This is based on the Book of Job as many theodicies are. A theodicy is an answer to the question of how a perfect and all-powerful God can permit the existence of evil. [Read Job 1:6-22]
The opening verses of the Book of Job have always
raised questions in my mind as to whether or not this whole story is an actual
historical event (or series of events) or if it is an Old Testament parable – a
fictitious story with a true and heavenly meaning. The reason I questioned it
was because of how the sequence of the disasters that befell Job are told to
us. A servant runs up to him, reports a tragedy, says he’s the only one who survived
– and this sequence gets replayed exactly the same way, one after the other,
three more times. We can be forgiven for thinking that it sounds a little
contrived. However, I’ve come to believe what some commentators say that the
story of Job really happened but the biblical account is a re-telling of it in
an ancient poetic and prose format.
This book is profound because it addresses many
questions that come up naturally in our lives like, “Why do bad things happen
to good people?” I’ll come back to that at the end of the message but even more
important than that is what this book addresses directly: the issue of God's
goodness. And it is done brilliantly and paradoxically when you consider the
mayhem and destruction in the story.
The book opens with an introduction of Job and we
are told that he is wealthy and blessed and that he was righteous – blameless
and upright, the opening verses tell us.
To begin with, Job portrays the picture of patience, hence the old
saying that “So-and-so has the patience of Job”. Even in this severe trial, he
still praises God. However, it doesn’t last. There are some underlying feelings
and attitudes that God wants to expose in Job and deal with. Apparently even
Job can run out of patience and we'll see how later on he questions God's
integrity with his self-righteousness.
This morning we would do well to remember that God doesn’t fit
into all the neat little boxes that the various cultures of the Christian
Church have put Him in over the centuries. I would like us to look afresh at
the God of the Bible who revealed Himself to man in the Old Testament in
various ways and at various times and incarnated Himself in the New Testament
in the Person of Jesus.
According to the Bible, all that happened to Job and his family
was the result of a conversation between God and Satan, the Accuser. Neither
Job nor his family and friends knew anything about this and were never told.
That’s interesting to note. You and I have the privilege of seeing the whole
show, as it were. Perhaps if Job and his family and friends had known, they would’ve handled things
differently…but because they didn’t
know, their ignorance of God emerged and their sinful assumptions were
revealed.
It takes a little while to see what's happening here. Following
the place where we left off in our reading this morning, we get introduced to
Job’s three friends. For most of the remainder of the book, up to and including
chapter 31, these three friends come to Job and try to get him to confess his
sin and repent of it. When Job insists over and over again that he has not sinned and did nothing to deserve
the calamity that has befallen him, they don’t believe him. They think he is
just being resistant and they tell him that things won’t get any better until
he confesses what he must before a holy God.
In chapter 32, we get introduced to a fourth man, Elihu, who
brings a different perspective to all this. If you read through chapters 3-37
inclusive, you’ll get the gist of the back-and-forth conversation and you may
even come to the conclusion that everything the three friends said is correct
and accurate.
It is not till the end of the book that God arrives on the scene
and reveals what's really going on.
He rebukes and corrects the three friends as well as Job himself. While their
words sounded good, their understanding of God was legalistic and they believed
Him to be a punitive moralist, i.e., a God who lives to get even, to punish the
bad people of the world and to reward the good. Listen to what one of the friends,
Eliphaz, said in chapter 4:7-9,
“Stop and think!
Do the innocent die? When have the upright been destroyed? My experience shows
that those who plant trouble and cultivate evil will harvest the same. A breath
from God destroys them. They vanish in a blast of his anger.”
What’s wrong with what he said? Surely, God does bless those who love Him and ultimately punishes the
impenitent people of the world who work against His purposes. The Bible does
not reveal to us a wrathless God. The
Crucifixion is proof of that. That said, Eliphaz’s correct words were
misapplied and that can lead to problems as it did for many historical
characters of the Old Testament. The Pharisees and Sadducees of the New
Testament had the same problem.
Before Jesus, it was just generally assumed in that society that
God had His favorites and people who were physically disabled or emotionally or
mentally afflicted in some way had unconfessed sin in them or there was sin in
their parents’ or grandparents’ lives or…take it back as far as you like. Many
prejudices were formed from that way of thinking.
Their thinking is actually quite surprising. If they had but read
the Psalms, Ecclesiastes or the prophets they would've seen that God doesn't
play favorites. Jeremiah 12:1, “Righteous are You, O LORD, that I would
plead my case with You; Indeed I would discuss matters of justice with You: Why
has the way of the wicked prospered? Why are all those who deal in treachery at
ease?” Because of their willful ignorance, they were inconsistent in
their religious ideas which informed their social conditioning.
