The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Most people trust their doctors, especially specialists, with their lives. Literally. Most of us have to, because we don’t fully understand how our bodies work. We don’t understand how certain medications are supposed to work, or how they will affect us. We don’t know about certain medical procedures and treatments that may actually help us. But our doctors — or at least they’re supposed to — know all these things. Most doctors even have diplomas hanging on walls of their offices, so that the patient knows that the doctor knows more than the patient knows. Now, if we trust our doctors with our lives because they know more than we do, how much more should we trust in God concerning all things that take place, that happen within our own lives? That’s the lesson God taught Job in the Old Testament this morning. He knows everything that there is to know. That’s the point of the reading, chapter 38:4–41. We, on the other hand, know very little about very little. By definition, the Lord God is all-knowing, infinitely wiser and more powerful than we are. He uses that wisdom and that power for our good, as His adopted children. Not only has God made a promise to be gracious to us, He has shown His grace toward us in the sending of His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, into the flesh, to die for our sins and to save us eternally. Even when we’re suffering and questioning why God would allow suffering into our lives, we can still trust that God is wise and gracious and powerful in all things, that He truly cares for us, provides daily bread for us, and will work His will for our good in our lives, no matter what the circumstances appear to be.
The story of Job is perhaps the most tragic story in all the Old and New Testament. Job had been greatly blessed in every way: spiritually, physically, materially. We’re told that he had ten children, that he possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 female donkeys, and very many servants. And then he was the greatest of all the people in the east. In the ancient world, he was a superstar. Then one day he lost it all. His flocks and the servants were killed by raiding parties from surrounding nations, and his children were killed in their homes by a storm. Not long after these things, Job himself was afflicted with sores all over his body. And from that moment on, Job became the poster boy for suffering through all the generations and all the cultures. Not long after this, he had visitors come, who came to make it all the better. But they didn’t do that. Through it all, though, Job never lost his faith in God. Even in the midst of all the physical, psychological, and spiritual suffering, Job was being tempted to turn away from the Lord God because of what the Lord God had permitted or sent upon him. That doesn’t mean that Job didn’t have a complaint against God. He said in chapter 10:1 and 2: “I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why You contend against me.” Job even insisted that he be given a day in the divine court of the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim. Job thought he was being unfairly treated, and he wanted an opportunity to make his case before God, that he didn’t deserve all that had come his way. He wanted to persuade God that God had made a mistake and was being unjust toward him. Job 13, verse 3: “But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God.” That’s all he wanted. He wanted answers, and to plead his case before the Lord God.
Now, we have all, young and old alike, experienced suffering. We know what it means to suffer in one way or another. Some have had to bury a child, or children. Some have had to live through the death of a spouse, a husband or wife. Some have had to endure, for a prolonged period of time, troubles with family members. For some of us, it’s a family member who by their suffering has brought suffering upon the whole. Some faced financial ruin in their time. Some had to deal with painful illnesses, had to be treated with painful remedies in order to remedy a various condition. None of us, no matter what the age, is immune from suffering. Suffering is simply part and parcel of the curse of Genesis chapter 3. It comes with the human condition. Job was made famous by suffering, extreme suffering. But while extreme, his suffering wasn’t all that uncommon, especially in the ancient world. He suffered the loss of property by raiders from fellow nations who came in to plunder the territory. Happened a lot, frequently, all the time. He suffered physical sickness, the loss of those he loved the most: his ten children by death, his wife by allure. He lost his name and his reputation. The man who was known as the wisest and wealthiest and kindest in the ancient world was now reduced to sheer rubble. When it comes to suffering, the question that almost always seems to come to mind, in the mind of the one suffering, not to mention family, friends, and neighbors: Why, God, are You making me suffer? Why are You allowing or inflicting this suffering upon me? What thing have I done to displease You? Why would You allow a thirteen-year-old girl to die of cancer, or get killed in a car wreck, or worse yet, murdered? Why did God send a tornado to wipe out an entire community? Why, why, why? That’s what we want to know when real suffering befalls us, or our family, or our friends. You see, suffering by its nature is a faith tester. Suffering shakes us to the core. It makes us wonder about our relationship to God, and God’s relationship to us. That’s why Job’s friends thought they’d show up and cheer him up, comfort him. Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar. These were the men who heard about their friend’s suffering and troubles, and they came. And at first they were quite helpful. They were simply there for him. For seven days they sat in silence, as he sat in silence, there by their presence to comfort him. But then suddenly all their good intentions went wrong. They opened their mouths, and they spoke, and they pretended to speak as if they spoke in the place of God Himself. In their limited knowledge, his friends were convinced that Job wouldn’t be in this awful predicament if he hadn’t done something wrong. They were convinced that he had hidden something in his life, a grievous and great sin, that he never confessed to God. Perhaps he was a hypocrite, a false believer, they thought. After all, look at the magnitude, the extreme nature of his suffering, that every part of life had been taken from him. Job’s three friends tried to convince him, chapter after chapter, that he was being punished for one of two reasons. One, he either had committed a great sin, like being a false believer. Or two, that God was doing all this to prevent him from falling into sin in the future. Job’s wife was even less helpful than his three friends. In Job 2:9 and 10: “Then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.’ But he said to her, ‘You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?’ In all this Job did not sin with his lips.”
