Living Words

The Lord Answered Job

Job 38-41

by William Klock

Job has cried out to the Lord.  He’s demanded a hearing.  And in the face of God’s silence he’s thrown down the gauntlet.  He’s listed a host of sins and has called down curses on himself should he be guilty of any of them.  If God doesn’t strike him down, he may still be sitting on the ash heap scraping his sores with a potsherd, but at least he can claim that his righteousness has been vindicated.  And so I think it’s safe to say that Job was probably surprised when the Lord did speak.

Chapter 38 begins with the words, “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said…”  God coming in a whirlwind is never a good thing.  It means that God is angry.  It’s how he came to Adam and Eve after they’d disobeyed him.  It was how he came to Ezekiel to express his anger with Israel.  And now he comes to Job and his friends in a whirlwind.  And note, it’s specifically the Lord who comes.  In Job the narrator refers to the Lord—to Yahweh—the God of Israel, but Job and his friends refer to him with the more generic Elohim or El Shaddai—God or God Almighty.  It makes sense.  Job and his friends aren’t Jews and so they don’t refer to God by the name he revealed to Israel.  That may be part of their problem.  They lack the full revelation that the Lord had given to his people.  It may be that part of Elihu’s function—the fourth friend who suddenly appears at the end of the dialogues—is meant to bring us closer to the God of Israel.  Elihu wasn’t an Israelite, but he’s so close.  He’s the descendant of Abraham’s nephew.  Elihu brought us closer to the truth about God than Job or the other friends had got, but still fell short.  So close, but not quite there.  And now the Lord, the God of Israel arrives in a whirlwind and speaks.  And it’s not just the whirlwind that communicates his anger:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?

Dress for action like a man;

         I will question you, and you make it known to me.  (Job 38:2-3)

Job has been arrogant and presumptuous—and not just Job, the other have too as they’ve made wrong pronouncements about God and accused righteous Job of sin.  Finally, the Lord answers, but what will quickly become obvious is that he hasn’t come to teach wisdom; he’s come to rebuke.  It’s also important to remember that God isn’t angry with Job because of unrighteousness.  The Lord himself has defended Job’s righteousness.  That’s not the issue.  The problem is Job’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of God.  The Adversary’s case was focused on Job’s motivations for being righteous.  Job has won that case for the Lord, but in the aftermath Job has complained and accused and shown that he does not understand God or his ways and the Lord has now come to set Job—and his friends—straight.

So how does the Lord respond to the errors and foolishness and presumption of these friends?  Well, his address comes in two speeches with a few lines from Job between them.  Chapters 38 and 39 contain the Lord’s first speech and the Lord’s focus here is on his governance of the cosmos—specifically on his establishing and maintaining order.  Chapter 38 focuses on the big stuff and then in Chapter 39 the Lord zeroes in on the smaller affairs of life.  We’ve got a long passage today, so we can’t read the whole speech, but that’s okay.  The Lord makes his point through repetition so we’ll start with the first stanza, verses 4-7:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

         Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements—surely you know!

         Or who stretched the line upon it?

On what were its bases sunk,

         or who laid its cornerstone,

when the morning stars sang together

         and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

 

“Were you there?” or some variation of that is the Lord’s persistent question through these chapters.  Job is righteous, but he’s known horrible suffering and so he’s called the Lord’s justice into question.  Job’s has accused the Lord of not ordering the cosmos, of not running things properly.  Remember the Retribution Principle is his basis for understanding justice.  God is supposed to punish the wicked and reward the righteous.  God’s fallen down on the Job when it comes to Job and so Job has questioned God’s governance.  For ancient people order was key.  The duty of the gods was to maintain order and God clearly, Job as accused, isn’t doing it right.  God, Job thinks, is not just.

So the Lord asks, “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?”  The Lord describes his giving order to Creation.  He’s asking Job, “Could you have done that?”  And he goes on: Who brought the waters of chaos under control?  Was that you, Job?  No, that was me.  Who causes the dawn to break every morning?  Have you walked the depths of the sea?  Do you know what’s down there in the dark?  Have you ever been to my storehouses of snow and have you ever cleft the clouds to make a channel for the rain?  Who has begotten the morning dew and the frost?  Was that you, Job.  No, that was me.  Did you set the stars in the heavens?  Can you send forth lightning?  If you were to command the lightning would it even recognise your voice?  This is Chapter 38 in summary.

Job has questioned the Lord’s establishment of the cosmos and his governance of it.  Job has presumed to think that, given the opportunity, he could do a better job.  He’s reduced the governance of the cosmos to a naïve and overly-simplistic model.  And so the Lord asks a series of questions.  Were you there?  And Job has to admit that, no, he wasn’t.  Was it you?  And Job has to admit again, no, I wasn’t.  It was the Lord.  Not only that, none of this is even remotely fathomable to Job or to any human being.  If Job were in charge, the earth would have no foundations, no storehouse of snow, and he’d never be able to figure out how to get the rain to the earth.

Beginning at 38:39 the Lord continues the speech, but narrows his focus going from big things like the foundations of the earth and the stars in the heavens to the animal kingdom: Can you hunt the lion’s prey?  Do you know how the mountain goat gives birth?  Who has let the wild donkey run free?  Is the wild ox willing to serve you?  Do you give the horse his might?  And finally, in 39:26-30:

“Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars

         and spreads his wings toward the south?

Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up

         and makes his nest on high?

On the rock he dwells and makes his home,

         on the rocky crag and stronghold.

From there he spies out the prey;

         his eyes behold it from far away.

His young ones suck up blood,

         and where the slain are, there is he.”

 

The Lord has ordered the animal kingdom just as he’s ordered the heavens, the rains, the storm, and the foundations of the earth.  Does Job know anything of these matters?  No.  He can observe them and he knows the hawk soars and that the eagle makes his nest on high, but he doesn’t know why and if it were up to him to govern these things, the lion would starve and the eagle would plummet to the ground.  And so the Lord concludes his first speech in 40:2 asking, “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?  He who argues with God, let him answer.”

And Job finally responds with wisdom:

“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you?

         I lay my hand on my mouth.

I have spoken once, and I will not answer;

         twice, but I will proceed no further.” (Job 40:4-5)

The Lord has answered.  It’s not the answer Job wanted, but the Lord’s point has been made.  Job puts his hand over his mouth and is ready to listen—the wisest thing he’s done all day.  The Lord continues 40:7:

“Dress for action like a man;

         I will question you, and you make it known to me.

Will you even put me in the wrong?

         Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?

Have you an arm like God,

         and can you thunder with a voice like his?

“Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity;

         clothe yourself with glory and splendor.

Pour out the overflowings of your anger,

         and look on everyone who is proud and abase him.

Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low

         and tread down the wicked where they stand.

Hide them all in the dust together;

         bind their faces in the world below.

Then will I also acknowledge to you

         that your own right hand can save you.  (Job 40:7-14)

The Lord challenges Job a second time.  This time he begins very frankly: You’ve condemned me to justify yourself.  Will you really defame the Lord in order to defend your own righteousness, Job?  And so the Lord challenges Job: How about I hand over control of the cosmos to you and you can impose order on it.  What would happen if Job were to be God for a day?  Could he bring justice on the basis of the Retribution Principle?

It’s interesting that the Lord only goes on to talk about Job punishing the wicked, probably because it would be a lot easier to punish the wicked than to protect the righteous from suffering, but the Lord’s ultimate point is that Job would fail all around.  Not only is Job incapable of fulfilling God’s role, his concept of justice, embodied in the Retribution Principle, is flawed.  Job and his friends have been looking to justice to explain the cosmos, but back in Chapter 28 the narrator instead has pointed us to wisdom and the Lord points us to wisdom as well.

Beginning at 40:15 the Lord shifts gears a bit.  He’s exposed the shallowness of Job’s complaint and silenced his accusations.  Now the Lord shows us the way forward.  Back in 28:28 the narrator told us that the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and now the Lord’s going to show Job what that looks like.  He does that by describing to mythical creatures, Behemoth and Leviathan.  We could spend a lot of time talking about the identity of these two creatures, but we don’t have time this morning and we’d run the risk of missing the point of the text.  Behemoth and Leviathan were chaos creatures in the thought of Israel and her neighbours.  They were mythical creatures on the periphery of the ordered world.  They’re sort of the tornadoes of the animal kingdom.  They weren’t evil; they were just sort of outside the order of creation.  They might wreak havoc, but not because they’re bad.  It’s just what they do.  And yet the Lord still exercises control over them.  The Lord brings them into the dialogue here, because Job earlier accused God of treating him as if he were one of these chaos creatures in need of taming.  And so the Lord now sort of say, “Okay Job, you accused me of treating you like Behemoth, let’s look at that.”

“Behold, Behemoth,

         which I made as I made you;

         he eats grass like an ox.

(So the Lord draws a connection between Behemoth and Job.  He’s made them both.  And Job, just like Behemoth has been well fed.)

Behold, his strength in his loins,

         and his power in the muscles of his belly.

He makes his tail stiff like a cedar;

         the sinews of his thighs are knit together.

His bones are tubes of bronze,

         his limbs like bars of iron.

(I’ve made him strong, just as I’ve made you, Job.)

“He is the first of the works of God;

         let him who made him bring near his sword!

(He is first amongst his kid, just as you are, Job.)

For the mountains yield food for him

         where all the wild beasts play.

(I care for him as I care for you.)

Under the lotus plants he lies,

         in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh.

For his shade the lotus trees cover him;

         the willows of the brook surround him.

(I protect him just as I protect you, Job.)

Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened;

         he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.

(When trouble comes he is not afraid, just as you should trust me and not be afraid, Job.)

Can one take him by his eyes,

         or pierce his nose with a snare?

(Behemoth is invulnerable and so should you be, Job.  But, instead of trusting me, you’ve accused me of injustice and foolishly left yourself open to my snare.)

Job accused God of mistreating him, of treating him not as his friend and loyal servant, but as a chaos creature and the Lord’s response is to say, “If only, Job.  I care for you, just as I care for Behemoth, but when the storms come, Behemoth knows that I have ordered the cosmos well and he remains unafraid—he certainly never accuses me of incompetence.  Instead, you’ve been sitting on your ash heap shaking your fist at me and accusing me of injustice.  Job, you need to be more like Behemoth!”  Brothers and Sisters, be like Behemoth!  Fear the Lord.  Trust in the one who laid the foundations of the earth, who places the stars in the heavens, who provides prey for the lion and causes the eagle to soar.  That is the beginning of wisdom.

Then, beginning with 41:1, the Lord compares himself to Leviathan, another chaos creature.  The way most of our English translations work with both of these passages gives us the sense that God is asking Job all of these “Can you do this?” and “Can you do that?” questions with the implication that, no, Job can’t, but God can.  That’s misleading.  That’s what the Lord was doing in his first speech in Chapters 38 and 39, but here he’s addressing how we should approach him.  Unlike the stanzas of the first speech, here the Lord never says what he can do that Job cannot.  The Lord is comparing himself to Leviathan here.  It’s a longer passage so I’ll have summarise it a bit.

“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook…? (v. 1)

(Job, you cannot control Leviathan and you can’t control me.)

Will you play with him as with a bird,

         or will you put him on a leash for your girls? (v. 5)

(He will not submit or become your pet and neither will I.)

Can you fill his skin with harpoons

         or his head with fishing spears? (v. 7)

(You cannot win a battle with him and you cannot win a battle with me.)

No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.

         Who then is he who can stand before me? (v. 10)

Who can strip off his outer garment?

         Who would come near him with a bridle? (v. 13)

(Leviathan cannot be domesticated and neither can I.)

Out of his mouth go flaming torches;

         sparks of fire leap forth.

When he raises himself up, the mighty are afraid;

         at the crashing they are beside themselves. (vv. 19, 25)

(You don’t want to arouse Leviathan and you don’t want to arouse me.)

Though the sword reaches him, it does not avail,

         nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin. (v. 26)

(Leviathan is invulnerable and so am I.)

On earth there is not his like,

         a creature without fear. (v. 33)

(No creature is his equal.  That goes for Job and if Job isn’t Leviathan’s equal, he certainly isn’t the Lord’s equal—but that’s more or less how Job has approached him in his demands.)

He sees everything that is high;

         he is king over all the sons of pride. (v. 34)

(The Lord is king over the proud.  They think they can stand up to him, question his governance, and even make demands of him, but the Lord is King.)

Job has tried to confront the Lord and what the Lord’s done here is to say, “Okay Job, let’s back up a bit.  Would you dream of confronting Leviathan?  Do you think you could control him?  The obvious answer is “no” and Job knows that.  And so the Lord is saying, if you can’t subdue Leviathan, what makes you think you can subdue and domesticate me and issue commands to me?  In summary the Lord is saying here, “Job, if you can’t even control Leviathan, what makes you think you can control me?  No, you need to be more like Behemoth.  I care for him as I care for you and he knows to trust me when times are tough.  Have faith job.  To fear me is the beginning of wisdom.”

We’ll stop at this point today and finish up the book of Job next week with Job’s response and the epilogue.  There’s a lot here to think about.  Maybe one of the most striking things is that Job isn’t really about helping the suffering to find comfort.  At least not directly.  That’s often what we want when things are bad.  In times of trial we often set our faith on asking and believing that God will make everything better.  He’ll heal us or heal a sick loved one.  He’ll heal or restore a broken relationship.  He’ll get us through tough economic times.  He’ll save us from someone who’s out to get us.  He’ll bring an end to a pandemic.  We’ve all been there in one way or another.  Other times we set our faith on God somehow giving us an answer to why we’re suffering or at least expect that he’ll explain how our suffering fits into his working all things for good.  But the book of Job gives us a very different answer and points our faith in a different direction.  Here the Lord tells us that in midst of trial and suffering, in the midst of loss and sorrow we need to point our faith towards the God who is perfectly wise and who has established and governs the cosmos with wisdom.  Not only that, but as we take hold of him in faith, as we trust in him, our first priority ought to be to ask for the grace, to ask for the help to live well before him no matter our circumstances.

Wisdom is key.  All through the book we’ve seen Job and his friends looking to justice.  Justice is important.  Justice is good.  But God isn’t subject to or contingent on some external standard of justice.  He is just, but justice flows from him and, ultimately, his justice is governed by his wisdom.  This is the point of the Lord’s first speech.  He is the one who has established and governs the cosmos.  Whatever we think of how he does it, neither you nor I nor Job are worthy to devise a scheme to govern even the smallest part of it.  As this reality sinks into Job it moves him to admit, “You are God.  I am not.”  But that’s only the first step.  It’s not enough.  Knowing who God is and knowing our place ought to foster a certain attitude or posture towards God, and that’s the point of the second speech.  Knowing who God is and knowing who we are, ought to move us to humility and to submission.  Now, that’s not an easy posture to take.  We want to be in control.  We at least want to know why things happen.  But part of knowing who God is, is to move us to faith.  Reflecting on his establishment and governance of the cosmos, even in light of our trials and tribulations, ought to move us to a trusting faith.

It’s worth noting that the Lord never does give Job an explanation for his suffering.  If he did, that would undermine this whole exercise, because in the real world we do not receive such answers.  God rules in wisdom.  We create the problems.  He pronounced his creation good.  Then we rebelled and messed it up.  He established order.  We spend out days creating disorder.  And then we complain to God that we suffer.  Could God remove our suffering?  Yes, he could, but in his mercy he’s opted for something else.  In our self-righteousness and short-sightedness we think that others are the problem and forget that God could whip creation back into order by removing evil from it, but in so doing he would have to remove us as well.  Instead, the Lord has lovingly chosen the path of mercy and grace even though it means that we, his creatures, continue to make a mess of things, to hurt each other, and to hurt ourselves.  Rather than wipe us from the face of creation, he draws us back to himself, enfolds us with his grace, and gives us hope that one day he will set everything to rights.  He offers redemption rather than judgement to the very people who have upended his creation, who daily rebel against him, who have made ourselves his enemies.  He has, himself, become one of us and died the death we deserved that we might be reconciled to him.  And for some reason we still want to question his justice and his governance of the cosmos.

Brothers and Sisters, we can never fathom the wisdom of God and so he calls us simply to trust.  That, for us, is wisdom.  The Lord’s comparisons here to Behemoth and Leviathan make no comment on righteousness or justice.  In his suffering, Job’s focus was on his righteousness and he angrily accused God of injustice.  But in all that he missed the point.  Behemoth isn’t an example of righteousness.  Behemoth is an example of stability and trust.  Leviathan isn’t a paragon of justice, but an example of one who cannot be challenged or domesticated.  Wisdom lies in recognising that God cannot be challenged and that we can stand secure in the midst of raging rivers as we trust in his wisdom, goodness, and faithfulness.

But don’t forget that you and I have so much more reason to trust the Lord than Job did.  Job was not an Israelite and did not know the life of the Lord’s covenant.  Presumably he knew little or probably nothing of Abraham and the Lord’s faithfulness to him and to his family.  Job knew nothing of the Lord’s deliverance of his people from slavery or his establishment of them as his people.  Job was not amongst those who cried out to the Lord and were heard and delivered.  And Job, of course, knew nothing of the faithfulness of God revealed so profoundly in Jesus and his death and resurrection.  Brothers and Sisters, if God could expect Job to trust in his wise governance of Creation, how much more ought we to trust him.  We not only have the evidence around us in the natural world, we have not only the foundations of the earth, the rain and snow, the soaring eagle and the stalking lion, but we also see God’s faithfulness to his people over and over again.  We live in the shadow of the cross, which gives us insight into the relationship between suffering and God’s wise governance the likes of which Job never imagined.  And this morning the Lord invites us to his Table.  As we gather here, as we eat the meal, as we participate in that great exodus from sin and death led by Jesus, let us be moved again to faith, to trust in this God who inexplicably loves us despite our sin.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, thank you for your patience with us.  You’ve not only created us, but you’ve show us mercy and grace even in our rebellion.  Even still, we fight, we struggle against you, we question your goodness and your wisdom and you are patient.  Teach us to be more like Behemoth, we ask.  As we look on your creation and as we look at your faithfulness to your people, strengthen our faith and teach us to trust in you, because you are supremely worthy of our trust, even as we stand in the midst of raging rivers.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

Listen to me!

Job 32-37

by William Klock

One of the worst pieces of pastoral advice that I’ve ever heard is that it’s okay to be angry with God.  I’ve heard it over and over.  I talk to people who have been through something difficult and often they’re struggling with faith and eventually they tell me that some pastor or counsellor told them that it was okay to be angry with God.  The other version of this bad advice is that they’ve been told that they need to forgive God for some bad thing he’s caused to happen.  And when I hear this, it’s no wonder these folks are struggling in their faith.  Brothers and Sisters, will God ever do something that is wrong?  Will God ever sin against you?  Will God ever do something for which he needs to be forgiven?  The answer is “No”.  This is why the author of the book of Job has told us that wisdom is to fear—to trust in—the Lord.  He is good, he is faithful, and ultimately he is wise.  He is wise in ways we, as finite beings, will not and cannot ever fathom.  And so we’re called to trust in him.  That’s what human wisdom looks like.  But can you fear a God, can you trust a God whom you believe has it in for you or who needs to be forgiven for having wronged you?  This is why it’s such bad pastoral advice.  It might help a person resolve a difficult situation in the short term.  It is good advice to forgive someone who’s wrong you.  But God isn’t your friend or your mom or dad or any other human being from your past.  God is not a fallen sinner who makes mistakes or commits sins.  God is God and anything that undermines that truth will also undermine our faith.

This gets at one of the key points Elihu makes in Chapters 32-37 of Job.  In Chapter 32 this newcomer, Elihu, son of Barachel the Buzite suddenly appears in the story.  He really pops out of nowhere.  So far it’s been Job and his three friends, but now suddenly we find that a fourth younger friend has been sitting by and listening and now he interjects.  Job has thrown down the gauntlet and asserted his innocence before God.  At this point we’re expecting that either the divine silence will continue—which is what Job expects—or that God will, actually, finally speak.  Job’s got us on the edge of our seats waiting for the resolution.  And suddenly this new fourth friend pushes us back into our seats and declares that he’s got something important to say.

So who is Elihu?  Whereas the other three friends are clearly not Jewish, but represent various flavours of the great wisdom of the East, Elihu is closer to the Jewish audience.  His name is Hebrew for “He is my God”.  He’s not Jewish, but he’s close.  He’s a Buzite—a descendant of Abraham’s nephew, Buz.  And that illustrates the careful way that Elihu’s ideas are brought to the table.  He rebukes Job and his friends.  Their ideas about God are wrong.  And Elihu is right in most of what he says, but he’s not quite all the way there—just like one of Abraham’s nephews: so close to the covenant community, but still on the outside.

But Elihu’s also really annoying.  He’s not only long-winded—but yes, we’ll get through his whole speech today—but he’s also kind of a twit, who comes across as a disrespectful know-it-all.  Look at Job 32:1-5.

So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes.  Then Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, burned with anger.  He burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God.  He burned with anger also at Job’s three friends because they had found no answer, although they had declared Job to be in the wrong.  Now Elihu had waited to speak to Job because they were older than he.  And when Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these three men, he burned with anger.

 

We usually say that wisdom comes with age and Elihu would hope that, but Elihu also isn’t afraid to point out that sometimes age just causes us to become entrenched in our foolish thinking.  He goes on:

“I am young in years,

         and you are aged;

therefore I was timid and afraid

         to declare my opinion to you.

