Sermon Transcript
This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. He had 7 sons and 3 daughters, and he owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.
His sons used to hold feasts in their homes on their birthdays, and they would invite their 3 sisters to eat and drink with them. When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would make arrangements for them to be purified. Early in the mornings, he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. This was Job’s regular custom. One day the angels came to present themselves to the Lord, and Satan also came with them.
The Lord said to Satan, where have you come from? Satan answered the Lord, from roaming through the earth, going back and forth on it. Then the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him. He is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.
Does Job fear God for nothing? Satan replied. Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands so that the flocks and herds are spread through the land. But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.
The Lord said to Satan, very well then, everything he has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger. Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord. One day, when Job’s sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house, a messenger came to Job and said, the oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing nearby, and the Sabeans attacked and made off with them. With them. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who escaped to tell you.
While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, the fire of God fell from the heavens and burned up the sheep and the servants. I am the only one who has escaped to tell you. While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said, the, the Chaldeans formed 3 raiding parties and swept down on your camels and made off off with them. They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you. While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came and said, your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the 4 corners of the house.
It collapsed on them, and they are dead. I am the only one who has escaped to tell you. Another day, the angels came to present themselves to the Lord, and Satan also came with them to present himself before him. And the Lord said to Satan, where have you come from? Satan answered the Lord, from roaming through the earth, going back and forth on it.
Then the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him. He is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason? Skin for skin, Satan replied.
A man will have— a man will give all he has for his own life. But now stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face. The Lord said to Satan, very well then, he is in your hands, but you must spare his life. So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.
I never know how people are going to respond whenever I meet them for the first time and they find out I’m a pastor. I’m from Texas and so that’s the Bible Belt and you meet a pastor, they’re like on every corner, it’s all around, it’s not that big a deal. But he But here in California, it’s a little bit different. A lot of people have never seen a pastor out in the wild, okay?
Sometimes people meet a pastor and they’re indifferent. Sometimes we’ve been having a conversation for 15 to 20 minutes and then the topic comes up of, oh, what do you do for a living? And then they ask me, what do you do for a living? And it brings the conversation to a screeching halt. Kind of like those old Westerns.
Everybody’s in the saloon having a great time. The piano player’s playing. Everybody’s playing cards. Dancing, and then the stranger walks in. You know what I’m talking about?
The swinging doors open, the piano player stops abruptly, and everybody turns and looks at the— this person. Who invited this guy? And I’ve had people who’ve not known what to do once they’re faced with the— this information that they are talking to a pastor. Some people will change the subject really, really quickly. Some people will apologize for everything they’d said up until that moment.
I’m not kidding. Or some people don’t know what to say, so then they say something really odd. Like, I have a guy that I met one time, John, and we were having lunch one time, and then the topic came up of what it was that I did, and his response was, so how’s the soul-saving business going? I mean, like, that’s not something you would normally say to somebody, but that’s John. John’s response to me.
And then other people kind of treat it sort of like a National Geographic special where you’ve seen this bird that is very, very rare, nobody’s ever seen this thing. And so people are like, you know, getting like their friends and telling people to come over and meet me and that kind of thing. It, it, it’s a really, really strange experience. And despite all those things though, it is still one of the greatest privileges I have to be a pastor because I’m humbled to get to observe and to walk with people through every single stage of life’s experience, the full spectrum. I love when our young families here at the church have babies.
I love seeing them move into the nursery. I love seeing babies dedicated. I love watching these children grow up. I love watching children kind of move through the stages of school. I love watching them hit transition after transition, and many of them coming to faith faith, many of them taking next steps in their faith journey.
I love watching our students then move into middle school and then high school and watching them sort of go through those phases of life. And then you watch them graduate, and then you start getting graduation announcements and wedding announcements and all these kinds of things that are just so exciting. And I have the privilege as a pastor of watching people through all of this, again, full spectrum of life’s experiences that an accountant may not get to see, or some other profession may not get to see. I get to see that, and I get to see people when they’re having marital issues, and I get to see people when they’re struggling with work conflict, or when they’re having some sort of challenge or suffering in life. I also get to see people as they finish their days here on the earth.
