone marrow in the body. Louise Russo, I don't know if you recall the name, but she was the woman who was standing in line at a sandwich shop in North York back in April of 2004 when she was hit by a stray gangster bullet that shattered her spine, paralyzed her from the waist down, confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Johnny Tata Erickson was a teenager swimming and diving off a raft in a shallow lake when she hit her head on the bottom of the lake, broke her neck, reduced to a quadriplegic, has spent the rest of her life significantly unable to use all of her lower extremities. And those are but a couple of examples of what happens to people, life can turn on a dime. And it doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or whether you're not a Christian, you're not automatically immune, disaster can befall us out of the blue. And when that happens, it's very important to understand that even then, God is still in control. Don't know if you've ever given any thought to this, but if you look at the story of Job, you will discover that the disaster that befalls him is the result of three elements working together. Let me quickly walk you through that. The first element is natural forces. It is the Sibians that invade the country and take his oxen and his donkeys. It is lightning that strikes his sheep and kills them. It is the Chaldeans who invade the country and run off with his camels. And it's this strange wind blowing in from the desert that destroys the house in which his children are feasting, causing all 10 of them to die. You see, much of life and much of what happens to us is the result of natural forces or the results of things other people do. People often say, "Where's God when all this trouble happens?" Well, fact of the matter is, much trouble that happens is the product of sin, a fallen creation that groans in travail and that sometimes causes much hurt and much damage even for the children have gone. But beyond the forces of nature, according to this particular story, stands the power of Satan. He is the one who persuades the Sibians to invade the land. He's the one who somehow arranges for the lightning to strike and to kill those sheep. He is the one who stirs up the Chaldeans so they steal all of his camels. And he's the one who somehow can stir up this whirlwind and cause the death and the destruction of all Job's children. We don't wrestle against flesh and blood. We fight against principalities and powers and much of what happens in the world, even when it bears the face of natural forces or human beings, is still stirred up by Satan, who hates God and who hates the people of God and who will do whatever he can to cause harm and destruction. Unless you have a healthy theology of Satan and his destructive power, you will never understand why there can be so much pain and so much evil in the world. But the story of Job goes on to point out and takes considerable pains to do so that nature in Satan are not all powerful in and of themselves. They are still under the authority of God. Because when all has been said and done, it is God who gives permission to Satan and to go only so far in bringing about his destruction. Notice how Job 1-12 puts it, "The Lord said to Satan, 'Very well then, everything he has is in your hands.' But on the man himself did not lay a finger, and Satan went out from the presence of the Lord." In chapter 2, again, "The Lord said to Satan, 'Very well then, he is in your hands, but you must spare his life.'" The devil can't get any closer to you than what God allows him to get to you. And you say, "Then why does God not automatically protect us?" A good many years ago, Rabbi Kushner wrote a book, "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People." His ultimate conclusion, for those of you that haven't read it, is that somehow or another, God is actually not omnipotent in the face of natural disaster. God is not omnipotent in the face of human wrongdoing. That is biblical nonsense. All through the Bible and all through history, God is sovereign and he will either avert all evil or he will turn it to our good. Why doesn't he stop at all? Because sometimes, as the book of Job illustrates so clearly, God has a greater purpose in mind. Job has no idea what's going on behind the scenes. He knows nothing about this conversation between God and Satan, and he knows nothing about the way that Satan has tested and challenged God, challenging God's integrity that God can produce a human being who will love God for who he is and not for what he gets out of him. And so God says to Satan, "You go ahead. You test him and you see if he will curse me because all of his blessings have evaporated." And then again, when it comes to his health, and the Bible says in all these things, Job did not sin because he trusted in the Lord. Why does God allow it? Because in the end, God has a greater purpose and a greater deal of glory in mind. Job had no idea that he was part of a cosmic battle between good and evil in which God wanted to vindicate the glory of his grace and his love freely given. And that's why James here refers to Job when he says, "You have heard of Job's perseverance. You have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy. Life can turn on a dime, but if you're a child of God, there will come a day you look back on it and you will see that God has brought good out of bad." It was Joseph, you will recall, who said to his brothers concerning his imprisonment and his slavery at Egypt, he said, "You meant it for ill, but God, he meant it for good." Life can turn on a dime, and your friends don't always get it. One of the fascinating elements of the book of Job, if you've read it recently, is the conversations that he carries on with his three friends who have come to provide comfort in his affliction. Those friends are introduced to us in chapter two where scripture says, "When Job's three friends, Eliphaz the demonite, Bildad the shoe height," shortest man in the Bible, shoe height, bad joke, "so far the Nehemiahite heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him, they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads." Now the three friends of Job often get a bad rap, don't they? They get a bad rap because by the time you get to the end of the book of Job, God is royally ticked with them, and he says they need to bring sacrifices to have their sins forgiven, and they need to have Job pray for them lest they be destroyed. And there's