Thursday evening after I put the finishing touches on my sermon, I went out for a walk with all the prayer cards to pray for you all, and about ten minutes into my walk I received the most painful phone call I have ever received. One of the dear sisters in our church went to be with Jesus at age 14. She took her own life, although I am convinced it was an accident. One of the sweetest, happiest, most delightful faces in our church over the past four years or so, we will no longer see. Why would God let this happen? One of her favorite verses was Romans 8:28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. There are a lot of tragedies we can think through and think of ways that it could work out for good. But this? A beautiful, happy 14 year old girl dying this way? And the horrific agony and pain that her family and friends will suffer for the rest of their lives? How could this possibly be good?
If only we could know what she was thinking. If only there were a note, or something on her Facebook page, or diary, or a comment to a friend – something to give us some idea what was going through her mind so we could know why. How could it possibly be a good thing for us not to know?
When bitter calamity strikes like it did Thursday, everything in us just wants to reject it. When you lose a loved one in some horrible way, or you endure some assault or abuse, or you contract some terrible disease – when those huge, massive calamities come crashing into our lives, our natural reaction is, “No, no, no – this can’t be true. This can’t be happening.” We do not want to accept it, but reality forces its way in on us, and we are left reeling with thoughts about how wrong and absurd and meaningless and undeserved it is. It just comes out of nowhere and baffles our sense of justice and the way things ought to be.
One of our most important jobs as leaders in this church is to preach and pray in such a way that when the day of calamity comes, you do not curse God. And not just that you not curse Him, but that instead of cursing you might worship Him. Not contrived, forced, outside-only “worship,” but true, genuine, heartfelt expression of delight, trust, rest, and hope in God. And so far so good. What happened Friday night – Sam sends out an email about an impromptu prayer meeting, and almost the whole church shows up – the place is packed and prayers and praises went up for over an hour straight without a break, and hearts of God’s people were offering some of the truest and deepest worship we have ever offered in this church. That is wonderful. But the test is not over. There is more that God requires of us. Our immediate response was good, but what we have to do now is respond in a godly way in the long term.
The Calamity
We have been studying in 1 Peter about suffering while doing good. Would this count? Does losing a loved one count as undeserved suffering? Absolutely. What happened Thursday did not happen because of some sin we were committing. Hundreds of you were out doing all kinds of good that day, only to be hit with the horrible news. Losing a loved one is definitely in the category of unjust suffering, and so everything Peter says in chapter 2 applies – including the part about it being commendable before God if you endure it in a godly way. It brings honor and glory to God when we respond to something like this with worship rather than cursing – or even questioning. And no book teaches us how to do that like the book of Job.
The book starts out describing Job’s remarkable godliness. He was blameless. And out of nowhere comes an absolutely unthinkable calamity. Job did not just lose one daughter – he lost all ten of his children in one day. On top of that he lost all his wealth, and he contracted a horrific, painful disease with open sores that became contaminated and infected with worms. The grief in his heart must have been absolutely unimaginable. So sudden – just out of nowhere, undeserved, unexpected, unjust.
And then the writer gives us a glimpse of something that Job never got to see – and that you will never see in your own life. The whole book Job is crying out, “Why? Why? Why is this happening?” And the book starts out right off the bat by telling us why. So the reader knows why. Job never does – not even at the very end, when God speaks to Job. But just this once, God lets us see into heaven so we get the answer to the question why.
And it is an answer you would never dream of. If you are trying to piece together why some horrible thing happened in your life, this is probably the last thing that you would naturally think of. In fact, even though it is in the Bible, I doubt there are very many people who even consider that this might be what is going on in their case.
Job has no idea, but here is what happened: Verses 6–12 describe a meeting between God and Satan. In verse 7 Satan says that he spends his time going to and fro on the earth. Then God puts on display a trophy that he delights in very much. He says, "Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?"
Why did God do that? I don’t know if Job ever got to read the book of Job, but if he did, when he saw those verses he might have thought, “God, brag about something else.” This is like the owner of a jewelry store who has a famous diamond thief enter his store. The owner says, "What are you doing?" And the thief answers, "I was just walking around in your store." And then the owner says, "Did you see that one up front? It’s our biggest diamond. It’s worth a million dollars." Why would you say that to a diamond thief? Obviously God is setting this up.