I said, ‘Let days speak,

         and many years teach wisdom.’

But it is the spirit in man,

         the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.

It is not the old who are wise,

         nor the aged who understand what is right.

Therefore I say, ‘Listen to me;

         let me also declare my opinion.’  (Job 32:6-10)

Elihu has done his best to show respect for his elders.  He has deferred to them, but in the end their wisdom wasn’t very wise.  They’re saying things about God that are offensive.  In particular, he will spend most of his time taking Job to task.  And he says that at the end of the day, wisdom doesn’t come from age; wisdom comes from God.  God made human beings from the dust and animated them, enlivened them with his breath.  And Elihu says, wisdom comes from God in a similar way.  One would hope that with age one would have greater opportunity to understand the wisdom that comes from God, but not everyone bothers—and Job and his friends have apparently wasted their years.  But Elihu will get them sorted out.  (See, I said that even when he’s right, he’s an annoying twit.)  The rest of Chapter 32 is Elihu’s rather long-winded explanation.  He’s “full of words” and he can’t hold his tongue anymore or he’ll burst like a wineskin and promises in verse 22 that he doesn’t know how to flatter.  (And, we’ll see, that’s no lie!)

But before Elihu raised his beef with Job, he’s got just a few words for Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.  Look at 32:12-14.

I gave you my attention,

         and, behold, there was none among you who refuted Job

         or who answered his words.

Beware lest you say, ‘We have found wisdom;

         God may vanquish him, not a man.’

He has not directed his words against me,

         and I will not answer him with your speeches.

 

They think they’ve told Job what’s what, but Eliphaz rebukes them.  If they really knew what’s what, they would have refuted Job, but instead, Job has shut them all up.  Zophar didn’t even have a response to Job’s second speech.  But Elihu is much wiser.  No one’s yet raised the points he’s about to raise.

So, first, Elihu sums up Job’s argument.  Look at 33:9-11.

You say, ‘I am pure, without transgression;

         I am clean, and there is no iniquity in me.

Behold, he finds occasions against me,

         he counts me as his enemy,

he puts my feet in the stocks

         and watches all my paths.’

 

Elihu doesn’t use Job’s exact words, but I think Job would agree that this is a fair summary of his argument.  Job has insisted that he is innocent and his complaint is that rather than treating him as his friend, God is treating him as his enemy.  And in verse 12 Elihu makes the central point of his argument against Job:

“Behold, in this you are not right. I will answer you,

         for God is greater than man.

 

Basically, Elihu is rebuking Job for thinking that he can out-God God—for thinking that he knows better than God does.  Remember the triangle I’ve talked about to help us understand the dialogue in Job.  At one corner you’ve got God’s righteousness or justice, at another you’ve got Job’s righteousness, and at the third you’ve got the Retribution Principle.  Well, Elihu is going to stand very firmly at the point representing God’s righteousness and justice.  That’s what he’s going to defend and he’s very rightly noted that this is the point that Job has attacked or called into question.  Job was wrong and Elihu is right.  And at this point, we can agree with Elihu.

Job’s other complaint is that God has been silent.  Elihu rebukes that, too, in verse 13:

Why do you contend against him,

         saying, ‘He will answer none of man’s words’?

 

God has spoken, Elihu goes on to argue in the following verses.  Those horrible dreams that Job has had, that was God trying to get his attention.  The Hebrew in Chapter 33 is difficult and I don’t think the ESV captures it very well, but Elihu’s point in the verses that follow is that he is essentially the answer to Job’s prayers.  Job wants an advocate.  Well, here’s Elihu.  God has sent him to speak to Job, but Elihu casts his role as more of a mediator.  With his help, Job will recover his health and be reconciled with God after he makes a public confession of his wrongdoing and of God’s grace.  In verses 31-33 he says:

Pay attention, O Job, listen to me;

         be silent, and I will speak.

If you have any words, answer me;

         speak, for I desire to justify you.

If not, listen to me;

         be silent, and I will teach you wisdom.”

 

I told you he’s a twit.  He’s not wrong, but he is pretty full of himself.

In Chapter 34 Elihu defends the justice of God.  We can’t read the whole chapter, but verses 10-15 are a good summary:

“Therefore, hear me, you men of understanding:

         far be it from God that he should do wickedness,

         and from the Almighty that he should do wrong.

For according to the work of a man he will repay him,

         and according to his ways he will make it befall him.

Of a truth, God will not do wickedly,

         and the Almighty will not pervert justice.

Who gave him charge over the earth,

         and who laid on him the whole world?

If he should set his heart to it

         and gather to himself his spirit and his breath,

all flesh would perish together,

         and man would return to dust.

 

The point is that Job has no right to be angry with God or to say that God has wronged him.  God does no wrong and he does not pervert justice.  And then he points his finger at Job and says in verse 17:

Shall one who hates justice govern?

         Will you condemn him who is righteous and mighty.

 

Without God’s creative and sustaining presence all creation would return to dust.  Who are you, Job, to condemn him who sustains creation with his justice?  This, Elihu eventually concludes, is Job’s offense.  Verses 36-37:

Would that Job were tried to the end,

         because he answers like wicked men.

For he adds rebellion to his sin;

         he claps his hands among us

         and multiplies his words against God.”

 

So, Elihu thinks, Job isn’t being punished because of something he did.  No, what’s happened is that God has put Job in the press to test him and Job has failed the test.  Elihu affirms the Retribution Principle, but he puts a different spin on it than Job’s friends.  They assume that Job has sinned.  Elihu’s point is that sometimes God’s punishment or affliction isn’t in response to some past sin, but is meant to sort of expose and root out future sin—and that that’s just what happened to Job.  Everything was fine, but God put Job to the test and that test has exposed Job’s wrong thoughts about God.  The good news, from Elihu’s perspective, is that all Job has to do is confess and repent and God will make him whole again.  Of course, this is where Elihu makes the same mistake the other friends did.  He’s assuming Job’s pursuit of righteousness is for the material benefits.

So, again, Elihu understands justice in terms of the Retribution Principle.  He puts a bit of a different spin on it, but it’s still the Retribution Principle.  And since this is his basis for understanding justice, just like Job’s other friends, he also assumes that Job’s in it for the stuff.  That’s kind of the only way the Retribution Principle makes sense.  And so, in 35:3 he accuses Job:

“[Y]ou ask, ‘What advantage have I?

         How am I better off than if I had sinned?’

 

But now Elihu has put words in Job’s mouth—and they’re wrong—Job has proved that he’s not in it for the stuff—Elihu proceeds to explain why this reasoning is wrong.  But the thing is that even though Elihu is misreading Job, what he says about God is actually true.  He begins in 35:5 by reminding Job of his place:

Look at the heavens, and see;

         and behold the clouds, which are higher than you.

 

Basically, “God made the heavens.  Who do you think you are questioning him?”  And, more important, “What could possibly make you think that God needs your righteousness?”  In verse 7:

If you are righteous, what do you give to him?

         Or what does he receive from your hand?

 

God desire for us live righteously, but he doesn’t “need” it from us.  Remember how ancient pagan religion worked.  The gods had needs and when humans met those needs, it put the gods in their debt.  That’s how you got what you wanted from the gods.  Elihu has falsely assumed that this is the basis for Job’s righteousness.  He’s wrong about that.  But he’s spot-on about God.

Then he addresses Job’s angry cries for God to speak and to justify his actions against him.  “Everyone cries out to God thinking that God has done them wrong,” says Elihu.  And in verses 10-11:

But none says, ‘Where is God my Maker,

         who gives songs in the night,

who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth

         and makes us wiser than the birds of the heavens?’

 

People act like God is at their beck and call or they think they can demand an account of him and are then angry when he doesn’t respond.  Maybe, instead, they’d actually get a response from God if they pursued him not in anger, but in trust.  Maybe they’d actually hear from God if, instead of demanding answers from him, they sought him in humility to learn the ways of his wisdom.

Elihu’s big point here is that he thinks that in his self-righteousness, Job has exalted himself over God.  He overstates his case, but this is in fact what Job has done.  He thinks that God is taking too great an interest in him—as if he’s micromanaging him—and he thinks that he can hold God to account by making demands of him.

And so in Chapters 36 and 37 Elihu waxes eloquent about the nature of God.  It’s one of the highlights of the book of Job, but it’s too long to read here this morning.  Elihu affirms the mightiness of God, but also that God is not arbitrary.  He has “strength of heart”—a literal rendering of 36:5—which has the sense of commitment to his purposes.  God has a wise plan and he’s seeing it through.  Elihu affirms the justice of God.  He does indeed punish the wicked and reward the righteous.  And that’s just what’s happened to Job, says Elihu.  Again, Job isn’t being punished for the sin he committed in the past, but pre-emptively for this self-righteous attitude he’s taken towards God in the midst of testing.  So Elihu is right about God in some important ways.  God is indeed transcendent.  God is indeed just.  Elihu goes on at length with some wonderful poetry about God’s work creating and sustaining the cosmos.  He causes the rain and snow to fall, he directs the clouds and the thunder.  And yet no one can understand it.  As Jesus will say, “The rain falls on both the just and the unjust”.  Why?  Who knows?  Elihu would say that God knows, but his ways and his purposes are beyond our understanding.  But that doesn’t mean his creation isn’t ordered—or as Elihu puts it, his ordering of creation is just and reveals God’s justice.  Again, Elihu is right on all these points.  But that doesn’t mean he isn’t also wrong.  He affirms that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous, but he oversimplifies this—as if you can make a simple equation out of it.  He rightly affirms God’s transcendence, but he takes it too far.  Elihu’s God is beyond human reach.  But what we’ll see next week is that while God is transcendent and beyond human reach, he is also immanent.  He does, in fact, condescend to us; he does stoop down to our level to speak.  So Elihu brings some needed correction to the dialogue, he adds some nuance to the ideas the others have already expressed, but ultimately Elihu fails.  He said he'd provide the answers that the others were grasping for, but in the end he falls into the same error.  Why?  Because like the others, Elihu is trying to make sense of the cosmos and to make sense of God’s actions by holding God to a human-conceived concept of justice.  This was the mistake that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar have all made and it’s the mistake that Job himself has made.  Somehow we have to get past that, but for that to happen, we’re going to have to hear from God himself.  That’s what comes next.

So in the end Elihu has an important part to play in Job.  If we’re tempted to idealise Job—which a lot of people have done—Elihu is right in pointing out Job’s self-righteousness as it relates to God.  Yes, Job is righteous.  Even God affirms that.  But Job has no business thinking he can question the justice of God or demand an accounting of him.  Brothers and Sisters, this part of Elihu’s message needs to stick with us.  It’s a perennial human error to think that if we were somehow in God’s position, we’d make better or wiser or more merciful decisions.  I can’t help but think of the movie Bruce Almighty.  Bruce has a great life, but he can’t see all his blessings.  He gets angry with God.  He’s like an impious Job with first world problems.  On the one hand he thinks that God is petty and punishing him unfairly and on the other that God is ignoring him and won’t make an accounting of himself.  And so Bruce is suddenly visited by God who hands over his powers for a week.  If Bruce thinks he can out-God God, here’s his chance.  And what happens?  Bruce proves to be petty and selfish.  He gives himself all the things he wants, but leaves a wake of destruction behind himself.

We forget that the problems of the world—whether it’s the little problems in our own lives or the big ones we see in the newspaper—are the result of human fallenness.  Instead, we think more highly of ourselves than we should and try to blame God for all these things.  We dream up simplistic solutions that ignore the complexities of the real situations.  We forget that the only real solution is the elimination of sin and for God to make all things new.  And, again, we even think of that in overly simplistic ways.  Why can’t God just put an end to evil, we think.  But we forget that to do that would mean putting an end to us—to all of us.  We forget that it would mean cutting short his redemptive plans for the human race and for Creation.  We forget that each of us, in our own way, contributes to the problem, because each of us is fallen.  And yet we persist in thinking that, given the chance, we could manage the world better.  Elihu gives us a much-needed reminder that we can’t.  God is the one perfectly just, perfectly merciful, perfectly wise, not us.

Second, I think we can learn something from Elihu’s insistence that Job would be wise to seek God for what he might teach rather than demanding that God speak and explain or account for his actions.  Elihu is right.  God is wholly other.  He isn’t working customer service.  That said, Elihu goes too far.  He suggests that the way we need to view God is as the wise God who is busy running the cosmos.  We can and should trust in his just governance of everything—he’s right on that point—but that we have no business bothering him with our petty concerns.  That’s where Elihu is wrong.  The fact is that for all his transcendence, God has also drawn near to his people—particularly and most dramatically in Jesus.  God does, in fact, invite our prayers.  St. Peter tells us to cast all our anxieties on him, for he cares for us.  But, again, as much as prayer gives us access to God, Elihu has a point.  The purpose of prayer is not to question God, manipulate him, or try to influence him.  More than anything else, prayer should be a means by which we humbly approach the God who created and maintains the cosmos in wisdom and in goodness.  Prayer should be a means of expressing our trust in him.

Finally, what about Elihu’s assertion to Job that his pain and suffering have been God’s means of speaking and that he’s been using them to try to communicate to Job that he’s guilty?  I think we often think the same way when we’re faced with pain and suffering.  What did I do wrong?, we often think.  When we see some kind of mass or global tragedy, there are always Christians quick to point out that it’s a message from God or an act of his judgement.  Just look at some of the pronouncements that have been made about the current pandemic.  Is Elihu right?  Well, again, yes and no.  In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis wrote, “Pain insists on being attended to.  God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”[1]  Lewis was right.  There’s no ignoring pain.  It shouts at us and it can’t be ignored.  And the Bible does teach us that God sometimes uses pain to get our attention—and often as a response to sin.  God does afflict the wicked.  But Job’s friends, as they try to reduce this down to a simple formula, remind us that things aren’t that simple.  God rarely, if ever, fits our generalisations.  Sometimes God does use pain to shout at us and to get our attention.  God does punish the wicked—sometimes to death and other times bringing them to repentance.  But there, overshadowing any attempt we might make to generalise about God’s involvement in our pain and suffering, is the cross.  There hangs Jesus, mocked, beaten, scourged, nails through his hands and feet, dying.  There hangs Jesus the bearing pain and suffering—and even the death—that we deserve.  There hangs Jesus bearing it on our behalf.  It defies any formula we might think up.  And yet, Brothers and Sisters, from the cross pain does indeed shout at us.  It shouts to the world.  It shouts to the world that this God who is transcendent, who is wholly other, who has created and governs the cosmos with wisdom far beyond our understanding, this God who does indeed punish wickedness and will on day wipe every last trace of it from his Creation, also draws near in love, in mercy, and in grace.  This God who is so big and other, has also become one with us in Jesus, sharing our smallness and knowing our curse of death, that we might once again truly know his greatness and fear him as we were meant to.

Let us pray: Father, we thank you this morning for your word, even when its words are hard as they are in the book of Job.  Thank you for reminding us that you have created and sustain the cosmos in wisdom and justice, thank you for the reminder of your greatness.  But thank you, too, that you do not leave us hanging with the words of Elihu or even with your final speech to Job.  Thank you for the words of the Psalmist and the words of the Prophets that remind us that you are just as near to us as you are far away from us, that for all your transcendence, you are also immanent, that you are also close by.  And thank you, most of all, Jesus in whom you have shared our humanity, our smallness, and even our death that we might live.  As we think on these things, teach us the balance between your greatness and your smallness, your being so far away and yet your being so near, your hatred of sin but also your redeeming love of your sinful people.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] (New York: Macmillan, 1977), page 81.

Let the Almighty answer me!

Job 29-31

by William Klock

It would be an understatement to say that things have gone from bad to worse for Job.  Job’s troubles started at a far worse point than most of us have probably ever known and then went quickly downhill from there.  He’s lost everything: his prosperity, his children, and finally his health.  And yet for Job that wasn’t all.  Job was a righteous man.  Because of that he was esteemed by his friends and his community.  And now that’s gone too.  He once sat in a place of honour at the city gate, a respected elder of the community, but now he sits on an ash heap in the garbage dump.  Job has lost his reputation.

We may miss this because we no longer live in an honour-based culture.  In an honour culture—which is what virtually every culture was before the Twentieth Century—certain choices in life are esteemed over others and the people who choose those things are shown honour by the society, while people who make poor choices are shamed.  This has mostly been lost in our culture in recent decades.  We often hear people talk about it in terms of our having created a “participation trophy” culture.  We still do have some sense of honour, but you can’t have honour without also having shame and we’ve largely done away with the shame.  What little concept we have left of honour won’t last much longer.  But in Job’s world honour was important and Job has lost his.  And this is largely because he and the people around him looked at the world and had a sense of divine justice rooted in what I’ve called the Retribution Principle—this idea that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous.  Seeing Job’s loss of everything and sitting in the town dump scraping his sores with a potsherd meant that he was being punished.  He’d seemed like a righteous man, but clearly he’d been hiding some secret sin and was now being punished.  And this has left Job utterly crushed.  As much as he laments the loss of his material blessings, the biggest blow to him is the loss of reputation.  He knows he’s a righteous man, but everyone now thinks otherwise.

So far we’ve listened in as Job and his three friends have debated.  Job has maintained his righteousness.  He’s refused to compromise his principles and in doing that, he’s proved the Adversary wrong.  Job has pursued righteousness, not for selfish reasons, but because he values righteousness itself.  But Job is still left, as we saw last week, with the big question: Why?  How can God let this happen to him?  And so the second half of the book was introduced by a hymn, sung by the narrator, about wisdom.  Wisdom is more precious than gold, but human beings will never find it.  It’s not buried in the earth the depths of the sea.  Rather wisdom lies with God and thus, to fear the Lord—to trust in him—is the wisest thing a human being can do.  This gives us something to think about as we dive into the second half of the book.  Today we’ll look at Chapters 29 to 31.  Job now launches into a series of three discourses and here we get a sense of his frustration, not only with his situation, but also with God.  Job continues to pursue righteousness, but in terms of wisdom he goes further and further off the rails.  He’s supposed to be one of the wisest of the wise—and so were his three friends—but none of them truly grasps wisdom.

In Chapter 29 Job recalls his former days of blessings from God and honour amongst his people.  Look at verses 2-7:

“Oh, that I were as in the months of old,

         as in the days when God watched over me,

when his lamp shone upon my head,

         and by his light I walked through darkness,

as I was in my prime,

         when the friendship of God was upon my tent,

when the Almighty was yet with me,

         when my children were all around me,

when my steps were washed with butter,

         and the rock poured out for me streams of oil!

When I went out to the gate of the city,

         when I prepared my seat in the square…

 

Right at the outset Job assumes that because his life is no longer full of blessings that God must be absent—he’s no longer watching over Job.  God once shone his light upon Job and guided his path, but now Job is in darkness.  Once the friendship of God was on Job’s tent, but now, Job senses, God has abandoned him—or worse, has become his enemy.

We get a sense here of just how close Job is—or was—to God.  It’s telling that in the divine counsel, when the Adversary challenges God, God immediately thinks of his servant Job.  Now here Job speaks of God’s friendship being upon his tent—his dwelling place.  Now, Job wasn’t a Jew, but the way he phrases this would have, to the Jewish readers of this book, taken on the sense of sacred space.  Because of Job’s friendship, his closeness with God, his very house took on the sense of temple or tabernacle and that casts Job in the role of prophet and priest.  And so the rest of this makes sense when he speaks of the young men deferring to him and the old rising in his presence.  Job held a place of great honour in his community because of his nearness to God.  Even princes and nobles ceased to speak in his presence, he says in verse 9.

But Job’s righteousness wasn’t just pious talk; he also walked the walk.  In verse 12 he says:

I delivered the poor who cried for help,

         and the fatherless who had none to help him.

 

and continuing at verse 14:

I put on righteousness, and it clothed me;

         my justice was like a robe and a turban.

I was eyes to the blind

         and feet to the lame.

I was a father to the needy,

         and I searched out the cause of him whom I did not know.

I broke the fangs of the unrighteous

         and made him drop his prey from his teeth. (Job 29:14-17)

Job deserved his reputation.  This is the first time we’ve heard the details and it contrasts very sharply with where he is now.  In Chapter 30 his speech turns into another lament.  In the first verse he says, “But now they laugh at me.”  But who is it that’s laughing?  It’s not just the people who were once his peers.  No, it’s worse than that.  In verses 1-8 he describes men who have no honour: “men whose fathers I would have disdained (v. 1)…A senseless, a nameless brood (v. 8).  The men who lack wisdom and honour and righteousness—who live like animals—disdain Job.  “They abhor me,” he says in verse 10.

Because God has loosed my cord and humbled me,

         they have cast off restraint in my presence.  (Job 30:11)

Job then moves on from his loss of honour to his physical afflictions before crying out again.  His cry is, on the one hand, a cry to God to hear him, while at the same time a cry of hopeless lament.  Job no longer expects God to hear his cry.  Look at verses 19-21:

God has cast me into the mire,

         and I have become like dust and ashes.

I cry to you for help and you do not answer me;

         I stand, and you only look at me.

You have turned cruel to me;

         with the might of your hand you persecute me.

