Sermon Transcript
Job 42:10-17. And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends, and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before and ate bread with him in his house. And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him. And each of them gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold.
And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning. And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys. He also had 7 sons and 3 daughters. And he called the name of his first daughter Jemima, the name of the second, Keziah, and the name of the third, Karen-happuch. And in all the land there were no women more beautiful— so beautiful as Job’s daughters.
And their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers. And after this, Job lived 140 years and saw his sons and his sons’ sons, 4 generations. And Job died an old man and full of days.
Christians can, can sometimes have a complicated relationship with money and financial prosperity. Have you noticed that? On one extreme, you have prosperity theology. Which teaches if you just believe enough or you trust enough that God will give you wealth. And that is not true.
One simple rebuttal of prosperity theology is all of Jesus’ closest followers, his disciples, you know, his guys, all of them died penniless, either martyrs or captives. And you figure if anyone would have had enough faith to kind of activate some kind of financial windfall from God, it would have been those guys. But they didn’t. Prosperity gospel is just false. It’s false, false, false.
But on the other extreme is what some people have labeled a poverty theology. And a poverty theology looks at money or financial resources with at least skepticism and at most, like, outright denunciation, saying that all all of it is evil. So, for example, there have been a number of historians who studied the life of A.W. Tozer, who you may love, and have criticized Tozer for giving away so much of his income that it was a detriment to his wife and family. Um, Tozer, if you didn’t know him, was— he’s a phenomenal pastor, author, editor.
He has many, many books, but his books Pursuit of God and Knowledge of the Holy, they’re fantastic. Fantastic. They’re fantastic. The man knew Jesus, no doubt about that, and we can learn much from him. I hope someday I love Jesus as much as Tozer did.
But these biographers have noted, just as one piece of evidence that something wasn’t in proper alignment in his life, after his death, his wife remarried, and she said in reference to her 2 husbands now, Aiden, that’s A-W- AW, so first husband. She said, Aiden loved Jesus, but Leonard, second husband, loves me.
AW loved Jesus, but Leonard loves me. And we’re like, if your wife is saying that, something’s off, right? Like, Jesus and your wife shouldn’t be in competition with each other. Like, your love of Jesus should, should make your wife feel mega loved, right? But it looks like Tozer might have been neglecting her in the name of serving and giving to Christ.
That doesn’t mean you need to throw away all of your Tozer stuff if you are a fan of his. You will never find anyone who lived perfectly. You need to chew the meat and spit out the bone with everybody, including me. You want to filter everything through the grid of Scripture so you can still read him, feel free. But he’s an example of how we can overskew, we can err in our approach to wealth and reject it to such an extent that we hurt others.
That’s poverty theology. Or we can desire it so much, we can desire prosperity so much, pursue it so much that we hurt others in that way. Prosperity theology. Our relationship with wealth can be unhealthy in either direction. And thus, Christians often have a complicated relationship with wealth.
Today, we are concluding our study in the book of Job. We’ve been here, this is our 7th week, and next week we’re starting in Psalms for the summer. But as we just read the end of the story of Job, Job’s fortunes are restored, his health is restored, his reputation and his friends are restored. He even has more children and sees his grandchildren down to the 4th generation. The account tells us God gave Job twice as much as Job had before, and if we go back to the beginning of the book of Job, it tells us Job was already the greatest man in the East.
So now, he’s double the greatest man in the East. And yet, Job seems to have a pretty healthy relationship with his wife. Wealth. Just as he approached pain and suffering with a commendable attitude we’ve talked about for so many weeks, he approaches wealth with a commendable attitude. So there is much that we can learn from Job.
And as we study this passage, this last passage of the book of Job today, we will see the origin of prosperity, the goodness of prosperity, and then our true prosperity. The origin of prosperity, the goodness of prosperity, and then our true prosperity. So first, the origin of prosperity. Prosperity is a gift from God rather than a reward. Prosperity is a gift rather than a reward.
It is tempting to read the story of Job and believe that his suffering somehow earned him the prosperity that he gets at the end of the book, like he paid his dues and now he gets his reward. We often think that way about ourselves. We had a hard day at work, so we come home, we say, you know, I’ve earned a piece of pie because I’ve had a hard day, right? Where it’s one of those days where everything has gone wrong, everything broke, everything was late, everything was difficult, the car wouldn’t start, the internet went out, the coffee was cold, we stubbed our toe, everything everything, right? If we’ve had one of those days, we often feel like the universe owes us somehow.
