Job

Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · January 30, 2022 · Finding Wisdom series

Marc Jolicoeur walks through the book of Job, showing that wisdom is universal, contextual and personal, and that God welcomes honest wrestling in prayer. When suffering has no answer to why, he invites us to trust who God is.

More from Marc Jolicoeur · The Finding Wisdom series

Topics: Faith, Prayer, Suffering

Transcript

[0:00] In the land of Uz, there lived a man whose name was Job. We're going to have a little bit of story time today. We're going to work through the book of Job, which is a pretty exciting and pretty pivotal book, actually, for the Bible. But first, we're going to take a look at a piece of art by a man named William Blake, who lived a long time ago. And this is a rendering that he actually has of Job. He's done a bunch of different work, actually, based upon the book of Job. But this is the one that stands out to me the most because it is beautiful, it is striking, it is terrifying. And it gives me an opportunity to basically also point out that if you are an art fan, it probably also means that you know people in your life who are artists.

[0:54] And so coming up here at the church on February, wow, I'm blanking on the date. That's really unimportant. February 19th, Imagine 2022 is coming up. And if you would like to submit any work that you have or point anybody towards some information about it, you can visit online right now, mw.church.com. So that's my little plug. So without any further ado, back to the book of Job. In the land of Uz, there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright. He feared God and he shunned evil. Now, Job was pretty much like the richest man that there was, like not just in the land, but probably pretty much everywhere around that spot.

[1:42] He was like mega rich, like more sheep than you could ever possibly kind of want to count. Not only that, he had a pretty full family. He had seven sons and three daughters. And it seems like he might have had like one wife, which is not necessarily characteristic for wealthy people at that stage of the game and also not characteristic. He was like a really big kind of steadfast worshipper of Yahweh. He was the real deal when it came to worshipping God. Now, it says in the text that one day the sons of God came to present themselves to the Lord and along with them came the Satan. Now, if you know anything about me, you know that I would probably love nothing more than to spend like about 25 minutes just talking about that sentence because it kind of blows my mind and I'm constantly curious about what it could possibly mean.

[2:36] But that will derail the entire message and possibly the rest of our day. So if you'll allow this, this is a very simple, almost probably simplistic way of expressing it, but this will give us a picture that we can walk away with. When you think of the sons of God kind of presenting themselves, you kind of think of the Lord sitting on a throne, which is kind of almost like a judgment bench. He's the boss. And so these angelic beings are presenting themselves to him. It's kind of like a courtroom scene. And the Satan is not necessarily a title of a person like their name, but kind of like his job. And it seems like his job is to be an opponent. In the courtroom metaphor, he would be like the accusing attorney. Somebody that I know says that he kind of seems like a product tester, actually.

[3:24] Somebody kind of goes around and kicks the tires and makes sure everything works. Again, that's much too simplistic, but it will set up the story for us right now. So the sons of God, they present themselves to the Lord, the Satan comes with them, and the Lord says, hey, have you noticed my servant Job? And the Satan says, yes, I've noticed your servant Job. But you know what? He's so upright and whatnot. He just worships you because of what he gets out of it. If you touch his stuff, if you remove that blessing, he'll roll over in a second. Now, for some reason, the Lord allows the Satan to go ahead and try this. He says, sure, you can take his stuff away. Just don't touch his body. Leave his body alone. And so this happens.

[4:11] And in a scene that we'll just kind of recount here really quickly, he loses everything, all of his herds, all of his houses, and much more shockingly and really, really sad. He loses, not just his servants, all of his children die in an accident as well. It's terrible. And the scene, it's like one servant comes and tells him one piece of bad news. And it says before he even finishes speaking, another servant comes and gives him more bad news. And before that one finishes speaking, it's just on and on. They kind of pile on top of each other. Maybe you've had days that kind of feel a little bit like that. And when it's all said, when it's all done, Job falls down and he worships.

[4:58] He says in Job 121, he says, Naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord is taken away. May the name of the Lord be praised. Or in some translations you might hear, blessed be the name of the Lord. Just, that's rough. So in the next chapter, a very similar sort of convening happens again. You have the same kind of courtroom scene and a lot of the same language. Have you noticed my servant Job? The Lord says to Satan. And he goes, yes, yes, of course he's still worshiping you. You haven't touched his body. Pain, that goes a long way.