God knows exactly what is going to happen – why is He doing this? He is doing it because it is so important to Him to expose the strength and beauty of Job’s faith. Why? Why is it so important to expose Job’s faith? Because Job’s faith puts on display God’s worthiness to be trusted. When someone says, “I love God. I trust God” – that may be real, it may not. But when they are still saying it after God has taken everything away – then it is real.
Satan is banking on it not being real in Job’s case. Basically he says to God, “The only reason Job worships You is because You buy him off with all this blessing – ten healthy kids, wealth, health – anyone would worship You if You bribe them with all that.”
Job 1:11 But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face."
In other words, “God, You’re not worthy to be worshipped just for who You are.”
At this point God could have said, "I don't need to prove anything to you or anybody else. I know the heart of my servant Job and that is enough for Me." He could have done that, but in this case he didn't. God chooses in this case to go ahead and get an open victory over Satan for his own glory. So God gives Satan the green light to go after Job. And the devil unleashes his vicious, evil, malicious attack on Job and kills all Job’s children and takes away his wealth and his health.
Satan’s Work Is the Work of God
So we learn right away in this book a very important principle: Satan's work is ultimately the work of God. The person who hurt you or took something away from you – that person’s work is ultimately the work of God. That person was accomplishing evil but God was accomplishing good. God says to Satan…
Job 2:.6, "Very well then, he is in your power.”
Then verse 7 makes it very explicit that "Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and afflicted Job." But again in verse 10 Job says, "Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” Job looks right past the evil men who attacked him, and the germs that infected him, and even the devil and looked up to the ultimate Cause – God. He saw His losses and sickness as being from God. And each time Job does that, the inspired writer warns us not to criticize Job. He was exactly right to think that way. There are a lot of messed up beliefs that we read about in the book of Job – the friends putting God in a box and saying He could never bring trouble on a good man, Job doubting God’s justice and goodness – plenty of examples in Job of people going off track in various ways. But one thing nobody in the book of Job ever doubted was that these tragedies came from the hand of God. No one questioned that – not the three friends, not Elihu, not Job – not even Job’s wife! That was just so basic that everyone understood that much.
The only reason you ever hear people say things like, “God had nothing to do with that tragedy” – the only reason anyone says that today is because we are so deeply affected by the twisted, depraved naturalism of our culture. We live in a culture that thinks it explained away God when it discovered gravity and gave it a name. They think the observations of science explain everything, so we no longer need God. The observations of science explain nothing. They are just that – observations. And the fact that they give long, complicated Latin names to the things they observe does not mean they can explain even the simplest questions like, “What powers gravity?” But our world lives in the insanity of the illusion that “mother nature” somehow created itself and powers itself. And that insanity affects even people in the church, so that we imagine that things in the creation can actually happen outside of God’s control. But at the time of Job, people had not fallen that far into depravity yet, and even the most simple-minded people understood that it is obvious that God controls all things.
Psalms 135:6 The Lord does whatever pleases him, in the heavens and on the earth, in the seas and all their depths.
So all of these horrors break into Job’s life all at once, and Job is thinking, “What in the world is going on?” And the answer is – that is not the question. The issue is not what in the world is going on; it is what is going on in heaven that is important here. A major accusation has been made in heaven. Satan is saying that God Himself is of no value. If a man loses everything in this world and all he has left is God, then he has nothing left. That is what the devil is saying to God here, and that is what he tries to convince us of every day. He does it two ways – through pain and through pleasure. When pain and loss come, Satan says, “You’ve lost everything. If all you have left is God, you don’t have enough.” And when pleasure comes Satan says, “See how satisfying this is? This is what brings joy and fulfillment – not God.”
Job’s Godly Response
Verse 21 records the victory. These are the words that may have brought tears to more eyes than any other sentence ever spoken.
Job 1:21 and said: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
And no doubt heaven erupted with praise and Satan was driven out by the shouts of praise and celebration of victory among all the myriads of angels. God does not have to buy it or bribe for it – He is worthy of it even when He takes everything away.
And when Megan was taken away in such a sudden, horrible way and Janee and the boys were not cursing God the next day the hands of 100 million angels were thrown up into the air and a mighty roar of worship thundered Satan right out of heaven. “Worthy is our God, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!” A single, suffering saint who continues to worship God even after losing what is most precious in this world is a cosmic victory for the glory of God. From Thursday night to today Janee and the boys showed God to be more valuable even then their precious daughter and sister. And they did it in a way that a person who is not suffering could never glorify God. The more this whole thing stings you, the greater your capacity to bring glory and honor to God by continuing to worship Him.
