There's certain people here from Detroit and other
points, those who were in Lake Geneva last
year, you are free to go to sleep
right now.
There was a man in the land of
Oz whose name was Job, and that man
was blameless and upright, one who feared God
and turned away from evil.
Verse six, Now there was a day when
the sons of God came to present themselves
before the Lord, and Satan also came among
them.
The Lord said to Satan, Whence have you
come?
Satan answered the Lord, From going to and
fro on the earth, and from walking up
and down on earth.
The Lord said to Satan, Have you considered
my servant Job, that there is none like
him on the earth, a blameless and upright
man who fears God and turns away from
evil?
Then Satan answered the Lord, Does Job fear
God for naught?
Hath thou not put a headship out of
him in his house, and all that he
hath on every side?
Thou hast blessed the work of his hands,
and his possessions have increased in the land.
But put forth thy hand now, and touch
all that he hath, and he will curse
thee to thy face.
And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, all
that he hath is in your power.
Only upon himself do not put forth your
hand.
So Satan went forth in the presence of
the Lord.
And then Satan comes a second time after
the affliction that he visited upon Job, of
which all that are aware.
Verse 3 of chapter 2.
The Lord said to Satan, Have you considered
my servant Job, that there is none like
him on the earth, a blameless and upright
man who fears God and turns away from
evil?
He still holds fast his integrity, though you
moved me against him to destroy him without
cause.
Then Satan answered the Lord skin for skin.
All that a man has will he give
for his life.
But put forth thy hand now, and touch
his bone and his flesh, and he will
curse thee to thy face.
And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, he
is in your power.
Only spare his life.
Now chapter 42.
Verse 7.
Chapter 42 in verse 7.
After the Lord had spoken these words to
Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite,
My wrath is kindled against you and against
your two friends.
For you have not spoken of me what
is right, as my servant Job has.
Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams
and go to my servant Job and offer
up for yourselves a burnt offering.
And my servant Job shall pray for you.
For I will accept his prayer not to
deal with you according to your folly.
For you have not spoken of me what
is right, as my servant Job has.
So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite
and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what
the Lord had told them.
And the Lord accepted Job's prayer.
And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job
when he had prayed for his friends.
And the Lord gave back to Job twice
as much as he had before.
Thomas Carlyle, the English writer, has said that
this is one of the most magnificent pieces
of literature that's ever been written.
And I think it's generally recognized as a
great piece of dramatic literature that our Eucharist
Synod is not literary, but personal.
The Book of Job explores the whole problem
of suffering and suffering on the part of
the righteous.
And I shouldn't say it really explores this,
it doesn't explain it, but it gives us
an example.
And if we turn to the Book of
Psalms, because of varied experiences in our own
lives that we find paralleled in the Psalmist,
in deep distress, we invariably turn to the
Book of Job.
Not because we get answers, because we don't
get answers in the Book of Job, but
because we feel a kinship to this man.
That's why we turn to the Book of
Job.
And we realize that we do not realize
among our contemporaries, we realize that among our
spiritual ancestors, there are people who have suffered
as some of us have to suffer in
our own lifetime.
And it's the second thing that we realize,
that God has not singled us out to
toy with us as a cat toys with
a mouse before he destroys us.
God is not dealing with us like that.
There are no answers to Job in this
book.
He is never told why he had to
go through the devastating suffering that he went
through.
That says a great deal to me about
our own suffering as we go through distress.
But perhaps we should have time to look
at that.
Job, as we recognize from the prologue, this
prose prologue of the first two chapters, is
an exceedingly wealthy man, one of the wealthiest
men in the Near East, and one of
the most revered and respected, if you go
back to his own defense in chapters 30
and 31, or maybe about chapter 29, and
he talks about the great reverences with which
he was held, even among the elders.
And because of that, I shouldn't say because
of that, but that was a basic premise,
presupposition on which Job lived, and which his
friends lived, and that is that the righteous
always prosper, and that Job's prosperity was directly
related to his righteousness.
That was one of the basic presuppositions by
which they lived.
That presupposition was preceded by another one, by
the way, and that is that God is
absolutely righteous and will never do what is
wrong.