[5:44] If you cause him pain, he'll turn on you, I promise. And again, for some unbeknownst reason, the Lord allows this hypothesis to be tested. And Job, he is inflicted with what is described as essentially an infectious skin disease from head to toe. You might remember from the painting at the beginning. It just boils everywhere and it's painful, it's excruciating. And we have this scene where he's sitting there on the ground in ashes and he has a piece of broken pottery and he's just doing anything he can to dig at it, to make it stop. And his wife comes upon him and she says, are you still maintaining your integrity?

[6:32] Curse God and die. But Job replied, you are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God and not trouble? And it says in all this, Job did not sin in what he said. Now, three of Job's friends who seem to live actually kind of far away from Uz, they heard through the grapevine what happened and they made the trek to go see him. And when they get there, they are just overcome by what they see. It's just, it's mind blowing. They're just, they're speechless. And so they actually, they sat on the ground with them. It says, for seven days and seven nights, no one said a word to him because they saw just how great his suffering was.

[7:24] Now, all of that action, all those highs, all those lows, the character movement, the introductions, all that happens in two chapters, basically the size of a double-sided sheet of paper. And the next 35 chapters of the book is a dialogue between Job and these three so-called friends of his, although there's also a young bystander who just can't help himself from kind of hopping in at the end. And it's an argument back and forth and it centers really around one question. And you could even say it's just a two-word question. It would almost fit into a wordle if we could get rid of one of the letters. Why Job? What did Job do?

[8:13] Does he deserve this in some way? Did he sin? Is there something hidden that people can't see as to why he is suffering? Is this divine retribution? And Job's friends, they keep saying yes. And Job, he keeps saying no and on and on this goes. It kind of reminds me of some Facebook posts I've seen recently. So all the while, while this debate is raging, there is a storm brewing, metaphorically, yes, but also literally. And from the storm, we find out that somebody has been listening this whole time. And it's not just Job's wife. The Lord, the Lord God, he has some things that he wants to say.

[9:00] And it says in chapter 38, then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm and he said, Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man and I will question you and you will answer me. And then the Lord just completely unleashes on him. He goes, he says, Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand who marked off its dimensions. I mean, surely you know who stretched a measuring line across it, on what were its footing set, or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.

[9:45] Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed the limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, this far you may come and no farther. Here is where your proud waves will halt. Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place and on and on? The Lord just pummels Job and his listeners with all kinds of stuff that they do not and cannot ever know. And after a chapter and a half more of this onslaught, he says, Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?

[10:32] Let him who accuses God answer him. So understandably, Job, he kind of tries to get off the hook, right? He says, I am unworthy. How can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. But the Lord's not really ready to let Job off the hook quite yet. And we go on here. And actually, if there's any kids still with us in the room here, hey, if you are interested, you can even try right now if you have access to a Bible or, you know, the Internet or maybe you can look later. But I would just say you read Job chapter 41. It's a fun read.

[11:17] And you, if you want to, you can throw it in the chat right now. What animal do you think the Lord is describing in Job chapter 41? Hint. My son is obsessed with them. So he goes on to talk about a few different animals or creatures, if you will. And then in English, it's often anglicized as behemoth and leviathan, behemoth and leviathan. And it's hard to say exactly what we're talking about. But one thing is abundantly clear. He made these things. They are crazy powerful. And Job could not even dream of being able to control them. He says, speaking about leviathan, he says, if you lay a hand on leviathan, you will remember the struggle and you'll never do it again. Any hope of subduing it is false.

[12:05] The mere sight of it is overpowering. No one is fierce enough to rouse it. Who then? Who's able to stand against me? Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me. And then Job, he collects himself. And he says, I know that you can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge? Surely I spoke of things that I did not understand, things that are just too wonderful for me to know. You said, listen, now I will speak.

[12:52] I will question you and you shall answer me. My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you. And therefore I despise myself and I repent in dust and ashes. And that's pretty much the end of the book. We're only 11 verses away from the end of a 42 chapter book. And the takeaway at this point seems relatively clear, I would say, right? God is God. Don't question him. Sit down and enjoy the ride, right? That's probably the conclusion.

[13:39] Maybe. We'll have to come back to that. But before we kind of actually wrap up the book in entirety, let's take a look at a couple of different thoughts that emerge as we go through the text. The first one is this. Wisdom doesn't play favorites. What do I mean by that? Where is the land of Uz? I think it's Uz. Where is that place? When is this book set? Is it near Israel? Scholars debate a whole lot of things about this because, well, scholars debate about everything. But what pretty much no scholar is trying to debate is that the land of Uz is actually near Israel in some way or that Job or his family are somehow kind of like ethnically Israelite, whatever that might mean, whatever we think about when we read the Old Testament.