The Long Term Battle (Job Falters)
So like Janee and Eric and Ryan, Job won the initial battle decisively. And he also won round two and round three. But after that came another test. You might think that after chapter 2 God would skip right to chapter 42 and bring Job’s trial to an end and reward him and bless him. But the ordeal is not over. Now Job has to face the long, dark valley of pain that went on and on and on. And to make matters worse his “comforters” were falsely accusing him. So then he had to deal with that on top of everything else, and it is those false accusations that seem to really wear him down. And Job eventually slips and starts questioning God’s justice and goodness.
That goes on for thirty-five chapters. Now fast forward to chapter 38. Clouds begin to gather, and it starts storming, and out of that storm, God speaks.
Job 38:1 Then the Yahweh answered Job out of the storm. He said: 2 "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? 3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
Wow, isn’t that kind of a harsh way to talk to a man who has been crushed with the kind of sorrow and hardship Job has experienced? God is normally tender and gentle and patient and compassionate, but Job had questioned His goodness and justice, and that has to be rebuked. Once you start questioning God’s goodness, you are on a track that will lead to absolute destruction, and so it is crucial that it be dealt with decisively to save Job’s life.
Solution: God’s Resume, Not Answers
So now, over the course of the next four chapters, God is going to solve Job’s problem. He is going to bring comfort and strength to Job. But He does not do it the way Job wants Him to do it – and the way we always want. What we want is to know “Why?” “Just answer my questions, God. Give an account for why You have done what You have done.” We always think we will be so much better off if we know the things God has hidden from us. We want God to give us an account so that we can pass judgment on whether He did the right thing or not. We have our opinions about whether this thing God has done is best or not.
But God knows better. He knows that what we really need is not more information. What we need is to understand how capable He is, how powerful He is, how good He is, how wise He is, and how much He can be trusted to do what is best. Imagine the world’s most skilled brain surgeon. He is doing surgery on your child, and he makes an incision and you say, “Tell me why you cut right there.” And he knows that he could give a three-hour lecture on why he made that incision the way he did and you still would not begin to understand it without years of medical training. So instead of answering your question about the incision, he just gives you his credentials as a surgeon, because he knows that will do far more to calm your fears than the answer to your question.
That is exactly what is happening here. Job has all these “Why?” questions, and God responds by answering none of them. Instead, God just takes the opportunity to present some of His resume. That is exactly what Job 38-41 is – God’s resume. So let’s just spend the rest of our time focusing on the Lord’s credentials, and see if we can get to the point where we trust Him to have made the right decision about the timing and circumstances of the beginning and end of Megan’s earthly life and every other calamity you face.
He starts with the earth.
Job 38:4 "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone-- 7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?
Some of you look pretty old – raise your hand if you are so old that you can remember when God laid the foundation of the earth on day one of creation? Would you agree, if you are going to be giving God advice on how to run things, you should at least have been around for that?
Next comes the sea in verses 8-11.
8 "Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, 9 when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, 10 when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, 11 when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'?
Anyone who is going to be qualified to give God advice should at least be able to create the ocean and move it around at will.
Then in verses 12-15 He talks about the dawn. If you are so wise and so powerful that you are in a position to question God – you should be able to create mornings – make the sun rise. God does that every single day – anyone who is God’s counselor should be able to easily move stars and planets.
How about the light itself? How much wisdom does it take just to invent light? Did you know that the only reason this world can exist is because light does not follow the rules of physics? For example, if you are in a car traveling 50 mph, and a faster car is coming up behind you at 70 mph, if you look out your back window you will see that car gaining on you at the rate of 20 mph. But light does not follow that rule. It always gains on you at 186,000 miles per second. If you are in a parked car, light from behind will approach at 186,000 miles per second. If you are in a car going 180,000 miles per second, light from behind will still catch up to you at the rate of 186,000 miles per second.
And there is a connection between the speed of light and time. The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time passes for you. This was discovered mathematically, but has actually been tested. If they get two identical atomic clocks, leave one on the ground and fly the other one in a jet around the world, the times are off by the exact amount the equations would suggest. So if one twin flew on a rocket at close to the speed of light until ten years passed on earth, when he came back his watch would say he was only gone a few moments, and he would actually be ten years younger than his twin.