The truth is, not every
overtly sinful person appeared to be cursed in some way. Many of them – like
Zaccheus the tax collector – were very prosperous and seemingly blessed,
despite being deceitful. In this same vein, Jesus had to correct the thinking
of the religious people of His day.
Luke 13:1-4 reads, “About this time Jesus was
informed that Pilate had murdered some people from Galilee as they were
offering sacrifices at the Temple. Jesus asked, ‘Do you think those Galileans
were worse sinners than all the other people from Galilee? Is that why they suffered? Not at all! And you will perish, too, unless you repent of your sins
and turn to God.
And what about the eighteen people who died when the tower in Siloam fell on
them? Were they the worst sinners in Jerusalem? No.’”
Jesus taught something new and different here.
He shattered the people’s assumptions about the afflicted by saying that people
who experience tragedy and grief in some way aren’t necessarily the worst of people. And while it’s true
that we can bring grief on ourselves by our misdeeds, it is also true that we
experience difficulties simply because they’re a fact of life in a fallen
world. In other words, just because you’re suffering in some way doesn’t
necessarily mean that God is punishing you because you are somehow morally
inferior to others. And the opposite is equally true. Just because things are
going your way and are "living the dream" doesn’t mean that you are
morally superior to others.
Jesus is shifting the focus from that day's
traditional religious/cultural norms to the need of all people to repent of their sin.
Getting back to Job and his friends now, in chapter 31, Job makes
his final appeal. Verses 2-8 read, “For
what has God above chosen for us? What is our inheritance from the Almighty on
high? Isn’t it calamity for the wicked and misfortune for those who do evil?
Doesn’t he see everything I do and every step I take? Have I lied to anyone or
deceived anyone? Let God weigh me on the scales of justice, for he knows my
integrity. If I have strayed from his pathway, or if my heart has lusted for
what my eyes have seen, or if I am guilty of any other sin, then let someone
else eat the crops I have planted. Let all that I have planted be uprooted.”
There you have it. His sin is laid bare before God but is perhaps
still hidden from Job himself. Job is waxing indignant, saying in effect, “Let
God come and judge me and if I’m guilty, let Him destroy all I have.” Job is
confident in his own righteousness to the point where he implies that God will
most certainly vindicate him and if He doesn't, then there is something wrong
with God's justice. Job touted his own righteousness thereby indirectly
bringing God's sense of justice into question.
Elihu, the fourth man, saw it right away. He was
introduced to us in chapter 32 and in verses 2 and 3, after Job’s appeal, we
read, “Elihu burned with anger. He
burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God. He burned also at Job’s three friends
because they had found no answer although they declared Job to be in the
wrong.” In the chapters that follow, Elihu tells Job that he needs to put
away his growing self-righteousness and, in humility, trust and submit to God
as he goes through this trial. Elihu knew what he was talking about more than
the others.
By chapter 38, God has had enough of all the speculating and arguing and He goes on the offensive by challenging Job directly about his ignorance of who God is. Job 38:2-4, “Who is this who questions my wisdom with such ignorant words? Brace yourself like a man, because I have some questions for you and you must answer them. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? Tell me, if you know so much.” During the next couple of chapters, God continues to challenge Job on just how much he really knows which, in the end, proves to be not that much, if anything at all.
But there’s more. God is just
getting started with him and by the time we reach chapter 40:8, God asks Job
the critical question, the one He set him up for, the one that addresses, I
believe, the root flaw in Job. God asks, “Will
you discredit my justice and condemn me just to prove you are right?” That
question is a deeply searching one for Job and, by extension, for you and me.
So, again, Job and his friends were talking out of
their religious educations. It was all academic, what their culture taught. Their
arguments were religiously on point but their hearts weren’t right because
while they knew about God, they
didn't actually know Him. Job has
retreated very much into self-justification and at the end of the book, God has
a lot more to say in correcting Job than He does with correcting Job’s friends,
though all had to repent of their words and attitudes.
You've
heard it said many times that God looks on the heart. God is not impressed by
our religious credentials. He sees right through them to the underlying
self-righteousness. Job’s and his friends’ religious ideas were actually preventing them from knowing God and
thinking and acting righteously for its own
sake.
Satan
posed his cynical question back in chapter 1:9, “Does Job fear God for nothing? You have blessed the work of his hands,
and his possessions have increased in the land…But put forth Your hand now and
touch all that he has and he will surely curse You to Your face.”