[14:32] In fact, none of the names of any of his friends seem to be remotely Hebrew. There's no other references to any other Old Testament characters. Hardly any language, really, although there's a few really notable elements. And some people would make the argument that this is actually on purpose. It's to somehow make this an opportunity to describe wisdom as a universal, which I think makes a lot of sense. If Job is wise, it has nothing to do with his genetics or with his national borders, but the fact that he fears the Lord. Now, just a really brief foray here. We've been reading the book of Proverbs. Today we're reading the book of Job. There's a few other books in the Old Testament that are often kind of lumped together in what we might call wisdom literature.

[15:24] But just like the other books of the Bible, even though they're in here, they're not the only books of their kind. They're in a genre. So there's actually a lot of different wisdom literature that was written in what we would call the ancient Near East or the geographic areas around ancient Israel. We've got Hittites, we've got the Egyptians, we've got the Mesopotamians. A lot of them are doing this. And even as Joel talked about a few weeks back, the idea that the book of Proverbs is written a lot anyway by the King Solomon to his son. A lot of this other texts were also written kind of by royalty. In fact, they were pretty much all written by the elites. Two other elites so that they could figure out how to rule better.

[16:09] It was essentially kind of a classist thing. But this is where the Bible turns it on its head and makes wisdom a bit of a universal, because these texts were to be written and shared for everyone. It wasn't just something that was, you know, for the royal courts, but it was for all the people. It was to be shared in the synagogue and it's to be shared at the temple and it's to be shared today with us in the church. Now, just because wisdom is universal, though, doesn't mean that it's unspecific. When Job worships the Lord, that's not just some sort of a philosophical concept. It's not some sort of, you know, whatever you mean by God kind of thing. It's not the force.

[16:55] Job worships Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And that's important because even though wisdom is universal and doesn't play favorites, number two, wisdom does need a context. Wisdom needs context. Now, we haven't actually looked at the closing paragraphs of this story yet, but when we do, we're going to discover that there's actually a little twist at the end that's going to cause us to reevaluate maybe some of the things that we've read before. I'm hoping here we're going to take a look at a few passages of Scripture that are actually from the book of Job earlier on. So, for example, if we look at Job chapter four verse eight, Job chapter four verse eight, it says, I have observed those who plow evil and those who sow trouble tend to reap it.

[17:46] Or Job eight, five and six, it says, if you will seek God earnestly and plead with the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, even now he will rise himself, rouse himself on your behalf and restore you to your prosperous state. Or what about Job 11 when it says, yet if you devote your heart to the Lord and stretch out your hands to him, if you put away the sin that is in your hand and allow no evil to dwell in your tent, then free of fault, you will lift up your face. You will stand firm and without fear. These are some beautiful parables we have here, nice little proverbs. Now, each of these statements come in turn from one of Job's three terrible Comforter friends.

[18:34] And to be honest with you, when I read them, they sound kind of right. But what we find out at the end of the book is that the Lord basically casts dispersion on these friends and says that what they've said is not right. And so we're left kind of scratching our head and figuring out what about these things then is not right. Now, if you've been tracking along with us in this Finding Wisdom series, then you'll know that we've been working through a lot the Book of Proverbs. In fact, in January, there was a Proverbs challenge where every day you were kind of challenged to read one chapter of Proverbs and share some of it. A lot of you have been hopping on the train and it's awesome. If it's not too late, you can start any time. A lot of months have 31 days in it.

[19:21] But even if not, it's always good to work your way through. If you did start from the beginning, then this last week, you probably would have read Proverbs chapter 26. Now, depending upon the translation that you used or how caffeinated you were at the time that you read it, your head might have tilted to the side a little bit like my dog's when she's kind of curious about something. When you came across these two verses back to back, Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5. Do not answer a fool according to his folly or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly or he will be wise in his own eyes. What? What's going on here?