When light travels through space, from the perspective of the particular photon, it leaves its source and arrives at its destination in exactly the same instant. Since it is traveling at the speed of light, from its perspective, time is stopped, so it makes the trip in zero time. So it goes out of existence the very same moment it is created, which you would think would require that it never existed. And for this universe to function, it has to be that way. And it has to behave sometimes as a particle and not a wave, and other times as a wave and not a particle. If I were in charge of light, that would be a big problem, but it is no problem for God. It is right there on His resume.
Then in verses 16–18 God focuses on the depth and breadth of the sea and land. “Job, you have never even been to the bottom of the ocean. How could you possibly think you know enough to argue with God?”
And that is the easy stuff – down here on earth. Starting in verse 19 we launch into the heavens.
19 "What is the way to the abode of light? And where does darkness reside? 20 Can you take them to their places? Do you know the paths to their dwellings? 21 Surely you know, for you were already born! You have lived so many years!
Then, in verses 22–30, God asks him about snow and hail and rain and frost: Do you know anything about how to store up hail for the day of battle? Would you know how to cut a channel in the sky to make it rain on a land where no man is? Or lift your eyes even higher, Job, at the constellations. Can you move those around? Or are the stars a little too big for you? They are puny compared to God.
The kinds of things that God does with His fingers are awesome beyond imagination. There was an explosion that happened in our own Milky Way galaxy and became visible in the year 1054. The explosion was visible from earth and could be seen in the daylight for twenty-three days and at night for almost two years. It can still be seen with a telescope. They call it the Crab Nebula and it is still expanding at the rate of 700 miles per second. The cloud of wreckage from that explosion is ten light-years across. That means if we reduced the universe down so the earth were right here, and the moon were ½ inch away, the sun would be 15 feet away, and the Crab Nebula would cover the entire United States. And the Crab Nebula is a tiny blip in a single galaxy that is one of countless millions, and all that the Psalmist says is “the work of His fingers” (Ps.8:3). He made it all. Every star, every grain of sand, every galaxy, every molecule, every animal, every insect, everything.
Can you do that? Because if you are going to advise God, how about lightening? Do you know how to whistle for the lightning so it snaps to attention and says, "Here we are!"? Can you count the clouds with your wisdom? If you are going to question God you should be able to easily do this stuff. These are the kinds of things He could do in His sleep – if He ever slept, which He doesn’t.
Do you see what God is doing? He is saying, “Job, I think I’m capable of running the universe without your input.” God does not have to report to us or give an account to us. We do not need to micro-manage God by looking over His shoulder as He works and demanding explanations. And when we imagine we need to know the answers, it is loving for God to withhold them so we can recover from the illusion that our knowing those things or not knowing them matters – because it doesn’t. It would only matter if God could not be fully trusted and needed to be supervised by us. Can we all be humble enough to admit that whether we focus on the earth or the sea or the dawn or the snow or hail or constellations or rain, we are just, plain ignorant and impotent? We cannot even begin to run those things.
Animals
In verse 39 God turns to the animals. Who provides the animals with their food? Could you take care of all the animals? Do you even know how many animals there are in the world? God feeds every one of them every day. Let’s just take one kind of animal - birds. Do you know how many birds God has to feed before the sun goes down tonight? Between two and four hundred billion. If that were your job you would have to come up with 100 million tons of food per day every day and get it all distributed - just for the birds. God does that, plus feeds all the other 1.2 million species of animals.
And it is not just the feeding. Every time an animal gives birth, anywhere on the planet, God has to help. God is on top of that.
He is on top of everything. Think of the coordination of all the systems just in this one little planet. The system of the sun on its surface, gravity, warmth, light and heat, thermonuclear fusion, etc. Perfectly interlocked with that is the earth’s hydrology system. The system of the animal kingdom – the animals are dependent on the other animals for their existence. The ecosystem of a river, the systems of humanity, the moon and tides, the rotation and revolution of the earth, the atmosphere, oxygen, trees, animals, the interdependence of the complex ecosystems of deserts, lakes, coral reefs, mountains, rain forests, ice caps, tundra, wetlands – each one an incredibly complex ecosystem and each of those systems functioning together globally. God keeps all that in His head and figures it all out more easily than you calculate 2+2.
And while He does all that He also keeps all the cells in all living things all running. Just to give you an idea, about the simplest cell there is is blue green algae. That is about as simple as it gets for a cell. It contains just a single molecule of DNA and lacks well-defined internal structures such as the nucleus. And yet a bacterium of blue green algae can synthesize some 3000 to 6000 compounds at a rate of about 1,000,000 reactions per second. That is a machine complex beyond anything man has ever dreamed of making. The simplest, tiniest little blobs of nothing in this creation are complex beyond comprehension. And it becomes infinitely more complex from there when you contemplate a human cell – and then the arrangement of billions of those into a human being.