I, I’m humbled, seriously, to, to have that privilege. I don’t take it lightly at all, and I try to communicate that to people when strangers want to know, how did you get to be a pastor in the first place? I want to talk about the honor that it is to get to watch people go through these different challenges of life. And what all of these experiences, though, as a pastor have reinforced in me is just how much suffering is a reality for There are some of you who are suffering right now, or some of you who’ve come through seasons of suffering, and I can’t even begin to imagine what it is that you’re going through.
I don’t say this to be depressing. I just say it to be real. From the day we’re born, life is filled with all kinds of troubles and suffering. And there are inevitably questions that we ask that come along with this. Why?
Why me? Why him? Why her? Why this? Why now?
And these questions, I think, are almost instinctual to us. They’re almost the first thing that comes out of our mouths sometimes when we encounter trouble. Everybody wrestles with and wonders about these deep existential questions of life about God’s justice and about suffering and about the presence of evil in the world and why bad things happen to good people. And I want to share with you today from God’s Word in a way that I hope and I pray that will strengthen some of you who are going through those challenges right now.
I also hope that this will prepare you for suffering that’s going to be coming your way later this week. This month, or later this year, or maybe even years from now. Towards that end, we’re going to be starting a brand new 7-week series, sermon series, today in the book of Job. There’s a perception— and again, like, this is my opinion and my experience— I think that there’s a perception among some in the world today that many Christians live in some fantasy land of faith that ignores hard realities in the world and that would rather change the subject and only offer pat answers to tragedy and to the immense and urgent physical and spiritual needs that we see all around us and all the suffering. What I hope we’ll see as we go through Job is that God does not dodge these hard questions, these hard realities of life.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that simply reading Job or simply being a Christian or simply reading the Bible or knowing the Bible will automatically make your suffering easy. Nothing can prepare us adequately for the shock of suffering when it hits. And when that moment comes, it hurts whether you’re a Christian or not. The point is, is that God is never afraid of our questions. He invites our honesty.
He doesn’t try to change the subject. God never looks down on the person who is suffering. God never mocks our pain, never turns a deaf ear to the cries of his children, and he never condemns us for our struggle. And so the book of Job is inviting us to honestly bring our pain and our grief to God and to trust that he actually cares and that he actually knows what he’s doing.
So let’s start by taking the text that Tyler just read for us. I know it’s several verses. This is the prologue to the book of Job. We’re not going go through every chapter and every verse in the book of Job. There’s 42 chapters.
We’re not going to get through all of them. We’re just hitting the big principles here. But I want us to reflect for a moment on Job’s suffering, because the way that Job suffers, I believe, is the way that you and I suffer. Not the things that he suffered specifically, the way he suffered.
What do we learn about Job’s suffering and therefore about our suffering? First, we see here at the outset of chapter one, that in Job, suffering is sometimes, or often even, undeserved. Suffering is sometimes, or often, undeserved. Now, I want to be careful because God’s word is also clear that our poor choices and wicked decisions come and lead to suffering. That’s a direct result of our sin.
When a spouse is unfaithful in marriage, it causes pain and suffering in the marriage and in the children. When a person is hurtful with their words or their actions, it leads to suffering. Sinful choices lead to suffering, no question. But the writer of the Book of Job seems to be going out of their way to show that Job’s suffering was not a direct result of his or his family’s sin. It goes to great pains, in fact, to show us not Job’s impurity but his purity.
He is described twice in these verses as blameless and upright. He feared God and shunned evil. And that’s not like Job saying that about himself. That’s God, even in chapter 2, saying that about Job. God agrees.
This doesn’t mean that Job was sinless. Nobody’s sinless. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. And the book doesn’t say that Job never did anything in particular— excuse me, it doesn’t say that he was— that he never did anything wrong. It just says that he was blameless and upright.