[20:06] Somebody must have made a mistake. Throw it out. You encounter a lot of people who sometimes try to push against the Bible and Christianity in general. And this is one of my favorite ones, is when people try to pick an example like this and, you know, tear it all apart. Somehow thinking that ancient people, they just weren't smart enough to figure out that this was a problem. They knew it was a problem. Oftentimes, as you're reading through wisdom literature, these kinds of different approaches or different ways of thinking about things will be separated across chapters and pages. But I believe quite clearly that these two were purposely placed next to each other to help us understand that wisdom is not simple. It's not simplistic, but it's contextual. We need to be able to understand that sometimes you should answer a fool and sometimes you shouldn't because, listen, it's really good to know what to say, but wisdom is needed to know whether or not we should say it.

[21:09] So these two verses, like I said, I believe are kind of custom made and placed there in purpose. And likewise, I believe the Book of Job was placed kind of smack dab in the middle of the Old Testament for the very same purpose to kind of blow up any preconceptions we might have about the simplicity of wisdom. Because wisdom needs context. Wisdom doesn't play favorites. And wisdom is not a formula. Wisdom is not a formula. It's not some sort of mathematical equation that you can just kind of plug and play. There is no scientific instrument that you can use to measure the atomic weight of wisdom. Wisdom is universal.

[21:55] Yes, wisdom is contextual. Yes, wisdom is not formulaic. Wisdom is personal. Now, last week, Pastor Jewel did a wonderful set of teachings about how we can use wisdom in our daily lives. And so if you have not had a chance to listen to that, I highly encourage you to go back and check that one out. It's fantastic. And if you're anything like me, it's great if you missed the service and you want to listen to the message in particular, or if you just want to brush up on it again, you can do it while you're washing dishes or driving down the road with the podcast. So you can just check out the MW Church podcast wherever you happen to podcast. But there's also this lock screen, which is still available. And it's a great way that you can kind of grab this image.

[22:41] You can put it on your phone. You can put it on your desktop. You can print it out and put it on your mirror if you want in your fridge. And it gives us a way of thinking through decision -making in a very practical way. You know, what is true? Why is it true? And what should I do? Now, I made much ado about saying that wisdom is, quote, not a formula. And so you might be wondering, Mark, are you trying to speak against Pastor Joel? Nay, nay, nay, my friends. I would not dare. He's within earshot. You'll notice that if you take a look at this setup, what we have here is not just some sort of A plus B equals C scenario. We have questions, right? What is true? Why is it true? What should I do?

[23:27] See, questions are perfect for this, because questions give us the opportunity to converse. We have a bit of a conversation, yes, with our inner monologue, but much more importantly, much more fruitfully and much more intentionally, we have a conversation with God, with the living God, with the creator of the universe. Yes, we listen, but we don't just listen. We actually speak. We reach out. We converse. Now, later on, we're going to see that maybe conversation is a little bit too light a word, and maybe we want to say that we wrestle a little bit, but we'll save that. Back to Job. We left off with Job in a narrative where it sounded an awful lot like Job had pretty much repented for questioning God, right?

[24:19] My bad shouldn't have done it. But next, there's a twist. Job 42, seven to eight. After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has. So now take seven bowls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has.

[25:04] He said that twice. Now, it could seem then that the Lord here is sort of validating all of Job's dialogue and invalidating all of the dialogue of his friends. Job was right, and they were wrong. Now, this would be perplexing for a couple different reasons. One, when we heard the Lord talking earlier, he kind of sounded ticked off. I don't know about you, but that was the vibe that I had. And also, as we mentioned, a lot of the things that Job's friends say, they kind of sounded right. And so this is a little bit of a confusing thing. If you think about it, Job's friends spend an awful lot of time talking about God, but at least in the text, they spend that much time talking to God.

[25:52] Actually, I have a quote that we're going to put up here from Craig Bartholomew. He says, The friends merely assume that their accumulated wisdom is sufficient to interpret Job's anomalous situation. And here's the key. It is possible, in fact, to interpret the Hebrew of that last phrase that we read in Job 42. You have not spoken unto me as my servant Job has. In this reading, Job, he does choose to silence himself. Yes, but not until he has spoken to God, and not just mildly, not politely, not formally, he has poured out his complaint in a powerful and passionate way.

[26:42] And frankly, church, in a way that our tradition and our text teaches us to pray, I do not know if you have recently read through the Psalms, but some of the ways that the Psalmists speak to God, it could almost make you blush. But this is in our DNA, church. We are to speak to and with the living God. And you know what's the most surprising part? Is that it actually shouldn't be all that surprising. We read the word Israel all over this book, Old Testament, New Testament, upside and downside, but we forget where it came from. We won't read Genesis 32 today, but if you're not familiar with it, you should definitely check out how a man named Jacob had his name changed to Israel when he had wrestled with God.