In chapter 39 God goes on to talk about His control over wild animals, His creation of the ostrich. He even makes a point that He is the one who is in charge of the ostrich being so dumb.
Job 39:17 for God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense. 18 Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider.
God makes fast things fast and dumb things dumb and smart things smart and weak things weak. Whether we consider the prey of lions, the birth of mountain goats, the freedom of the wild donkey, the insubordination of the wild ox, the stupidity of the ostrich, the might of the war horse, or the flight of the hawk and eagle – God controls all of it.
Job 40:3 Then Job answered the Lord: 4 "I am unworthy--how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth.
But God is not finished. He launches into another whole chapter that focuses on the awesome power of His mighty arm, and the thundering omnipotence of His voice. Why? Because when you start questioning God you have a serious, life-threatening deficiency of three key nutrients in your soul: understanding of God’s power, of God’s goodness, and of God’s wisdom. And to make up for that deficiency you need to take those in huge doses to stay alive. If your arm is out of joint it takes some violence for the doctor to shove it back into place, but it is an act of love. So God keeps going all the way through chapter 41.
Of Course God’s Ways Would Be Mysterious to Us
If you truly believe that the Maker of heaven and earth is an all-powerful, all-wise God, who holds the Universe in existence, and guides it to a great climax, then at least one thing is sure: there will be strangeness and mystery in the world beyond our finite little comprehension. I am a sinner whose knowledge is statistically zero compared to God, and so if I believe in some god who always does just what I would expect, I can be sure that I am believing in a false god – a god who thinks just like a puny, finite, sinful man. There is zero reason to think that god should run the world according to our expectations.
He is infinite; we are finite. He knows everything that can be known; we forget where we put our car keys. He is strong enough to wield galaxies and never sleeps; we spend 1/3 of our lives flat on our back unconscious in sleep. He is more glorious than all the Swiss Alps and the Grand Canyon and the most glorious sunset and the Northern Lights and the Milky Way; we have to spend a half hour in the morning just to become presentable so we are not an eyesore.
If God is really that much greater than us then of course the way he runs the world will often puzzle us.
Romans 11:33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 "Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?"
And yet God has not left us in total ignorance. He has actually revealed to us all of the most important things. He has confided in us His grandest purposes in his Word. But it is a good thing that God has also left us to trust Him whenever He does things that are greater than our miniscule little brains can comprehend. And it is mercy that He does not give us answers every time we want them because we would fall into depending on our own wisdom if He did. Plus, we want a lot of answers that would not be good for us to have.
Do not spend yourself trying to figure out what God has not revealed. That feels like the solution to your sorrow, but it isn’t. The more you understand the truth about the wisdom and power and goodness and trustworthiness of God, the more your response to crushing pain will be like Paul’s in 2 Corinthians 1:9.
2 Corinthians 1:9 Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.
Conclusion: You Can Trust Him
Let’s close by bringing this back around to 1 Peter 2. I began by saying when any calamity comes into your life – if it is not a direct consequence of some specific sin, then it falls into the category of suffering while doing good. And when we suffer while doing good, and we endure it without a sinful response, this is commendable before God. How do you do that?
We will look into this in detail next time, but the short answer is in 1 Peter 2:23 When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. That is how you handle calamity – entrust yourself to the God who can be trusted. When some horror comes into your life and you feel yourself resisting, “No, no no – this can’t be – no…” – when that happens, stop resisting and turn your attention to the credentials on God’s resume in Job 38-41, and say, “God, I trust You.” Did you know even Jesus had to do that? Even Jesus had to entrust the situation to the Father when He faced undeserved suffering. That is the path Jesus took through life, and He left tracks for us to follow in His steps. When horrible things happen, life has not gone off the rails. You are following in Jesus’ steps. To this you were called! Why? We will find out a lot of the answers to that in next week’s message, but for now, let’s just keep God’s resume before us and trust our faithful Creator.
Benediction: 1 Peter 5:10,11 And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 11 To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.
1:25 Questions
1. What is it on God’s resume that tends to be most impressive in your heart? What could you do to remind yourself of that in times when trust is difficult?
2. With some kinds of suffering, it is easy to trust God’s wisdom. Other times it is harder. What kinds of suffering do you find the most difficult to trust Him with?