 

This is the setup for Job’s final appeal in Chapter 31.  Job is convinced that God either isn’t listening or refuses to respond, so he leverages that.  Now, Chapter 31 has some textual difficulties.  Verses 2-4 are the clear introduction to Job’s appeal and the words of verse 1 fit better in the middle of the chapter as he makes his case.  The same goes for verses 38-40, which fit better before what are clearly Job’s closing remarks before that.  These things aren’t that uncommon.  Scribes would sometimes miss a line or two and, rather than recopy the whole thing, they’d make a note of it in the margin.  A later scribe might not be sure where to insert that marginal text and would just put it at the beginning or end of the chapter.  So in verses 2-4 Job begins:

What would be my portion from God above

         and my heritage from the Almighty on high?

Is not calamity for the unrighteous,

         and disaster for the workers of iniquity?

Does not he see my ways

         and number all my steps?

 

This is the Retribution Principle.  “The unrighteous are punished.  That is justice,” says Job, “So why is God punishing me?  Has he not seen my ways?”  Of course, the question is rhetorical.  God knows Job’s righteousness.  So Job’s now calling God’s justice into question as he goes on to make the case for his own righteousness.  Specifically, here’s what Job’s doing now.  He’s speaking as much to God as to his friends at this point and so he makes two things clear: First, God punishes the wicked and, second, God is watching all of this.  That means that as Job goes on to make his detailed claims to righteousness, if he’s being dishonest, then God is obligated to punish him in some way.  It’s Job’s last-ditch effort to reclaim his honour.  He will insist on his righteousness.  He lists a hosts of sins and calls down curses on himself if he is guilty of any of them.  If God does not act or if God refuses to speak in response—and it’s clear that Job is counting on divine silence—then he will be vindicated.  He may not have his material blessings back, but at least he will have his reputation.

Job begins in verse 5 with his honesty:

“If I have walked with falsehood

         and my foot has hastened to deceit;

(Let me be weighed in a just balance,

         and let God know my integrity!)

if my step has turned aside from the way

         and my heart has gone after my eyes,

         and if any spot has stuck to my hands,

then let me sow, and another eat,

         and let what grows for me be rooted out.  (Job 31:5-8)

Notice how Job calls down a curse on himself if he has been dishonest in his business: may someone else eat what I have sewn.  Now look at verses 9-12:

“If my heart has been enticed toward a woman,

         and I have lain in wait at my neighbor’s door,

then let my wife grind for another,

         and let others bow down on her.

For that would be a heinous crime;

         that would be an iniquity to be punished by the judges;

for that would be a fire that consumes as far as Abaddon,

         and it would burn to the root all my increase.

 

Again, he calls down another curse: If I have pursued my neighbour’s wife, may my wife “grind grain for another”—a euphemism for his wife bearing another man’s children.  This is a crime that the judges would be sure to punish and that would condemn Job to destruction, surely then, God will not overlook it if Job is guilty.

Job continues with this pattern.  In verses 13-15 he calls down a curse on himself if he has “rejected the cause of my manservant or maidservant”.  In verses 16-23 Job asserts his care for the poor:

“If I have withheld anything that the poor desired,

         or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail,

or have eaten my morsel alone,

         and the fatherless has not eaten of it…

if I have seen anyone perish for lack of clothing,

         or the needy without covering,

if his body has not blessed me,

         and if he was not warmed with the fleece of my sheep,

if I have raised my hand against the fatherless,

         because I saw my help in the gate… (Job 31:16-17, 19-21)

So far Job has asserted his faithfulness in marriage, his care for his servants, and his generosity with the poor.  Again, Job wasn’t an Israelite, but the things he’s addressing were all core to the ethical system that the Lord had given to Israel.  These are key things that define righteousness, especially as it pertains to externals.  But Job goes on in verse 24:

“If I have made gold my trust

         or called fine gold my confidence…

 

Job has been richly blessed with material wealth, but he has not made an idol of it.  Similarly, in verse 26:

if I have looked at the sun when it shone,

         or the moon moving in splendor…

 

Job has not turned to other gods either.  He says in verse 28:

this also would be an iniquity to be punished by the judges,

         for I would have been false to God above.

 

He has been as faithful in his religious duties to God as he has been faithful in his familial duties to his wife.  He has not trusted in his wealth or worshipped other gods.  Verse 1 seems to fit best with these verses as well.  Job says there:

“I have made a covenant with my eyes;

         how then could I gaze at a virgin?

 

The sense isn’t so much about sexual ethics, but in the context, about Job using his wealth and position to build a harem.  Other men would have done that and it would have been culturally acceptable, but Job has lived humbly, not exploiting his position.  He has followed the way of righteousness.

Finally, Job wraps up his appeal with a miscellaneous ethical list: “If I have rejoiced at the ruin of him who hated me” (v. 29), [If] I have not opened my door to the traveller” (v. 32), “If I have concealed my transgressions as others do” (v. 33), and “If my land has cried out against me…if I have eaten its yield without payment” (vv. 38-39).  Job covers the gamut of sins.  “If I have done any of this,” he cries out, “may God bring these sins back on me in punishment.”

He concludes in verses 35-37:

Oh, that I had one to hear me!

         (Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!)

         Oh, that I had the indictment written by my adversary!

Surely I would carry it on my shoulder;

         I would bind it on me as a crown;

I would give him an account of all my steps;

         like a prince I would approach him.

 

This is Job’s formal claim to innocence.  He has called down curses on himself if he has lied.  He makes his mark.  The “signature” in Hebrew is the letter taw, which in the script used in the days of the Old Testament was actually an “X”.  Job uses legal language here.  He has stated his case and has signed his mark to it.  If this were an earthly court and no one rose to challenge his statement, Job would leave vindicated.  Now, on the one hand, Job is ready should God finally speak.  He will defend his case with confidence.  But, the fact is, since God has refused to answer Job thus far, Job’s expectation is that God will not answer.  And there’s the problem in Job’s thinking. He’s trying to win back his honour through manipulation.  And that, I think, is the point on which we can transition to our application.

Again, we see that Job’s righteousness is a disinterested righteousness.  He’s not in it for the blessings; he values righteousness because it’s right.  And this is good.  Job continues to prove that God was not wrong to hold him up as a paragon of righteousness in the beginning.  Job was introduced as upright and blameless and nothing he’s done has shown otherwise.  But.  But, Job has a seriously flawed view of God.  We’ve seen hints of it here and there.  Earlier in the book we got a hint that Job, for all his righteousness, also thought that he could manage God or placate his anger through the observation of petty rituals.  This is how people in the ancient Near East thought.  We call it the Great Symbiosis.  Ancient religion was about figuring out what the gods wanted or needed and then providing it, which then obligated them to provide what the worshippers wanted or needed.  But Israel was to be different.  When the Lord made himself known to Israel, he wasn’t like the pagan gods.  He has no needs.  He cannot be manipulated.  He is worthy of worship because he is God.  But there’s a splinter of that old paganism firmly wedged in Job’s conception of God.

Consider, too, that as Job tries to win back his reputation, he does so at God’s expense.  Job assumes the Retribution Principle defines justice and he asserts his own righteousness and, in the process, Job sacrifices God’s righteousness.  Job, in his frustration, has reached the point of accusing God.  He’s trying to make sense of his situation.  He’s looking for an answer to that big question of “Why?”.  But Job’s looking in the wrong place.  He’s trying to answer the question by looking at himself and asserting his own righteousness over everything else, rather than looking to God and giving God the benefit of the doubt.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but Job has forgotten this in his despair.

In his final claim, Job has called on God to act.  Either I’m guilty or I’m not, Job claims.  And he calls down curses on himself if he is guilty.  To his way of thinking, he wins his case if God remains silent or refuses to act.  But, of course, that’s just what Job expects.  God hasn’t spoken so far, so why would he speak now.  I bet most of us have done something similar in an attempt to manipulate God or to force his hand.  We’re faced with a difficult decision.  Often, I think, it’s a decision to do something we know is sinful.  And so we pray and we ask God to speak.  We ask God to give us a sign.  Maybe we ask the Holy Spirit to convict us if what we’re planning to do is truly sinful.  Once when I was in college I prayed that if I was supposed to ask out a certain girl I like, that God would give me a sign by having her walk past me on my way to class.  Of course, I prayed that just before I left for class, planning to take a route where I had a near 100% chance of passing her.  A friend of mine in those days would put his Bible on his desk and pray that if God didn’t want him to do such-and-such, he would guild him as he blindly opened the Bible at random to a passage that would make it clear what he was supposed to do.  Not only is that second example treating the Bible like a Magic Eight Ball, both of those scenarios reflect a flawed view of God—that we can manipulate him or force him into a corner and demand he act.  But this is not the God who reveals himself in Scripture.

Brothers and Sisters, God cannot be manipulated like the pagan gods.  He needs nothing.  But, more importantly here, he cannot be outmanoeuvred.  Job knows that God is not needy, but he still treats God as if he is apathetic or inept.  Job tries to justify himself, but at God’s expense.  Consider that if Job wins his appeal, it means that God is both unjust and unwise.

In contrast, we have the closing words of the hymn in Chapter 28.  Wisdom is to fear the Lord—to trust him.  That means, on the one hand, recognising that he needs nothing and that nothing we can offer him can put him in our debt.  And, on the other hand, it means that he cannot be manipulated or outmanoeuvred.  Our attempts to either of those things only serve to demonstrate the splinters of paganism that remain wedged in our faith.

The other major flaw revealed in Job’s theology is his perceived need to bring God to account for what has happened.  Again, this is a splinter of paganism wedged into his thinking about God.  The pagan gods were often wicked and capricious.  They had to be held accountable for their actions.  But not so the God of the Bible.  We’ve seen this problem festering in the discourses of Job from the get-go.  Job and his friends have adopted an objective standard of righteousness based on their limited observation of the world and they demand that God must be held to it.  If he does not, as Job implies here, then God himself is unjust.  In the chapters that follow, a fourth friend, Elihu, will step in and challenge this thinking.  But it serves as a reminder that God is not contingent.  He is not just because he conforms to an objective standard of justice.  No, justice flows from God, just as wisdom flowed from him in his creative acts.  He defines justice, not the other way around.  Again, as we saw last week, to fear the Lord is wisdom.  Why?  Because it means submitting to him as the one from whom wisdom—not to mention justice and goodness—flows.  He is the source.  Our duty is not to question, but to trust.  Even if God were to respond to our demands for answers, we could never possibly grasp those answers.

Brothers and Sisters, the point made here is to beware.  It’s very easy for us to develop a skewed perspective about God when we’re in the midst of a crisis or a tragedy.  It’s also very easy for us to piece together flawed theology based on our circumstances.  We’re limited creatures.  We were created to trust in God.  He’s the one with infinite wisdom and knowledge.  Couple that with our fallen nature and it doesn’t make for a good combination.  We forget our own short-sightedness.  We’re also selfish.  Put those two things together with difficult situations and our natural inclination is often to blame God and to impugn his character rather than to look for the fault in ourselves or to recognise that it is we rebellious human beings who have made a mess of the world he created good.  Job, here, serves as a warning.

But there’s hope here, too.  For all his flawed thinking and bad theology, Job is held up by God himself as righteous.  As Job says here in Chapter 29, he was the friend of God.  Brothers and Sisters, righteousness and friendship with God does not depend on our perfect theology.  Some of the finest and most godly Christians I have ever known have rarely cracked open a theology book.  I know plenty of truly faithful saints who have fallen victim to awful pop-theologies like the Prosperity Gospel.  It’s a false, pagan religion that has stolen much of the language of Christianity, but remains apart from the faith.  It has a heretical view of God and of faith.  I know many saints who have bought into secular philosophies and pagan New Age ideas and the like to one degree or another.  And yet somehow the Spirit seems to keep the worst of these heresies and false theologies at bay.  Like Job, there is a splinter of paganism wedged firmly in their faith, but they remain friends of God and their righteousness is known to everyone around them.  Praise God that he is a God of grace.  We’re reminded here in Job of the dangers of bad theology.  Friends, we have an obligation to root these errors out—to immerse ourselves in the Word and to be diligent to know the truth of God, not from our experiences, but from his Word.  Theology is important.  But we’re also reminded by Job of God’s grace.  This is the God who gave his life at the cross for the sake of sinners.  This is the God who places his own Spirit within us, because our hearts are broken and our desires disordered.  This is the God who knows our fallenness.  This is the God who has given us a redeemer.  This is the God who moment by moment extends to us his grace.  This is the God who draws us out of the darkness and into his light.  This is the God who has bought us from death that we might know his life.

The Fear of the Lord is Wisdom

Job 28

by William Klock 

Does the world make sense?  That’s kind of the big question that every thinking person grapples with.  From a naturalistic or scientific standpoint we know that the world makes sense.  We’ve seen enough of how things like physics and chemistry and biology work to know that Creation is ordered—that it makes sense, that we can observe it, that we can understand its workings.  There are theoretical physicists and the like who trust in this ordered nature of Creation enough to seek out grand theories of everything and expect to find an answer once they’ve accounted for all the factors and put them all together.  But there’s more to life than gravity or evolution or particle theory to contend with.  Medicine can dig into the depths of a coronavirus and parse out its DNA, even develop treatments and vaccines.  It can tell us where it came from and how it evolved.  But it can’t answer the big question of why.

And that’s where Job’s at.  Bandits stole his livestock.  A wind blew down the house and killed his children.  Disease afflicted his body.  But why?  Even as we, the readers of the story, know that it was the Adversary behind each of these tragedies, that question of why is still there.  Why did God allow the challenge from the Adversary in the first place?  Why?  Sometimes we’re careless or we do dumb things and bad things happen.  We know the why, even if we don’t like to admit that it was our own fault.  But there are other times when we can only look to heaven and cry out to God, “Why?”

Job’s friends are convinced they’ve got the answer.  The “why” is Job’s sin.  He, however, insists on his innocence.  No one’s actually seen Job do anything wrong.  But that’s got to be the answer, they think.  And they’re convinced of this because they’re convinced that justice governs the cosmos.  God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous.  God must be punishing Job for something.  We’ve called this idea the Retribution Principle.  It governed the way most ancient peoples conceived of divine justice.

And yet Job refuses to concede.  He holds fast to his integrity.  And as the readers we know he’s right.  The very first verse of the book told us that Job was upright and blameless.  And he’s proved himself—not just that he’s upright and blameless in his living, but that his uprightness, his blamelessness is disinterested.  He’s not in it for what he can get, he’s not in it because he knows that what goes around comes and around and he wants good to come around to him.  He’s righteous because he knows that it’s right to be righteous, regardless of the outcome.  So at this point we’ve completed the first part of the book, these three cycles of speeches between Job and his friends.  They’ve urged him and urged him and urged him to give up on his integrity and to confess so that he’ll get his blessings back and Job has stood his ground.  He’s proved the Adversary wrong and he’s proved God’s policies to be right.  But Job doesn’t know anything about that.  He knows nothing about the Adversary’s challenge.  All he knows is that, whether his righteousness is disinterested or not, God is supposed to bless the righteous—and Job’s only known cursing.  So why?

That’s the rest of the book and it starts with an interlude—a hymn or a poem spoken by the narrator of the story.  We’ll look at Chapter 28 this morning.  We can break it down into three sections.  Let’s look at the first, which runs from verse 1 through verse 11.  Picture miners digging deep into the earth for treasure as we read.

“Surely there is a mine for silver,

         and a place for gold that they refine.

Iron is taken out of the earth,

         and copper is smelted from the ore.

Man puts an end to darkness

         and searches out to the farthest limit

         the ore in gloom and deep darkness.

He opens shafts in a valley away from where anyone lives;

         they are forgotten by travelers;

         they hang in the air, far away from mankind; they swing to and fro.

As for the earth, out of it comes bread,

         but underneath it is turned up as by fire.

Its stones are the place of sapphires,

         and it has dust of gold.

“That path no bird of prey knows,

         and the falcon’s eye has not seen it.

The proud beasts have not trodden it;

         the lion has not passed over it.

“Man puts his hand to the flinty rock

         and overturns mountains by the roots.

He cuts out channels in the rocks,

         and his eye sees every precious thing.

He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle,

         and the thing that is hidden he brings out to light.

 

The earth is full of treasures: silver and iron, gold and sapphires.  But it’s rarely just lying around on the surface for the taking.  To get to that treasure we’ve got to dig.  The poet describes miners digging deep into the earth, hanging deep in mineshafts, carrying light into the otherwise impenetrable darkness.  He overturns the roots of the mountains themselves, deep down and far beyond the otherwise all-seeing eyes of falcons and other birds of prey.  He toils, he innovates, he gets dirty, he gets injured.  Sometimes he even dies.  Man spares no expense to bring forth from these hidden treasures of the earth so that he can display them in the light.  The earth’s treasures are hard to find and hard to get to, but we know their value and we spare no effort or expense to get our hands on them.

In contrast stands wisdom.  Look at verses 12-19:

“But where shall wisdom be found?

         And where is the place of understanding?

Man does not know its worth,

         and it is not found in the land of the living.

The deep says, ‘It is not in me,’

         and the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’

It cannot be bought for gold,

         and silver cannot be weighed as its price.

It cannot be valued in the gold of Ophir,

         in precious onyx or sapphire.

Gold and glass cannot equal it,

         nor can it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold.

No mention shall be made of coral or of crystal;

         the price of wisdom is above pearls.

The topaz of Ethiopia cannot equal it,

         nor can it be valued in pure gold.

 

We prospect for iron, for copper, and for precious metals.  Again, we find it and we go to great lengths to dig it out of the ground.  But wisdom?  “Man does not know its worth.”  We know it’s valuable.  We desire it.  But it’s true value exceeds anything we can imagine.  And yet it’s nowhere to be found in the land of the living—nowhere under the sun.  We can plumb the depths of the sea and we will never find it.  No matter how much money you’ve got, you can’t buy it in the marketplace.  Even if you were to find it for sale, it is beyond the price of gold and jewels and pearls.  None of us could ever afford it.  The poem goes on in verses 20-22:

“From where, then, does wisdom come?

         And where is the place of understanding?

It is hidden from the eyes of all living

         and concealed from the birds of the air.

Abaddon and Death say,

         ‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’

Again, you won’t find wisdom in the land of the living. Search to the ends of the earth and it won’t be there.  Ask a bird with its keen eyesight to spy it out for you and that bird will turn up nothing.  Open the gates of the grave and call down to death and even Abaddon will have heard only a rumour of it.  If wisdom is nowhere to be found, how are we to ever answer that great question why?  How will Job—or you or I—find an answer to our suffering?

Well, look now at the third section of the chapter, beginning at verse 23:

“God understands the way to it,

         and he knows its place.

For he looks to the ends of the earth

         and sees everything under the heavens.

When he gave to the wind its weight

         and apportioned the waters by measure,

when he made a decree for the rain

         and a way for the lightning of the thunder,

then he saw it and declared it;

         he established it, and searched it out.

And he said to man,

‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,

         and to turn away from evil is understanding.’”

 

You want wisdom and understanding?  Look to God.  But in the end, wisdom may turn out to be something different than we expected.  It’s interesting here that the reason wisdom is so inaccessible to human beings is not because of its position in space, but because of its position in time.  It’s not hidden deep in the earth or at the bottom of the sea.  Notice the origin of wisdom here.  God oversees the cosmos, not just the ends of the earth, but everything under heaven.  And the poem speaks of God’s creative acts: when he created the wind and when he tamed the waters and divided them.  It’s a picture of God bringing order to the chaos of the pre-created world.  When he decreed the rains and the storms that come with them—when God ordered the cosmos, when he made it fit for life, that was when, that was the time at which he saw wisdom and declared wisdom; he established wisdom, and searched wisdom out.

Here’s what the narrator is getting at: He stresses the order that God has established through his creative acts.  He looks back to the day when God tamed the primordial chaos, reigned it in, and made it suitable for life—made it serve his purposes.  None of us was there and none of us can fathom what that looked like or what was involved.  Just think of the words of Genesis.  God spoke and tamed the chaos.  God spoke and brought forth life.  While it speaks volumes about the creative and life-giving power of God’s word, it’s unfathomable.  How does that work?  It’s utterly beyond us.  But through it God gave order to creation.  Eventually God will communicate this when he speaks later in the book.  As Job demands an answer, God will ask a series of questions about creation, “Were you there when I?  Were you there when I?  Were you there when I?

Now, what’s important here—and this is where the book of Job changes gears—what’s important here is what that order entails.  Remember, Job and his friends have assumed that the foundation of Creation’s order is justice.  The Retribution Principle is foundational in their thinking.  The wicked are punished and the righteous rewarded.  Job’s already beginning to question this idea while his friends hold fast to it.  When God speaks later in the book, it will be to tell them all that their understanding of the order of the cosmos is horribly wrong.  You see, from our limited perspective, all we can see are the effects of God’s work in creation.  He causes things to happen and we see the result.  The problem is that we then try to root out those unseen and unknown causes.  That’s what gets us into trouble.  It’s our feeble attempt to play god.  And what God reveals is that there is no foundational principle running creation.  As ordered as Creation may be, as much as God has built into it consistent order that we can observe and around which we can develop theories and laws, it is he who ultimately sustains and maintains, gives life and controls it.  As we saw back in our study of Genesis, back when we looked at that passage from Genesis 1 telling us that on the seventh day God rested, for God to “rest” wasn’t what we usually think of.  We think of rest as disengagement.  But for God to rest was for God to take up residence in the temple he’d just created, to be seated on his throne, and to begin the work of ruling, governing, sustaining his new creation.  For God to be seated on his throne in his temple meant for him to be engaged in the ongoing activity of the cosmos.  The Hebrews never conceived of God as a clockmaker, building a watch, winding it, and then hanging it in space to watch.  He was engaged in everything.  His hands held together, sustained, provided, chastened, brought blessings, and brought cursing.  And so Job and his friends were as wrong to think that justice was the operational foundation of the cosmos as modern people are wrong to think that we can reduce the operation of the cosmos to scientific laws and theories.  Is there justice?  Of course.  Can we derive laws and theories about the regular and ordered nature of God’s creation?  Of course.  But God’s point in Job is that his governance of his creation is ongoing and omnipresent and, most importantly for Job, it’s dynamic as God acts not like a machine following a set of laws or as a divine vending machine, but as he acts according to each and every circumstance.