We say, I deserve a break. Deserve. And if we’re married and we’ve had a day like that, we kind of think it’s our spouse’s responsibility to be the conduit of the blessing which we now deserve. We hope we’re going to come home and our spouse will tell our story of woe and spouse will just say, you know, watch whatever you want. I’ll bring you your favorite snack.
That’s what we hope our spouse will say because we’re owed some kind of relief, like the suffering has purchased me a reward for something that’s gone wrong. And now our spouse is going to be able to listen to the universe and give it to us. But very often that’s not what happens, and I don’t know why, but it seems like maybe evil tends to pile up and families all at once. If we’ve had a day like that and we want to come home and lie on the couch, we open the door and our spouse is already lying on the couch, right? Because he or she had that exact same kind of day too, and they are looking to us for the exact same kind of relief that we think we deserve.
So we had our story of woe all put together and rehearsed to convince them of our need for a break, but then they have an even better story of woe, and I was like, well, now what do we do, so we end up fighting about who gets a break, and it makes everything worse. And instead of relief, we get more tension. How to solve that is another sermon, right? But husbands, this is just for free, love your wife like Christ loved the church, okay? He sacrificed everything for her.
That’s another sermon. But we believe this, right? We believe that we get a reward for suffering. It’s somehow entrenched in us. If we have some difficulty, we think now, therefore, we deserve.
So, it’s tempting to read the book of Job like that. No one has suffered more than Job, so now he has earned the blessing he receives at the end. It’s tempting to think that, but that would be a mistake. That would actually be the same mistake that Job’s friends made earlier in the book. Remember, the false theology of Job’s friends is people always get what they deserve.
Deserve. So if you’re having a hard time, it’s because you deserved it. And if you have health and wealth, it’s because you deserve that. And that’s incorrect. It’s karma, but it’s incorrect.
God actually says, Job 42:8, that Job’s friends have not spoken what is true. So it’s very definitively wrong. They are definitely wrong. Job does not get prosperity at the end. Because he deserves it, just like he didn’t get suffering at the beginning because he deserved it.
He gets prosperity at the end because it’s a gift. As God had sovereignly allowed suffering into Job’s life, God now sovereignly provides relief. Verse 10, the Lord restored the fortunes of Job. Verse 11, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. It’s the Lord that gave.
It’s not that Job earned it. It in any way. Relief and prosperity are gifts, unearned blessings. You can think about it like this. If one person has had a hard life, another person’s had an easy life, it’s not like the person with the easy life earned it.
Some people are born on third base. Other people aren’t even born in the stadium, right? Now, as you might have already sensed, and some of you are likely feeling, the people who generally get most upset over the idea of prosperity being a gift are the people who have accomplished much in life. For high achievers, and there’s a lot of us in this room, it’s very difficult to believe success is a gift because high achievers have worked hard, and if they hadn’t worked hard, they wouldn’t be where they are. And that’s true, that is absolutely true.
They needed to work hard in order to have what they have, needed to. Very true. Hard work is essential for success, but it doesn’t mean success and prosperity wasn’t also a gift, a grace from God. Just think about your own life. Would you have had the same success if you had been born into a different family or born into no family?
What if you were orphaned in a third-world country because both your parents had died of of AIDS. If that was your start, would you have gotten to where you are right now? Probably not. What if you had been born into a place that had zero education available? What if you had been born in the middle of a war zone or a famine?
What if you were born into a place that whatever it is that you’re particularly gifted to do, maybe computer engineering, you were born at a time of history in the world where there was no marketplace for that that set of skills. You were born when you needed to kill some woolly mammoth, and all you can do is type on a computer. You might not have been where you are today, right? And we didn’t earn to be born when and where we were born. We didn’t accomplish somehow the circumstances of our birth, upbringing, country of origin.
All of that was a gift. I’m not saying we didn’t play a role in our success. Of course we do. Of course we worked Of course, we needed to work hard in order to have what we have, but there was so much of it that was out of our control. Maybe most circumstances are out of our control.