It’s the book’s way of saying that Job didn’t do anything wrong in this particular instance to deserve what happened to him here. His account, so to speak, was clear before God. There were no unconfessed sins in his life that hadn’t been dealt with or forgiven. He maintained his reverence before God, even offering sacrifices on behalf of his children in case they had sinned. So Job is a righteous, pious, good guy, and that’s a problem for us.
The fact that Job is a righteous, pious, good guy makes the story even harder. If he was a wicked guy, we might say, good, he’s getting what he deserves. It’s not the case here. He was just sitting there minding his own business when all hell broke loose in his life. Suffering sometimes, maybe even often, is undeserved.
Suffering is also often unexpected. Verse 13 of chapter 1 says it was one day, one day when these tragedies took place. The language is so simple there. It was literally just a day like anybody else or any other day when everything changed. We don’t usually wake up going, okay, all this suffering is going to come crashing down in our lives.
That’s what happened to Job. It was unexpected and it caught him off guard. Suffering is also often unimaginable. Unimaginable. In a single day, an avalanche of woes fell over Job.
4 disasters took place, culminating in the loss of all 10 of his children. It’s not like Job got some bad news one day and then weeks later he got some more bad news, some months passed and then he got some more. It all happened one right after the other. It’s unthinkable. And then in chapter 2, Job is also afflicted with pain across his body, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
We’re Now, modern doctors have tried to figure out what exactly Job’s physical ailments were, but it’s described throughout the rest of the book in these terms: inflamed, ulcerated sores, itching, degenerative changes in facial skin, loss of appetite, depression, loss of strength, worms in the boils— that sounds fun— running sores, difficulty breathing, darkness under the eyes, foul breath, loss of weight, continual pain. Restlessness, blackened skin, peeling skin, fever, whatever it was. By verse 8 of chapter 2, the man who used to be considered the greatest man among all those in the East found himself sitting among the ashes scraping his itchy, running sores with a piece of broken pottery. That’s unimaginable.
So suffering is often undeserved, not always, often, often unexpected, often unimaginable, but it is always, always painful. We’ll get more into how Job dealt with his pain and calamities next week, but we need to see that the Bible is not glossing over this at all.
Suffering just has this way of cutting through abstract theology, if you think about it. Suffering is never abstract when you’re the one who’s suffering. It’s personal. It’s tangible. It’s specific.
It’s not impersonal or theoretical. The Bible never presents suffering as some abstract idea that is removed from life. In God’s Word, he never tells us to ignore the pain of suffering or to put on a spiritual face and pretend that everything’s okay. We’re free, therefore, to express real, honest grief before God while also being careful not to sin. How do we do that?
That’s where I want to turn our attention for the remainder of our time and reflect and meditate on God’s sovereignty, God’s sovereignty amidst our suffering. It’s a big theme throughout the book of Job. What does it mean to say that God is sovereign? When we use sovereign as an adjective, as in God is sovereign, we’re saying that God is powerful and authoritative to the extent of being able to override all other powers and authorities.
Powerful and authoritative to the extent of being able to override all other powers and authorities. It simply means that God is in control. He has unlimited power to do whatever he pleases, and everything that happens here on earth comes about because either God directly causes it or he consciously allows it. That means there’s no such thing as luck. There’s no accidents.
Everything that happens passes through God’s fingers first. That’s what it means that he’s sovereign. Now, we’ll see this throughout Job, like in Job 23:13, where it says, but he— meaning God— stands alone, and who can oppose him? He does whatever he pleases. That’s God’s sovereignty.
Or in Job 42, which is really one of the best definitions of sovereignty in the entire Bible. Job says, I know that you, God, can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted. That’s God’s sovereignty, meaning nothing can successfully stop any act, event, design, or purpose that God intends to bring about. Nothing can derail or hinder his purposes.
He is sovereign. So one of the implications of God’s sovereignty, and one of the reasons why we can find greater confidence and peace, I think, as we go through periods of suffering is the fact that God is in control. He’s sovereign. He’s in control. Now, that also brings a lot of agonizing why questions, doesn’t it?