And then there was a third presupposition on
which they lived, and that is that God
causes everything that happens.
Now, when you put two of those presuppositions
together, that God is righteous and will never
do what is wrong, and secondly, that God
causes everything that happens, you are bound to
come out with a third one.
That prosperity is the direct action of God
in response to the righteousness of a human
being, because God is right, and God does
everything that happens in a man's life.
And that if a man suffers, it's because
he has sinned.
God would never cause a righteous man to
suffer, because God always does what is right,
and everything that happens is caused by God.
One of those presuppositions is true, and the
other two are false, and yet they live
by all three.
The only one of those three presuppositions that
is correct is that God is right and
will never do what is wrong.
The presupposition that God causes everything that happens
is wrong.
The presupposition that prosperity in life is due
to a man's righteousness, it's God's reward, and
suffering is God's punishment, that presupposition is wrong.
But their lives were founded on those three
presuppositions, two of which were wrong.
God does not cause everything that happens.
That's obvious on the surface of it.
Sin happens.
Does God cause that?
It's blasphemous to think so.
No, God does not cause everything that happens.
And that idea got Job and his friends
into all kinds of difficulties in what was
going on.
But you remember Job's sufferings.
The terrible devastation that came upon him in
one day, and then his own personal illness.
I don't know how we could parallel that,
except perhaps in times of war, mass bombings
of British and German cities in World War
II.
It may be in some of those devastated
cities, a husband and father was the only
one that escaped from the rubble of his
home, and he had to turn around and
see that his wife and his family and
all his possessions had been wiped out in
that night bombing raid.
And then if he were to discover a
week later that he had an incurable cancer,
we might have some sort of a parallel
to Job.
If that cancer were very slow-acting, not
a rapid cancer, then we would have something
parallel to Job.
The problem with Job's disease is it wouldn't
kill him quickly.
But if you could think of a situation
like that, you would have Job's situation.
Let me say here that, lest I forget
it, there was one thing that Satan was
trying to do in this man's life, and
that was destroy his confidence in God.
And if you've never been in a situation
where you begin to question the reality of
God's goodness, and whether or not it really
is worthwhile to put your trust in God,
you have no understanding of Job's dilemma.
But that's what Satan was trying to do.
Satan had certain assumptions on which he was
operating.
He assumed that Job's life was wrapped up
in his possessions and in his children, and
that God was an auxiliary to Job's prosperity
and his family, and that if he destroyed
Job's possessions and Job's family, he would have
destroyed Job.
His other assumption was that if that didn't
work, Job's life centered around his own personal
well-being.
And if he could destroy that, he would
destroy the center of Job's life.
God's challenge was that the center of Job's
life was God himself.
But Satan felt that if he could destroy
Job's possessions and his family and his health,
Job would give up his faith in God.
And as I read through the scriptures, this
is exactly what Satan was trying to do.
Satan does not operate in what we call
the moral realm of life, though I think
we restrict that term far too narrowly.
But the gross sins of the flesh, that's
not the area where Satan is operating.
He's operating in a much more difficult area
than that.
Once you begin to see the biblical priorities,
as C.S. Lewis says, you realize that
those gross sins of the flesh are mere
flea bites compared to the real sins.
And what Satan is working at is to
kill our confidence in God, to destroy our
confidence in God either through our circumstances or
through our own sin, as in the case
of Peter.
Satan has desired to have all of you,
that he may sift you as wheat, but
I have prayed for you, singular Peter, that
your faith fail not.
Whereas in the case of the Apostle Paul,
that thorn in the flesh, he describes as
a messenger of Satan.
A messenger is one who delivers a message,
and that thorn in the flesh was delivering
a message to Paul.
You might as well give up.
It's not worthwhile to serve Jesus Christ when
this is what happens to you.
That's the area in which Satan operates, to
destroy our confidence in the living God, and
that's what he was trying to do here.
So, I want to talk a little bit
about Job's suffering, first of all.
And one of the reasons I've read part
of this prose prologue is to indicate very,
very clearly there was no reason in Job
for that suffering.