The opportunities we’ve had are a gift. It’s the Lord who blessed Job more later in his life than earlier in his life, verse 12. When we read that, we shouldn’t conclude something like, oh, that must mean Job was out there hustling twice as hard later in life than he was earlier in life. That’s what it means that he was blessed. That’s not the point of the passage.
The point of the passage is not how hard Job worked. The point of the passage is prosperity, health, length of life are gifts from God. Prosperity is a gift, not a reward. Okay, secondly, and probably therefore arguably, we can see the goodness of prosperity. The goodness of prosperity.
It’s a gift of God. It’s good. Now, for most of you, I probably don’t have to convince you that prosperity can be good. Probably don’t have to put together too great of a case for that. But for all the A.W.
Tozers out there, give it some thought. God provided Job with an enormous amount of wealth, enormous. And in the narrative of the book of Job, the prosperity that God provided at the end is really contrasted with the work of Satan who originally destroyed all of Job’s wealth, health, prosperity, relationships, with God’s permission, of course. But now, God restores all of those. So, God’s restoration is meant to be seen as kind of an undoing of the work of Satan that we saw at the beginning of the book.
So, there is little doubt it’s supposed to be a happy ending. We don’t read this part of the story and say, how dare Job have wealth. Wealth is evil. That’s not the point of what we’re reading here. We’re supposed to be happy for Job and celebrate what God brought into his life.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s in the text, so someone needs to hear it. It’s not wrong to have resources. It’s not wrong to have a lot of resources. Now, it could be. It could be wrong.
It’s not for nothing that Paul warns Timothy that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. So we really do need to be honest about the state of our heart in regard to prosperity, and we should admit it is hard to be honest. Our hearts are a mixed-up mess. But as best as you can self-evaluate here, look into your own heart and really think through it. To whatever extent we feel need financial means, like we must have them, or to whatever extent we feel incomplete or insufficient if we don’t have means, or to whatever extent we feel inferior or inadequate to people who have more than us, or the opposite side, to whatever extent we feel superior to people who have less than us, to whatever extent we feel any of those things, it will always lead to problems.
We really do need to listen to our hearts. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of being in love with money, to think we need it, to think we’re inferior or superior. It’s so easy. But that does not mean having resources in and of themselves is wrong. It’s not wrong.
As we said before, at the beginning of the book of Job, Job was already the greatest man in the East, and now at the end of the book, he has twice as much as he had before. So he had a lot. And yet God says of Job that Job turns away from evil, Job 1:8. And then at the end of the book, God commends Job again. So for Job, having wealth did not lead him to evil.
Job is not unjust with his wealth. And for some of us, perhaps that’s a new category. Category. Some of us might think wealth equals evil or wealth by definition is some type of injustice. It’s not.
Someone could have a lot of prosperity without being unjust. One way to tell, of course, or one probable indicator of whether we are being just or unjust with our prosperity is what we do with it. What we do with our wealth will largely tell us whether we have a healthy attitude toward it or not. It’ll be judged by what we do with it. Now, it’s not a— it’s not a foolproof indicator of where our heart is.
I— there could be mafia members who give a whole lot to the church. Don’t know, could be. By the way, if we have any mafia here today, you’re not— nobody tipped me off. I don’t know, you haven’t been outed, so don’t worry. But giving doesn’t necessarily necessarily mean that our hearts are right in regard to prosperity.
So looking at what we do with our resources is not 100% foolproof, but it’s, it’s one indicator. It’s an indicator. And in our text, we don’t know the whole story of what Job did with his prosperity, but from what we are told, it seems Job is pretty outward-facing with his resources. Seems like his posture was to want to give instead of being focused on getting, getting, getting more. 2 instances of Job’s posture in this passage.
So first, verse 15, he left an inheritance for both his sons and his daughters. And remember, Job is in a culture that would not automatically give an inheritance to daughters. Sons got an inheritance, daughters didn’t. So Job is doing something extra compared to the people around around him. And it’s being pointed out because Job is different.
He’s being outward-facing with his resources. Parents in that culture would be much more concerned, much more focused on keeping family wealth with the sons because that’s preserving the family line. The sons are the ones who will maintain property rights. If we give daughters property, it’s just going to be gone out of the family when she marries a man from another family. It will be in that family then.
