The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
More than 1,500 years before the birth of Jesus, there lived a man in the land of Uz named Job. He was a great man, a successful man, and a rich man. He was a father of ten, and he was likely a descendant of Abraham. But above all, he was a faithful believer in the God of Abraham, Yahweh Elohim. We read in Job 1:1 that Job was “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” Job 1:2-3 tells us that Job had seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.
Then suddenly and tragically, out of the blue, everything changed. In a day, most of Job’s livestock had been stolen, with the exception of his sheep. As for the sheep, Job 1:16 tells us that “the fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants and consumed them.” Worst of all, Job’s ten children were killed when a great wind struck the house in which they were all eating at the oldest son’s home; the house collapsed and crushed them all. As for Job, he was stricken head to toe with boils. Happiness and wealth and status and health and children, all gone in a single day, replaced by sadness and sorrow, mourning and misery, infirmity and illness.
As Job sat in the ashes, Job’s wife, angry at God, said to Job in 2:9, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” When three of Job’s friends heard what had taken place, they left their homes and journeyed to see Job, in an effort to comfort him and to help him try to make sense of what had happened so radically and dramatically within a day. So over the course of 37 chapters, the four of them discussed theology. They offered their thoughts on why God would do what He had done to Job. The dominant theory was that Job was being punished for having committed some great and secret sin.
Job took issue with that theory. One of his friends raised the possibility that perhaps God Himself was somehow inflamed, that is, impulsive and arbitrary, and His actions toward Job were without any good reason at all. Another of Job’s friends argued that suffering is sent by God as a mixture between a blessing intended for temporal, spiritual, and personal growth, and a judgment against one’s sins. But even in the face of the various arguments, Job continued to maintain his innocence. He was blameless and upright, trusting in the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim, and confused over why God would act in such a manner toward him.
Chapter after chapter, Job’s friends made long speeches arguing that God must and does punish people according to their deeds, and that you can tell by what’s happening to somebody whether they’re virtuous or not. For 37 chapters they maintained that Job is guilty of something, and Job maintained his innocence. But his innocence just deepened the mystery as to why so many bad and horrific things would happen to Job in such a short period of time. In fact, in chapter 3 Job laments the very day he was born and begs God for his death. In chapter 10 he cries out, “I loathe my life; I will give free rein 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 demands answers from the Lord God Himself. In other words, Job was saying, “Look, I know my situation better than You do. I know that I struggled to be good and wise and faithful and a man of integrity. I know I’m innocent. I know I don’t deserve this kind of suffering.” So much for that confession, “I, a poor miserable sinner, confess my sins and deserve nothing but Thy temporal and eternal punishment.” Job apparently forgets that in the moment.
After listening to the debate and Job’s complaints and his lament for 37 chapters, the book of Job tells us that God spoke directly to Job. Starting in chapter 38, the Lord makes His own case, and He does so with a beautiful mixture of poetry, probably one of the most poetic sections of the Old Testament. The Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind and said, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.”
Here’s the lesson most people, both inside and outside the church, need to learn: the Lord God, the maker of heaven and earth, doesn’t much care for sinful human wisdom. He doesn’t like it when people presume to speak in His stead without wisdom or understanding, without a revelation from the Word of God, that is, without a biblical text used properly. God doesn’t like you postulating theories about why this or that is in the world. Even though we think we know things we don’t, we often try to explain them, and God doesn’t really like those feeble attempts to explain the mysteries of creation or God’s own thinking.
Through the prophet Isaiah, God stated the situation as succinctly as it can possibly be stated: “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.” That’s a lesson that Job and his friends hadn’t learned at the beginning of the book. Most people still have this tendency to think that God thinks and acts and works as we do.
So beginning with creation, God asked Job a series of questions, and He asks us the same questions when we find ourselves in hardship: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 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, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? 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’?”
In the opening salvo of God’s long dissertation to Job, God combines two images in poetic form to paint a picture of creation: the image of a builder and the image of a midwife. Both teach us that in creation and in the governance of heaven and earth, God knows what He’s doing and has the power to do it. He knows how things operate, whether He’s building a house, delivering a baby, or allowing Job and other Christians to suffer. He does what He does in service to His creation, meaning you and me.
God began His theological lecture with the act of creation, but He didn’t stop there. In rapid succession over the next few chapters, He would touch on the greatness of the universe, the mysteries of nature, the wonders of the animal kingdom, His power, and the limitations of human understanding. God asked Job one question after another, and they’re all rhetorical questions, because there’s no need to wait for Job to answer. He doesn’t have any of the answers, which is why he’s lamenting and wishing for his death.