[27:38] Because Israel is the one who wrestles with God. In a wrestling match with God, I don't know about you, but I will definitely lose. But the thing is that this kind of wrestling, even when you lose, you gain. This, in some respects, is how we get wisdom. Wisdom isn't something that you can buy with pocket change. It's not something that you can download. It has to be, listen, it is given, no question. I don't want to use the word earned, but it is gained in some respects through an exchange. And that exchange, all too often, sadly for us, the nature of the game, it is through suffering.

[28:29] It is through suffering and pain that we gain wisdom. And so here's the question. Why Job? Why have we been talking about Job for this last half an hour? Why? Here's the truth, the God's honest truth. I have been dreading, just absolutely dreading this message. Not because I don't like the book of Job. I love it. I think it's a fantastic book. I think it's, from an artistic perspective, it's some of the most beautiful poetry that you could find, and it really is instructive.

[29:15] It's beautiful to me what it says. And yet, when you read the book of Job, there's not a single character in there that I'm like, yep, I'd like that. I want what Job had. Sign me up for an experience like his. I mean, yes, I want his faithfulness. I do. I want that kind of outcome. But I would never, ever want to go through what he went through. And so sometimes when you read the book of Job, there's just this fear. Will that be me? But here's the real fear that I have today, much deeper and frankly a lot more real than that, is I don't want to be Job's friends. I don't want to sit here in front of you and spout off some sort of nonsense about how you can gain wisdom.

[30:07] If only you buck up camper and muscle through, then you too can be happy, healthy, and wise. Because I know in my life I have not suffered all that deeply. Now, I know that suffering is coming. I say that all the time. You can't actually escape it. You can push it off. But this week alone, I have had text messages, and I've had phone calls and emails with people who are deeply suffering. They are in the throes of it. They have lost loved ones. They have lost jobs. They are physically suffering. They have gotten diagnoses that say, wrap up your business. And so they're sitting there. They're not saying, why, Job? They're saying, why me?

[30:52] Why me? And so for you today, humbly, I approach you not as one with some sort of trite answer, but with one who has tried to wrestle with this text and with the God who inspired it to say, you, me, all of us, we need to try to shift from a why to a who. From a why to a who. We can never find out the why. It's actually the amazing thing about this story. We didn't read the very last end. But in this, there's a strange twist, lots of strange twists in Job. But the very end, you know what? Job gets it all back.

[31:39] He doesn't just get it all back. He gets a double portion. He gets twice what he had before. The guy's loaded. It's a happy ever after story. Now, you can read lots of other examples in this book that will not give you an earthly happily ever after. It'll be an eternal happily ever after. And you know what? There's good news there because when in eternity, you will never have to worry about losing it again. But I can't ignore the fact that in Job, this text says that Job got it all back in this life. But you know what Job never got? Not once, as far as I can tell, and I've read this story a lot of times. Job never found out why. He never found out why.

[32:25] But he did shift from why to who. And that's what you and I have the opportunity to do. Because even though we might never be able to find out why this side of eternity, we can know who. We can know who to trust. We can know who is in control. We can know who loves us. In fact, who loved us so much that he was willing to lay aside his rights and to come and to pour out his life for us on the cross so that we can have not just some sort of happily ever after here, but a happily ever after. We can know who. And nobody and no circumstances can ever take that who from us.

[33:16] Would you let me pray for you today? Lord, God in heaven, hallowed be your name. When we say your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. When we say give us this day our daily bread, we know that everybody has a different kind of need. Some people are literally starving for bread and other people are literally starving for help emotionally. Some people are starving for their loved ones who have been taken from them too soon and some people are starving for some kind of physical relief. God, but give us this day our daily bread.

[34:01] And when we say lead us not into temptation, we enter this wrestling match where we don't always know what is good and what is bad because we only have the eyes to see what's in front of us. But, Lord, deliver us from the evil one. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom. Yours is the power. And yours is the glory forever. And so, Lord, I pray for people today who are suffering. I pray for people today who are asking questions. And I pray for people today who have never crossed the line of faith. That today, that this moment could be a turning point. Holy Spirit, speak to us and let us know that even though we might not know why, we can know who.

[34:52] In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.