So what does this mean for wisdom?  We can’t find it and God knows it and so we read, again, in verse 28:

And he said to man,

‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom,

         and to turn away from evil is understanding.’”

 

Do you want wisdom?  Trust the Lord, because it resides with him.  I think John Walton sums this up really well when he says:

“Fearing the Lord means to take him seriously as opposed to:

thinking him detached (therefore to be ignored)

thinking him incompetent (therefore to be treated with disdain)

thinking him limited or impotent (therefore to be scorned)

thinking him corrupt (therefore to be admonished)

thinking him shortsighted (therefore to be advised)

thinking him petty (therefore to be resented)”[1]

This may be a struggle for some of us who want to find wisdom for ourselves or to define it on our own terms.  It’s never going to happen.  Our wisdom is dependent on God and on our trust in him.

Notice, too, that wisdom isn’t some abstract standard by which God acts.  I talked about this before in terms of justice.  All too often we think of justice as an objective standard by which God acts.  Brothers and Sisters, when we do that, we fall into the trap in which Job and his friends found themselves.  They set up a certain standard, called it justice, and then tried to compel God to act according to it.  It didn’t work.  It meant accusing righteous Job of sin on the part of his friends, and for Job it meant questioning God himself, since he wasn’t holding to their standard.  As I said before, justice is not external to God; it flows from him.  He is the source.  In that sense, he establishes the objective standard.  But, again, because our knowledge and understanding are limited, so is our understanding of justice.  And now we see the same goes for wisdom.  Wisdom is not some standard that was out there in the universe and that God adheres to.  No.  Wisdom is defined by God himself as it flows from him—as it did when he tamed the primordial chaos and brought order to creation and as he sits on his throne and holds the cosmos in his hands.

I think that realizing this can help to focus us on the right thing.  When we understand that wisdom isn’t just some abstract principle that we can find or that God can give, but that wisdom flows from God as its source, then we can understand that as much as we often ask for wisdom (and we’re right to do so), to fear the Lord in itself is an act of wisdom that, as it causes us to trust in and to draw near to the Lord, opens up to us the path to wisdom and its source.  And, of course, the opposite is also true: If we believe that God is wise and the source of wisdom, the more nature it will be to fear the Lord.

Now, think about Job and his righteousness and of the Adversary’s challenge to God.  Think of what I talked about last week in terms of our motives for pursuing both God and righteousness.  The Adversary’s argument was that if God rewards righteousness, people won’t really pursue God or righteousness—or wisdom; people will, instead, try to patronise God, try to butter him up, and try to give him what they think he wants or needs so that he’ll be obligate to bless them in return.  Think how often we treat God as a divine vending machine.  We put our money in, we push the right buttons, and we think that he’s obligated to give us what we want.  We negotiate with him.  “I’ll give you this, God, if you’ll give me this in return.”  Or we get into trouble, and we start bargaining.  Ack!  I think I’m about to lose my job and we start getting introspective and we bargain with God, “Okay, I’ll finally give up such-and-such sin if you’ll let me keep my job.”  Or we do what Job’s friends urged Job to do: we start confessing.  I remember sitting at the bedside of a friend dying of cancer.  Radiation didn’t work.  Chemo didn’t work.  He was in terrible pain.  And he said, “I’ve confessed every sin I can think of and God isn’t taking this away.”  Brothers and Sisters, none of that is the path of wisdom.  To fear the Lord is to trust him, not to approach him as needy or petty or as someone we can manipulate.  So as much as Job is struggling with some of these things, as much as he’s questioning the Lord’s justice, his integrity and his disinterested righteousness show us that he really does fear the Lord.

Getting closer to our own hearts and that issue of the big “Why?” question, where does this leave us.  We want answers.  We cry to the depth of sea, “Where is wisdom?”  And we get no answer.  We call down into the depths of the grave, “Have you seen wisdom?” and death calls back, “I know nothing more than you.”  On the one hand here we’re told that this search for wisdom is fruitless.  We’ll never find the answer.  Instead, we’re told to fear the Lord in the belief that he has created and continues to sustain his creation in wisdom.  We’ll never be able to understand what that looks like.  God cannot give us an answer to our question of “Why?” that will make sense to our limited understanding.  I know that won’t be a very satisfying answer to some of us.  When you’ve done everything right and you’re still suffering, when you hold a miscarried child in your hands, when your business has failed despite your best efforts, when your children have walked away from the Lord after years of catechism and faith-building, after a diagnosis of cancer or some other awful sickness we want an explanation and just to say, “Trust the Lord” can seem like a cop-out, but it’s not.  It’s God’s word right here in Job 28.  It’s not to say, “There’s a reason even if we don’t know what it is”.  No, it’s to move beyond our question about causes and reasons.  You see, if we believe that the Lord has created and established and sustains his creation wisely, then to trust him is move beyond the need for an explanation and to trust that whatever tragedy we experience is reconcilable with his wisdom, with our trust in this God who is engaged, who is able, who is powerful, who is righteous, and who has infinite and eternal perspective.

“God understands the way to [wisdom]” says verse 23.  It is ultimately beyond our reach and beyond our knowing, but we become wise ourselves as we fear him, submitting to his wisdom.  Brother and Sisters, that means that when we’re in the midst of trouble and tempted to demand an explanation, we should instead trust in him.  Is it easy?  Of course not, although I do think it gets easier the longer we persist in trusting him.  Some of you who are older than I am can confirm that.  In the meantime this is why God has given us means of grace.  Brothers and Sisters, if you struggle to trust God, if you find yourself in the midst of trials and are tempted to think that you could do better than God, if you find yourself resenting God, avail yourself of his means of grace.  Immerse yourself in the Scriptures where we see his goodness and wisdom and love—and most of all his faithfulness—revealed in the history of his people.  Immerse yourself in the Gospels and be reminded that we fear the God who humbled himself to become one of us and who gave his life on the cross in order to reconcile us to himself and to set to rights the world that we have broken.  Recall that he is the one who has given us his very Spirit as a downpayment on the life of the age to come.  Pray.  Pray those Scriptures back to him.  Pray the psalms—the inspired words of men, often written in the midst of trials and suffering—and let them shape your faith and bolster your trust in God.  And come to his Table, eat the bread and drink the wine, recall and participate in the saving acts of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and know first-hand the wisdom of God that has not changed since he spoke those words into the darkness, “Let there be light.”

Let us pray: Wise Father, Job reminds that we are small and that you are infinite.  We’re so often tempted to think that we’re bigger or greater than we are and it has got us into a great deal of trouble.  It has broken your creation.  And yet you love us still.  The wisdom that flowed from you when you made us flows still through Jesus and the Spirit to forgive us, to restore us, to make us new.  I pray that we would remember your wisdom when we struggle, when we’re tempted to doubt or to question, when we cry out “Why?”, and that knowing your graciousness, we would do the wisest thing we can and cling to you in faith.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] The NIV Application Commentary: Job (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), epub version.

Motives

Job 22-27

by William Klock 

Some people don’t know when to shut up.  Right?  And we’ve all been on both the receiving end and the giving end of that problem.  A friend keeps talking when they should have stopped and hurts us deeply.  And on another day I’m the guilty one who should have stopped a long time ago, but just so intent on making my case that I kept going even though I’d lost the argument or missed the point long before.  We’re at that point in the book of Job.  Really, I think we reached that point some chapters back, but it’s just now that it’s starting to dawn on some of the characters in the story.  Today we’ll be looking at Chapters 22-27.  This is the third cycle of speeches between Job and his friends, but it’s a little different than the first two.  The pattern has been for Eliphaz, the mystic, to speak and for Job to rebut him, then for Bildad, the traditionalist, followed by another rebuttal from Job.  Finally, Zophar, the rationalist, speaks and Job responds.

In the first cycle, Job’s friends tried to induce him to confess his sins with the promise that if he did so, God would restore all of his material blessings.  Their accusations were vague and non-specific.  And Job stuck to his guns and insisted that it was his integrity that was important, not the “stuff”.  In the second cycle, Job’s friends appealed to what we’re calling the “Retribution Principle”: God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked.  They were more pointed in accusing Job of some non-specific sin and, again, he stood firm on his integrity.  Along with Job’s wife, who spoke at the beginning, Job’s friends are playing the part of devil’s advocates.  In the prologue the Adversary challenged God’s wisdom, arguing that if God rewards people for righteousness, people will be righteous for selfish reasons, which isn’t righteousness at all.  And so Job has become a witness in God’s defence.  He has refused to compromise his integrity just to get his blessings back.  But Job’s friends aren’t done yet.  The trial isn’t quite over.  And they keep pushing.  At this point there’s nothing left for them to do than to up their game through outright accusations.  The Retribution Principle is how God works, they insist, thus Job is guilty and their job is to persuade him to confess his guilt.  If Job does that, the Adversary wins his case in the divine court.

Eliphaz doesn’t know when to stop.  As we’ll see, this cycle is shorter than the others.  Eliphaz goes on at length, but Bildad has only six short verses to say before he sputters out.  Zophar knows when to be silent—finally—and says nothing.  Many Old Testament scholars think that Zophar’s speech has either been lost or that it was transposed and merged into Job’s response to Bildad.  Either is possible, but I think that what we have actually makes rhetorical sense.  Eliphaz, the mystic who thinks that God has given him a vision about Job, just doesn’t know when to quit.  I’ve noticed that that’s often the case with people who are convinced that God has spoken to them.  Bildad, the traditionalist, tries one last time, but really has nothing left to say.  Zophar, the rationalist, hears Bildad sputter out and realises that he’s got nothing more to add and should probably just keep his mouth shut.

So look at Chapter 22, beginning with verse 5.  Eliphaz isn’t going to beat around the bush anymore about Job’s supposed sins.  He says:

Is not your evil abundant?

         There is no end to your iniquities.

For you have exacted pledges of your brothers for nothing

         and stripped the naked of their clothing.

You have given no water to the weary to drink,

         and you have withheld bread from the hungry.

The man with power possessed the land,

         and the favored man lived in it.

You have sent widows away empty,

         and the arms of the fatherless were crushed.

Therefore snares are all around you,

         and sudden terror overwhelms you,

or darkness, so that you cannot see,

         and a flood of water covers you. (Job 22:5-11)

These were serious charges in Job’s world, just as they were serious charges in Israel.  They should be serious charges to us, but in our world we’ve largely given up personal responsibility for these sorts of things to the government.  In the ancient world it was expected that people would take care of each other.  Those who had, were generally expected to help the have-nots.  But these charges are pretty silly when laid against Job.  He wasn’t just a wealthy man.  He was a prominent man of his city—an elder who sat at the gate.  Everyone would have known his charity and he would not have had the reputation he had if he’d been truly guilty of these charges.  Whatever the case, Eliphaz accuses Job and urges him to confess in verse 21 and following:

“Agree with God, and be at peace;

         thereby good will come to you.

 

Again, the message is: confess and God will restore his blessings to you.  Confess, and you’ll get your stuff back.  The Hebrew of verse 30 is difficult.  The ESV speaks of God delivering the one who is not innocent, but the Hebrew really seems to indicate that Eliphaz is talking about Job delivering the innocent: “who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.”  In other words, if Job would only listen to his friends, humble himself, confess and repent, not only will God restore his blessings, but Job could then be an encouragement to others in similar situations to do the same.

Job will have none of it.  He doesn’t respond to Eliphaz with anger or sarcasm this time.  I think that at this point Job has given up on his friends.  Instead, he laments his state and expresses his longing for a hearing before God.  Look at 23:3-7.

Oh, that I knew where I might find him,

         that I might come even to his seat!

I would lay my case before him

         and fill my mouth with arguments.

I would know what he would answer me

         and understand what he would say to me.

Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?

         No; he would pay attention to me.

There an upright man could argue with him,

         and I would be acquitted forever by my judge.

 

Job still has hope in God, if only he can get a hearing.  Surely God would hear him and set things right.  But, alas, Job goes on, God is nowhere to be found, and as much as God seems to be paying too much attention to him, he doesn’t seem to hear Job’s cries.  But, most important, Job continues to stand firm on his claim to righteousness.  Verse 12:

I have not departed from the commandment of his lips;

         I have treasured the words of his mouth more than my portion of food.

 

Job continues his lament in Chapter 24.  It’s interesting, because Eliphaz is encouraging Job to think of himself, but Job’s outlook continues to be bigger than himself.  Again, it’s not about “stuff”; it’s about righteousness and as part of that, Job’s asking questions about righteousness and justice that affect the whole world.  In verse 1 he asks “Why are not times of judgement kept by the Almighty?”  People do the sorts of things that Eliphaz has accused him of.  They “drive away the donkey of the fatherless”, “they thrust the poor off the road”.  And, Job says, the poor end up seeking food in the wasteland and lie all night without clothing.  They bring in the harvests of the wicked, but are given nothing to eat in return.  “The murderer rises before it is light,” says Job in verse 14, “that he may kill the poor and needy.”  “The eye of the adulterer also waits for the twilight, saying, ‘No eye will see me’.

And yet, says Job—and the ESV doesn’t communicate this very well—this is all for at time.  Look at verse 24:

They are exalted a little while, and then are gone;

         they are brought low and gathered up like all others;

         they are cut off like the heads of grain.

 

It looks like Job is starting to find a chink in the Retribution Principle.  If the wicked can prosper for a time, but still face justice eventually, then maybe—just maybe—the righteous can face suffering for a time and live with a hope of restoration.

Now, Bildad responds in the six verses of Chapter 25:

“Dominion and fear are with God;

         he makes peace in his high heaven.

Is there any number to his armies?

         Upon whom does his light not arise?

How then can man be in the right before God?

         How can he who is born of woman be pure?

Behold, even the moon is not bright,

         and the stars are not pure in his eyes;

how much less man, who is a maggot,

         and the son of man, who is a worm!”

 

God is big and we are small.  Oddly enough, Bildad argues that Job’s claims of innocence are bunk because no one is innocent.  While he is correct, perfection was never Job’s claim.  But in the end Bildad just sputters out: We’re all maggots and worms.  God will never grant you an audience, Job.

In his final speech, Job uses Bildad’s talk of God’s ordering of the cosmos as a springboard.  In 26:7-14 he sings a great hymn of creation, speaking of God’s power and authority as he brings order.

He stretches out the north over the void

         and hangs the earth on nothing.

He binds up the waters in his thick clouds,

         and the cloud is not split open under them.

He covers the face of the full moon

         and spreads over it his cloud.

He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters

         at the boundary between light and darkness.

The pillars of heaven tremble

         and are astounded at his rebuke.

By his power he stilled the sea;

         by his understanding he shattered Rahab.

By his wind the heavens were made fair;

         his hand pierced the fleeing serpent.

Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways,

         and how small a whisper do we hear of him!

         But the thunder of his power who can understand?”

 

God has tamed the primordial chaos—that which was formless and void—and has given it purpose and function.  And yet for all the power and authority God has exerted to bring order to Creation, we can hear but a whisper of him.  We have a glimpse of him, but his ways remain a mystery.  This may be the wisest thing Job has said so far, although I don’t think he realises it at this point.  Our knowledge of God is limited and his ways in this world will always be, in large part, mysteries to us.  God will come back to this point when he finally speaks at the end of the book.

But regardless of the mystery, Job refuses his friends’ advice.  He will hold fast to his integrity.  The heart of his last speech is in 27:2-6.

“As God lives, who has taken away my right,

         and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter,

as long as my breath is in me,

         and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,

my lips will not speak falsehood,

         and my tongue will not utter deceit.

Far be it from me to say that you are right;

         till I die I will not put away my integrity from me.

I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go;

         my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.

 

When he talks about not speaking falsehoods or uttering deceit, what he’s saying is that he will not make a false confession of sins that he hasn’t committed.  “Till I die,” he says, “I will not put away my integrity…I will hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go.”

This is the climax of the dialogue section of the book.  The key point here is that Job values righteousness for righteousness’ sake.  He’s not in it for the blessings.  He’s not in it for the “stuff” and he never was.  This was the whole point of the Adversary’s challenge to God and Job says here that he will cling to his integrity whether he receives benefits or not.  Job, the star witness to the wisdom of God’s policies in the world, proves the Adversary wrong.  God wins the case.  Now, there’s more left to the book of Job.  God has won his case against the Adversary, but Job knows nothing of that.  He’s still got serious questions that need answering.

Again, the key point here is that Job affirms that there is really something calling righteousness and that it can be objectively defined.  You see, most religion in the ancient world was defined by what we call the Great Symbiosis.  The gods had needs and people tried to meet them.  In return, the gods would give the people what they needed.  But to know what the gods needed was trial and error.  To a large degree, whatever resulted in prosperity was assumed to be what the gods wanted and was therefore “righteous”.  To them Job’s idea of a disinterested righteousness, the idea of righteousness for righteousness’ sake didn’t make any sense.  Their whole religious lives revolved around serving the gods in order to receive blessings—to have their needs met—in return.  But Job has found something greater.  Job has found a righteousness defined by a God who, as Creator, is worthy of service, of worship, of faith regardless of the blessings he may give.  Even when the world governed by this God doesn’t makes sense, Job knows that this is the God who made fair the heavens by his wind and who shattered the forces of chaos.  We hear but a small whisper of him, but knowing who he is, Job is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when life doesn’t make sense.

I think this is a good place for us to pause today.  Some flavours of “Great Symbiosis” religion still exist.  A lot of people believe in the idea of karma.  It’s hard to think of a better example of righteousness motived by selfish reasons.  Closer to home, there are wide swathes of Christianity that have been influenced and even taken over by the Prosperity Gospel.  It’s a false gospel that turns Christianity into little more than a means to health and wealth.  But even Prosperity Gospel aside, we Western Christians have increasingly over the last couple of hundred years turned the gospel into a primarily therapeutic message.  The gospel is, first and foremost, the royal summons to the King who has given his own life for his people.  If Job, who knew nothing even of the Lord’s covenant with Israel, could see in God someone worthy of service and worship for his own sake, how much more ought we be able to see that in the God who became incarnate in Jesus and died on the cross for our sake?  But all too often we pitch the gospel almost entirely as a therapeutic message: Jesus will make all your problems better.  He may.  But following Jesus also means taking up our crosses daily to follow him.  Jesus may solve some of our problems, but following him is to take the narrow and difficult path.  Brothers and Sisters, if we need to think about our motives and Job gives us a good opportunity to do that.  Even if we haven’t bought into something as off the mark as the Prosperity Gospel, we should still be asking ourselves what motivates our pursuit of righteousness.

I remember this discussion hitting me about the time I got into high school.  That’s where it started becoming one of the more common topics of teaching in our youth group.  Up until then we Christian kids just followed the rules.  As kids that’s where the focus usually is.  Things are simple: don’t lie, don’t hurt other people, don’t steal their stuff, and so on.  We learned the Ten Commandments.  But as you get older you start to realise that the Bible doesn’t have a commandment for everything and even when you can find a commandment about something, the application isn’t always clear.  We tell our kids: Holiness means not having sex until you’re married.  Seems simple.  But then what do our kids do?  They start asking what constitutes “sex”.  How far can I go before I cross the line and break the rule?  You see, this is what happens when we try to teach holiness and godliness as keeping the rules without doing the much harder work of teaching our kids the motivations for holiness and godliness, without digging into the gospel of God’s loving grace with them and teaching them that Jesus is the King to be served because he is both our great and loving Creator and our merciful and gracious Redeemer.  Asking how far is too far, pushing the limits of the rules is not holiness.  It reflects a false and self-centred righteousness.  But this sort of minimalistic faith is common today.  It asks, “What’s the least I have to do?”

But it’s not just high school kids.  We often continue to carry this minimalist approach to faith with us as we get older.  We see it in our attitude towards giving.  We ask things like, “Am I obligated to tithe off my gross or my net?” and then we calculate that tithe to the penny.  Never mind that the tithe was an Old Testament concept.  Never mind that even when the tithe was obligatory, it was given to support the temple and its priests.  The law also required the people to be generous to the poor and needy on top of the tithe.  But we often fall back on the tithe, because it makes for an easy rule by which to judge.  There’s no easy rule in the New Testament, but if we’re willing to pay attention and if we’re willing to think beyond a minimalist faith we see that the New Testament (and the Old for that matter, too) calls God’s people to a proportional generosity.  No, there’s no number on it, but that’s how holiness is.