So, the common thing to do would be to protect self, protect lineage, protect family, be inward-facing with resources, keep it with sons. But Job is contrasted to that. He is outward-facing. He’s, give it away, give it away, give it away. And Job’s behavior, when we read this, it’s written as commendable.
So, the reader is supposed to admire Job. Job for including his daughters. And I’d say we need to notice these things when they happen because there’s so much disinformation that Scripture is somehow anti-woman simply because it is written in cultures that subjugated women. And Scripture— that’s true, Scripture was written in those cultures, but it was not of those cultures. Scripture is not of any culture.
Scripture is always overturning and undermining errors in every culture. It corrected ancient people in some ways, and it corrects us in different ways. But what we see here in Job is him elevating a group that wasn’t elevated in his culture, and it’s seen as commendable. So, that’s what he does with his wealth. You might have also noticed the names of the 3 daughters are listed, but none of the sons’ names are listed.
And again, that’s unusual for the surrounding at the time. It’s giving his daughters a measure of status. His daughters’ names, by the way, I will not try to pronounce them. You did a great job. You see how I get other people to read Scripture before the sermon?
That’s pretty clever, isn’t it? So then I don’t have to pronounce biblical names. But the first name, which I won’t pronounce, the meaning of it is warmth or affection. The meaning of the second name is a pleasant fragrance, like Cinnamon. Those are lovely, aren’t they?
Warmth, affection, fragrant, cinnamon. Those are nice names. You want to know— do you want to know the meaning of the third daughter’s name? Horn of Paint.
Horn of Paint. That sounds ridiculous, right? It’s not as bad as it sounds to us. It’s referring to like face makeup, okay? Like ladies, you paint your face, you know, beautify yourself.
So, maybe it’s like calling your daughter Eyeshadow. I should have done some research before. Estée Lauder, Maybelline, you know, something like that, giving your daughter that kind of name. But these 3 daughters, even the 3rd one, clearly very dear to Job. You get that from their names.
You get that from their inheritance. You see Job giving them a status and a worth the rest of the society around them likely isn’t giving them. That’s one piece of evidence Job is more about giving than amassing or protecting his own lineage. Second piece of outward-facing evidence is how Job treats these friends and family that show up in verse 11. His brothers, his sisters, and all who had known Job before his trouble came to him, they show up and they bring him gifts, and Job hosts them in his house.
He feeds them. But notice they show up now because he’s back on his feet, when they have been strangely absent for like 40 chapters. They did not bring him a gift when he was down and out to comfort him. They bring him a gift now that he has influence again. Those are not real friends.
They seem like fair-weather friends at best and maybe pretty slimy at the worst. I mean, but Job, he doesn’t kick them out. He hosts them. If you want a piece of evidence that Job is pretty compassionate toward others, this is it, right? Because I— you can answer for yourself.
I think if I had been through what Job had been through and all my friends had left me in the middle of it, except for the ones who were miserable comforters and added to my suffering. They stuck around, like Steve said a few weeks ago, but everybody else left, right? And now I’m back on my feet, and these friends and family show up. What would you say to them? I’d say, where were you all before?
And if you weren’t going to come comfort me when I was experiencing the worst suffering imaginable, I don’t want you around now. Like, take your gift and go, thank you very much. But Job doesn’t say that. Job hosts these people who abandoned him. You want to talk about being outward-facing with your resources, this is it.
You know what this is an example of? In the New Testament, Jesus rather oddly, Luke 16:9, says, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourself. That’s weird, isn’t it? Use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourself. Jesus says that, and it’s odd.
But Jesus is like, if you have money, people are gonna come around. They will. And sure, they’re probably deadbeats and moochers, but don’t kick them out. Don’t squander that opportunity. Lean into that principle.
If people are hanging around you, you can have an influence in their lives. If you are out outward-facing with your resources, even to people who only show up when times are good, you can really make a positive difference in this world. So do it. When Jesus brings it up, it’s in the context of evangelism. Okay, so that is the goodness of prosperity, the goodness of prosperity.
Lastly, true prosperity. Our true prosperity is the best is always yet to come. The best is not what Job gets in chapter 42. That is not the best. Even though he was the greatest man in the East times 2, even though grandkids down to the 4th generation, not the best.