Job knew he was a righteous man in God’s sight, not because he was a man without sin, or morally superior to other people. Rather, he was righteous because he still trusted in God, in the promised Redeemer. In Job 19:25 he tells his friends: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.” That’s a confession of faith, spoken by a man of faith in the midst of great suffering, trusting in the promised Messiah. That’s a confession of faith. Now you see, Job lived around 2200 BC, to give you an idea. Moses is about 1500 years before the birth of Christ. That was long before a book called the Old Testament was even put to pen. That was long before Moses had written a single word in the Torah, in the five books of Moses. See, Job probably lived sometime around the time of Abraham, Lot, and Isaac. And what Job knew of God and the promised Messiah likely came to him by oral tradition, passed down between three to four generations. That’s how close Job was to the life and death of Adam and Eve. Job remained faithful to what he had learned from his ancestors, what he had been told about God. And clearly by the Book of Job, it’s clear that Job was waiting for the promised Redeemer, for the promised Messiah, that he had faith and confidence that God would forgive his sins in the promised Messiah, and that he himself was a child of God. But for 37 chapters, Job’s friends made their argument that God is just, and that God only punishes sinners while blessing the righteous. Since Job was on the suffering end, they thought he must have done something wrong, and all he needed to do to set things right again would be to confess his sin and to make it all right. For Job’s part, he wanted answers too. He wanted to understand to what ends he was being made to suffer. After 37 chapters of people trying to make sense of what had happened to Job, God gave Job what Job was demanding: an opportunity, an audience, to hear from God directly, and to speak his mind directly to God. Verse one of the reading: “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” The Lord answered, and His answer was not the kind of answer Job was looking for. That whirlwind part should have been a clue that it wasn’t going to be soft and gentle words coming Job’s way. In this audience, only the Holy One of Israel would be the one asking the questions, not answering them. So God asked Job: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man” — that’s basically saying, grow up — “I will question you, and you make it known to Me.” Job, like the rest of us, had it backwards. The Lord doesn’t have to answer a question at all from us. He is the Creator, we the created. He is the Savior, we the saved. We answer to Him. And that process began in Genesis 3:9: “The Lord called to the man, ‘Where are you?'” And the questions have never stopped. In Job’s case, the question was: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding.” Job wasn’t there when God made the foundation of the earth. He had no understanding. He could answer no question. “Who determined its measurements — surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?” Job knew that God alone had done these things. He had no idea how these things were done. He only knew the one who had done them. That’s all. The Lord God is God, and He does these things, and much more. We, we are the recipients of all that He says and all that He does. We are His children by grace through faith in Christ alone. Human beings are still trying to understand this thing called creation. And if we can’t understand how God brought these things into being, why do we think we can understand deeper mysteries, deeper and more personal mysteries, namely how He makes all things work together for the good to you who are called according to His purpose, Romans 8:28?
Here’s the interesting thing. For all of his troubles, all of those chapters of dialogue, of questions and arguments back and forth about why God does what God does, Job’s never told, never told why his troubles came about. He’s never given the answer. He’s only given questions that show how little he knows, and that he is, in fact, the created, not the Creator. He’s never told that his troubles really stem from a bet between God and Satan over what this blessed man Job would do in the face of suffering, real suffering, unmatched suffering. After hearing a couple of chapters of God asking questions, Job eventually finds the courage to speak, and he says, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Job, in that moment, gave up feeling sorry for himself, and he returned to a new, renewed understanding and a new faith. In other words, he repented. And that’s what God was seeking in the moment. That’s always what the Lord God desires from us: humility and repentance, knowing that we don’t know as much as we think we know. Psalm 51:17: “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” That’s the most important lesson to be learned of Job’s odyssey. Think of everything Job went through: his loss of wealth, his house, his home, his children, his wife, his own health, and even more. Yet even though he had suffered all these things, he wasn’t entitled to even one simple answer from the Lord God. We are the clay, He is the Potter. It was sheer arrogance to think that God needed to justify Himself before Job, or before any man or woman. Centuries later, God would say it this way through the prophet Isaiah: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Luther reminds us about this in the First Commandment, in explanation. He calls us to fear, love, and trust God above all else, and then writes: that is, we are to believe that He who made the heavens and the earth knows what He’s doing in all things, especially as He directs the affairs of our own lives.
We have a unique advantage over Job. We see what suffering can do: namely, pay for the sins of the whole world, your sins and mine. We can look back at the work of Jesus. We can know the same God that laid the cornerstones of the earth became the Cornerstone of salvation and of our faith. “Have you never read in the Scriptures,” Jesus said, “‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.'” Unlike Job, we can see both the wisdom of God and the love of God in the birth, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who worked our salvation for us. Events that God planned long before He laid the foundation of the earth came to be in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. Who determined its measurements? Who stretched the line upon it? Or who shut the sea in with doors when it burst forth from the womb? Jesus did. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made” — namely Jesus Christ, the one who loved you with an unending love, and was so committed to your eternal well-being that He came down from heaven, was conceived in your likeness, to bear your sins, to suffer death, so that you could live eternally with Him. Jesus did all these things and more. He determined the measurements of the earth, and He shut in the sea. He determined them with the knowledge that one day that same earth would house His tomb, where His bloody, beaten body would be buried. And then on Resurrection morning, that same earth would shake to its core as He rose victoriously from the grave. In the midst of our suffering, we can’t comprehend the inner works of God. We do not understand His wisdom. His ways are simply just too deep for us to see. And that’s okay. We need to learn to let God be God, and we His children. If we can’t understand how God holds the universe together, how can we understand how He uses our suffering for our well-being? It’s an article of faith. We simply trust that all things will work together to the good, according to His purposes. See, why God allows suffering: He allows it for our eternal welfare. For your sins are forgiven in His suffering. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.