The Defense Rests
Job 31:1-40
Cascades Fellowship CRC, JX MI
April 25, 2010
Series: Through the Bible in a Year
I want to begin this morning with a bit of a disclaimer – or perhaps a clarifier would be a more appropriate term. What you are about to hear in no way is a reflection upon this church or any of its members. The love and support I have received here has been a source of strength for me and an encouragement. Please hear what I say next in that context – it is important for you to know that I love this church and remain convinced that I am where God has placed me.
Now that I have your attention….
There has been a lingering sadness in my life, one that I have borne quietly for a number of years and have only mentioned obliquely on a few occasions. It is a sadness that I have even kept from my wife – at least the fullest depths of it – because there was nothing to be done about it. I am sure she has sensed at times this sadness, but I have resisted all probes because I did not think it a matter of consequence – it was water under the bridge and there was no need to bring it up again. So I plodded on, looking for the greener pastures God would lead his sheep into and the quiet waters by which I might repose.
But this grief still dogs me, for in some ways it was a death to me. It was death to a way of life – my way of life – and in its loss I lost more than just the dream of a career hoped for, I lost a people – my people. The loss I refer to, the grief I bear, is the resignation of my commission in the United States Navy as a Chaplain candidate. I had hoped to serve full time after three or four years here at Cascades Fellowship, but finally had to relinquish that hope in 2007 after it became clear that because of a ruptured disc and cervical fusion surgery to repair it I was no longer physically qualified to do the job.
To understand why I am still grieved by this you should also know that I grew up in a military family and the first part of my adult life was in the military. I remember my brother asking me shortly after my senior year in high school what I intended to do with my life. I told him then that I could already hear reveille being played – I already had a vision for military life and knew I was destined to be a soldier, airman, sailor or marine. I would never say that I always dreamed of being in the military, but as I matured I came to understand the cut of my cloth and embraced it.
Then I blew a disc in my neck while working out to get in shape for returning to the military after three years in congregational ministry. As disappointing as that was I still was unprepared for the day of resigning my commission. I put it off as long as I could – why? Because I sensed then what I know now – once I resigned I was not only losing a career, I was being cut off from the culture I was nurtured in. I would become a man without a people.
I do not bring this up now to win pity points or style points by providing some memorable anecdote for my sermon. Nor am I trying to win your favor by being vulnerable – such manipulation is beneath the dignity of this pulpit and I would never play so fast and loose with the trust you have placed in me as your pastor. I bring it up now because of the text from Job that we encounter this week in our reading schedule. Like Job, I have asked some probing questions of God and his ways and the preamble to every question has always been, “I was just trying to do what I thought you wanted me to do….” It is some variation of that preamble that forms the undercurrent of Job’s complaint.
Mine is not a unique experience – we have all had those Job moments in life; a time when despite doing everything we were supposed to do our world crashes in around us and we are left wondering what we have done to deserve such calamity. We try to draw meaning out of our suffering, sometimes at the expense of truth; sometimes at the expense of God’s majesty and glory. This is really the substance of the Book of Job; in a search to bring meaning to his suffering he diminishes God’s majesty.
At the very beginning of the book we find that Job was a man of great wealth and reputation. Job 1:3 says that he was the greatest man of the East. He was a good and upright man who feared God and shunned evil. He was a man who did everything right.
And yet great calamity came to him – the ruin of all his finances, the loss of all his children and finally the erosion of his health. He went from being the paragon of virtue, the example of a godly life to becoming the butt of jokes told by adolescent boys and the cause of revulsion among his peers. And he was desperate to make some sense of it.
As the readers – who stand outside of the world of Job looking in on the spectacle of his life – we know that his affliction is divinely appointed. It is a test, a trying of his faith – but this is only because the narrator lets us in on this little secret. Job and his friends remain unaware of the root of his suffering and so set about trying to divine its meaning.
To fully get what is going on in Job you have to understand that there was a belief at that time that said wealth, good health, and good reputation were all signs that you were living under God’s blessings because you did what was right. So tragedy – sickness, reversal of fortunes and the like came because of sin. They were God’s punishment for sin – so you can imagine what was being said about Job when in a day’s time he loses everything. His sin must be really bad – you can almost hear the tongues clucking, trying to guess what heinous evil he must have done to deserve such suffering. Then comes the sickness – the boils and sores – not only did he sin big but he apparently refused to repent. Why would God punish him so otherwise?
At some level, this belief is still with us today – we see it in the health and wealth Gospel and its purveyors. They teach us if we just have the right frame of mind, if we just give the right amount of money, if we just obey the Law of Moses God will bless us with an abundance of money and exceptional health. If we are sick or impoverished or afflicted in some way it is because we live under God’s displeasure – we have unconfessed sin or we refuse to believe, really believe the promises of God. Our troubles are an indication that our relationship with God is in a shambles and we need to repent.
This is what Job’s friends believed about him – surely God would not allow such evil to befall him if he were walking uprightly; if he were doing his devotions, giving his tithe, and walking faithfully with God. But Job maintains that this is precisely what he has done – there can be no cause in him that has brought on his recent disasters. And so the trial begins – Job’s friends are the prosecuting attorneys and Job is his own defense lawyer. The friends assert that Job stands guilty of some gross sin and point to his troubles as evidence. Job offers an alternate theory – the one who is the judge in this case, the Lord God, he brings the affliction without cause or at least a cause he has not expressed. Let him come and face Job and tell him what he has done to merit such trouble.