The best is yet to come. Because think, I mean, for the most part, Job gets a happy ending, but it’s not a completely happy ending. His family that passed away earlier in the book, they never came back to life. So, he lost them forever, and he’s going to have a hole in his soul no matter how many other children children he has or how big his family gets. And then Job himself dies.
So, that’s still a tragedy. He’s got all these grandkids, his family seems to love him a bunch, and then he dies. It’s sad, right? I mean, did you ever have a favorite grandparent that passed away? You weren’t like, yay!
It was sad. So, here we are at the end of the book of Job with mostly a happy ending, but also with some disappointment. On the one hand, we’re grateful so much was restored to Job, and probably most of us hope that God might bless us in a similar way to how He blessed Job. We might ask even, how could I convince God to give me what He gave Job? That’s on one hand.
We want what Job has. But on the other hand, we kind of don’t want what Job has. We ache for what wasn’t restored. And what are we supposed to do with that? We’re happy and we’re not happy.
It’s a bit unresolved, and that’s how the book of Job ends. And maybe you would say, well, that’s how life works. Some losses can be recovered, other losses cannot, and in— but always the end comes regardless. But with God, that’s not the end. Even from the first pages of Scripture, the Bible is looking forward to when God will restore all things, that evil will one day be squashed and totally wiped out.
The brokenness of the world will be mended. All diseases will end. The hurt that we cause each other will cease, and even death is going to be reversed. Loved ones will be reunited in eternity and for eternity through Christ’s work on our behalf and our faith in it. The lingering questions we have at the end of the book of Job are answered by by the rest of the storyline of Scripture.
In other words, our hope isn’t Job. Our hope is someone far better than Job. Our hope is Jesus. Because like Job, Jesus was outward-facing with his resources to deadbeats and moochers. But unlike Job, Jesus gave up everything he had for us.
Like Job, Jesus suffered even though he hadn’t sinned. But unlike Job, Jesus carried our sin when he suffered. Like Job, Jesus was attacked by Satan. But unlike Job, Jesus volunteered for the job. Like Job, Jesus was restored.
But unlike Job, when Jesus was restored, he rose back to life, conquering sin and death forever, securing for us our eternal home. Like Job’s restoration reversed the work of Satan in his life, Jesus’ resurrection also reversed the work of evil. But unlike Job, Jesus’ resurrection will eventually undo all the evil that has ever taken place and remake the world in such a way that all sad things will become untrue. Listen, your future as a Christian is not what was restored to Job. Your future as a Christian is way better than that because it’s in Jesus.
One reason why listening to a prosperity gospel message is so frustrating is because they’re aiming to low. God has not promised financial wealth or a long life in the ways we would normally think of them, right? Prosperity preachers are aiming for Job, and that’s too low. God has not promised us that. We should not be pacified with the trinkets that Job had when real treasure is available.
God has promised us true riches. He has promised us Jesus. So aim for Jesus. 1 Corinthians 2:9, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. Even Job, even with everything that Job had on this earth, when Job stepped into eternity, I’m sure everything that he had previously been given suddenly seemed as if it were nothing.
Because at that moment when he saw what no eyes had seen and he heard what no ear had heard. He realized up until that moment he had really never had anything. The best is always ahead of you, Christian. No matter how great you’re doing in this world, you have not peaked. Isn’t that good news?
You have not peaked. You will never peak, actually, because in eternity we will be captivated by the glory of God himself, and that is a treasure that we will never get to the bottom of. No matter how much of Him we have, there will always be more of His greatness to experience. His mercies are new every morning forever. He is the ultimate treasure.
He is the treasure we were made for. He is the treasure that if He is at the proper place in our hearts, everything else will be as it should be. Put Him in the center of your heart and you will have the proper relationship with wealth. Not overskew in either direction. You won’t feel inferior or superior.
You’ll be captivated by the one you are meant to be captivated with, living for him, the one who gave up everything for you. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for Christ. Thank you that he is a true treasure, Lord. Thank you for giving us so much more than we could ever ask or imagine in him, with— through relationship with him to you.
Father, we pray that we would be captivated by true treasure, true riches, that it would properly align us to this world, the wealth in this world, and like you, Lord, that we would be outward-facing with any prosperity that we have, not wanting to get more but wanting to give more. May that be our hearts, Lord. We pray those things in Jesus’ name.