Another good example is one I never thought I’d see, but that is regularly coming up in some of the clergy discussion forums I frequent.  Pastors want to know how to address cannabis use in the Church.  It used to be easy—falling back on the rules—because it was illegal.  Christians shouldn’t break the law.  But falling back on rules doesn’t teach holiness.  And now, as many jurisdictions lift their prohibitions, how do we address the problem?  I know there’s some debate over this, but this is one of those issues the Bible doesn’t address directly.  There’s no “rule” for it.  I think the prohibition against drunkenness gives us some guidelines that apply particularly to drug use for purely recreational purposes.  I’ve read a number of articles talking about a dramatic upswing in cannabis use during the pandemic.  People are stressed, they’re worried, they want escape.  But does this kind of escape draw us closer to God?  Think of David, the man after God’s heart.  There’s a guy who faced some difficult and stressful situations—some of his own making.  When David was faced with hardship, he went straight to God.  Many of the psalms are the result.  If, instead, David had looked for relief or escape in a pipe full of dope, we’d have no Psalter—and I don’t think he’d gone down in history as a man who pursued God.  And, of course, this goes for anything we might use to escape our problems rather than bringing them to God, but I think the current cannabis problem illustrates this sort of minimalism well.

Another example.  A Christian guy I used to work with came to me for advice one day.  His wife was angry at him.  He’d struggled with a porn addiction ever since he was a teen.  He knew it was wrong, but he only decided to do something about it when his wife got fed-up with it and threatened to leave him.  This was the first problem: He wasn’t motivated with the idea of honour God; he was motived by the potential loss of his wife.  He went to his pastor for counselling.  I don’t know if the fault lay with poor counselling on the pastor’s part or if my friend misunderstood, but whatever the case, he fell back on “rules” and convinced himself he was doing the right thing.  He dug up the legal definition of “pornography” and stopped looking at that kind of thing.  He stopped looking at websites with pictures of full nudity and switched to websites that featured swimsuit and lingerie models and convinced himself he wasn’t looking at porn.  And he couldn’t understand why his wife was still upset with him.

Jesus gets at this sort of legalistic minimalism in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5.  People thought they were fulfilling the law against murder so long as they didn’t stick a knife into their neighbour, but Jesus reminded them that the requirement to love one’s neighbour is bigger than that.  If you hate your neighbour, even if you don’t actually kill him, you’ve failed to fulfil the law of love.  Similarly, he says, lusting after a woman—whether she’s clothed or not—is to commit adultery in your heart, even if you don’t actually engage in the act.  Jesus concludes with the words, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”.

Brothers and Sisters, that’s what it means to be godly.  That’s what holiness looks like.  Yes, there are times when the Bible gives us clear rules, but our goal isn’t to be slavishly obedient to the rule, while pushing its limit.  It’s to look at the principles of godliness that lie behind it and to recognise that the rule isn’t there to keep us from having fun, but as a guide to holiness.  If we approached the clear rules with that in mind, I think we’d do a lot better in addressing those areas in life where the Bible doesn’t offer clear rules.  Rather than asking what the minimum is to be a follower of Jesus, rather than asking how much we can indulge ourselves before falling into sin, we’d be making our way through life and evaluating everything we encounter, every choice we have to make and asking things like, “Does this bring me closer to God or will it drive me from him or cause me to miss an opportunity to draw closer?” and “Does this look like loving my neighbour or does it look like loving myself?” and “Is this self-centred or is it God-centred?”  Ultimately: “Does this entail sacrifice, giving of myself in a way that honours God and makes him known?”

Brothers and Sisters, Job teaches us the importance of following after God for God’s sake and of pursuing righteousness for righteousness’ sake—because both are worthy, not for what we gain, but because God is God and righteousness honour him.  Because God has proved himself worthy of our devotion by his goodness and his faithfulness, seen supremely in the cross, and because pursuing holiness and righteousness in our lives pleases him while exposing the unbelieving world around us to the hope he has given us of a world and a humanity one day set to rights.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, as the Creator who tamed the primordial chaos you are worthy of our service and worship, but you have proven yourself even more in giving your Son to die on our behalf, to die for your enemies, that we might be restored to your fellowship.  You have proved your goodness, your faithfulness, and your worthiness.  Even as we struggle with disordered, sinful, and selfish desires, you have poured your own Spirit into our hearts to turn them to you.  Teach us, we pray, to avail ourselves of the means of grace that you have given—that we would immerse ourselves in your word, live in loving fellowship with our brothers and sisters, be reminded of the grace of the sacraments, that we would pursue godliness in our lives, setting aside every selfish motive and pursuing righteousness solely for the purpose of honour you and of making you known.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

Everything as Loss

Job 15-21

by William Klock

This morning we’re returning to Job and the age-old question of suffering.  Why do we suffer?  Where is God in our suffering?  And what’s the place of faith in the midst of suffering?  These aren’t easy questions, but we should have answers.  Probably not pat, easy answer, but we need a biblical framework to work from—a biblical framework through which we can evaluate the unique specifics of a situation, whether ours or another’s, and offer at least the beginnings of what will be a helpful way to approach trails and sufferings in faith.  Frankly, Christians are often really bad at this.  We often give answers that are too easy and answers that ignore the uniqueness of each situation.  Often we pitch the gospel with false promises that Jesus will make all of our problems go away if we only have faith.  And when the problems don’t go away, people get angry with God, they question his faithfulness, and they often abandon the faith.

In my years as a Christian and in ministry I’ve seen a troubling number of people walk away from the faith, mainly because they were brought to Jesus, not really by the gospel, but with the expectation of material blessing and benefits.  Rather than preaching the glory of God and the love Jesus manifested at the cross, rather than hearing the message that to follow Jesus is to sacrifice everything, but that he is imminently worthy, they were drawn in with promises of the good life.  The Prosperity Gospel is the most prominent example of this sort of thing, but we still do this to a large degree when we twist the gospel from being the royal summons to the King into a message that’s mostly about therapeutic benefits.

So, last time, before the Ascension, we looked at a rather long passage running from Chapter 4 through Chapter 14.  That was the whole first cycle of speeches.  You’ll remember that Job’s friends had arrived and were in such shock at his state that they simply sat in silence.  After a week of that, Job finally spoke and it was a long lament.  Finally, then, his friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar spoke and Job responded to each in turn.  Job repeatedly insisted on his righteousness and integrity.  His argument boiled down to: “I don’t deserve this.  I’m being done a great injustice.”  But Job’s friends argued that he wouldn’t be in this sad state if he were as righteous as he claimed.  “Confess, Job,” they urged him.  “Confess, repent, and God will restore the blessings.”

Two things to remember.  First, is the theological framework or the worldview from which all of them—including Job—are working.  Bible scholars call it the Retribution Principle.  It’s the idea that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous.  And, of course, the corollary of that as we see in the arguments of Job’s friends, is that those who are suffering must have done something wrong to deserve it.  Remember I talked about a triangle to help visualise the discussion in Job.  The triangle has three corners.  God’s justice is at one, the Retribution Principle is at another, and Job’s righteousness is at the third.  But given Job’s suffering something has to give.  Job’s friends are affirming the righteousness of God and the Retribution Principle, therefore Job is the problem.  Job affirms the retribution principle, too.  But Job also knows he is righteous and that means, as far as he is concerned, that God is being unjust.

Second, remember that for Job’s friends the issue is the blessings, the stuff.  They urge Job to admit his sins so that God will bless him again.  But as miserable as Job is, for him it’s not about the material blessings.  For Job it’s all about integrity.  He refuses to compromise.  This is important to remember, because this is the key to the whole book.  Remember that all of this began with the Adversary challenging the wisdom of God: “God,” he said, “If you reward people for righteousness, they’re only going to be righteous for selfish reasons—because they want material blessings.”  That’s exactly how Job’s friends are thinking.  But Job is the star witness for God’s wisdom and he’s proving that, at least for him, he’s interested in righteousness for the sake of righteousness and God for the sake of God.

Now, let’s move into the second series of speeches.  Eliphaz makes his second speech in Chapter 15.  We get a sense of just how much the rhetorical stakes are increasing when Eliphaz begins by basically calling out Job as a windbag.  It doesn’t get any better.  In verses 5-6 he says:

For your iniquity teaches your mouth,

         and you choose the tongue of the crafty.

Your own mouth condemns you, and not I;

         your own lips testify against you.

 

Eliphaz is saying that Job has so rationalised his sin that he’s become oblivious to it.  His iniquity has taught his mouth and now all he can speak are these crafty rationalisations.  But somehow Eliphaz and the others can see right through it.  Job’s mouth condemns him, he says.

Job is arrogant, he says.  Instead, Job should listen to the “comforts of God”—that’s verse 15.  This is a call back to the supposed prophetic vision that Eliphaz appealed to in his first speech.  But Eliphaz is a false prophet.  Job knows his own innocence.  Eliphaz isn’t calling things right.

But the focus of Eliphaz’s speech this time round is on the wicked in verses 17-35.  Here’s how he starts:

“I will show you; hear me,

         and what I have seen I will declare…  (v. 17)

And jumping down to verses 20-21:

The wicked man writhes in pain all his days,

         through all the years that are laid up for the ruthless.

Dreadful sounds are in his ears;

         in prosperity the destroyer will come upon him.

 

And verse 24:

distress and anguish terrify him;

         they prevail against him, like a king ready for battle.

Suffering and affliction are the lot of the wicked, argues Eliphaz.  Justice always catches up with them.  “It’s what I’ve seen—what you’ve seen—with your own eyes,” he says.  And why?  Look at verse 25:

Because he has stretched out his hand against God

         and defies the Almighty…

 

Eliphaz clearly aims this right at Job, who in the last cycle of speeches, was voicing his anger with God, questioning God’s justice, and demanding a hearing before him.  Notice, Eliphaz sort of twists things around when Job protests his innocence, on the one hand arguing that Job really is a sinner, but that he’s so rationalised his sins that he can’t see them anymore.  But, of course, even Job’s best friends here can’t pin any specific sin on Job, so Eliphaz turns to lumping Job in with the wicked based on his protestations of innocence.  It shouldn’t be a surprise at all that Job responds with frustration and anger.  On top of that, Eliphaz still doesn’t understand just what it is that Job wants.  Eliphaz, in verses 30-35, talks about the wicked being barren, dried up, and empty.  He still thinks that Job just wants his blessings back, but what’s important to Job is his integrity.  Whether God blesses him or not, Job wants his integrity and righteousness acknowledged.

So in Chapters 16 and 17 we read Job’s response.  We don’t have time to read Job’s entire response this morning, which is a pity.  Chapter 16 gives a sense of just how deeply Job feels he’s been wronged by both his friends and by God.  In 6-12 he says:

“If I speak, my pain is not assuaged,

         and if I forbear, how much of it leaves me?

Surely now God has worn me out;

         he has made desolate all my company.

And he has shriveled me up,

         which is a witness against me,

and my leanness has risen up against me;

         it testifies to my face.

He has torn me in his wrath and hated me;

         he has gnashed his teeth at me;

         my adversary sharpens his eyes against me.

Men have gaped at me with their mouth;

         they have struck me insolently on the cheek;

         they mass themselves together against me.

God gives me up to the ungodly

         and casts me into the hands of the wicked.

I was at ease, and he broke me apart;

         he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces;

he set me up as his target…

 

Job sort of affirms what Eliphaz has said, at least so far as the Retribution Principle goes.  He’s basically become God’s punching bag—his “target” he says at the end there.  So, yes, if it’s true that God punishes the wicked, then Job looks like a wicked man—not because of what he’s done, but because God is punishing him.  But that’s just it.  That’s why Job is so frustrated and angry.  He doesn’t serve this.  And so Job calls again, as he called in the first cycle of speeches, for a hearing before God.  Job wants someone to argue his case.  Look at verses 18-21:

“O earth, cover not my blood,

         and let my cry find no resting place.

Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven,

         and he who testifies for me is on high.

My friends scorn me;

         my eye pours out tears to God,

that he would argue the case of a man with God,

         as a son of man does with his neighbor.

 

Job cries out that his blood—his trials—not be forgotten that his cry find no resting place until it comes before God.  Job calls on one of the members of the divine council to testify on his behalf before God.  The idea here is that maybe if God will not hear Job’s cry, one of his councillors will and will bring Job’s case before him.  Of course, the irony is that it was just one of those councillors, this Adversary character, who brought all of this on Job by challenging God’s policies.  Now, Job doesn’t know that.  We, the readers, were let in on that scene in the divine council at the beginning of the book, but Job doesn’t know that.  At the end of the day, the last thing Job needs is someone else calling God to account on his behalf.

In Chapter 17 Job expresses his hopelessness again.  In verse 1 his spirit is broken, his days are at an end, and the graveyard waits for him.  He just wishes death would come and make an end of his misery.  But we find the key part of Chapter 17 in verse 9.  Job tells us here what’s important to him and it’s not what his friends think is important:

Yet the righteous holds to his way,

         and he who has clean hands grows stronger and stronger.

 

Integrity and righteousness are the most important things to Job.  Again, his friends keep telling him to confess his sins and God will restore his blessings, but Job knows that he’s got nothing to confess.  He’s not going to compromise his integrity for the sake of “stuff”.  I’m sure Job would have liked to have all his material blessings restored, but material blessings were never why he served God.  For Job, God himself was enough and righteousness was its own reward.  So, once again, even as Job cries out in anger and frustration to God, he maintains his integrity and makes the case for God’s wisdom against the accusations of the Adversary.  Remember, the Adversary’s charge was that people are only righteous because they want the blessings that come with it, but Job is proving him wrong.

Now, in Chapter 18 Bildad speaks again.  Whereas Eliphaz is the mystic, the guy who thinks God has given him words and visions, Bildad is sort of the traditionalist.  Bildad draws his speech from the wisdom of the ages.  And, again, that wisdom says that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked, ergo, Job has done something to deserve his predicament—or at least that’s the logic of Job’s friends.  So Bildad continues the discussion with a litany describing the fate of the wicked.  In many ways what he says sounds like it could have come straight from the book of Proverbs.  He says things like:

The light of the wicked is put out,

         and the flame of his fire does not shine. (v. 5)

A trap seizes him by the heel;

         a snare lays hold of him.

A rope is hidden for him in the ground,

         a trap for him in the path. (vv. 9-10)

 

The wicked end up caught by their own snares, in other words.  But in verse 13 Bildad strikes closer to home for Job.  Does this sound familiar?

It consumes the parts of his skin;

         the firstborn of death consumes his limbs.

 

Bildad says this to a man sitting on a garbage heap, scraping his open sores with a potsherd.  He goes on saying, “He is torn from the tent in which he trusted.”  He speaks of his branches withering and his memory perishing.”  Hitting really close to home for Job, he says in verse 19:

He has no posterity or progeny among his people,

         and no survivor where he used to live.

 

And then in verse 21 he verbally slaps Job across the face:

Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous,

         such is the place of him who knows not God.”

 

So Bildad takes the accusation another step.  Now Job doesn’t know God.

Job responds in Chapter 19.  He begins by asking how long his friends plan on keeping up their torment.  They came to comfort him and now they’re accusing him of being a wicked man who doesn’t know God.  He’s already disgraced and they’re just heaping it up.

In the main part of the chapter, Job laments what God had done to him.  God has put him in the wrong, has made his paths dark, has stripped way his glory, has pulled him up like a tree, has cast siege ramps against him.  God has pursued him and now so are they.  He cries out for mercy.  Then in verses 23-27 he cries out in one of the best-known passages from the book:

“Oh that my words were written!

         Oh that they were inscribed in a book!

Oh that with an iron pen and lead

         they were engraved in the rock forever!

For I know that my Redeemer lives,

         and at the last he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been thus destroyed,

         yet in my flesh I shall see God,

whom I shall see for myself,

         and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

         My heart faints within me!

 

“Oh that my words were inscribed in a book or carved in stone,” Job cries.  He still wants to plead his case before God, but Job’s got the sense that he’s not long for this world.  If only his words were recorded for posterity, maybe future generations hearing his story would remember his integrity even if his friends won’t.  The rest of this passage has been made difficult because past generations of both Jews and Christians have read into it ideas that the rest of the Job’s statements rule out.  They may be true, but they’re out of context in Job.  Job expresses his hope in what the ESV translates as a “redeemer”—it even capitalises it as a reference to Jesus.  While many Jews took this as an affirmation of Job’s hope in being vindicated in the grave—which can easily be ruled out as Job clearly says many times that there is no hope to be found the other side of death.  This also rules out the common Christian reading of this as a sort of messianic passage.  Job has already made it clear—and we know that this was the normal understand of the Jews until very late in the Old Testament—that this life is all there is.  Over and over the Old Testament saints appealed for the Lord to set things right in this life, not at some point after death or in the far future.  They may have been wrong.  The messianic hope hadn’t yet been revealed to them.  But that doesn’t mean we can read things back into the text that aren’t there.  Rule No. 1 of Bible reading is that the text means what it means in its original context.

The word Job uses is go’el.  The best known go’el is Boaz in the book of Ruth—the kinsman redeemer who rescued Ruth from destitution.  The idea of a go’el is one who recovers a loss and who also restores the dignity of the one who suffered the loss.  Again, think of Boaz rescuing Ruth.  Job expects such a rescuer here—not to restore his material blessings, but to affirm his integrity and to restore his reputation.  And Job expects this go’el to make his appearance right here on his ash heap before he dies.  Job doesn’t expect that day to be far off.  He sits daily with his potsherd, scraping his skin raw, but he has hope: before he’s scraped himself to the bone, his go’el will appear.  And if we look at the argument Job has made, the only person who makes sense as Job’s go’el is God himself.  So what Job is getting at here is that as futile as it may seem, he expects that he will get his audience before God and, as he’s said, if he can only plead his case before God, God will restore his favour and his reputation.

So, again, for Job’s friends it’s all about the stuff—about Job finding a way to get his material blessings back.  But Job isn’t interested in that.  Again, he’s interested in righteousness for righteousness’ sake and he will not compromise his integrity.

Now Zophar speaks.  He’s the theologian of the three friends and he says essentially the same thing that Bildad has said.  He reminds Job of the fate of the wicked and, also like Bildad, he points his finger right at Job as he speaks.  In verse 15, the wicked man swallows down riches and then vomits them up.  In verse 23 Zophar reminds Job that God rains down his burning anger on the bodies of the wicked.  In verses 28 the wicked man’s house is carried away—all things that have happened to Job.  In verse 12 Zophar accuses Job of hiding his sin:

Though evil is sweet in his mouth,

         though he hides it under his tongue…

 

Chapter 21 is Job’s final speech in this second cycle.  In verses 7-33 he points out the giant flaw in his friends’ arguments.  Again, they’re affirming the truth that God punishes the wicked, but from that truth they’re drawing a false corollary: That someone suffering must therefore be suffering the wrath of God.  And now Job goes on at some length to remind them that this simply isn’t true.  They know it, but it’s not convenient to their arguments.  He says in verse 7:

Why do the wicked live,

         reach old age, and grow mighty in power?

 

Sure, we all know of the wicked who get caught in their own snares.  We all know of the wicked who end up caught and punished.  But we also know of the wicked who seem to get away their schemes and even to prosper.  Job goes on in 13-14:

They spend their days in prosperity,

         and in peace they go down to Sheol.

They say to God, ‘Depart from us!

         We do not desire the knowledge of your ways.

 

The system is broken, cries Job.  Yes, God is supposed to punish the wicked and reward the righteous, but look around you.  The wicked prosper and I, a righteous man, have lost everything.  And in the end, he says in verse 26, we’re all, good or bad, just food for worms:

They lie down alike in the dust,

         and the worms cover them.

 

And yet Job holds on to his faith.  Yes, he’s questioning God and his justice.  He’s frustrated and angry.  Something’s gone wrong and he doesn’t understand why.  But Job holds on to his integrity.  Even as his friends encourage him to compromise, to admit to some sin that Job knows he hasn’t committed in order to get back on the right side of this system of rewards and punishment, Job refuses.  Righteousness is too important.  And so is God.  Even as Job pours out his frustration to God, he still trusts.  It’s still to God he appeals.

So what’s the lesson here?  Well, as I’ve said before, the book of Job is ultimately about the wisdom of God—and trusting in that wisdom even when we don’t understand.  Job and his friends made the mistake of making it all about the justice of God—and then they imposed on him a standard of justice they’d cobbled together themselves from half-truths and of misapplied truths taken out of context.  Yes, God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous—but not according to some mechanical system.  And, too, God is under no obligation to do either.  God is God.  We can’t apply our limited standards of justice to him.  Instead, we’ll learn that justice flows from him and out of his infinite wisdom.  As we see his justice flow, that’s where we learn these principles like “God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous,” but God’s justice is more complex than this.

But specifically here in this second cycle of speeches, what should get our attention is Job’s righteousness.  The Adversary challenged God, arguing that righteous people are just in it for the reward and Job is proving him wrong.  Truly righteous people value righteousness for the sake of righteousness.  They value integrity for the sake of integrity.  They value God because he is worthy, not because they can get stuff from him.  In the end, when Job is pushed to the breaking point, it’s not about the rewards and the stuff.  It’s about integrity.  This is important.

