Themes of the Bible: Suffer (Job 1)

 

Themes of the Bible: Suffer (Job 1)

If you did the homework from last week, then you already know that today we’ll be in Job 1, and if you want to pre-read for next week, as we are continuing this series, where we are looking at the major themes that God is giving to humanity in His Word, we'll be in the book of Psalms, so you can read Psalm 23. Those of you that are not really Bible readers, I think when you read this chapter, there's going to be phrases and statements in there that you are familiar with, culturally, you've heard these before, but we want to look at what God's message is, not the culture’s message.

But for this week, like I said, we will be look at Job 1, and let's just be honest, if you did the homework, Job had a really bad day. This is the pinnacle of a bad day. Now, we've had bad days, and you know how the hits keep coming. Job is standing there and one thing after another continues to happen to him as you watch this unfold. It's almost unbelievable and so the question becomes, ‘what is the point of an account like this?’ Why is God preserving this for us in His Word? It seems incredible that this would be something that God would want us to know, about all this suffering that came upon one of his most precious believers in Job. Well, if you want to know the point of the story. This is one that you can just turn to a later passage of scripture. Thousands of years later, the apostle James writes these words, James 5:11, “We count those blessed who endured. You have heard of the endurance of Job and have seen the outcome of the Lord’s dealings, that the Lord is full of compassion and is merciful.” So, according to Scripture, what is the story, the account of Job, about? That the Lord is full of compassion and mercy.

Still, when you read chapter one, are you getting the vibes in chapter one of God's compassion and mercy? Because when I read chapter one, I don't really get the vibe that God is overly compassionate, and he's overly merciful to those who love Him. Now, granted, if you read the whole thing you’ll get to chapter 42 and the culmination of all of that where all of this comes to a head, and you will see the compassion and mercy of the Lord extended to Job.  

Ok, to begin, for those of you that didn't do your homework. Here's the summation; you have a guy who was blameless and upright in the sight of the Lord. I want you right now to think of the person in your life, and please don’t everybody think of me, but think of someone who you know who is above reproach. This is the person that you would look at and say, ‘that's a holy person,’ I can't imagine that sin is really playing a very big part in their life. Whoever it is that you’re thinking of, realize the Job is 20,000 times more faithful than that person. That's what we know from Scripture. This is what God says of Him. God defines Job and describes Job as someone who feared God, who had reverence towards God, and he shunned evil, he walked away from evil, this is a guy who says that he made a covenant with the Lord never to look at a woman lustfully, and he kept that promise to God. This is a man who shuns evil, this is a guy that when his children sin, he is so upset by the offense to God's character, that he feels it necessary to go out and make restitution, because nobody is going to say or speak ill of his God. He is a man who loves God, fears God, he is known for his reverence of God. In other words, you look in Job, and there's absolutely nothing here that you see in his life that you say, ‘well, this guy needs to learn a spiritual lesson.’ Remember King David, his sin with Bathsheba? He may be a guy after God's own heart, but he's got some issues that need to be worked through. Abraham had Ishmael with Hagar, a woman who was not his wife, and Scripture says that he is ‘father of the faithful’ but he's still needed to learn some lessons in faithfulness. But, there's nothing in Job's life that you can point to and say, ‘well here's the problem.’ Nothing like that. And then what happens, Job chapter 1, verses 14 through 19.

If you have your Bibles open, that’s where we’ll be. This is unbelievable. [Read Job 1:14-19]. I mean that's unbelievable. You are standing there and then it's just messenger after messenger after messenger, just bad news after bad news. Two of those are attacks by man, the two foreign groups, and then you have two of what we would call ‘acts of God,’ whether that's lightning and a windstorm, whatever it is, but in those four events, he has lost all of his property, all of his wealth, his prosperity, all of his family dead, except for his wife, who is with him, all of that in one afternoon. That is a bad day.

