Job 23:10-14; Psalm 22:1-5; Hebrews 4:12-16
Introduction
When I hear the words of the scriptures in today’s passages, I am reminded of the deep feelings of grief and sorrow that Job and David experienced. Job, the perfect man, as the Bible says, was feeling abandoned by God. David felt as if God had forsaken him, and felt as if God would not answer him. Have you ever felt like that?
Abraham Lincoln, who I would call our greatest president, lived his whole life with those types of feelings – in dark depression. “Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th-century English preacher, talked openly in his lectures to students about his dark moods that he called "his fainting fits." Winston Churchill spoke frequently about being plagued by the "black dog," his code word for depression. Franz Kafka talked about his dark moods,… and Van Gogh, the artist, cut off his ear in a fit of depression. So if you sometimes find yourself being pursued by the "black dog" or caught in an emotional fog, welcome to the human race!”
Even a man by the name of Charles Spurgeon, from whom I will quote later in this sermon, was given to periods of depression. History tells us that there were times when Spurgeon would be so depressed that he would refuse to leave his home to go to church. On more than one occasion, his deacons had to come and physically carry their pastor to the pulpit.
Stephen Foster, in his song we know as “Swanee River” wrote these words:
“All round de little farm I wandered when I was young,
Den many happy days I squandered,
Many de songs I sung.
When I was playing wid my brudder happy was I.
Oh! take me to my kind old mudder, Dere let me live and die.
Chorus: All de world am sad and dreary,
Ebry where I roam,
Oh! darkeys how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home.”
What a dreary song! Yet those same feelings of abandonment, loneliness, despair and grief are common both to believers and unbelievers. And while some may avoid scripture passages such as we read today, in these same passages I find great hope and comfort.
1. For while some flee from God in times of depression, here in these scriptures I see men who, while expressing their emotions in vivid honesty, still knew that God was sovereign. They didn’t let their emotions overrule their knowledge of who God was, and what he had done for them. They continued to trust him in spite of their feelings. They continued to serve him, worship him in fact, with their whole beings. They continued to have faith in God.
“The Psalmist reminds us just how much God prefers heartfelt authenticity to superficial religiosity. The Scriptures encourage us not to suppress or candy coat our feelings of abandonment. They do not discourage our cries of dereliction, our sense of divine desertion, but in fact give them voice.”
“…from [the book of Job] the modern Christian may with astonishment learn Christianity; learn, that is, that mystery of suffering may be a strange honor and not a vulgar punishment....”
Yes, faith and trust in God takes you to a place that you cannot control. It is scary and sometimes looks foolish. But until you go there to that place you can’t experience fully what God has for you. Pain and suffering brings the knowledge & experience of God. And faith then brings us to the point where we see God in the situation and continue to trust him for the Sovereign God he is.
Mother Theresa once said, “You will never know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
2. And I see people who were willing to accept the hand of God in their tragedies, to accept God on his own terms, and to accept his timing.
You see, when we look for God on our own terms it often seems as if he absent. The reality is he is never absent, but it can sure seem that way. And these writers of the scriptures knew deep down that God was not really gone. They acknowledged God at work in their lives, in the good and the bad, and it did not destroy their faith. As one pastor said, “God is always giving grace as yes and no all wrapped up together.”
That is a difficult place for most of us to be. It is the naked acknowledgement of mystery. And our world seems to have not much room for mystery. But I have to agree with the writer who said, “The more that we are comfortable with mystery the more we understand in this world; and the more comfortable we are with mystery in our journey, the more rest we will get along the way”
And even in our spiritual life, we seek to avoid mystery. We want to know why. Job wanted to know why and he was out of sorts because he couldn’t seem to figure it out. We seek the easy answers to our difficult questions and far too often, we even “offer easy answers. Philip Yancey says, ‘Churches that leave room for mystery, that do not pretend to spell out what God himself has not spelled out, create an environment conducive to worship.’ One mark of spiritual maturity is feeling more comfortable with mystery than certainty!”
Think of it like this - Can you as a parent love your child enough to let them hate you for awhile? What about the parent who rushed her severely burned child to the hospital. After several days and nights of trauma, she left to get some rest. Arriving back to her child’s room, she was greeted with a child who was relieved that she was back. Surely her mother would not allow the nurses to place her in the whirlpool bath to have the dead and burned skin exfoliated? It would be severely painful. And as the mother gave her approval to the nurses for the painful therapy, the child screaming her hatred for her mother for allowing her to experience pain, the mother realized the heart of God on many occasions as his children suffer pain. She knew the mystery of both the pain and the healing.
That great preacher of Metropolitan Tabernacle, Charles Spurgeon, once preached on this very passage from the book of Job and talked about this willingness to accept God on his terms by emphasizing the motivations of God:
“Trials are no evidence of being without God, since trials come from God. Job says, "When he hath tried me." He sees God in his afflictions. The devil actually wrought the trouble; but the Lord not only permitted it, but he had a design in it. Without the divine concurrence, none of his afflictions could have happened. It was God that tried Job, and it is God that tries us. No trouble comes to us without divine permission. All the dogs of affliction are muzzled until God sets them free. Nay, against none of the seed of Israel can a dog move its tongue unless God permits. Troubles do not spring out of the ground like weeds that grow anyhow, but they grow as plants set in the garden. God appoints the weight and number of all our adversities. If He declares the number ten they cannot be eleven. If He wills that we bear a certain weight, no one can add half an ounce more. Since every trial comes from God, afflictions are no evidence that you are out of God’s way.