And Satan wasn't entirely wrong. Self-righteousness
can be hard to detect. To exalt ourselves before God is to attempt to belittle
Him. If we keep on asking God why He doesn’t vindicate us – or others - right
away, when we think He ought to, we
are accusing Him of being unjust and that is blasphemy. This is what Job had to
repent of, the buried notion…the subtle lie that was first uttered in the
Garden of Eden…that God is not always righteous and is not good.
So, Satan told God that man will only make good
choices if there is something in it for him. After Satan made his accusation,
he left and we don’t see him again in this whole drama. And so you may ask, why
would a good God put poor Job through the ringer just to prove a point with
Satan? Well, that was only part of it. God has nothing to prove to Satan but He
did show Satan that Job was capable of choosing the right thing apart from his
own self-interest.
So, what about us? We have the capacity within us to
honor God and do the right thing for nothing in return. Will we do it just
because it is the right thing no
matter how ridiculous it makes us look? Your answer to that question defines
your true religion. The Christian author Phillip Yancey wrote that the choices
we make matter very much to God. That is very clear in the story of Job.
We declare His goodness intrinsically when we put
aside the notions of our
righteousness and walk in true heartfelt obedience to Him. That is right living and, by the way, that is all Jesus did. He
walked in perfect obedience to His Father thereby testifying that God is good.
In Luke 18 Jesus replied to the rich ruler, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.” Jesus
wasn’t denying His goodness. He was saying that if you call Him good, that’s
the same thing as believing He is God because goodness belongs to God alone, so
they should give serious thought to what they’re saying.
It’s time to wind up the message but when looking at
all of this, and considering our own lives, there are some lingering questions.
As I mentioned at the beginning, we like to ask, “Why do bad things happen to
good people?” The theologian will give us the short answer that there are no
good people so bad things happen to everyone.
Still, many awful things happen in the world to
innocent people, as Jesus said. Just look at all the school shootings. Those
kids and teachers did nothing to deserve that. So, my answer to the question of
why people go through the trials they do is ‘I don’t know’. Nor do I understand
why good things happen to bad people. But I do know this – and so do you: good
and bad things happen to good and bad people and have since the beginning of
time. Jesus said God is good to the just and the unjust, and just like His
Father, He doesn’t tell us why.
In this
trial, God was teaching Job what it means to be a child of His. Knowing God means more than just acquiring
knowledge about Him. It meant Job
growing up and learning to choose the right
thing and not necessarily the religiously
correct thing - and we often confuse the two. That was God’s will for him
and it is God’s will for you and me. If we are going to live with Him forever and run the universe
together with Him, which is our inheritance, we had better get to know Him and
for us that means following Jesus. And Jesus said we will have trouble in this
life but to fear not because He has overcome the world.
It is in the trials we endure in this life that we learn about the goodness of our Father in Heaven. It is because He is good that He refines us, by trial if He so chooses, and deals with the sinful muck in our hearts - that often only He can see - because to make us like Jesus is what He wants for us more than anything. As St. Augustine said, “You have made us for Yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You.” Our problem is that we don't always know our true rest and we all need to be taught what that means.
Another question. Why is this God’s will? It’s because
everything is ultimately for His glory and He wants to share it with us. Two
things to keep in mind: First, God will not be denied His glory in His
creation. And second, He wants to show His glory to His people. Does that seem
wrong to you? Someone once told me that only an insecure and egotistical God is
preoccupied with and jealous of His own glory - and yet, God emphasizes and
jealously regards His glory all throughout the Bible.
Consider this: If God is truly God, then there is no
higher being than Him. If God was to worship anything other than Himself, He
would be worshipping something less
than Himself and that is sin. All who bear His image find their righteousness
in being God-centered, including God Himself. But He is not self-centered in
the way you and I are self-centered.
At
Calvary, the justice and goodness of God were on full display. At the behest of
God, the King of righteousness died a wrathful and substitutionary death for
us, who are like Job...or worse. Two men died with Him - one met God and
embraced His righteousness and heaven was his. The other one met God, too, and
balked at Him and bitterly retreated into his own righteousness. In Job, God
revealed the folly of any so-called righteousness apart from His and in Christ,
He sets the choice before us, either to accept or reject it.
In the end, Job made his peace with God. In 42:5 he finally admitted, "I had heard of You by the hearing of my ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." That is where he found his strange comfort in the storm and that is where we will find ours – in repentance and in trusting our very good God simply because He is God and loving and trusting Him are the right things to do. And when we come to that place we won't want to be anywhere else.