But what about the benefits.  Job was blessed for his righteousness.  As Christians we know the benefits and the blessings of being God’s people.  Through the death and resurrection of Jesus we know forgiveness of sins and we live in hope of the age to come and of life with God himself.  Because of the power of the gospel, we know the benefits of being restored to God’s fellowship and we know the benefits of restored relationships and of hearts and minds sanctified by the Spirit.  How do we think about these things in light of the warnings in Job?

Well, the issue isn’t whether or not there are benefits to being in Christ.  Instead, Job should prompt us to think about our motivations.  Are we in it for the blessings or are we in it for God?  Is righteousness its own reward or are we looking for more?  Are we doing all this, are we going to church, are we praying, are we reading our Bibles, are we being charitable to others because we expect a return on our investment?  Is there a point where the cost outweighs the benefits and we drop out?  This is what we need to think about.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus is not a way to cash in or to turn a profit.  Our faith in Jesus is about more than escaping hell or finding heaven.  It’s about more than knowing someone who will hear our prayers or make us rich.  If we’re following Jesus for the benefits, we’re not really following him.  That’s like marrying your husband for his money or marrying your wife for her looks.  What happens when the money runs out?  What happens when looks fade?  Now, God’s blessings aren’t going to run out, but what I’m getting at is the fact that Jesus promises us that life in him is not an easy road.  To be holy in a fallen world is a difficult thing.  The easy road leads to destruction, he says.  To follow him in faith is to walk the narrow and difficult path.  It’s to sacrifice.  It’s to take up our crosses as we make a conscious choice to follow him each day.  Yes, to gain Jesus is to know real life, to know forgiveness, to know restoration.  But to follow Jesus we also have to count the cost and to follow him anyway.  We do this not for the benefits, but because we know that he is worthy of our faith and our worship.  He is the God who, out of love, gave his own life for our sake.  He died that we might know his fellowship and his life.  Friends, that’s the motivation: to know the God who has loved us so much that he sacrificed his own life that we might be restored to his friendship.  In light of that we can say with St. Paul, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, teach us to ponder and to marvel at the depths of your love and the wideness of your mercy.  Remind us of our sin that we might look to the cross and truly know your grace: that in Jesus you died for our sake.  As we follow Jesus, risen from the grave, into the life of the age to come, may it not be purely out of a desire for a better life, but because we’ve known your love, your mercy, your grace, your goodness, and your wisdom and know that you are worthy of our faith, our worship, and our allegiance no matter the cost.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

The God Who Is

Isaiah 6:1-8 and St. John 3:1-17

by William Klock

Five hundred years ago, John Calvin famously wrote in The Institutes of the Christian Religion, that the human mind is a perpetual forge of idols.  Our minds, he writes, are stuffed with presumptuous rashness and so we forget the God who is and create gods suited to our fallenness.  We ignore the God who has revealed himself in the Scriptures.  We ignore the God who has revealed himself in Jesus.  And instead we imagine gods for ourselves that affirm us in our particular sins and failures, that affirm the heresies and false ideologies we hold to, and that, on the other hand, stand against everything we don’t like.  Have you ever had one of those conversations where someone interrupted and said, “Well, my god isn’t like that” or “Well, my god would never condemn such-and-such.”

We reject the God who is, the one who revealed himself to Moses as “I am”, and we reconstruct God in our own image.  This deity we call “My god” never challenges us.  He—or it—gives us whatever we want.  It doesn’t embarrass us with its demands.  It affirms us as we are.  It boosts our ego.  In our Old Testament lesson this morning we read about Isaiah’s encounter with the Lord and how he could only respond by falling on his face and declaring not only his own unworthiness, but the unworthiness of his people.  “My god” never prompts that sort of reaction, because “My god” is home-made, a myth, and ultimately just a means to worship ourselves.  “My god” rarely inspires us to feed the poor, let alone preach good news to them.  “My god” doesn’t inspire missionaries to sacrifice everything to proclaim its gospel to the nations.  “My god” typically affirms us in whatever we’re doing—particularly if whatever we’re doing isn’t worship and service of the God who is I am.

And now, on Trinity Sunday every year, the Church confronts us with the living God, the God who is, the great I am.  The Church reminds us that even though we spurned the God who is so that we could serve our idols and ourselves, he still desires us.  Today we wrap up the first half of the Church Year.  We began with Advent—anticipating this God’s coming among us—and then at Christmas, his birth, his incarnation, his taking on our flesh and becoming God as one of us and God with us.  We saw this Jewish Messiah revealed to the Gentiles at Epiphany, reminding us that the God of Israel is also the Lord of Creation.  We walked with him through Lent and watched his ministry to the outsiders and outcast.  We knelt below the Cross as he was crucified on Good Friday and then worshiped with joy on Easter, remembering that he has risen from grave, conquering sin and death.  Two Sundays ago we celebrated his Ascension to his throne and last week we recalled that he has sent God’s own Spirit to indwell his people, fulfilling the promise the Lord had made through the prophets, to renew the hearts of his people and to dwell in their midst.

This sequence, ever year, not only reminds us of the great story of redemption, but it also reminds us of the God who is and just who he is.  He’s not the god we imagine, but the God who comes in humility, the God who confronts the idols of his people, the God who gives his life for his enemies, the God who says, “Never think that you have chosen me; it is I who have chosen you.”

And now, at the end of that sequence of Sundays recalling the God who is amongst us, the Church confronts us with this God as Trinity—with this God who is one in three and three in one.  It’s complicated.  It’s not easy to grasp.  Christians for two thousand years have tried to come up with analogies and they always fail.  Why?  Because there is nothing in Creation like God.  He is the Creator and he is totally and entirely other.  This isn’t the God we humans would ever invent.  As an avid reader of fantasy novels, I’ve run across plenty of authors who have developed their own mythologies and written into them some sort of god who manifests him- or herself in multiple ways or persons or forces.  But none of these authors would have come up with these ideas if it weren’t for the fact that there was an actual Trinity that provided the inspiration.  The doctrine of the Trinity isn’t something that the Church Fathers constructed at Nicaea as if it was a theological laboratory.  There is certainly a sense in which the process involved something like doctrinal algebra as they sought out just the right language to describe who God is and at the same time making sure they were also very clear about who and what God is not.  But they didn’t construct the idea.  They were, so to speak, solving for “x” and “x” was already there.  They were simply working out how to express the divine equation in human language with all its limitations.  No, the God who is, this three-in-one and one-in-three doesn’t fit into our boxes.  And so the Trinity calls us to walk in faith.  This is the God who truly does reveal himself, but when he does, there’s only so much of him we can comprehend.  We fall on our faces in humility and in awe and in worship.  And then he picks us up—or like Isaiah touches that holy coal to our lips and purifies us—and says, “I’m sending you.  Follow me in faith.”  It’s remarkable.  We can only fathom his depths so far, but he knows us deeply, through and through.  We want a god created in our image, a god we can know, a god who gives us what we want, but the God who is, is beyond our full knowing, but still calls us to bear his image, and gives to us not what we want, but what he knows we need—even when it hurts like a coal on the lips.

But why does it matter what we believe about God?  Why do we have, for example, the pages-long Athanasian Creed spelling out the Trinity and the Incarnation in details that seems so unnecessary to so many Christians?  Why does it matter?  And what difference is it going to make?

Brothers and Sisters, all we have to do is look at the world around us.  Why can we find the funding for trillions of dollars to make war, while turning “peace” into a political dirty word?  Friends, it’s because we’ve been worshipping Mars instead of the Prince of Peace.  Why is pornography the most lucrative business on the Internet while poor people starve?  It’s because we’ve been worshipping Aphrodite rather than the living God.  Why are we so keen on converting everyone to political causes and parties, but can’t be bothered to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord?  It’s because we’ve been worshipping Caesar rather than Jesus.

You see, what you believe about God is important.  It makes a difference in how you relate to him and to the world around you.  The problems is that so much of our misunderstanding and misbelief about God is part of the cultural water we swim in.  We have to stop and think and ponder on these things sometimes—which is why the Church confronts us year in and year out.  If we would only listen.  But I think we can get a sense of the problem if we think about the way so many people in our culture think about God today.  For most people he’s remote.  He’s the “man upstairs” or he’s some kind of “great spirit”.  People acknowledge that he had something to do with creating the cosmos, but he’s been pretty much hands-off ever since.  Even our cultural understanding of redemption is essentially justification—not by faith—but by death.  If God does judge it’s on rare occasions—only when someone really evil like Hitler or a serial killer comes on the scene.  But for the most part this god has left us to look after our own interests.  And as good as this sounds to a lot of people, all you have to do is look at the chaos, the strife, the violence around us to see that we’re not doing a very good job of it.

But, you see, this is the god the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment thinkers wanted.  This was the god they were talking about when they said “My god” is such and such.  In their case “My god” was a divine clock-maker.  And how they thought of this god had a profound effect on how they related to him and the world around them.  This is the god who only demands—if he demands anything at all—that we worship him for an hour on Sunday mornings.  The rest of Sunday, not to mention the rest of the week, we can do our own thing.  And when this is what we think of God, even when we do go to church on Sundays, worship and ritual lose their meaning and the focus turns to self.  It’s all about “me” anyway, so the focus of church should be on making sure I feel good about myself.  That’s “My god”.  He doesn’t confront our sin.  He doesn’t confront our idols.  He doesn’t require we change.  And this is why world is such a mess.

The problem is that when we banish God to the far-away reaches of space, other gods will always fill the void.  We worship Mars and Aphrodite.  We worship Caesar and Mammon.  We worship self.  And we think we’re so smart and we build this world that we call civilisation.  We think we’re so much more sophisticated than the primitive people who came before us and who had this idea of a God who dwelt in their midst.  And yet this great civilisation we’ve built without God has brought us two world wars, nuclear bombs, Communism and Fascism, eugenics, a sexual revolution that has destroyed our families and culture, and a genocide of the unborn, the most innocent amongst us.  This is what we get when we worship “My god” instead of the God who is.

So what happens when we do acknowledge the God who is, this Trinity?  If these doctrinal propositions are so important even though they often seem so finicky and esoteric, then affirming them—even celebrating them—must have some kind of positive working out, right?

First, Brothers and Sisters, doctrine is important.  We live in an age when many people think it’s not.  This is part of why so many people who call themselves Christians are perfectly happy talking about “My god” and then describing a god of their own making, not the God who is.  We live in an anti-intellectual age, which doesn’t help either.  We think that it’s not so much about what’s in the head, but what’s in the heart.  As long as you’re sincere, that’s all that matters.  But, Friends, it’s not.  Do you remember—it was quite a few years ago—when I sat on a box here?  It looked pretty solid, but what happened?  It collapsed under me.  If you were here, you’ll remember that it collapsed under me even faster than I anticipated it would!  You see, it’s not our faith that saves.  It’s the object of our faith.  All the faith in the world that a carboard box will support me won’t change the fact that it can’t.  It’s the object, not the faith itself.  This is why Jesus said that all we need is faith the size of a mustard seed.  Our faith has no power of itself.  The power lies with the God in whom we put our faith.  All the faith you need is the faith that causes you to trust him, to rely on him, to ask him and then to trust in his good and perfect will.  Faith is not our god.  God is our God.  And so we’d better be putting our faith not in “My god” but in the God who really is, in the Three-in-one and One-in-three.

But, too, remember that Christianity is not defined by race or sex or nationality or even by the things we do.  Remember our study of Romans?  The Jews defined the people of God in terms of what they did.  They were circumcised, they observed the Sabbath, they followed certain dietary rules.  And Paul said that all that was fine and good, but that it wasn’t what truly defines the people of God.  What defines the people of God is faith in God himself and in his promises.  It all comes back to God and so it’s vitally important that we put our faith in and worship the one, true God.  And this is why we recite the Creed together every time we gather to worship—to remember and to affirm that this is the God in whom we trust.  Church history shows us over and over again that whenever we sideline doctrine and deny its importance we stray into heresy.  At the root of every cult is some misunderstanding of the Trinity or the Incarnation.  This is why the Fathers worked so hard to hammer out the creeds with such precise language.  Without theology—“theology” comes from the Greek for “study of God”—without it, we will eventually forget the one, true God and fall into idolatry.

I think the second thing to remember is that the doctrine of the Trinity recalls the God who is as he revealed himself in the Old Testament.  It’s very common to hear people say that the Trinity is a Christian invention—not something Jewish at all.  But this isn’t true.  The Jews believed in a God who was very much other, but who also had once lived in the midst of his people and, one day, would live in their midst again.  He breathed his Spirit into various people at various times—people like King David and the Prophets and even the craftsmen who built the tabernacle—and he inspired them to speak and to act and to make beautiful things all with his authority.  His word had been there in the beginning as the agent of Creation and his wisdom continued to guide his people.  The Jews saw the God who is in all these things and in all these manifestations.  The first Christians didn’t reject all this in order to come up with something new called the Trinity.  They simply found these Jewish ideas coming into sharp clarity when they looked at the risen Messiah Jesus and when they saw God’s Spirit indwelling his people.  It’s a tragedy that rather than resting mainly on the language and ideas of the Old Testament, the Fathers later used the language of Greek philosophy to define the Trinity, but the doctrine is there nevertheless in the New Testament itself.  It’s there when St. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:19 that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself”.  It’s there in our gospel as Jesus said to Nicodemus that that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  While the language used by the Fathers to define it came later, this doctrine is not some late addition to the faith or corruption of Judaism and the Old Testament.  It’s there through and through both the Old and New Testaments and sits at the core of our faith.  This is the God who is.  This is the object of our faith.

So where does this take us?  If we’ve got this part right, what sort of worship should flow from it?  What sort of people does it make us as we go out to our families and our workplaces and into the world?  What priorities does it give us?

Brothers and Sisters, to affirm the doctrine of the Trinity is to affirm that the God who is, is a God of love and of mercy.  Yes, he is distant and utterly other, but he has also drawn near in Jesus, taking our flesh on himself in humility.  And why?  Because he “so loved the world” as we read in our Gospel.  The God who is has given himself—his very self—to reconcile his enemies to himself.  In our Epistle from Revelation we get a glimpse into the heavenly throne room.  God sits on his throne in all his majesty.  He is the judge.  He is the one whom we finally see in Revelation setting his Creation to rights, coming in wrath to wipe away every last bit of evil that has corrupted his Creation and then making all things new.  The God who is judges, condemns, destroys.  And yet, if we were to flip two chapters ahead, we also see the Lamb at the centre of that heavenly worship—the Lamb who gave his life that his enemies might once again be his friends.  The God who is will judge the earth—and if you really think about it, that’s a frightening image for a sinner and idolater to behold—but he is also the God who loves his Creation and his creatures so much that he will one day set it all to rights and has given himself so that we can have a part in that new creation, rather than being destroyed on that day when he wipes it clean of sin and evil.

Brothers and Sisters, the doctrine of the Trinity declares to the world that the God who is, is both the judge to be feared and the saviour to be adored, who has entered into his own creation to share and to bear our pain himself for our sake.

The Trinity affirms that Jesus is one of the three persons of the Trinity, but it also affirms that the Spirit is one of them, too.  The God who is has sent his Spirit to apply to his people the work done by his Son.  To affirm the doctrine of the Trinity is to affirm that in Jesus, God came to bear our pain and our wrong and to set Creation to rights.  It’s also to affirm that God comes today in the Spirit to enliven his people and to send us into the midst of the pain and sin and brokenness of the world with the good news about Jesus and with renewed hearts ready and eager to bring the gospel of Jesus to bear on the pain and wickedness of the world.  And so our affirmation of the God who is—not the god we might make in our image, but the one, true God who is—shapes who and what we are and how we serve and worship.  He is the one who lies behind our prayers even as we reach out to him with those same prayers.  He is the one who fills our hearts with gratitude and love for the mercy he has shown to us in Jesus and who makes us stewards of his grace for the sake of the world.  He is the one who gives us a vision of creation set to rights and who inspires hope as we stand at the empty tomb and look ahead to that future and then work for justice and peace and goodness, pulling God’s future into the present that this world of idolaters might have a glimpse of the God who is.

So to affirm the Trinity is to look up to the God who is, but it’s also to go out into the world in the name of the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit and to bear his image, restored to us by Jesus and the Spirit.  We affirm the doctrine as we recite the sometimes strange-sounding words of the Creed, but maybe even more importantly, we affirm the God who is as we receive his invitation and come to his Table.  Here we celebrate the life of the God who is, given in Jesus the Messiah, God with us, as we receive his gifts of bread and wine blessed and made holy by his Word and Spirit.  Brothers and Sisters, the bread and wine remind us that we’ve not only been redeemed by the God who is and saved from our sin, but that we’ve also been given his life as he has filled us with his Spirit.  Here we meet the God who is.  And here the God who is reminds us that you are his temple and that I am his temple.  And that means that we, his people, are now the place where this lost world meets the God who is.

Friends, we cannot come to the Lord’s Table and be reminded of the love and compassion, the mercy and grace, and the life he has given to us through Jesus and the Spirit without then going from this place to make that same love and compassion, mercy and grace, the very life of God known to the world.  We Anglicans don’t very often use the word “Mass” to describe the Lord’s Supper, but it’s an apt word nevertheless.  It comes from the Latin word for dismissal.  Having met the God who is in word and sacrament, he now sends us out into the world as stewards of his grace.  The world wants “My god”.  The world wants god in its image.  But the God who is wants the world—wants to flood it with love and mercy and grace and forgiveness and life—and you and I are his means of taking it to them.

Let us pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you have given us your servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity: Keep us steadfast in this faith, we pray, not merely in our heads and not merely in our hearts, but also in our hands and our feet, our eyes and our ears that we might also be steadfast in making you known to the world as stewards of your grace.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns together with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

There Came from Heaven

Acts 2:1-11

by William Klock

Last Sunday we recalled the Ascension of Jesus and remembered it’s significance—that it offers a powerful visual confirmation of his lordship over creation.  Now Pentecost.  Do we understand the significance of Pentecost?  I think that for a lot of Christians, Ascension is little more than a reminder that Jesus isn’t physically present with us anymore.  There’s a whole theological system or movement in Evangelical Christianity that has pushed the reign and kingdom of Jesus into the future and every time I run into one of these people I want to ask: What about the Ascension?  Actually, I’ve done just that and what I find every time is that the significance of the Ascension has never really dawn on them.  And I think something similar has happened with Pentecost.  Not necessarily in the same way, but nevertheless, we’ve allowed a cheapened view of things to downgrade what Pentecost actually means.  In the case of Pentecost, I think what’s happened is that a lot of Christians have turned it into little more than a person experience.  And as much as the reality of Pentecost is a personal experience for us as Christians, when that becomes our main focus, we tend to lose the bigger picture, the big picture of redemption.

So let’s back up to the Ascension for a moment to get some perspective before we head into Pentecost.  Again, the point of the Ascension is that Jesus has taken his throne and that he will reign from there until, as St. Paul says, every last enemy is put under his feet—until every enemy of God and his people, of his kingdom and his new creation has been conquered.  And if Jesus is reigning, that means that his kingdom is here and his kingdom is now.  This is what the Old Testament points to throughout its pages.  It’s what the New Testament affirms about Jesus and his coming and his mission.  Now, there’s a big machine out there in Christians TV and publishing that’s figured out you can make a lot of money publishing sensationalist books about the future and they feed Christians a steady diet of theology that says Jesus’ kingdom hasn’t yet come, but the fact that Jesus ascended should tell us otherwise.  King’s don’t take their thrones without their sovereign rule being inaugurated and that’s as true of Jesus as it is for earthly kings.

As I’ve thought about this I’ve come to suspect that one of the major reasons we’ve missed the reality of God’s kingdom is that we haven’t fully grasped the mission of the Church—of God’s new creation here on earth.  We pray every day, “Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” but we never fully grasp just what we’re praying in those words.  And that’s what I want to talk about this morning.  And that brings us back to Pentecost.  What’s the significance of Pentecost?  Why is Pentecost important?

The best place to start is our Epistle from Acts 2 this morning.  St. Luke tells us there of this amazing thing that took place as the Holy Spirit came in a rush of wind and fell on the disciples in something that looked like tongues of fire.  Suddenly they were praising God in other languages.  Jews from all over the empire were there and heard these Galilean men telling of the mighty acts of God in their own languages.  None of these visitors was quite sure what was going on.  Some of them thought the disciples were drunk.  And that’s when Peter stood up and gave his first sermon.  He began with Joel’s prophecy as he walked the people through the Old Testament and then explained how Jesus, in his death and resurrection and then in his ascension not only fulfilled those prophecies, but how Jesus actually fulfilled Israel’s failed mission.  As he says in verse 36, “Therefore let the whole house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

It’s an amazing picture Luke gives us, but as we read it we probably missed the really significant little note he gives us right at the beginning.  In verse 1 Luke begins by telling us that all this happened “when the day of Pentecost arrived”.  And we think, “Well, of course…this is why we refer to that day as Pentecost!”  What a lot of people don’t realise is that it wasn’t Luke or the Church that decided to call that day Pentecost.  That day was already called Pentecost.  That’s what the Greek-speaking Jews called the day fifty days after Passover—“pente”, “fifty”.  In Hebrew it was called the Feast of Weeks—specifically, seven weeks after Passover.  And the connection between this Jewish festival and what happened on that day Luke tells us in Acts when the Spirit descended on the disciples is important.

