There is a certain kind of person who seldom trusts anybody but himself to get things right. Some of us want to have our hands in every stewpot, we want to be up to our ears in every enterprise, we want to do it ourselves, or else we are afraid it won’t be done right.
Do you remember that a few years ago there was a TV ad, I think it was for a headache medicine, and it featured a young woman being coached on how to do something by an older woman? Except that the migraine took over and the young woman would shriek out, "Mother, please, I’d rather do it myself".
Well, that’s the way a lot of us are about our lives. "Mother, please, I’d rather do it myself.” I may get it wrong, I may not be a success by somebody’ s standards, but I’d rather live my own life. I may make mistakes, but at least they are my mistakes. A whole lot of us want to manage our own lives without interference and without supervision. Just want to do it ourselves.
And so some of us when we get sick will not go to the doctor; quacks, what do they know? We will open up the medicine chest, and take something that worked on last year’s chest cold and hope it will do the job on this spring’s sinus infection. Just want to do it ourselves.
And others of us -- I’m one of these, I confess -- others of us will face a piece of broken equipment and will say, "Well, I can tackle that. I can try to fix that." Call a repairman? Do you have any idea how much those guys charge? Just rather do it myself.
Never mind that my furnace has been rattling all winter because there is a bent motor shaft that needs to be replaced. I’ll do it, I’ll get to it. Plumbers cost too much.
Never mind that someone who visited our house this week and who had not been there for several years commented with surprise that he really did think I would have finished making those kitchen cabinet doors by now – five years, after all! Well, I’m going to get around to it. I am certainly not going to call a professional carpenter. Why would I get a professional when I can do it myself?
Many of us, I say, would rather manage our own lives than pay the price for someone else to do things for us. We don’t want the professional, we want to remain fumbling amateurs. We want to save money, and more: we want the satisfaction of having done something for ourselves.
Funny how the same attitude carries on over into our spiritual lives. Strange how the same approach applies to our emotional and spiritual management.
For, you see, most of us are dedicated amateurs in dealing with spiritual issues, and the last thing in the world we want to do is to turn over our spiritual needs to the professional. Most of us suppose that we know enough about authentic living; why let the pro do it for us? Why not just look out for Number One on our own’?
Mind you, I am not talking about turning your spiritual life management over to pastors and counselors. I am talking about the real pro. I am talking about God Himself. The primary issue for most of us is that we do not want to turn our lives over to God; we do not want God, though He knows who we are and of what we are made, to manage us. We don’t want to trust God.
Let me give you some counsel. Let the pro do it. When you are sick, call a professional physician. When you have furnaces to repair, hit the yellow pages and ask for a plumber. When you need real cabinets and not botched and battered boxes, look for a carpenter. And when your life, your spiritual, emotional, relationship life needs management, trust the creator. Trust the one who put it together in the first place. Trust God.
I
At the end of a stormy several days of arguing, complaining, and speech-making, that’s what Job found out. Job who had been such a great man of substance; Job who had managed flocks and lands and houses and family, but who had found it all swept away in one terrible night; Job who had been pitched up in the whirlwind on the garbage heap, where all he could do for a time was wail and cry and demand a hearing.
For several weeks now we in this congregation have been struggling along with Job. We have listened to him insist that his situation is unfair. We have heard him cry out to the heavens to be heard. And we have watched his friends come by and try to help poor old Job, poor, stinking, poverty-stricken, flea-bitten, lice-ridden Job. And we have recoiled in horror at the very thought of anybody in as bad a shape as Job was; but we have also been fascinated as his friends have tried their best to tell Job what was wrong, and he has rejected it all.
The bottom line is that, bad as Job’s plight is, he still thinks he can manage it himself. The issue that Job keeps on raising is that he has a right to understand why all this disaster has come on him and therefore that he has a right to know the way out of it.
And so Job rejects the advice of his friends; Job turns his back on the wisdom of his counselors; and Job resolutely, steadfastly insists on two things and two things only: one, that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, having managed his life well on his own; and, second, that God will address him and answer his complaint. Two things run throughout the speeches of Job: one, I’d rather do it myself. And, two, where is God when you need him?
The silence after Job’s speechifying is deafening. Everything that can be said has been said. After all, what else do you do with somebody who is so sure he wants to manage his own life and answer his own questions and tie up all the loose ends for himself?
The silence is deafening, but now turn your imagination loose. Across the garbage dump the wind begins to blow, softly, gently at first, here a leaf lifting off the trash heap, there a little cloud of dust kicking up. Stronger and stronger it comes, gusting, then surging, whipping everything in its path -- a whirlwind, a storm wind of tremendous power.
And out of that whirlwind the voice of God, Job, oh Job, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements -- surely you know!””
II
What God is saying to Job is really quite simple and quite straightforward. God says, Job, are you really capable of doing this job? Are you really able to handle something as complicated as your own destiny? Do you have that kind of wisdom?
And the questions begin to pile up. "Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?"
God begins to speak now in a crescendo of questions about Job’s capabilities. Job, what can you really do? "Can you send forth lightnings? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you provide for the young ravens? Can you bind the wild ox? Do you give the horse his strength? Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?” On and on God goes, pointing out to Job that his knowledge is so tiny and his capacities so limited: Where do you get the idea that you can manage your life on your own?