And I am distressed by the number of
commentaries on Job that I read that say,
God knew that Job was a proud man,
and he had to humble Job through this
suffering.
That's false.
God, in the record of Scripture itself, three
times, twice to Satan, and once in the
description of Job, says that he's an upright
man, he is blameless, he turns away from
evil.
That's God's witness to this man.
And then on the fourth occasion, to Satan,
Job says, You moved me against him without
cause.
There isn't any reason in Job why he
suffers like this.
And we are going to misread the book
of Job if we come to it with
that idea, and we are going to misread
our own lives and the lives of other
people, and judge other people if we come
to the book of Job with the idea
that Job was a proud man whom God
had to humble.
He was not.
And even at the end, and that's why
I read from the 42nd chapter, when it
was all over, when there were things of
which Job had to repent, things that he
said, God said to those three friends, You
have not spoken of me what is right
as my servant Job has.
There was not any reason in Job why
he should suffer that way.
Let me beg of you, as you work
with fellow Christians who are in deep distress,
do not start assigning moral causes.
If there is a moral cause, let it
be between that individual and God.
We are not God.
We are not the judges of our brothers
and sisters.
Secondly, as far as Job's suffering is concerned,
no explanation was ever given to Job.
We know from the prose prologue what was
going on.
Job never read the prose prologue to this
book.
He was the chief actor in the play,
and he hadn't read the whole play.
He never knew, and God never explained to
him why he had suffered so.
I had the privilege of sitting under Dr.
Kenneth Consler, who is now dean of Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School up in Deerfield, Illinois.
I remember once in our theology class, as
we discussed the doctrine of God, particularly some
of the attributes of God, we got into
Romans chapter 9.
He was taking the illustration that Paul uses
there of the potter and the clay.
One of the things he got out of
it, being the kind of tender-hearted man
that he is, is that as the potter
fashions the clay, there is no way that
the potter can communicate to the clay what
he's doing.
How does a human being tell a lump
of clay what he's doing?
He can't do it.
And as God works in our lives, very
often there isn't any way that he can
explain to us what's going on.
We understand something of the conflict between Satan
and God.
We got the whole Bible.
Suppose God had tried to tell Job what
was going on.
Would it have helped Job to understand?
Wouldn't have helped me any.
I'd have told God, go pick some other
battlefield.
Maybe you've got a conflict with Satan.
Go fight it out in Heaven.
Don't choose me.
That wouldn't help me a bit.
And there isn't any way that the potter
can tell the clay what he's doing.
At that point, everything depends on whether or
not we trust the potter.
And Job never got an explanation.
Thirdly, there were causes far greater than Job's
own life and what was going on.
The issue was not Job, nor Job's integrity,
though that's the question Satan raised.
The real issue was God's integrity.
And Satan had made the bald accusation against
God that the only way he could get
followers on this earth was to bribe them.
The only reason you can get a human
being who you've made in your own image
and after your own likeness to follow you
is you've got to put a hedge around
him and make him prosperous, and what you're
doing is bribing his obedience.
And that's the kind of God you are.
And there were far bigger questions in this
than Job's own life, and Job knew nothing
about that.
And there was no way God could tell
Job about that.
One of the figures that C.S. Lewis
used as one of the pictures to try
to help us see some of this, particularly
as he talks about the second advent of
our Lord Jesus, and by the way, I
strongly urge you to get his little book
called The World's Last Night, and also his
little book called The Weight of Glory.
But as he talks about the world's last
night, the sudden, unexpected coming of our Lord
Jesus, he pictures us as actors in a
scene in a play.
We have our own lines to read.
Now, don't misread his picture and put into
that some non-biblical view of the sovereignty
of God.
What he's trying to get at is we
are in one little scene.
We know what's going on while we are
on the stage, a little bit of it,
not all of it.
We don't know all the lines the other
actors have.
We're aware of some of those lines, and
we get into the same bit of action
on the stage with others.
We know very, very little of the scenes
that have preceded ours, and we know very,
very little, if anything, of the scenes that
are going to follow ours.
It may be that right in the middle
of our scene, the author is going to
ring down the curtain on the play.
We do not know the whole play, the
whole drama.