Passover and Pentecost go all the way back to the beginning of Israel’s story in the Exodus.  Remember back to the first Passover.  The Lord sent his angel to take the lives of the firstborn of all Egypt.  But he made a provision to spare the firstborn of Israel.  He gave Moses instructions for the people: Each family was to slaughter a lamb.  They were to eat the lamb and they were to paint its blood on the doorposts of their home.  When the angel of death saw the blood of the sacrificed lamb he would literally “pass over” that home and spare those inside.  The next day the Lord led his people out of their bondage in Egypt.  He rescued them again as he parted the waters of the Red Sea so that they could escape Pharaoh’s army and he led them to Mt. Sinai in the wilderness where he gave them his law.  The law he gave to the people through Moses was the charter of his covenant.  To be God’s people is to manifest his glory and his faithfulness to the world.  That was Israel’s calling and it had been ever since the Lord had called Abraham: to be a light to the gentiles so that the nations might know the glory of the Lord and be drawn to him.  The Lord wrote his law on tablets of stone so that Israel would know what to do to fulfil her mission and ministry—that she would know what it is to live in covenant with the Lord.  God rescued his people, leading them in an exodus from their bondage to the Egyptians and on the fiftieth day he met them and gave them his law.  That was the origin of the feast of Pentecost.  And that was its significance for Israel down through the years.  At Passover they remembered how God had rescued them.  Year after year they sacrificed lambs and painted the blood on their doorposts to remind them of the way in which the Lord had saved them.  And every year, fifty days later they commemorated and celebrated the giving of the law that taught them how to live as the Lord’s people.

All of that’s packed into that statement Luke makes in Acts 2:1 about the day of Pentecost having come.  And that points to the meaning of Pentecost as we remember and celebrate it as Christians.  On that last Passover of the Old Covenant era, Jesus went to Jerusalem.  He and his friends ate that age old covenant meal in the upper room, but as they did so, Jesus gave it new significance.  Now the Passover bread was his body.  Now the wine was his blood.  The next day, Jesus gave his body and blood for the sins of his people.  And on that first Easter morning he rose from the grave, not only conquering sin and death, but leading his people in a new exodus.  This time is wasn’t an exodus from human slavery, but an exodus from slavery to sin and death and into the new promised land of the long-awaited age to come.

For forty days Jesus taught his people from the Law and the Prophets, showing them all these connections.  He gave his people a new mission.  And yet it wasn’t a completely new mission.  It was the same mission that Israel had had all along: to manifest the glory of the Lord to the nations and to call them into covenant with him.  But this time the Lord was equipping his people as he never had before.  He had promised through the prophet Ezekiel: “I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them.  I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19).  This is what humanity needed all along.  The law was external—written on stone tablets.  What humanity needed was a new heart, a new life, given and made possible by the indwelling Spirit of God.  And so, at his ascension, Jesus gave his disciples their mission: go out into the world, proclaim the good news—the message that Jesus is Lord, that there is a new and eternal King, make disciples of the nations, and baptise them into the God who loves and redeems his rebellious people.  But this is also why he told them to go to Jerusalem and wait.  The exodus made Israel God’s people.  In fact, we see throughout the Old Testament that it was in the Exodus that the Lord adopted Israel and called her his firstborn.  But being adopted is different from being given the tools needed to actually live as part of the family.

Think about that.  Imagine being adopted into a family, but not being told the house rules or the family expectations.  That was what Israel needed to live the Lord’s adoption.  And that’s the purpose that the law served when it was given at Sinai.  It was the family rules.  And just so with Jesus’ disciples.  Jesus is now the Lord’s firstborn.  He has taken Israel’s role on himself and as we pass through the waters of baptism in faith—our own Red Sea experience—we are adopted as Jesus’ brothers and sisters into the Lord’s family.  But we need to be equipped to live as members of the Lord’s family.  And so, on the fiftieth day after their exodus, after their rescue from slavery to sin and death, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to his people.  Instead of external tablets of stone, he gave his life-giving and empowering Spirit to breathe life into his sons and daughters that they—that we—might truly live as his people, as his family.  Instead of an external law pointing us to God, God comes to us himself, pours himself into us, and turns out hearts to him.

That day was a commissioning too.  Pentecost mirrors Jesus’ own baptism.  Think back to the beginning of the story of Jesus’ ministry.  He was baptised by John and as he came up out of the waters of the Jordan River the Holy Spirit descended on him and the Lord spoke from heaven: This is my beloved Son; in him I am well-pleased.  At Pentecost the Lord did the same thing for the Church.  He sent his Spirit not only to indwell us, but to commission us to carry out the mission that Jesus began.  On Pentecost the Lord declared to his Church, to all those who are in Christ: These are my beloved sons and daughters; in them I am well-pleased.  And as Jesus was sent from his baptism into the wilderness to suffer Satan’s harassment and to triumph over him in the power of the Spirit, so from our baptism at Pentecost, the Church is sent out into the wilderness: to charge into the darkness with the light of Christ, to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord and that he has conquered sin and death and Satan.  We’re not called to go timidly into the world to offer people a new option on the smorgasbord of world religions.  No, we’re to charge into the territory of Satan and of Caesar to proclaim that there is a new Lord, that the kingdoms of Satan and of Caesar are coming to an end and that Jesus is Lord.  Our message is one that we should be proclaiming not with timidity and fear, but with power and authority.  Ascension and Pentecost give us the assurance we need that Jesus reigns, that his kingdom is here and now, and that however bad things may look today, he will with absolute certainty subdue every enemy and return on the clouds the conquering king at the end of the age.

There’s no reason to be afraid.  There’s no reason not to have confidence in our mission.  Ascension and Pentecost should be reminders of that.  Last week we sang those words of the old hymn “See the Conqueror”:

 

Thou hast raised our human nature

In the clouds to God’s right hand

There we sit in heavenly places

There with Thee in glory stand

 

Jesus reigns adorned by angels

Man with God is on the throne

Mighty Lord in Thine ascension

We by faith behold our own

We by faith behold our own

 

In his Ascension Jesus gives us assurance.  He in his resurrected and exalted humanity has raised our humanity and this earthly realm to heaven.  That’s one half of his final promise to restore heaven and earth.  And Pentecost embodies the other half of the promise: In sending the gift of the Holy Spirit to indwell his people, the Lord has sent heaven to earth.  Humanity has risen to heaven with Jesus and heaven has descended to earth with the Holy Spirit and so we know that heaven and earth cannot remain sundered and separated forever.  One day they will be restored.  All that remains is for Jesus to subdue his enemies.

In the meantime, Brother and Sisters, we the Church have been made the temple of the living God.  Think about what that means.  In the beginning God created a garden temple where he and his people lived in fellowship with each other.  Men and women lived in the presence of God.  Our sin broke that fellowship.  Sin and death drove us from the garden.  Sin and death forced apart earth and heaven.  The tabernacle and the temple were built as models of that garden temple in miniature.  They became the centre of Israel’s life, because in the temple God and human beings could find fellowship, even if it was a limited and broken fellowship.  Then Jesus came and he became the temple himself.  In his incarnation he united humanity to God and in giving his Spirit to us, to the Church, the Lord has made us his living temple.  In us, thanks to Pentecost, God is made known to fallen and broken humanity.  In us the new creation has begun.  And in us the Lord is working to restore his fallen and broken world to himself.

And what’s our mission?  How do we shine the light of Christ in the darkness?  Brothers and Sisters, just as Israel was given a new set of “family rules” to show her how to be light in the darkness, we as God’s new Israel have been given the same.  Not a legalistic set of dos and don’ts, but a call to live as Jesus did.  We’re called to manifest faith and to manifest hope and, most of all, to manifest love to a world with no faith and no hope and that’s filled with fear and hate.  We’re called to live out the manifesto, the charter given by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount: hungering and thirsting for righteousness, showing mercy, making peace.  We’re called to show the world that Jesus has given us a new way of living.  In fact, it’s not a new way.  It’s the old way that was lost when we fell into rebellion and sin, but now it’s back and it’s possible because this time it’s not a set of rules carved on stone; it’s a new being and a new life imparted to our hearts by the very Spirit of God living in us and giving us his new life.

Brothers and Sisters, there’s an awful tendency to forget all of this when we turn Pentecost into a private experience as often happens.  Pentecost is about the people of God being equipped by the Spirit to live as his people, not just privately, but publicly—not for the sake of ourselves, but for the sake of the world.  Pentecost is about the Spirit bearing fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, it’s about the people of God being changed and renewed in our hearts that we might proclaim that Jesus is Lord.  And we do all this as heralds of his kingdom, proclaiming its good news.  This idea of “gospel” or “good news” in the New Testament brings together two meanings.  For the Jews “good news” brought to mind the language of Isaiah.  “Good news” meant a messenger coming to a people languishing in exile; a messenger sent to tell them that their enemies had been defeated and that the Lord had returned to Zion.  To Greeks and Romans, “good news” brought to mind an imperial herald, sent to the far reaches of the empire with the message that a new Caesar had ascended to the throne.  In Jesus both of those meanings are brought together.  In Jesus we have a new and eternal King; in Jesus the Lord has returned to Zion to dwell in the midst of his people.  The power of Pentecost is the power and life of the Spirit given to us to proclaim his kingdom and to live it before the eyes of the world.

Let us pray: O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Every Square Inch

Acts 1:1-11 & St. Luke 24:49-53

by William Klock

Now, more than ever, we need to be reminded that Jesus is Lord.  Some of us are really good at remembering that and we’re hanging onto it as tight as we can these days.  Others of us, not so much.  I wonder how many of you looked up as you walked under the lychgate as you arrived this morning?  How many of you saw those words carved over the entrance?  Those words that say, “Jesus is Lord”?

There are a number of ways that churches remind us of what it means to be a Christian and of our union with Jesus.  The church Veronica and I attended when we lived over in Vancouver was entered through the baptistery.  You couldn’t get into the church without having to walk in a semi-circle around the enormous font inside the church doors.  The water in the font carries God’s promise of redemption and new life.  At some point we each passed through those waters in faith to become part of the people of God.  And the font, there at the entrance to the church, was a reminder every time we passed by it of God’s covenant promise and of God’s covenant faithfulness.  Here, every time we walk through the lychgate, we’re reminded of the gospel itself.  Here we’re reminded of whom we come to worship and why he’s worthy.  Jesus is Lord.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s the heart of the gospel.

And that’s why we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus.  Year in and year out, during the first half of the calendar, the Church through scripture and prayer and liturgy leads us through the life of Jesus.  The year begins in Advent as we anticipate his coming.  Then, at Christmas, he arrives in humble majesty.  At Epiphany we see the Jewish Messiah manifested to the Gentiles.  Then, through Lent, we walk with him in his ministry as he makes his way to the Cross.  On Good Friday we recall his death with sombre silence and yet, still with joyful hearts, knowing that through his death comes the forgiveness of sins.  And then that joy rises to its height on Easter as we celebrate the empty tomb and Jesus’ resurrection from death.  At the Cross, evil rose up to its full height and did its worst, but on Sunday Jesus rose victorious over sin and death.  He broke the chains.  New creation went out from that empty tomb like a shockwave through Creation.

But the resurrection of Jesus did—or maybe better it signified—something else that often gets lost in the story.  Jesus is the Messiah.  That’s what “Christ” means.  It’s not Jesus’ last name.  It’s the Greek word for Messiah.  And the Messiah was the long-hoped for and long-awaited king of Israel.  Not just a king, but the king—the one who would lead the people in a new exodus, the one who would fix Israel’s heart problem, the one who would set this messed up world to rights.  Of course, we read in the Gospels and then in Paul, a lot of the Jews had the Messiah all wrong.  They’d misunderstood the plan that God had for the world and their place in it.  They were like the postman given a letter and then keeping it for himself.  And so they rejected Jesus.  More specifically, they rejected Jesus as the Messiah.  “We have no king but Caesar!” they shouted.  “Crucify Jesus!” they cried.  And so the resurrection of Jesus was more than just a happy ending to the story.  The resurrection was God’s vindication of his Son.  The world said, “He’s not the Messiah” and they killed him.  But God overturned their verdict and turned their violent act of hate and rebellion into an act of redemption through which he revealed his King.

And so, for forty days, the risen Jesus walked and talked with his disciples.  Luke says that he explained the Scriptures to them so that they would understand the story, his place in it, and theirs too.  And he says that this risen Jesus was glorious.  He was the same and different at the same time.  It took a while for his friends to recognise him.  But he was as human as ever.  He sat on the beach and ate fish with them.  I can imagine Jesus juggling the hot fish from one hand to another and gingerly biting into it lest he burn himself.  He was as human as ever, but he was more.  Appearing in a locked and sealed room and then disappearing just as quickly.  The resurrected Jesus was as at home on earth as he was in heaven and at home in heaven as much as one earth.  And that’s what we see today as we remember and celebrate his ascension.

In our Epistle we read those first eleven verses of the book of Acts and then in the Gospel we read the last verses from St. Luke.  Luke says that forty days after the resurrection, Jesus led his disciples out of Jerusalem and up to the Mount of Olives.  He promised them that John the Baptist’s prophecy would soon be fulfilled.  He was going to send his Spirit to baptise them with fire.  They didn’t know what that meant.  In fact, it didn’t even seem very important to them at the time.  They wanted to know about the kingdom!  That’s what the Messiah was about—he was supposed to come and restore the kingdom of Israel.  When he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday they were thinking that maybe now he would finally throw off the poor itinerant rabbi disguise and restore the kingdom, throwing out the Romans and taking up David’s throne.  But instead Jesus allowed himself to be arrested, beaten, and killed.  They were despondent.  But then on Sunday he rose from the dead.  Maybe this was finally it.  But through the next forty days Jesus simply taught them the Scriptures.  The disciples were excited to have Jesus back with them.  They were excited about his resurrection, although I don’t think they truly understood what it meant at this point.  And so there on the Mount of Olives they asked again: Jesus, it’s great you’re alive again.  We appreciate all the Bible teaching.  But when are you going to bring the kingdom?  And in response Jesus once again promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower their witness and then told them that it wasn’t their place to know the times and seasons fixed by the Father.  But then Jesus did something amazing: he ascended into the clouds.  There were the disciples staring into the sky, probably with their mouths agape, as Jesus disappeared from their sight.  And they just stood there, staring and staring until the two men, the two angels, broke into their wonder and amazement saying, “Hey, you men of Galilee!  Are you going to stand there forever staring into space?  Jesus went up to heaven and he’s coming back.  Didn’t he give you something important to do in the meantime?”

Why were the disciples standing there agape?  You and I would too if we saw our friend ascend into the clouds.  That’s not something that people do.  But for the disciples it was more significant than we might think.  It’s tied to Jesus’ last words and it’s tied to both the Old Testament and the symbolism of imperial Rome.  First, that great messianic passage in Daniel 7:13-14 that gives a dramatic visual of the son of man rising to his heavenly throne to rule:

I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven

         there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days

         and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion

         and glory and a kingdom,

that all peoples, nations, and languages

         should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

         which shall not pass away,

and his kingdom one

         that shall not be destroyed.

 

But, as I said, this symbolism was important to the Romans, too.  Julius Caesar took on the trappings of divinity when he became emperor of Rome.  After his death the senate declared him divine.  The later emperors of Rome followed suit.  On their deaths the Senate declared that they had ascended to heaven as gods and they were depicted in imperial imagery ascending into the clouds.

That was the imagery that surrounded Jesus at his ascension.  He didn’t have to ascend into the clouds that way.  Heaven isn’t up there somewhere above the clouds.  You can’t get there by travelling up—not even with a spaceship.  Even the Romans understood that heaven was simply the realm of the gods in contrast to the earth, which is the realm of human beings.  And so Jesus didn’t have to fly up into the clouds to leave the realm of human beings for the realm of God.  He simply could have vanished from the disciples’ sight.  But instead he chose to leave in a way that drew on this imagery familiar to both the Jews and the Gentiles.  Everyone knew that Caesar didn’t actually fly up to heaven.  The comet commemorating his divinity on Roman coins was just a symbol.  But Jesus did it for real.  Why?  Because it sent the message that Jesus is the Messiah, confirming the prophecies of Israel’s scriptures, and at the same time declaring that Jesus is Lord.  “Caesar is Lord” was the creed of imperial Rome.  But Caesar was just a pretender.  He brought peace to the world, but it was a temporary peace forged by violence and intimidation.  Jesus, on the other hand, really is Lord.  In contrast to Caesar who conquered his enemies with the sword, Jesus conquered his enemies by humbling himself and dying on a cross.  And in return, God exalted Jesus and seated him at his right hand—in the place of heavenly honour.  Caesar pretends at being Lord, but Jesus really is.  That’s the first take-away from the Ascension story as St. Luke tells it.

But the other take-away is the one that upsets much of the popular theology of today, and that’s that the kingdom is here and the kingdom is now.  The kingdom is not coming in the future.  It’s not coming after a rapture of believers.  It’s not coming before or after or in the middle of a Great Tribulation.  And it’s not something we have to go to heaven to experience.  The disciples asked Jesus when the kingdom was coming and Jesus responded by telling them that it was not for them to know.  I suspect he may have said that with a smile, because the next thing we see is Jesus ascending.  Just as the Ascension sends the message loudly and clearly that Jesus is Lord, it also sends the message loudly and clearly that his kingdom is here and now.  They asked him when the kingdom was coming and in response he gave them a dramatic visual that they’d never forget: They saw the King ascend to his throne.  Brothers and Sisters, the Ascension of Jesus tells us very dramatically and unmistakably that the kingdom is here and now.  King’s don’t sit on thrones to rule over nothing.  Why is the Ascension important?  Again, it tells us dramatically and unmistakably that the King is one his throne and that his kingdom has already been inaugurated.

All of this is important, but what does it mean that Jesus is reigning and that the kingdom is here and now?  For that we need to look at the big picture.  In the beginning God created the Cosmos to give him glory.  At the centre of it was a garden and in that garden the Lord placed human beings to tend and to keep it.  Everything about the garden points to its being the Lord’s temple.  When the Israelites built the tabernacle, the design was meant to mimic the garden.  It was in the garden that human beings lived in the presence of the Lord.  And later it was in the tabernacle and then the temple that the Lord manifested his presence in the holy of holies.  The temple was the place where heaven and earth met and where the people went to meet with, to worship, and to fellowship with the Lord.  The temple pointed back to the garden.  When humanity sinned, the garden was lost.  Adam and Eve were cast out and an angel placed at the entrance to guard it.  And from there the story of humanity goes from bad to worse.  And yet the Lord never abandoned his Creation.  The creation was meant to give God glory and when it turned on him, instead of destroying it, God chose to manifest his glory by renewing it—by making a new creation.  And as humanity lost all knowledge of the Lord, he called Abraham to himself and through Abraham created a new humanity in the family of Abraham.  Through Abraham, the Lord began the work of restoring the garden.  “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” God promised (Genesis 12:3).

And yet think about a garden.  You can’t plant a garden in the wilderness and expect it to flourish on its own.  Enemies and wild animals will raid the garden and steal the fruit.  Without cultivation and protection the wild will quickly overcome the garden.  And so the Lord provided for the protection of his new garden.  He sent Jacob and his family to Egypt, where the king looked on them with favour, provided for them, cared for them, and protected them.  When the king of Egypt became hostile, the Lord himself rescued his new creation—Israel—and led her into the wilderness and to the promised land.  He fed her in the wilderness and he drove out her enemies from the land.  Eventually the Lord gave her a human king to protect his new creation from the wilderness—from the hostile enemies—that surrounded her.  But through it all, it was ultimately the Lord who was King and who protected his people.  Isaiah declared that “the Lord reigns” when Israel was faced with conquest by the Babylonian empire.  The Babylonian king and the Babylonian gods had no power over Israel no matter how bad things got.  In Daniel’s vision ferocious beasts represent the kingdoms of the earth that had conquered and dominated Israel, but in that vision the Lord takes the kingdom away from those monsters and delivers it to the saints and ultimately to the Son of Man—to Jesus.  Even when the Lord uses earthly kings to discipline his people, he continues to care for them.  That’s the purpose of his kingship and his kingdom: the care and cultivation of his new creation.

And all this comes to full fruit in Jesus.  He has come as the Son of Man, the representative of Israel.  He has come as the Messiah—the true and eternal king in the line of David.  He has come to bring the Lord’s new creation to full fruit—to suffer for his people and to give them his Holy Spirit that they might truly be the new creation that Israel was supposed to be—that they might be the true sons and daughters of Abraham.  But not only that, he has also come to establish a kingdom over which he will rule himself—a kingdom to protect and to safeguard the new creation—the Lord’s garden as it grows and flourishes and spreads throughout the world.  This is the story of the book of Acts.  We read the beginning this morning: Jesus ascended into the clouds to take his heavenly throne.  Jesus is Lord; Caesar is not.  The rest of Acts is the story of the church, of the new creation, of the kingdom spreading throughout the world.  And Acts ends dramatically with Paul in Rome, in chains, proclaiming the lordship of Jesus right under Caesar’s nose.  Through the suffering, persecution, and martyrdom of the saints, the kingdom of Jesus has triumphed and will continue to triumph.  The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper summed it up well in that famous line of his: “There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”  Others, like Caesar may make their claims, but the reality is that Jesus is Lord of all.