And Job’s going to ask some of these why questions, and some of them are going to be answered, and some of them are not. But let’s think about God’s sovereignty right now in terms of, like, what we see here unfolding, because in verse 6 of chapter 1, we get this radical change of scenery. Here. It can be helpful, I think, to think of the story of Job as a play with 2 stages, an action going on at 2 different levels. You have the lower stage and an upper stage.
Job and his friends— we’ll meet his friends in the coming weeks— are on the lower stage where earth is. The upper stage is in the heavens where we’re introduced to God’s divine command center, almost like a heavenly Oval Office, if if you will, where God apparently has an executive staff. We don’t know if this is exactly how it works all the time, but this is a very familiar image in the Old Testament. It describes God as the sovereign king over all creation. He’s depicted like this ruler— God is— who daily assembles his officers, surveys the land, and then sends everybody out to accomplish their missions.
Those assembled with God in Job 1, we’re told, are subservient divine beings. They’re called angels or sons of God, and one standing among them is Satan. We’re not given much background information on who this person is in the immediate context of chapter 1, but we’re told that he’s been roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it. That’s what Satan does today, just looking for opportunities to steal and kill and destroy and to do evil. It’s what he was doing then.
It’s what he does now. He’s just looking opportunities for opportunities to stir up trouble. And so in chapter 1, we see Satan take on a position of opposition as an adversary. It’s what he does. And he’s an accuser.
That’s what he does. And so the accuser questions Job’s blamelessness and uprightness. He asks, how do you really know, God, that Job is righteous? Maybe he’s righteous, God, only because you bless and you protect him. He’s saying, God, Job is devoted to you and he worships you, but it’s all out of self-interest.
It’s a quid pro quo. You do something for him, then he will do something for you. The truth is, God— Satan is saying— is that he loves you in the same way that children love the ice cream man. If you turn off the faucet of blessing in Job’s life, watch how fast Job will turn on you. And so God agrees to this challenge.
He gives Satan the green light to inflict suffering on Job, but Notice he allows permission— God does— but he also offers a prohibition initially, that Satan could not lay a finger on Job’s body at first, and then in chapter 2, to not take his life.
There’s permission and there’s a prohibition. Now, as readers of the story, we know what’s going on on both stages because the writer intends for us to see these stages. We have to recognize though, Job does not know— he never finds out what’s going on in the heavens, just like you when you go through suffering may not know what God is up to. We’re not privy to all of those things. Is it a scene like we see here in chapter 1?
We don’t know. We just know that there are 2 stages of things happening. When we see what’s here on the earth We’re like Job, and our perspective is limited. Job only knows what’s happening on his stage, which makes how Job responds to all of this even more amazing. But the larger point for us goes back to God’s sovereignty and command of this whole situation.
How do we see God’s sovereignty on display here? First, God is sovereign in that God is the one who summons the angels to present themselves before him. It may not be as clear in some of our English translations where it sounds like they came on their own. But no, the original language implies that God is the one who invited them to come, and he’s the one who summoned and invited Satan to come. Notice also that God is the one who sets the agenda and the topic of discussion.
We sometimes get the story mixed up and we think that Satan is the one who took the initiative to bring up Job. Who brought up Job?
God was the one who brought up Job. God was the one setting the topic of discussion. God is one who permits the evil, and then God is the one who limits it. God is the one who dictates to Satan what he can and what he cannot do. Yes, Satan is active in wreaking havoc and evil in the world, but don’t miss the point here, friends, from the very, very start of this story, that Satan is ultimately on a leash and that God holds the reins.
This is not some kind of picture of dualism like in Star Wars where you have these 2 equal yet opposing forces of good and evil. This isn’t dualism, this is domination. Satan was then, and Satan continues to be today, completely subordinate to God. God was in absolute control the entire time. He is sovereign.