It's our responsibility to play our part well
without knowing the whole drama.
Job did not know the whole drama.
He knew nothing of the scene that was
being played in heaven.
He was acutely aware of the scene in
which he was an actor, but he knew
nothing of the scene that was being played
in hell.
We do not know the whole drama.
And from that, I want to talk a
little bit about suffering in general, as far
as the Christian is concerned.
I suggested to you already, as we talked
about Hagar, that we simply share the common
lot of all mankind, and there are no
exceptions for the godly.
If you think there are, you are taking
Satan's position, not God's, and you are taking
the position of the friends of Job who
were such an affliction to him.
You are not taking God's position.
That was the basic premise of Job's friends,
that the godly are exempt from that kind
of suffering.
And they were no help to Job.
They were part of his problem.
The godly are not exempt from that suffering.
I want to say a second thing about
suffering in general.
God is not primarily concerned about whether or
not we are happy.
What he is concerned about is that we
be good.
God really doesn't care whether we're happy or
not.
That's of no real interest to him.
What he is concerned about is that we
be good.
And I mean good in that noble and
righteous sense in which the word is used
primarily in the New Testament.
That's God's concern.
And if it takes unhappiness to make us
good, God is perfectly willing to sacrifice our
happiness to make us good.
It's obvious he was willing to sacrifice his
own happiness to make us good.
Why should he hesitate to sacrifice ours?
Any parent realizes that.
How do you feel about parents who always
give in to their children's demand to be
happy, that they should never experience pain or
displeasure?
How do you feel about parents who, when
their child lies on the floor and throws
a tantrum, give the child whatever he's asking
for so that he won't be unhappy?
What do you say?
You say that parent really doesn't love that
child.
God as our Heavenly Father loves us too
much to let us be happy at the
expense of being good.
And he will not exempt us from suffering
just to keep us happy.
And I like, and I do not like,
C.S. Lewis' expression that God is determined
to make us like his son, regardless of
the cost to him or to us.
So God is not really concerned about whether
or not we're happy.
And neither will we a million years into
eternity.
Whether or not we were happy on Earth
will be of no concern to us.
So I'm trying to get away from the
idea that all suffering in life is penal.
It isn't.
By the way, that's the position Job's friends
took, and I'd love to talk about those
three men and what they said about Job.
But as you read Job's defense in chapter
31, you discover that some of the sins
of which they were accusing him in the
first, and I haven't even got time to
outline this book to show you the three
cycles of speeches in which they went.
Any good commentary will do that.
Job has to defend himself against what we
call the sins of the flesh.
They're the kinds of sins that a man
of wealth and power in the Near East
could commit.
Just as I was talking about Abram with
Hagar.
Poor Hagar, who had no right.
A man of great wealth and power could
take any woman he wanted.
Who's going to stop him?
The most powerful chepton in the East, who's
going to stop him?
Could that girl's father stand up against a
man of Job's wealth and power?
Could she?
Could any other man?
No.
And so, these friends assume that because of
his wealth and power, those are the sins
of which Job has been guilty.
Job indignantly defends himself against the accusation.
But I thought, too, we are so much
like Job's friends.
We are so concerned about what we call
the grosser sins of the flesh than the
really delicious sins of the spirit we pass
over.
The devastating sins are not the sins of
the flesh, but the sins of the spirit.
You recognize that in the scriptures, too.
The sins of the flesh may make us
like animals, rucking around and mating feasts.
But the sins of the spirit make us
devils.
And it's worse to be a devil than
an animal.
It's better, of course, to be neither.
But the sins of the spirit are always
far more devastating than the sins of the
flesh.
But that's what they were saying, too, if
you're being punished for your sins, that he
was not.
The other thing I would like to say
about suffering, and there are many more things
that one could say, but the other thing
I would like to say about suffering is
this.
Do not confuse results with purpose.
Because God brings good results out of some
suffering does not mean that's the purpose for
the suffering.
And if I cannot distinguish between results and
purpose, I'm in trouble.
It's simply characteristic of God to get into
an evil situation and bring good out of
it, as he did with our sin, for
instance.