Brothers and Sisters, we are God’s new creation.  The wilderness has surrounded the Lord’s garden.  Earthly empires and kings have tried to steal its fruit, they’ve tried to stamp it out and burn it down, but King Jesus has preserved it.  Because of his preservation, past generations have carried the good news that Jesus is Lord from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and to all the world.  Because King Jesus has preserved it we know and believe that good news here in Canada, half a world away from that mount from which Jesus ascended to his throne two thousand years ago.  Because King Jesus continues to preserve his new creation, we can have confidence to go out in faith, to charge into the darkness with the light of Christ, knowing that no matter what happens the kingdom of God is here and know and that nothing will stop it.  As St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, this new creation of which we are a part is protected by the one who has been given all authority and who will reign until every last enemy is put under his feet, even death itself.

Our hope as Christians is in that day.  Death is the last enemy to separate earth and heaven and on that day, when Jesus finally defeats it, he’ll return from his throne on the clouds as the angels told the disciples.  As the joyful people of Rome went out to join their triumphant Caesar as he marched into the city as the conquering hero, St. Paul says that the people of Jesus will meet him in the air to accompany him as returns to earth the conquering hero—as he comes accompanied by heaven itself and restores earth and heaven.

Brothers and Sisters, in the Old Testament the temple was the one place on earth where heaven and earth met and where the Lord could be known.  When Jesus came he became the temple for us.  The amazing thing is that Jesus didn’t leave it at that.  He sent his Holy Spirit to fill and indwell us.  We, his Church, are now the temple.  We are now the place where heaven and earth connect and where the Lord is made known.  And that’s our mission.  Carved on our lychgate are those familiar words: “Jesus is Lord”.  We pass beneath them as we come to the church to meet and to worship, but have you ever thought about what they really mean?  The next time you walk under those words remember the Ascension.  Remember that Jesus is seated on his throne, that his kingdom is here and now, and that he has made us his people.  Jesus has restored us to the vocation for which we were created.  He has restored God’s image in us.  He has made us the people in whom heaven and earth meet.  He’s given us the gospel message: the King who died and has risen from the grave is Lord.  And he sends us out like Adam and Eve with that good news, to be fruitful and to multiply—to carry the royal summons to our friends, our families, and eventually to every corner of creation, spreading his kingdom.  We’ve seen the Conqueror mount in triumph and now we go out as his army.  But not an army like those of Rome sent out to conquer barbarians with the sword.  Jesus calls us to charge into the darkness bearing his light, to suffer and even to die for the sake of the lost, as we seek to make known his love, his peace, his justice, his mercy, and especially his grace.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, in his Ascension you have raised Jesus to the place of kingship and authority.  Let us never forget the significance of his rule.  As we face the darkness, give us courage to shine his light brightly and to proclaim that he is Lord.  In this time of disease that reminds us of our mortality, remind us that you have given us a promise of life.  Increase our understanding of your love and grace that we might manifest it to the world around us.  And remind us, Father, to live in the hope of his sure return when all of his enemies have been subjected to his rule.  In the meantime, as we wait for the restoration of heaven and earth, let us be faithful representative of your kingdom, making heaven visible and known to all around us.  We ask this through Jesus Christ, our Saviour and our Lord.  Amen.

Till We Have Faces

Job 4-14

by William Klock

We’ve watched as Job’s friends arrived to comfort him, but found the scene—poor Job, afflicted and sitting in the town garbage dump—so horrible that all they could do was sit in silence.  Even though they acted as if they were at Job’s funeral, that may have been their wisest move.  They were at a loss for words and they knew it.  So for seven days and nights they sat with Job until he finally spoke.  And when he spoke it was to lament and to curse the day on which he was born.  Job’s broken the ice and now his friends speak.  And their conversation or dialogue—or maybe we should just call it an argument—is arranged in three cycles that take up the first half of the book.

This is the rhetorical strategy of the book.  Each series or round of dialogue between Job and his friends addresses a specific philosophical point.  The four friends discuss and argue their way around that point, ultimately reaching some kind of resolution that then leads into the next series or round of dialogue.  So let’s jump into this first round.  It runs from Chapter 4 through Chapter 14—yes, ten chapters, and we’ll run all the way through this morning so be ready to turn some pages.

Eliphaz speaks first.  He starts out with words of encouragement, reminding Job of his wisdom in 4:3-4:

Behold, you have instructed many,

         and you have strengthened the weak hands.

Your words have upheld him who was stumbling,

         and you have made firm the feeble knees.

 

But Job’s forgotten his own wisdom and Eliphaz encourages him to remember:

But now it has come to you, and you are impatient;

         it touches you, and you are dismayed.

Is not your fear of God your confidence,

         and the integrity of your ways your hope? (Job 4:5-6)

And so Eliphaz reminds Job of what we called the Retribution Principle.  This is how they all—including Job—assume God works.  God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous.  He says in 4:7:

“Remember: who that was innocent ever perished?

         Or where were the upright cut off?

 

Remember the triangle I mentioned a couple of weeks ago—the triangle that we can use to help understand what these four are arguing.  At one point of the triangle is God’s justice, at another is Job’s righteousness, and at the third is the Retribution Principle, this assumption that God punishes the wicked and blesses the righteous.  The problem is that Job’s affliction puts these in tension.  Either Job isn’t really righteous or God isn’t really just or the Retribution Principle doesn’t adequately describe the way God does things.  So already we see that Eliphaz is affirming the Retribution Principle.  He also affirms the justice of God.  So I think you can see where he’s going to say the problem is.  It’s Job’s righteousness.  Job isn’t really righteous after all.  Now, Eliphaz does two things to soften the blow and to hopefully defect the anger he knows is going to come back from Job.  First, he presents what he tells Job as something that came to him in a vision.  In verses 12-16 he describes an eerie scene in the night that set his hair on end.  A voice spoke to him.  Now he passes those words to Job.  Look at 4:17-19:

‘Can mortal man be in the right before God?

         Can a man be pure before his Maker?

Even in his servants he puts no trust,

         and his angels he charges with error;

how much more those who dwell in houses of clay…’

Eliphaz says, “Job, God told me to tell you that you’re not as righteous as you claim.”  It’s hard to say why Eliphaz would claim to have heard from God.  It may be that he knows Job won’t like hearing this, so he buffers himself from Job’s anger.  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” and all of that.  Or maybe he’s making the claim to add authority to his words.  But Eliphaz doesn’t seem like the dishonest type.  I think he actually does believe God gave him these words.  But believing God has given you a vision doesn’t make it so.  God will eventually defend Job’s righteousness and expose Eliphaz’s nonsense.  Eliphaz does this and there are a lot of Christians who do it, too—and I doubt that they’re dishonest.  Most are well-meaning and really think that God had spoken to them when he hasn’t.  This should be a warning to anyone who would presume to speak for God.  If you’ve got something to say, never claim God gave it to you unless it came from the pages of Scripture.

Even then, there’s a second warning here.  Eliphaz also softens the blow to Job by noting that no mortal is truly righteous.  “Don’t feel so bad, Job, because we’re all in the same boat.”  Except that they’re not.  Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar aren’t sitting on the ash-heap having lost everything.  Eliphaz is technically correct.  St. Paul says it himself, more or less quoting Ecclesiastes, “None is righteous, no not one” (Romans 3:10).  Like a lot of Christians offering advice, Eliphaz grabs onto a biblical truth as if it were a nail, and with a single massive blow from the hammer, drives it home.  Now, if Job’s righteousness were the problem, great.  Problem solved.  But it’s not.  And rather than healing his friend, Eliphaz hurts him deeply.  He says in 5:17-18:

“Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves;

         therefore despise not the discipline of the Almighty.

For he wounds, but he binds up;

         he shatters, but his hands heal.

 

“Just repent Job.  Admit your sin and God will heal your wounds and restore what he has taken from you.  ‘Hear, and know it for your good’(5:27),” he says.  But here’s the thing: If Job took the advice of Eliphaz, if he were to give up his claims to righteousness that he knows is right, and made a false show of humility before God just to get his stuff back, he’d prove the Adversary right.  Remember, the Adversary has challenged God’s way of doing things.  He’s said that if God rewards the righteous, people will be righteous for selfish reasons.  And that’s just what Job would be doing if he caved to Eliphaz’s pressure.

Notice that everything that Job and his friends say is right.  All of these points in their arguments are good and valid theological points.  We can find all of this stuff somewhere in the Bible.  And yet they all end up being wrong.  Because they’re missing one simple, but profound truth, because they’re camping out on the justice of God as key rather than the wisdom of God, they take all these truths and put them together to create one big error.

Now, in 6:10 Job angrily responds to Eliphaz:

This would be my comfort;

         I would even exult in pain unsparing,

         for I have not [hid behind holy words][1].

 

Job is utterly miserable, he hopes for death, and he finds his consolation in a refusal to hide behind the sugar-coated reality of his friends.  How can a false admission of guilt on his part make anything better when he’s not being punished for his sin?  No, that would only make things worse, because then he’d have lost his integrity too.  So he angrily rips into Eliphaz and defends his righteousness.  In verse 29 he puts it out there plainly, saying, “My vindication is at stake.”  He demands Eliphaz take back his words, then he cries out for death some more.  Finally, in 7:7-21 Job cries out to God:

What is man, that you make so much of him,

         and that you set your heart on him… (7:17)

The Psalmist uses a similar phrase in Psalm 8, where it gives comfort.  God watches over us.  But here Job is accusing the Lord of being overly attentive and finicky to the point of harassing the righteous.  Job wishes God would either leave him alone or tell him what petty infraction he’s guilty of so that he can get it over with.  Job feels as though he’s been through a trial and pronounced guilty without ever having had the chance to defend himself.

In Chapter 8 Bildad confronts Job.  And that’s really what it is.  He doesn’t like what Job has said.  Look at verses 2-3:

“How long will you say these things,

         and the words of your mouth be a great wind?

Does God pervert justice?

         Or does the Almighty pervert the right?

 

“You’re a windbag, Job, speaking nothings!”  Bildad’s not stupid.  He knows full well where this is going.  If Job is going to insist on his own righteousness—and since they all know that the Retribution Principle is how God works, no one’s questioning that—then the implication is that God himself is unjust.  Bildad sees that that’s what Job is saying, if not in so many words.

So Bildad, like Zophar, urges Job to repent of his sins in 5-7:

If you will seek God

         and plead with the Almighty for mercy,

if you are pure and upright,

         surely then he will rouse himself for you

         and restore your rightful habitation.

And though your beginning was small,

         your latter days will be very great.

 

Repentance is the route to restoration.  In verses 11 and 12 Bildad asks whether papyrus can grow where there is no water.  Of course not.  Without water the reeds wither and die and he says in 13:

Such are the paths of all who forget God;

         the hope of the godless shall perish.

 

So he’s accusing Job of having forgotten God—of having strayed from the path of righteousness.  And, of course, this isn’t helping.

Job already knows all this, but it doesn’t answer the question.  What he really wants is to bring God into the courtroom as defendant, to bring a charge of injustice against him.  But Job knows that will never happen.  Look at 9:2 and following:

“Truly I know that it is so:

         But how can a man be in the right before God?

If one wished to contend with him,

         one could not answer him once in a thousand times….

 

How can one bring a charge, says Job, against the one who overturns mountain in his anger (9:5), who shakes the earth (9:6), who commands the sun and the stars (9:7), who alone stretched out the heavens (9:8).  No, says, Job, it’s hopeless in verses 13-20:

“God will not turn back his anger;

         beneath him bowed the helpers of Rahab.

How then can I answer him,

         choosing my words with him?

Though I am in the right, I cannot answer him;

         I must appeal for mercy to my accuser.

If I summoned him and he answered me,

         I would not believe that he was listening to my voice.

For he crushes me with a tempest

         and multiplies my wounds without cause;

he will not let me get my breath,

         but fills me with bitterness.

If it is a contest of strength, behold, he is mighty!

         If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him?

Though I am in the right, my own mouth would condemn me;

         though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse.

 

Even if God is in the wrong, I have no chance in court against him!  And so Job is hopeless.  You can hear him getting worked up as he says these things.  His hopelessness mounts and finally out comes the accusation.  It’s been there all along.  Job’s been beating around the bush, afraid to say it, but now it comes out in verses 22-24:

‘He destroys both the blameless and the wicked.’

When disaster brings sudden death,

         he mocks at the calamity of the innocent.

The earth is given into the hand of the wicked;

         he covers the faces of its judges—

         if it is not he, who then is it?

 

There, he’s said it: God is unjust.  It’s the only conclusion Job can draw.  He knows that he is righteous.  He knows that justice requires that the wicked be punished and the righteous rewarded, ergo God is unjust.  He has afflicted a righteous man.  Job goes on to call for an arbitrator.  He wants his day in court.  He wants God to take responsibility for this injustice.  And then he remembers that it’s pointless and Chapter 10 is another lament.  Job pleads for death.

As far as his friends are concerned, Job is just digging himself further into a pit.  Zophar is sitting there fuming as Job speaks and now he has his chance to respond.  You can hear the anger in his voice.  Job’s speaking blasphemies.  Look at Chapter 11:

“Should a multitude of words go unanswered,

         and a man full of talk be judged right?

Should your babble silence men,

         and when you mock, shall no one shame you?

For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure,

         and I am clean in God’s eyes.’

But oh, that God would speak

         and open his lips to you,

and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom!

         For he is manifold in understanding.

Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.  (11:2-6)

Ouch.  Great words from a friend, eh?  “Stop your babbling, Job.  Stop being such a goody-two-shoes.  If God did speak as you demand, you’d finally understand what real wisdom is and find out that God hasn’t afflicted you half as much as you deserve!”  And Zophar goes on, like Eliphaz and Bildad, to urge Job to admit his guilt and to repent.  If he will only do that, all will be well again.  In verses 16 and 17 he says:

You will forget your misery;

         you will remember it as waters that have passed away.

And your life will be brighter than the noonday;

         its darkness will be like the morning.

 

Eliphaz beat around the bush about Job’s sin, but Zophar just comes out and says it in verse 14: “Put away the iniquity that is in your hand, Job!”

Poor Job.  He’s miserable enough already.  He thought it was bad when his friends sat for seven days and nights and said nothing, but now they speak and make it even worse.  And he really bites back in Chapter 12.  Look at verses 2-4:

“No doubt you are the people,

         and wisdom will die with you.

But I have understanding as well as you;

         I am not inferior to you.

         Who does not know such things as these?

I am a laughingstock to my friends;

         I, who called to God and he answered me,

         a just and blameless man, am a laughingstock. (12:2-4)

 

At this point Job’s thinking starts to shift.  He’s ticked-off with his friends and as much as he’s angry with God for his affliction, the worthlessness of his friends’ advice drives him back to God.  In 12:13 he affirms:

“With God are wisdom and might;

         He has counsel and understanding.

 

Job waxes eloquent about the might and power, the strength and wisdom and the sovereignty of God.  He leads away the false councilors, he makes fools of false judges, he overthrows the mighty, he pours contempt on princes.  Suddenly Job’s hopelessness at the prospect of ever bringing his case before God, let alone winning it is gone.  In Chapter 13 Job now looks for hope in God’s court again.  In verse 3 he says:

But I would speak to the Almighty,

         and I desire to argue my case with God.

 

But it’s not just his complaint against God for his injustice.  Now Job’s talking about dragging his three friends into court with him, confident that God will vindicate him and rebuke the three of them:

As for you, you whitewash with lies;

         worthless physicians are you all…. (13:4)

Will it be well with you when [God] searches you out?

         Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a man?

He will surely rebuke you

         if in secret you show partiality.

Will not his majesty terrify you,

         and the dread of him fall upon you?

Your maxims are proverbs of ashes;

         your defenses are defenses of clay.  (13:9-12)

Job sort of gets his confidence and his hope back.  In verse 13 he says:

“Let me have silence, and I will speak,

         and let come on me what may.

 

In verse 15 he speaks one of the best-known verses from the book:

Though he slay me, I will hope in him;

         yet I will argue my ways to his face.

This will be my salvation,

         That the godless shall not come before him. (13:15-16)

Before Job was despairing of making a case at all, but now he pleads with God, “withdraw your hand from me” and let me speak, give me a chance to prepare my case.  His friends keep telling him that if he will only admit that he isn’t as righteous as he claims, God will restore him.  But in Chapter 14 Job envisions himself being restored to God’s friendship, having his righteousness vindicated.  Look at 14:13-17:

Oh that you would hide me in Sheol,

         that you would conceal me until your wrath be past,

         that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me!

If a man dies, shall he live again?

         All the days of my service I would wait,

         till my renewal should come.

You would call, and I would answer you;

         you would long for the work of your hands.

For then you would number my steps;

         you would not keep watch over my sin;

my transgression would be sealed up in a bag,

         and you would cover over my iniquity.

 

For just a moment there’s a glimmer of hope in Job.  I can imagine him looking up to heaven hopefully.  But then that gross potsherd in his hand, the one he’s been using to scrap the pus from his sores, brings him back to reality.  He remembers his lost wealth and his dead children and the hope is gone in verses 18-19:

“But the mountain falls and crumbles away,

         and the rock is removed from its place;

the waters wear away the stones;

         the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;

         so you destroy the hope of man.

 

And thus ends the first cycle of speeches in Job.  What was the point of all that?  Well, notice: Job’s friends are consistently and repeatedly urging him to give up his claim to righteousness, to admit that he has no integrity, and that if he will humble himself and repent, God will restore him.  For Job’s friends it’s all about the benefits of friendship with God.  And now we see that the Adversary’s challenge to the Lord isn’t finished.  We might have thought that God won the challenge when Job refused to curse him for his affliction, but the test goes on.  Now Job’s friends play devil’s advocates.  They don’t urge him to curse God and die, but they urge him to make it all about the benefits, all about the stuff.  They urge him to do whatever it takes to get it all back.  And Job refuses.  His integrity is more important than stuff.  Even if it means accusing God of injustice, Job will not compromise his own righteousness.  Now, that’s put him in a difficult spot.  For a moment we see a glimmer of hope return to Job, but by the end of the cycle it’s gone.  Job has no hope of ever having his day in court.  He will never be vindicated.  But he still holds fast to his integrity.  Job truly does value righteousness for righteousness’ sake.

And, Brothers and Sisters, that’s the point.  I think we too often miss the point of the book of Job.  We read Job and we think that the purpose of the book is to hold up Job as an example of how a godly person responds to tragedy and suffering.  Job refused to curse God.  Job refused to sin.  We quote some of those well-known words of Job: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.”  Nevermind that most of those verses we take to be expressions of deep trust in God come from some of the most difficult Hebrew of the book and were poorly translated in the King James.  We gloss over Job’s weaknesses.  We use translation to cover up his theological errors.  And that’s a mistake.  We need to allow Job his faults and his weaknesses.  As grand as Job’s view of God is, it’s still deficient.  But that’s okay.  Well, it’s not, but it does mean that Job is human, just like the rest of us.  His knowledge of God is imperfect, just like ours—although perhaps in different ways.  You see, our problem is often that we make the book of Job all about Job.  Considering the title, that’s a natural mistake.  But at the end of the day, the book is about God, not Job.  Job’s not the one on trial.  God is the one on trial, his policies being put to the test.  Job is his star witness, and for all his flaws, Job does spectacularly well, not because his theology is perfect, not because he always knows the right thing to say, not because he never questions God, but because he values righteousness for righteousness’ sake, because he values friendship with God for the sake of God himself.

And that’s precisely why Job is so frustrated and discouraged.  It’s precisely why he cries out to God, demanding a hearing.  And hopefully it’s the same reason we cry out to God in frustrating in the midst of our pain and suffering.  And as I said last week, it often feels like we’re crying out to a brick wall or as if our prayers are bouncing off the ceiling—that no one is listening.  And it may just be that, as he was with Job, God is giving us the opportunity to hear ourselves.  This was the basis for what I think is C. S. Lewis’ finest novel, Till We Have Faces.  Not all that different from Job, the wronged and grieving queen, the main character of the story, rages at the gods.  And then she hears a voice and she stops her raging.  And as she listens, she realizes that it’s her own voice coming back to her—bouncing off the ceiling if you will—and it’s only then that she realizes what idiotic babble she’s been screaming.  And yet the gods, in their silence, had done the one thing necessary.  They’d given her the opportunity to dig those words out of her soul and then to hear her own foolishness.  And the light goes on and she speaks the famous line that gave the book its title, “How can they meet us face to face till we have faces.”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s often just it.  Like Job, we want the God we know and love and who has shown us so much grace and good to come and give us an answer in the midst of our trials, our pain, our suffering, our tragedy—in those times when it seems like he’s retreated to the other side of the wall and bolted the door.  Like Job we cry out and may even rage at the silence and it may just be that God is giving us the opportunity to hear ourselves, to realise our error, to know our smallness, to ponder the limited nature of our knowing—giving us the opportunity to find our face that we might then meet him face to face.

Let’s pray: Father, thank you for these difficult words from Job and his friends.  Help us to wrestle with them and to understand.  I pray that having the benefit of the cross of Jesus before us, that we would better grasp the problem of suffering.  But most of all, remind us always of your grace that we might cling to you always, no matter what we face, no matter our fears, no matter our questions, that we might cling to you knowing that you are our life.  We ask this through Jesus our Saviour and Lord.  Amen.

[1] A better rendering of כִחַדְתִּי אִמְרֵי קָדוֹשׁ than the ESV’s “denied words of the Holy One”.