plenty of reason for God to be angry with the friends of Job, and there's plenty of reason for Job to be angry with his friends, but notice there's a lot they did right too, and there's a lot that we can learn from their example in dealing with grieving people. They don't just walk up to Job and start preaching to him, no, they sit down and they're silent for seven days. They weep aloud because they can hardly recognize him. These are people who care about Job, and they care about Job deeply, and that needs to be said. And they don't open their mouths to start speaking to him until he has first opened his mouth and cursed the day in which he was born. And then it is that they begin this whole series of interchanges with Job that comprises the bulk of the book of Job, and yet Job is angry with them. He says at one point, miserable comforters you are, and he would rather not have them there. Why? Because they don't get it. They don't get it because they have their own fixed theology of how the universe works, and they've got it all figured out. And there's a lot of people and a lot of believers who subscribe fundamentally to their underlying theology, and their theology is this. If you're good, God will bless you. And if God is not blessing you, then guess why? Because you are bad. Now there's a lot of truth to that. That's what makes this so difficult. Scripture does say, if we're covenant breakers, that we make ourselves liable to the discipline of God. And Scripture does teach us, for any one of us, when we start going through deep valleys or persistent patterns of pain that we experience, we must always ask the question, "Lord, what are you trying to tell me? Have I missed it somewhere?" James addresses that later on as we'll see, Lord willing, towards the end of the chapter when he says, "If you're sick, get the elders to pray for you. Confess your sins to one another. Pray for one another that you may be healed." None of us ought to be so presumptuous to think that we might not be wrong and that we have need of God's grace. So their theology wasn't all that. There's lots of emphasis in Scripture on that realization. But they were wrong in applying it to Job and in trying to force their conclusion on his life, because you see Job, in fact, was a man who was blameless before God. And if you read the book of Job and if you read Job's defense of himself, Job is a man who is in every way, as best as he knows how, walking in integrity. And when they keep insisting there must be something wrong at a very deep level in his life that he refuses to face, they are not only not standing for truth, they are adding misery to his already miserable life. And that's why we often talk about comforters like the friends of Job. See, sometimes even your best friends don't get it. Sometimes even your best friends want to try to take you to places where God is not taking you. And that increases your loneliness and that increases the pain. Now God doesn't seem to be there for you, your friends don't seem to be there for you, and it is truly the valley of the shadow of death. And all you can do in those kind of places is to say, "Lord, I trust you. And even if you kill me here, you're the one that somehow is going to have to bring me through and to vindicate me before your holy name for its glory." And there's another side to all of this, because there's a lot for you and me to learn from the friends of Job also in terms of walking with people who are going through difficult times. How easily we tell people, "I understand your pain." How easily we spill out a thousand and one words of comfort and advice, "Do this, do that, try the other thing." And there's a place for all of that, but all of that has to flow out of relationship and out of a sense of where God is at. Sometimes the best thing we can do is just be quiet, put our arms around a person, and cry with their pain and weep with their sorrow. Anybody here that's ever gone through a valley will know that sometimes the greatest comfort comes from somebody who can just come up to you, give you a big hug, and share the pain that you feel. Sometimes your friends don't get it. Sometimes life can turn on a dime. And the third lesson I think that we learned from the book of Job is that it's okay to engage the Lord. Another one of the interesting features of the book of Job is Job's brutal honesty in taking on God himself. Remember now Job is convinced about the righteousness of his cause. He knows God is the judge of all the earth. And so then you wrestle with God. How can you allow this to happen to me when I don't deserve the things that you're sending my way? And if you've ever been in that kind of situation, then you know. Remember now Job doesn't know what's going on in the background. He hasn't tuned into this conversation between Satan and the Lord. All he knows is what he is going through. And it doesn't fit his world any better than the world of his three friends. And so he takes God on and he argues his case. Here is what he says in Job 13.3, "But I desire to speak to the Almighty and argue my case with God." Ever been there? Ever want to say, "God, I want to talk to you and have this out because I don't like the way that you're treating me. Trouble upon trouble, disaster upon disaster. Here I am your child. How come you're not doing something about it?" And then in Job 23, 3, 4, and 5, "If only I knew where to find him. If only I could go to his dwelling. I would state my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. I would find out what he would answer me and consider what he would say." See, at least with his friends he can debate and he can argue. But God, where do you find him? Especially in those places. And how do you state your case? Now here's the very interesting thing. You and I are inclined to think that Job's attitude towards God is disrespectful. And haven't there been times in your own life where you've been unhappy with the Lord or unhappy with the Lord's orderings? And if you had dared, you would have fought it out with him and called him, "The Lord knows what kind of names under the sun." But you didn't dare, did you? Because you thought lightning might strike from heaven and then you'd really be in big trouble. And so we say to ourselves, "How can Job get away with this?" Because see, the interesting thing is when you get to the end of the book of Job, it's not Job that God is mad at. In fact, he says concerning the friends of Job, "I am angry with you