But to say that God purposed sin in
order that he might bring salvation and show
his grace in Jesus Christ is to fall
into the trap of which Paul indignantly talks
when he says, let us do evil, let
us sin, the great may abound.
That's wicked to say something like that.
And to say that God brought sin into
the world to display his grace is wicked.
We have confused results with purpose, and it's
simply characteristic of God to get into an
evil situation and bring good out of it.
But that result is not the same thing
as purpose.
That is why it happens.
And to look at what Job learned from
this experience is not the same thing as
saying that's why God brought it into his
life.
And God didn't bring it, by the way,
he let Satan do it.
He permitted it.
But to see the good that comes out
of it is not the same thing as
saying that's the purpose of it.
Do not confuse results with purpose.
I magnify the grace of God when I
see the results.
I twist the grace of God when I
say that there's a purpose.
I should also talk about Job's real problems.
How am I going to get all this
done?
Maybe I'll have to pick up Job at
another session and finish this thing.
Job's real problem, as you read through this
book and what he has to say, and
particularly as he begins it in chapter three,
Job's real problem was not the loss of
his possessions, nor the loss of his family,
nor the loss of his health.
His real problem was the loss of God.
There is no reason for him to say
in chapter three what he says when he
clutches the day of his birth and the
moment of his conception.
If the real problem was the loss of
his family and friends, when your loved ones
die, if you've had a happy life, you
can always look back on those pleasant memories,
and you thank God for that.
The loss of them does not make you
wish you were never born, and if you
end life in a diseased condition, you can
look back to all those years of health
that you had.
That doesn't make you say, I wish I'd
never been born.
The problem was the loss of God, because
Job worked from that basic presupposition, God causes
everything, and that illness and loss are the
consequence of sin, they're God's punishment.
And what Job felt at first was that
God had turned against him, but Job knew,
though he was not sinless, there was no
reason in Job for God to do that.
That wasn't pride, that was Job just being
realistic.
And what he felt was that God had
arbitrarily turned against him, and if the Psalms
had been listened, Job would have understood that
22nd Psalm, My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?
That's Job's problem, because that struck at the
heart of his life.
The heart of Job's life was not his
family, not his possessions.
The heart of Job's life was God, and
when God seemingly could arbitrarily leave him and
forsake him, Job's whole life was shattered, and
it would have been better for him never
to have been born than to end up
life without God.
Now, that's a biblical idea.
Better for that man, Jesus said, if he
had never been born.
That's what Job thought.
Let me say one thing about that.
It really wasn't true.
God was not arbitrary, and God had not
forsaken Job.
Job felt that he had, and he acted
as though God had, but God hadn't.
Now, let's distinguish something else.
We must distinguish between the presence of God
and the sense of God's presence.
Whether or not we have the sense of
God's presence isn't important.
Oh, we like it, but it's not important.
The important thing is to know that God
is there.
Whether I sense his presence or not isn't
important.
If God gives us that sense, fine, but
let's not build on the sense of it.
What we build on is his promise never
to leave us nor forsake us, and if
we build our lives on the sense of
his presence, we're going to be in trouble.
And that's what Job had to work through.
That while he did not have the sense
of God's presence, what he discovered at the
end of the book is that he had
always had the presence of God.
God had not forsaken him, even though Job
felt that way.
Now, perhaps some of you don't understand anything
about that.
Some of you will.
Some of you have used Psalm 22-1
in your prayers at times in your life,
haven't you?
Sure, some of us have been there.
But he hasn't left us.
No matter how devastating the circumstances in our
life may be, no matter how much it
may seem we have lost the sense of
God's presence, we have not lost God's presence.
He is there.
Not only will he not forsake us, that
is, abandon us permanently, he will not even
temporarily leave us.
I will never leave you, nor forsake you.
And he is there.
In the end, that's all Job needed.
And that's all he wanted.
That's it.
To the breath, O God, from shallow thoughts
of yourself, and shallow conclusions about life, and
shallow thoughts about our relationship to you, help
us in the hours of great suffering and
loss to stand on the bedrock of your
promise when all our sinful perceptions fail to
come true.
Your promise never to leave us, nor to
forsake us.
We pray in the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ.
Amen.