It’s only after the Lord had finished His interrogation of Job that Job realizes just how wrong-headed he has been in his laments and complaints. His ideas, and those of his friends, came from a place of pride and arrogance, and above all, the law: if you behave like a good dog, God will treat you like a good dog; you behave like a bad dog, God will treat you like a bad dog. That’s what they thought, and they were wrong. Job, after all, was blameless and upright, who thought his uprightness entitled him to a life of minimal or no suffering at all. That’s a common problem among mankind, and we aren’t exempt from such thoughts. It’s simply the old sinful nature that raises questions about one’s standing before God and defaults to the law.
Now the Lord God had set Job straight. After question after question, Job is humbled. He confesses his sin and he repents. He replies, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
In the midst of this terrible day of suffering, of losing everything, of great pain, all of his wealth, his status, his wife now estranged, his children all crushed and dead, he says, “Things too wonderful to understand.” It’s an amazing thing. How often do we do the very same thing? Not merely about temporal matters in the world, but about spiritual matters regarding God. We do it in the context of our own lives all the time. We are given so many material and spiritual blessings, yet when trouble comes, when sickness invades, when sorrows that are common to all mankind reach our house, we want to know why. Why me? Why this? What have I done to deserve such trouble? We sit in our own ashes, wishing things would have turned out differently, lamenting over what people did to us and the injustice of it all. We cry out to God, “Why this and not that?” But we, like Job and his friends, do so without knowledge.
Even in the most difficult circumstances, the Lord God is still doing something in us. He does His greatest work in the theology of the cross. It’s a universal problem, in every age, in every place, on every subject: humankind has spoken, and when they speak, they do it with absolute authority, as if they have understanding. Pick any subject, and tell me if you can find experts in agreement. The truth is, that which is wise and accepted today becomes foolishness tomorrow. And when bad things happen to other people, we sound a lot like Job’s friends; our instinct is to think they’ve done something wrong. When bad things happen to us, instead of heeding the lessons of Job’s life, we do as Job did: we complain and we whine and we carry on with unthankful hearts and minds, uninformed by the Word of God.
Remember, Job’s story begins with Job’s status before God. The whole episode happened because Job was in fact a faithful man, blameless and upright, who turned away from evil at every opportunity. Everyone assumed the opposite; they all assumed Job had done something terribly wrong, a secret sin, when in fact he was suffering on account of righteousness’ sake. So when people looked at Jesus on that first Good Friday, all they could see was a man who must have done something wrong. A great many of them thought that He had done something to earn that punishment. But the truth was the exact opposite: Jesus was nailed to the cross because, one, He was sinless, and two, He bore your sin. We sinned, not Him, but He was punished for our sin.
God doesn’t answer Job’s questions about “why him.” He never actually answers Job’s questions. He doesn’t need to answer; He’s God. It’s all part of His hidden will. We have His revealed will. You want to know what God wants you to know? It’s there, given to us through the book of Revelation. God doesn’t even talk about Job’s suffering; He makes no reference to it at all. And He doesn’t bother to give us explanations as to why things go bad in our life. You, like Peter in the Gospel this morning, are simply called to walk by faith, trusting in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that He won’t allow you to drown in eternal death or in your temporal sufferings in this life.
Job himself says it in 19:25-27. There in the midst of his suffering, as he’s sinking deeper into depression, Job says, “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, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s part of the funeral liturgy used in the church.
God raises Job’s sights from his own trouble to the marvelous world of creation. Job is called upon to do what all of us are called upon to do: to live by faith, not by sight. 1 Peter is called the epistle of suffering, and Peter concludes it with this: “And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.” Just as He did for Job at the end of the book: He restored, He confirmed, He strengthened, He established Job once again.
The hidden will of God is just that: hidden. We don’t really know why certain things happen in our life, though we want to. As long as we know that God loves us in His Son Jesus Christ, and He cares for us more than He cares for the birds of the air, and that He redeems all things in the life of a Christian. Where were you when God created all things? You weren’t. And it doesn’t make one bit of difference. What matters is where you are now: in Christ, walking by faith, not by sight. You will not sink in the waves and the storms of this life, for God has promised you a resurrection, and He’ll give it to you on the Last Day. Amen.
May the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.