And when Job is confronted with all these questions, all he can reply is a weak, whimpering apology: “What shall I answer thee? I lay my hand on my mouth. I will proceed no further.” You see, to discover how little we know is a humbling thing, and it reduces us to a shocked silence. The Job who was capable of lengthy arguments with his friends finds his tongue-tied before the barrage of unanswerable questions which God flings in his face.
An accomplished scientist was once asked if he could summarize his life’s work and his discoveries in about a hundred and fifty words. Just distill all you have learned over forty years of work in about a hundred and fifty words. That sound tough to you? The scientist’s article consisted of the phrase "I don’t know" written out fifty times!
When you really understand anything about life, you understand that there is very little you do understand!
And when God gets through telling Job that human capacities are limited, all Job can do is to repent and admit, "I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
Friends, when we confront the reality of human pain and suffering, and we ask "why?", over and over again we find ourselves having to say, "I don’t know". When we look at the task of fixing our own brokenness and making sense out of the jumbled confusion that most of us live in, we have to admit that we’ve bitten off more than we can chew.
Is it possible, then, that our lives are too complicated for us amateurs to handle? Is it time to let the pro do it? Is it time to trust God to take over?
III
Now, all through the book of Job, this struggling sufferer has kept on hinting that somebody was going to come along and help him. He has said several times, as you know if you’ve been here working through this book with me – he has said several times that there would be a redeemer just for him, that he felt there was a witness in heaven, a mediator, a reconciler, an advocate. All along Job has been saying that what he wanted most of all was a personal encounter with the living God.
Frankly, I believe that’s what you and I most want too, if we’ll admit it. It’s not just information we want; it’s God himself. It’s not just facts or philosophical ideas or some kind of instruction book about life; we want an exchange with the author of life himself.
If we don’t know how to manage our lives, then what we really want is one who knows more about it than we do, one who has overcome what we cannot overcome, one whose power and whose understanding go beyond ours. We want to let the pro do it.
And so, what Job could never fully know I want to tell you about. Something Job strained for and listened for but could never quite hear you can hear today, something Job stretched out to see but could not quite discern, praise God, I can tell you about today.
On another town garbage heap, stretched out on a cruel cross outside a city wall, suffering and shamed and shocking in His apparent weakness, Jesus of Nazareth died one day. And all the old questions came swirling back around that cross: why do the innocent suffer? Where is God when His own are in jeopardy? Does God care? Will God do anything for the cause of justice? All the same old questions, questions which Job fought out and which you and I fight with too.
And the answer came on the third day, when men and women, with their hearts fairly breaking, trudged down a garden path toward a sealed tomb. And when they arrived, they found it broken down, invaded; they found the Lord, risen from the dead. They found that God had taken death into Himself, had taken the whole horrible reality of human suffering into Himself, and had defeated it.
And so henceforth whenever men and women wonder about why the innocent suffer, they will still have no textbook answer, they will still have no airtight logic -- but they will have the human face of God. They will have the risen Christ, assuring them that suffering means something to the heart of God, but that God’s purposes are going to win.
The Jewish writer Elie Wiesel, writing about the Nazi death camps in his book, Night, speaks about seeing a child watch the Nazis hang another child. And the child who has to watch this unspeakable horror cries out, "Where is God? Where is He?" And Wiesel says of himself, "I heard a voice within me answer, ’Where is He? Here He is -- He is hanging here
on this gallows. ’"
To which I say, Yes, and more; God hanging on this gallows but climbing down off of it, too, and God marching through this world alive and victorious and purposeful. God who is on our side, a God who will bring victory out of suffering, if we can simply trust Him and His timing to do it.
Job says it, "I know that my redeemer lives, and at last will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side."
Henceforth whenever men and women wonder about how to give meaning and substance to their little lives in this vast universe, they will still have no encyclopedia of philosophy on which to draw, but they will have a living presence, Jesus the Christ, who will invite them to come to Him and be changed.
Henceforth whenever men and women wonder about how they can get control over their lives and how they can fix all that brokenness they will still fail. They will still make mistakes. They will still fall short. But they will have a pro at their side. They will have with them a man among men and yet more than that; they will have the one in whom and by whom and for whom all things are made.
I tell you, all we really need is to trust Christ to take charge of us and make us what He wants us to be. All we really need is to know that He is present, He is alive, He is in command. All we truly need to do is to follow Him, knowing that He brings us life and liberty.
Toward the end of the Second World War in an isolated prison camp in the Philippines, the prisoners huddled together inside the stockade, not knowing what to expect. The rumor mill had had it for days that MacArthur’s soldiers had returned and that liberation might cane. But there was no sign of it. Each day, however, more and more of the Japanese guards crept away, until there was no one left to guard the prison. Still the prisoners stayed behind, inside the stockade. They had become so used to prison and so frightened of what lay ahead that even though they had the opportunity to run, they did not take it.
One morning, however, it seemed that the guns in the distance died down and a strange calm took over. Still they made no move. Suddenly the gates of the stockade burst open and in strode one simple American soldier, with a gun cocked over his arm and a week’s growth of stubble on his face.
No one had to tell the prisoners what to do next. No one had to tell them what it meant to see the face of the Liberator. Just to see the face of one who had come through death and destruction safely, that was enough to set them free. That was enough to release their voices in loud long cries of joy.
To know Him and the power of His resurrection... that’s all we need. All we finally want, letting the pro handle us and shape us and mold us – all we finally want, is to be able to say with Job, "I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee."