Now, there have been bad days. Teddy Roosevelt, the former president of the United States, you may not know this, but he lost his mom, and four hours later loses his wife in childbirth. That's a bad day. There are bad days that people have, but none of those compared to what Job went through. This is unprecedented then, and it remains unprecedented to this day, so the question that we need to ask is, ‘what in the world is going on here and why has God preserved this?’ Something is going on beyond this world that is affecting what is happening in this world. If you want to know why some things happen in this world, you have to be aware that there are things beyond this world that are occurring, exactly like in the book of Esther. The master chess player is organizing his pieces where he wants them. He is using humanity to glorify Him, and bring about His will, and until you grasp that, it's not going to make sense.

So, what is it that's going on? We get a glimpse; in this passage of Scripture, verses 6-12, Satan presents himself to God. For some reason, God gives Satan an audience, and what does Satan say to him, look at verse 7. [Read Job 1:7]. In other words, he's searching the earth that he believes that he owns. Satan is running around, and what is he doing there? Many years later in the New Testament, the apostle Peter tells believers exactly what Satan is doing. He tells believers to “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).

That's what Satan has been doing. He's been roaming around the Earth, looking for someone to devour. It's what Satan does, he's a marauder, he's a thief. That's who he is. And then verse 8 happens. I cannot get over verse eight, verse eight throws me every time I read it, and there's a reason that throws me, and a reason that it throws you. After Satan has announced that this is what he's doing, he's roaming around the Earth, look at what verse 8 says, this is what will should make you have questions about this. Ok, verse eight, [Read Job 1:8]. What in the world is God doing here? Is he throwing Job under the bus? None of that makes sense. Is God just being careless here, of course not, but it might seem that way. It looks as if God was a business owner, who in the midst of looting tells the looter, “have you considered my most expensive, nicest TV set?” That’s not really what God is doing here, although it may seem that way. God knows Satan's nature, he knows he's a murderer. He knows he's a thief, he knows he's a marauder. And what does God do, he says, in essence, ‘Excuse me, Satan, I don't know if you've happened to notice my prized person over here, I'd like to make sure that you see that. Have a good day.’ Why is he doing that? God is undoubtedly setting Job up for a disaster, and nothing happens outside of God's consciousness, he knows he is setting Job up for a disaster. This doesn't seem like the God of compassion and mercy. And we're told by James that this story is a story about compassion, but this isn't compassionate and merciful, it looks as if he's throwing Job, one of his faithful, under the bus. So, why is he doing that?

Let me begin to try to answer that question, I don't know if it'll succeed. We know that God is proud of Job. Job is reverence towards God in the face of the world. That's what makes God proud of us when we choose to use our existence to glorify God, drawing other people to him. That is what God finds pride in us for doing, and it's the same thing with Job.

When is it that your reverence is most noticeable to the world, I'll give you two options. Is your reverence for God most noticeable and impressive to people when you just won an Academy Award, and you walk out on the stage and say, ‘I just want to thank all the people that are responsible for this, my dry cleaners and my dog groomer, and God, got to think thank God, this wouldn't be possible without him,’ Is that when your reverence for God is most impressive, or is it when a human being is in the midst of total and utter suffering, and they say, ‘Praise God.’ Which time is it that the world sits up and says, ‘Whoa! Something's different about that person. How is it that they're praising God in that circumstance, what is it about their relationship with God, that makes them say that in the midst of what they're going through?” You know the answer to that question. So, I'm suggesting to you that those hearts that are devoted to him, never shine brighter, are never put on a greater display to the world than when everything else has been stripped away. Just like Esther from our study last week, Job is getting an opportunity to be used for God's glory. Now, granted, these are two completely different set of circumstances, Esther was brought into the kingdom and into the palace to be used for God's glory, while Job is going to lose this entire family and get a disease. If you ask me which of those two earthly circumstances I would prefer, it's not difficult to pick.

The question is, who thinks like that? Who is it that looks at that and says, ‘This is an incredible opportunity to glorify God’? When you have lost everything in your life, those four things have occurred to you like they happened to Job, who is it that says, ‘Man, what a great opportunity to glorify God,’ who in the world thinks like that. The answer: nobody. We don't think like that. God does, and that's the point. That's what Job chapter 1 is all about. This is why when you read in Romans 12, that we are to transform our minds into his, that his priorities become our priorities, that his way of thinking has to be our way of thinking, that means something.