“Besides, according to the text, these trials are tests: "When he hath tried me." The trials that came to Job were made to be proofs that the patriarch was real and sincere. Did not the enemy say: "Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face." The devil will have it that as dogs follow men for bones, so do we follow God for what we can get out of him. The Lord lets the devil see that our love is not bought by temporal goods; that we are not mercenary followers, but loving children of the Lord, so that under dire suffering we exclaim, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." By the endurance of grief our sincerity is made manifest, and it is proven that we are not mere pretenders, but true heirs of God.”
3 Not only do I see men who continued to trust in the Sovereignty of God in spite of their emotions, and men who were willing to accept God on his own terms, but I also see men who were connected to a community of faith, a group of believers, and stayed connected to them through the whole process of emotional turmoil.
We are placed into a community of believers for a reason. It is in this community that we praise God and declare his name to the congregation, as the Psalmist said. It is in this community that we share our sorrows and our grief, our confessions of sin, trials and temptations. And in this community of believers we experience the grace of God in ways that cannot be found on our own.
John Eldredge says it like this, “We were meant to remember together, in community. We need to tell our stories to others and to hear their stories told. We need to help each other with the interpretation of the Larger Story and our own. Our regular times of coming together to worship are intended to be times of corporate remembrance. ‘This, God has done,’ we say; ‘this, he will do.’”
“One of the reasons modern evangelicalism feels so thin is because it is merely modern; there is no connection with the thousands of years of saints who have gone before. Our community of memory must include not only saints from down the street, but also those from down the ages. Let us hear the stories of John and Teresa from last week, but also those of St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, to name only two. Let us draw from that “great cloud of witnesses” and learn from their journeys, so that our memory may span the story of God’s relationship with his people.”
Conclusion
It was Chesterton who said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”
And these final thoughts from Spurgeon help me tremendously,
“Once more upon this point: if you have met with troubles, remember they will come to an end. The holy man in our text says, "When he hath tried me." As much as to say, He will not always be doing it; there will come a time when He will have done trying me. Beloved, put a stout heart to a steep hill and you will climb it before long. Put the ship in good trim for a storm; and though the winds may howl for a while, they will at length sob themselves asleep. Only have patience and the end will come. Many a man of God has lived through a hundred troubles when he thought one would kill him; and so will it be with you. You young beginners, you that are bound for the kingdom, but have only lately started for it, be not amazed if you meet with conflicts. If you very soon meet with difficulties, be not surprised. Let your trials be evidence to you rather that you are in the right, than that you are in the wrong way; "for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?" He that will go to hell will find many to help him thither; but he that will go to heaven may have to cut his way through a host of adversaries. … If thou wert only a bit of common clay God would not put thee into the furnace; but as thou art gold and He knows it, thou must be refined; and to be refined it is needful that the fire should exercise its power upon thee. Because thou art bound for heaven thou wilt meet with storms on thy voyage to glory.”
As I think about people who are willing to accept the hand of God in all things and people who continue to trust his Sovereignty in the face of raw emotion, and as I watch those people stay connected to people of faith, I am reminded of the passage in Luke 18. Jesus in his teachings on prayer tells his disciples a parable so they “might not lose heart.” In this story about a persistent widow, Jesus illustrates a person who persists in the face of difficulty, and then ends with this question, “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
It’s as if Jesus knows our hearts – and he knows that we are apt to lose our faith in the face of our own difficulties. But he desires that we remain faithful and full of faith. “14Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. 15For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. 16Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:14-16
Alternate Conclusion:
In his poem Affliction (IV) the poet and pastor George Herbert (1593–1633) captures this paradox of resilient faith in the midst of deep anguish.
Broken in pieces all asunder,
Lord, hunt me not,
A thing forgot,
Once a poor creature, now a wonder,
A wonder tortur’d in the space
Betwixt this world and that of grace.
My thoughts are all a case of knives,
Wounding my heart
With scatter’d smart,
As wat’ring pots give flowers their lives.
Nothing their fury can control,
While they do wound and prick my soul.
All my attendants are at strife,
Quitting their place
Unto my face:
Nothing performs the task of life:
The elements are let loose to fight,
And while I live, try out their right.
Oh help, my God! let not their plot
Kill them and me,
And also thee,
Who art my life: dissolve the knot,
As the sun scatters by his light
All the rebellions of the night.
Then shall those powers, which work for grief,
Enter thy pay,
And day by day
Labour thy praise, and my relief;
With care and courage building me,
Till I reach heav’n, and much more, thee.
References and Resources
"On Being Pursued by the Black Dog" The Rev. Dr. William L. Self; April 17, 2005; www.day1.net
Stephen C. Foster; http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/gallery/gal_foster_2.html
Reflections By Dan Clendenin; 8 May 2006; The Power of the Dogs: When Trouble is Near; http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20060508JJ.shtml
G. K Chesterton as quoted in The Midwest Chesterton News in “Schall on Chesterton,” http://www.morec.com/schall/chestert.htm
John Eldredge, in The Journey of Desire quoting G. K. Chesterton
Pastor Mark Batterson; Spiritual Temperaments: The "Mystical" Type; The Heart of Worship
Sermon (No. 2098), August 4th, 1889, by C. H. SPURGEON, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
John Eldredge; The Ransomed Heart, reading 277 from The Sacred Romance, pp. 207–8
G. K. Chesterton
Sermon (No. 2098), August 4th, 1889, by C. H. SPURGEON, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