Now, this of course raises the possibility of something that I would just offer to you, that I think it would be much easier for us to just gloss over. Let’s stay in the shallow end of the pool, shall we? We don’t want to get into deeper waters. Actually, we need to get into a little bit of deeper waters here. We need to ask who’s really the one behind all of this.
Who’s the one doing these things? There are 4 different sets of calamities, right, in chapter 1 that come upon Job all in one day. Verse 15, it was the army of the Sabeans. In verse 16, it was the fire of God, which may have been actual fire although some people think it was probably lightning.
In verse 17, it was Chaldean riding parties, raiding parties. In verse 19, it was a mighty wind. These were the immediate causes, and we would say God gave Satan permission to do these things, did he not?
Does Satan control lightning?
Does Satan control the wind? I mean, we, we can have that conversation everywhere else in the Bible, just about. God controls those things.
Now, Satan could certainly put it into the hearts of evil and pagan Sibyrians and Chaldeans to raid, but he may not be able to do these other things. And if he could, it would still be under God’s sovereign ultimate control and for his purposes. And then you go to chapter 2, verse 3, and we get this really just amazing statement that God tells Satan: You incited me against him to ruin him without any reason. It’s almost as if God is saying that he was the one behind the fire and the wind, but he was also the one behind the Sabeans and the Chaldeans. I know I’m offering something here that may be challenging to us, but however we look at it, the point is Satan is weak and he can’t do anything without God.
But we’re left to ask, why would God do this? Why would he agree to this in the first place? And what’s frustrating is the book of Job never totally answers those questions for us. Here’s what I know, and I think you all have probably experienced this too. Whenever someone suffers, there’s this temptation, I think, for some of us to seek to remove God from any association with the trials that we go through.
We suggest God didn’t bring it into our lives, that he does not want it to happen, that his hands are entirely clean, so to speak. This answer begins to teeter a little bit though in the face of a sovereign God who is always in control. God works out all things according to the counsel of his will, Ephesians 1. Not just the good stuff, not just the happy stuff. He is sovereign even over our suffering, and he only ever ordains it for a specific purpose.
Now sometimes we discover what that purpose is. Like Joseph in the book of Genesis, who came to understand that the pain that he, Joseph, endured by his brothers was actually sovereignly established by God in order to save many lives. He told his brothers, am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done. And we know this— God sometimes uses suffering to refine and to develop our faith.
James 1, we consider it joy whenever we go through trials of many kinds because we know that God is going to use these things in his children to shape us, to form us, to make us more mature and complete so that we don’t lack in anything. Sometimes God uses suffering to humble us, to lead us to repent of and to renounce all sin in our lives. Sometimes God uses suffering to teach us to rely more on him because you know what caused us to become humble is when you realize you’re not in charge and you’re not in control of the circumstances of your life. Suffering just has this way of forcing us to face reality and to realize that our life is in the hands of another.
And there could be any number of other reasons for suffering. We don’t know. And sometimes it is revealed to us by God what is behind our suffering, but not always. So let’s answer the question, what was Job’s— or excuse me, what was God’s purpose with Job? And what is God’s purpose when you and I go through suffering?
Here’s my best pastoral answer: we’re not sure.
We simply don’t know.
Here’s what we do know, is that God is only ever good, all the time. Time.
And we know that God hates suffering and evil, while at the same time he permits it and is in complete control the whole time. Now, Job never finds out about this whole exchange between God and Satan. Job has no idea why he is suffering. You may never find out why you are suffering as well. It’s tempting, I think, for us to speculate.
It’s tempting for us to presume that we can possibly know the mind of God. It’s tempting to come up with tidy, spiritual-sounding answers or to try to make God fit into our preconceived images and to protect his reputation.
This is, again, my opinion. In my opinion, I think it’s sometimes in suffering because we’re in such a rush to try to find answers that some of the worst theology can come out of people’s mouths in suffering, even out of some Christians. Maybe it’s because we’re grasping for comfort, like we’re longing for explanations, and yet we can come to some very unbiblical conclusions sometimes and say some of the most hurtful things to people who are suffering. The point is, you may think you know, I may think I know, other Others, we may think we know why others are going through some pain in the world. God doesn’t settle for pat answers, and God will not allow Himself to be put into a box.