It doesn't mean the American Christian idea of, I'm going to transform my mind to be a Christian, I'm going to think about good things all the time. I'm just going to think about positive things and try to see the silver lining in everything. That's not what it means to transform your mind to his, it's not the power of positive thinking, of always being happy. You can get that from any cheap psychiatry book on the shelves of Barnes and Noble or Amazon if you want to. This is something entirely different, transform your thinking to be like his. And until we start thinking like him, you will not be able to make sense out of what is happening in the book of Job, and you will not be able to make sense out of the things that you go through in your life.

When you experience the pain and the suffering of real life, you'll never make sense out of it until you start conforming your thinking to his. If we don't, we just get angrier and angrier because of our way of thinking. This is the human way of thinking, “if God loves me, he would do things for me that make me happy.” That's the human way of thinking. So, when things happen to me that don't make me happy, well, what does that say about God? That's not how he thinks. His priority is turning hearts towards Him. So, what is His act of love to us? If he loves me, He will allow me to be used to draw others towards him. That's the way a believer should think. There is no greater honor for one who is in Christ than for the God of the universe to use them in some way to glorify Him, and that's exactly what happens with Job. I'm not saying Job enjoyed it. I'm saying that there is joy to be found in it, when you properly understand what God is interested in. This is the master chess player again.

 Satan things God just threw his best piece of equipment out there in front of me, and I'm going to go and just destroy it. But he has no idea God's setting him up, once again, and, of course, God is going to win. Once again, Satan thinks he's so smart and so cunning, yet in every page of Scripture, the master chess player is working many, many moves ahead of him. Look at what Satan says to God, verse 9, [Read Job 1:9-11]. What is Satan doing here? He is assaulting the glory of God. What is he saying to God, ‘God, you think Job loves you, Job doesn't love you. He just loves your stuff. That's what he loves. He isn't devoted to you, he's devoted to the stuff that you've given him. Take that stuff away, and he will curse you like everybody else. You aren't as important as you think you are God.’ That's what he's saying. Satan is saying to God, ‘You are not Job's treasure. Your treasures are Job's treasures.” Remember Abraham and Isaac? I gave that message on Abraham and Isaac, from Genesis 22. What did Abraham demonstrate? That he loved God more than all of God's great blessings in his life, even the blessing of his own son. And so, we were challenged again by this: do we love God’s stuff, or do we love God more than anything else?

Here, God knows where Job's heart is. When Satan says, ‘God, Job doesn't really love you.’ God knows whether that's true or not. But Satan, he's probably articulating what the world believes, is saying, ‘well of course Job loves you because of all this stuff that you've given him, and if he didn't have that stuff, then he wouldn't love you anymore.’ God knows that isn't true, but the world doesn't know that. Which means God is allowing Job, in this instance, to put on display his adoration of God. He's putting on display the glory of the Father, in front of all of mankind, and we're still reading about it and talking about it thousands of years later. That's what God's doing in this situation, in this circumstance, but why Job? Why would you pick Job? He's been so good. He's been so faithful. My answer, if seeing someone like Job who had so much, lose it all and still praise the name of God, is that not likely to cause many who see it, to increase their confidence in their faith?

Through Job’s suffering, the world is about to see that God is King in Job's heart, not his animals, not hiss prosperity, not his money, not even his kids and his family. God is King in the life of job. That's the question for us: If you go home today, you lose every family member you’ve ever had, your house burns down, you lose your job and your dog leaves you, how do you respond? Is your response, ‘praise God’? Praise God for the years that I had them. Praise God for the opportunity for me to show the world my dependence upon Him and Him alone or is your response to rebel against God because a loving God wouldn't do that to me. A loving God would not allow me to go through this pain. How are we thinking, which way are we thinking?

We thank God repeatedly in our prayers. We thank God for all of the blessings He gives us, but I want to stress to you, that just thanking God doesn't mean that you love him. We love his stuff. That's why we're expressing the gratitude. I've been convicted by this in my own life. ‘Thank you for our home. Thank you for our cars, thank you for our jobs, thank you for all of these things God.’ Okay. It's not wrong to express gratitude, but my prayers are so much more focused on gratitude towards God, than adoration of God Himself. And that's concerning. Where's the focus of our prayer. Where's the focus of our adoration, the blessings are the blesser?