and your two friends because you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has." Isn't that interesting? Here's Job. He rails away at God and God somehow or another thinks Job is doing okay. But the three friends of Job who are trying to defend the justice of God, God says, "They're out to lunch and they're in big trouble." Now how do you square that? Well, listen carefully because this is critical and it's not easy to get your head around. For all his rebellion and his sense of being treated unjustly by God, Job loves the truth. And the truth of the matter is that in Job's case at least, he is righteous, he is blameless before God, and he loves truth too much to conveniently side with his friends who are telling him, "There must be something wrong with you or God would not be cursing you the way that he is." And Job's friends, you see, they love justice and their theological system more than they love truth because truth is Job is innocent. But if Job is blameless and all this trouble happens to him, their theology is messed up. Do you understand that? Life no longer makes sense. And so they must force the issue and force the issue because they are more anxious to defend the justice of God as they perceive it than the truth of God. But fact of the matter is God's more interested in truth than simply in justice because justice is not justice unless it is based on truth. And so he says, "My servant Job has spoken well of me because he understands my love for truth and has defended, even in the midst of challenging me, even in the midst of fighting me, he is still defending truth and asking that I be truthful in my dealings with him." Whereas the friends, their theology can't handle reality. And so they are prepared to sell out the truth in order for their version of justice to take place. Now here's the very interesting thing about the story of Job. As Job takes on God and God is never put out when we take him on in a search for truth, God would rather have us engage him honestly with integrity out of the core of our being because we don't want to live in a false world and we don't want to live in a religiously pretend world. God is big enough to handle our questions. God is big enough to handle our doubts. Read the book of Psalms and see what happens when God's people cry out and they engage God. That's what Job does. And that is a sign that you care enough about God to take him on and to wrestle with him until like Jacob of old, he blesses you. Now here's what's interesting about Job. Job never gets any answers to his questions. You ever notice that? You can read through the whole book of Job and God never explains to Job what has been going on behind the scenes. You and I know because we read the rest of the story, but Job, we have no indication understood anything of what was happening back there. All he saw was trouble. And God, where are you when I'm trying to appeal to you for justice? He never gets an answer. You know, and for that matter, Jesus, when he hung on the cross and he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He never got an answer either. You know why? Because when you're in pain, answers don't solve your problem. What pain needs is comfort and a revelation of who God is. So how did Job's problems get solved? Well, God gets tired of Job's ramblings. He gets tired of his three friends' ramblings and he takes center stage himself. And if you're familiar with the book of Job, then you know from chapter 38 to chapter 42, which is the conclusion of the book of Job, God has a few things to say himself to Job. The Lord answered Job out of the storm and he said, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? How's that for being put in place? Brace yourself like a man. I will question you and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? Tell me if you understand, you smarty pants. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know. Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footing set? Or who laid its cornerstone? While the morning star sang together and all the angels shouted for joy. And then he goes on for a couple more chapters talking about, look at nature, look at the wild beasts that I have created. Who do you think you are? Can you match my creative and redemptive energy and power? You see, when the time is right, God finally speaks. And what happens to Job when God finally speaks? Well, Job falls flat on his face and he says, surely I spoke of things I did not understand. Things too wonderful for me to know. You said, listen now and I will speak. I will question you and you shall answer me. My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. See, Job never sinned in attributing the evil that he was experiencing to God, nor did he turn his back on God. That doesn't mean he was right and all of his responses because Job had this overwhelming desire to prove that he was right. And he demanded for God to do him justice, not understanding that when all has been said and done, God is God. And Job was just a creature of his hands. And in order for the two of them to have a relationship that was truly a righteous relationship, Job had to bend his knee and bow his heart before the authority of God. And the whole purpose of the book of Job is to bring him to that point where humbled in the dust, broken by thy wrath and judgment, just as one of our old hymns says, he discovered the grace of God. And it's at that point when God has brought him to that point of total surrender and total humility. That is, we will see next time, Lord willing, that God can step into his life [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:33:02.900; remove through 00:35:22.000] and he can restore him to greater glory and greater [CUT] honor than he had ever had before. God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform. He plants his footsteps in the sea and rides upon the steppe. He's been under the marble mass of never failing spirit. He treasures up his bright designs and works his sovereign will. A fearful saint's fresh courage can cause he so much dread. Our big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head. His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour. The blood may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower. Like unbelief is sure to help and stand his work in vain. God is his own interpreter and he shall make it right. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:35:22.000; resume after this marked segment]