So you may never know the answer. I don’t know if that’s good news to you or not.
At the same time, I love what Tim Keller says when he says, not just— don’t just resign yourself to never knowing the answer to why you are suffering. Instead, embrace it.
Embrace the idea that you don’t need to know the answer.
There are people who say, I could handle this suffering if I knew— like, if God could just tell me why I’m suffering. If I, for instance, knew that God— okay, one week from now, this will result in this. One month from now, one year from now, what whatever, then that would help me to be able to handle it. Don’t miss this. God providing you and me an explanation for why we are suffering would be moving towards placing our hope for rescue and our hope for help not in God, but in whatever explanation He provides.
That’s an example of serving God for what we get out of it, and that’s the very thing Satan accused Job of doing. If you and I really want to learn to love God for Himself alone instead of trying to manipulate Him or exploit Him or make Him fit our image of Him, we have to be willing to let God be God. We have to be willing to let God be sovereign, and sometimes that means letting Him take us through the wringer.
And so, what you and I are called to do I’m not saying this is easy by any stretch. What you and I are called to do is to stay in a relationship with God that you and I cannot control, and to accept and embrace the mystery of maybe not knowing why you’re suffering, and not expecting that you ever will know, and to realize that this is the way for you and me to come to learn to love God for himself alone.
All of Scripture reveals God to be the loving, king. Amen. Yes, he sovereignly ordains and oversees all of our suffering. And if he were only ever portrayed as sovereign, we might be tempted to shrink back from him in fear, wouldn’t we? But because he’s also shown to not only be a sovereign God but to be a suffering God who willingly stepped into unthinkable affliction on our behalf when Jesus came to the earth, we can be assured of God’s goodness and move toward him in love.
God understands suffering and loss. At great cost to himself, Jesus volunteered to empty himself, Philippians 2 says, of heavenly glory to become a humble servant out of love for us. Jesus lost his Father’s tender intimacy in exchange for the fury of his fierce wrath. Jesus was Jesus was forsaken by his Father. He felt like he was forsaken by his Father to ensure that we’d never be alone or forsaken in our suffering and afflictions.
Likewise, the Father didn’t spare his own Son. He gave him up for us all. He endured the ache of turning away from the Son he’d eternally loved so that he’d never have to turn away from us.
Though they both felt otherworldly grief, the Father and the Son, they chose this death and this loss in order to ultimately defeat the suffering that comes from sin and death and loss for us. As we sang earlier, how deep the Father’s love for us.
When we feel like God is different— or excuse me, distant— we feel like God is indifferent or uncaring towards us in our suffering, the cross stands as compelling evidence that he’s not.
Yes, our sovereign God may wisely allow what we most fear, but our suffering God convinces us of his deep love as we face these things. The powerful hands that uphold all things are the hands that were pierced for us. And so, freshly seeing God as God, the suffering one, this— and the sovereign one that can free us from fear to trust him again and again as we go through our suffering.
Let’s pray.
Father, I am unworthy to stand before a group of people and to talk about a passage like this and to pretend like I I mean, pastors are supposed to have all the answers, Lord. I don’t. I’m humbled by the fact that I am amidst right now many who are acquainted with grief and suffering of their own.
I thank You that You in Your wisdom may permit these things, but that You also offer protection and life and Your presence in the midst of it all.
I pray, God, that you would help us— lead us into deeper waters where we put our hope and trust in you even when it doesn’t make sense, even if there’s a way that we might not ever know the answer to the reason why we are suffering, that we would see that it’s not because you don’t care. It’s not because you’re insensitive to our grief or our pain. You were only ever good.
You were a sovereign, mysterious God, and we worship you. We ask that you would be God.
We are your people, the sheep of your pasture, and we live under your rule, saying, Lord, you give and you take away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Thank you for your mercy and your compassion.
We pray all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