So, how does Job do with all of this, or let's speed through and get to the end of this. Look at, look at verses 20 and 21, this is, this is why job if you wonder why did God allow this happened to Job, right here it is. After just finding out that all of his kids are dead, everything he's ever had is gone, scripture says, [Read Job 1:20-21]. Job got up, tore his robe and shaved his head. That's our equivalent of just bursting into tears and weeping. Okay, first thing to notice there. Yes, human emotions are real, you will weed, they're real and it's okay to weep and be sorrowful for these things when they occurred to us. Then, he fell to the ground and worshipped and said, and look, I didn't have anything when I came into this world. Hey, I wasn't entitled to anything. I came into the world naked I came from my mother's whom and naked I will depart without anything else. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, may the name of the Lord being praised.

So, what about us as a church? Yeah, it's really cool to pack people into a building on Sunday mornings, but for what, what's the point. Why are you wanting people to come in on Sunday mornings. Is the kind of faith that is grown here, in this place, the kind that leads a widow who has just lost her husband and her child in an automobile accident, ‘may the name of the Lord be praised!’? If that's the kind of faith that has grown here, then it is a success, regardless of how many people are walking through the doors on Sunday. I think the goal of any church, these days, should be to produce Job's. Job's, whose lives glorify God everywhere they go. And if that's happening, then you have a successful local church. I lost all my money, praise God. I lost all my possessions, I didn't have any when I came into the world, I'm not taking any with me when I leave, praise God. I lost all 10 of my kids, praise God that I had them for the time that I did, and the impact that they made on so many people's lives, including mine, praise God. God and the Word of God in my life is superior to anything else that I've been given.

This account is teaching us why this attitude is so important for believers. Satan's goal is to belittle God. See, Satan is being destroyed, and he knows it. He could not stop the Genesis 3:15 promise. Christ crushed his head at Calvary, and he knows his days are numbered. And so, the only thing he has left is to inflict as much pain on the Father as he can. And he does that by keeping God's precious children away from a relationship with Him. How do you keep God's children away from him, you belittle Him in the eyes of the world, so that nobody wants to part of that. And how does he accomplish it? He accomplishes it best by destroying the joy that you, you people who call yourselves children of God, the joy that you place in Him. If Satan can rip that away from you, that is a perfect demonstration to the world that God must not be worth it. If Satan can ruin your joyful faith in God, he makes God a mockery in the eyes of the world. He makes God look worthless.

Let me see if I can make this make sense. I'll use myself as an example, when something from the world is taken from one of God's people. Let's say I lose my wife, God forbid, Christiana, that means the world to me, is taken away from me. Let's say that happens. And my response when that occurs is to forsake God, to curse God, to walk away from God. Saying, as a result of that, things like, ‘a loving God would not have allowed that to happen to me,’ and I walk away, because something that was a gift in this world was taken from me. What have I just signaled to the world? I have signaled to the world that the gift was more valuable to me than God. What the world offered me, and my relationship with my wife, was more valuable than the relationship I have with the Father. If that happened, then I, a follower of God has just demonstrated to the world that the world is of greater value than Him. How does Satan belittle God? Exactly like that. Why is this so critical for us to grasp and understand? Because this is our role to not send that message, to follow the example of Job, who, on his worst day, still praised God and said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Verse 21).

Everything I have is a blessing that comes from God. Your life is a gift. Every healthy muscle movement you have is a blessing from Him. Every full breath that you take is a gift from God, and when God takes it, He has done nothing wrong. He is working His purposes, and it's your great privilege to honor and glorify Him in the process. I don't pretend that this is easy theology. I do not pretend that I have this mastered, and I shudder to think how poorly I perform in this regard, but here's what I do know. I do know that this is biblical theology, that this is God’s way of thinking, and is exactly what the psalmist says, “because your love is better than my life, my lips will glorify you” (Psalm 63:3).

So, everything I have, take it all away. Take away my very life. If I still have you Father, then I have everything that I need.

Let’s pray.