I have often heard people comment about the patience of Job – how he endured such suffering without cursing God. His stiff upper-lip is held out as an example for us all. Bear patiently with suffering, God will turn our mourning into dancing, our sackcloth into the garment of praise. And this is true enough, but it really misses the point of the Book of Job. If anyone displays patience in Job, it is God – for Job accuses him continually of injustice, of turning against him and challenges him to set forth the evidence against Job.
Like stacking together so many Lincoln logs, Job builds his case for innocence. He answers his friends’ suggestions that he is hiding some terrible sin with counter arguments about his upright lifestyle and pointing out that it often seems that the wicked prosper. But he also says often that he would be better off dead rather than to continue suffering. All his days are consumed with tears and he can’t understand why God would allow him to linger on in his agony. This is again an implied charge against the justice of God.
Job’s arguments come to a climax in chapters 29-31 of the Book of Job. By chapter 28, his friends have argued till they are blue in the face and see Job as a hardened case – he’ll not repent, so let him eat from the fruit of his sin. In chapter 29, Job recalls his life before all this trouble – “…when God watched over me…” he says – again implying he has been forsaken by God. In chapter 30, he laments his present condition and questions God’s goodness, “Surely,” he says “no one lays a hand on a broken man…. When I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, then came darkness….”
Then in chapter 31 Job offers his closing argument – I have stayed away from lust, I have helped the poor, I have paid my tithes, I have dealt justly with the downtrodden, I have treated my hired help fairly, I have shunned idolatry, I have shown hospitality to the stranger, I have not trusted in my wealth, I have confessed my sin and honored the Lord with how I have used the land. Examine my life! Job challenges. You will see that God himself is incapable of bringing a charge against me – if he is, let him come forward now and lay out his case. I will accept it, whatever his judgment.
The defense rests.
Have you ever pressed such a claim against heaven? God, appear before me and give me an answer – why are you doing this to me? We may not have used these same words, but in essence, I am sure we have all asked this question, “God, what are you doing? Where are you?”
You see, this is the rub Job feels – the cause of his consternation. Only a day before, he felt he knew God but now in the face of suffering his faith seems too small and God too distant. Why does God remain silent in the face of his cries for help – if I am doing what you have called me to do then why don’t you get up and do something?
This is the rub I felt, the kind of questions I asked during the ten weeks I was locked up in the house waiting for my bones to knit together sufficiently to safely venture out. They are still the questions I ask on occasion. And the answer I have received is the same one that Job has – silence.
Now don’t get me wrong, God certainly is not silent – I see his hand very active in my life and in the life of this church. I still hear the quiet still voice of the Spirit, but when it comes to this question – what are you doing, where are you? God does not provide an answer….
He provides a testimony.
Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
And with that, God begins to answer Job. Not Job’s questions – God does not come offering reasons for Job’s suffering or even mention Job’s suffering, for that matter. Instead, God answers Job with a series of questions meant to expose two things – his majesty and Job’s arrogance in demanding that God submit to his questions about his suffering.
Now at first blush, this seems a little unsatisfying because let’s face it – when we experience pain, when life goes haywire, when evil seems to be winning the day and our nights are filled with the fears of tomorrow – blast it! We want to know why. We want God to give us an accounting – not so that we can debate it with him or question his motives. Well, maybe sometimes, that too – but on the whole we want answers so that we know we can trust where he is taking us. We want answers to calm our skittish nerves and strengthen our fainting hearts. We want to know that it’s going to be okay in the end – and is that such a bad thing? Is that too much to ask?
Yes, it is. Why? A.W. Tozer in his work The Knowledge of the Holy says that "…the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God," so it is imperative that "our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God" (Tozer The Knowledge of the Holy p.2 Harper Collins 1992).
Job’s problem – our problem – isn’t the questions in the face of suffering – it is the attitude betrayed in the asking. It betrays a view of God that has gotten muddled and in the crucible of suffering reveals a heart that lacks trust in the goodness of God or his power over evil and the ability to use suffering for his good and redemptive purposes. It betrays a heart attitude that believes it knows better than the Sovereign Lord and whispers under its breath, “I want to be God; I want to be God; I want to be God.”
You see, in reality God gave Job the only answer that ultimately can be satisfying. I am the Sovereign Lord. Let all mortal flesh keep silence before me; an explicit call to trust in God’s sovereign grace and goodness in spite of what swirls around us; to believe God is good and knows what he is doing. And in that reminding, God provided Job with the only source of comfort that can finally cause us to rest in difficult circumstances; the only source of peace when chaos seems to break out in every corner of our existence.
I could give you a dozen Scriptures that tell you how God uses the evil circumstances in your life to bring about your salvation and sanctification. I could set about justifying why God allows suffering to come to his children – I have whispered these promises to myself. But the reality is until you are willing to wrestle with the truth that he is God and you are not; he is sovereign and you are not – you will struggle with the presence of suffering and find little peace in those Scriptures. It all begins with our view of God.
My confession is that my view of God has gotten muddled – though my grief is negligible when compared to Job’s. May God grant me the vision of Job that I may see his majesty and say in abject humility, “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
