Two Messages From Job

[audio]

JOB 1-45

Preached 7/16/2017

 

I INTRODUCTION: Repentance and Sovereignty

Common misconceptions about Sin and Salvation

• BB Article (I’ll believe if you prove God agrees with me) – the danger of apologetics
• I am a good person, not like others that need salvation
• An imperfect picture of God – lack of knowledge or power 

From the beginning, the message has always been the same.  Of course as Christians, we have straightforward teaching like Paul’s argument in Romans 1-3, starting with an indictment of the human race before God, systematically taking down “the really bad sinner”, “the really good sinner”, and “the religious sinner” and ending with a crescendo in chapter three with the emphatic section starting with “For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin,” which concludes with Romans 3:23’s “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” – and if that wasn’t enough, in 6:23 he says that “the wages of sin is death”.  There are some who try to make this a Pauline issue, saying that Paul added his own theology to Christianity, ruining the pure message of love from Jesus.  But the apostle John (“whom Jesus loved”) was the one who wrote in his first epistle:

I John 1:8-10 ESV   ⁸ If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰ If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

John was the one who wrote down Jesus’ words in John 3:16, but who also quoted in verse 18 that all needed to be born again because they were already condemned.  Peter wrote in 1 Peter 4:18 that even the righteous “are scarcely saved” (the word meaning “just barely”).  John the Baptist had one message: Repent!  This message was for the common people, the religious leaders (brood of vipers) and even political people (like Herod).

Finally, Jesus Himself spoke of unpopular topics like hell more than any other.  His message was consistent. Back in the Sermon on the Mount series we showed how Jesus masterfully laid out the universal need for salvation in a three chapter masterpiece of a sermon

 

Ch	Self-Told Lies Demolished	The Truth from Jesus
5:1-16	I am a nice person (at least to my friends - but I get even against jerks and lament their existence)	True Happiness is from a kingdom different from what you and the world think
5:17-19	Those are old-fashioned puritanical rules - we are more enlightened now!	God's Standards have not and will not change.Jesus upheld the law, fulfilling, not abolishing it.
5:20-48	I keep the ten commandments, I do more good than bad. God owes me!	The point of the law was not to help you save yourself.  The three purposes of human religion
6:1-18	People think that I am great	God is our only judge - our "audience of One".  Don't do your deeds to be seen by men.
6:19-34	I am the master of my destiny - self reliance is the key to happiness	True happiness only comes from a close, trusting relationship with a good God.
7:1-6	That guy is much worse than I am!	You don't get to heaven by comparison with worse people (and you are worse than you think)
7:7-12	Eh - I am fine. I have need of nothing.	We need our heavenly Father and he is good and worthy of our trust
7:13-20	But everybody does it!	Narrow vs wide gate, difficult vs easy.  The world is going to hell - don't follow them there!
7:21-29	Sure I am going to heaven! I feel I am at least.(Review all the above reasons)	Don't be a false believer - listen to Jesus' wise, loving warnings!

The entire message of the gospel rests on two facts:

1.       God has every right to judge sin, and is blameless and just and good when doing so, and

2.       All of humanity is lost in sin and deserves Gods’ righteous judgment.

Without these two foundations, the gospel is not just weakened.  Without these facts the gospel doesn’t make any sense – it has no reason to exist and it is not “Good News”.  And yet we fight against them – they both are very offensive to human pride, self reliance, and self-glorification.  We like to think that we are better than we are, and we hate the idea of someone with a higher standard of right and wrong looking down and judging us.  So we sacrifice the idea of a holy, sovereign God and create some higher being in our own image – like the “mush God” – a god for all occasions who affirms us to be wonderful.  And our sin gets explained away as “mistakes” or as things that are someone else’s fault – sicknesses, reactions to bad parents, etc.

But sacrificing the biblical truth about God and about the human race actually has more collateral damage than we can imagine.  Without these keys to truth we still need to explain everything that happens in the universe but now our explanations are often hollow and unhelpful.

First, let’s think about what happens when we get rid of sin:

1. Without an understanding of universal sin, we end up with no compelling solution to the “why do people act badly” question, and we spend lots of time and effort treating symptoms with the wrong medicine.  For instance:

 

1. It must be about Money:  Marxist theory proposes that the unequal distribution of wealth is what causes problems in society.  Even many churches have abandoned the Bible and adopted Karl Marx’s philosophy, leading to things like “liberation theology”, which has seen many so called churches around the world openly advocating communist revolutions or, in this country, embracing punitive taxation and redistribution of money, often quoting Jesus to justify their policies.  It is a sad fact that countries that have implemented Marxism fully have generally worked hard to crush churches and eradicate the gospel because it disagrees with their views.  In the end, this doctrine led to the direct deaths of over 100 million people in some of these countries just in the last century, but in the end human nature did not change.

2. Another evil that comes from a lack of understanding of universal sin is spiritual pride – the whole idea that I can justify myself by looking down on others, and that I am immune from conviction myself.  I once heard someone in this church say (during a sermon) “that’s why I hate going to church – they are always ‘talking down’ to you”.  The preacher was not saying anything that he did not apply to himself in equal measure, so how was this ‘talking down”?  The only way that this could be true is if the person taking offense thought themselves to be ‘above it all’ and ‘better than’ others.  They would certainly have denied this – I’m sure with great conviction – but offense is a reaction to a perceived injustice.

3. Finally another result of the denial of sin is acceptance of evil, and the labeling of evil as good.   God said to Isaiah “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (5:20)  He considers it a very bad thing indeed.  What happens in a society that calls evil good and good evil?  The foundations are torn away and those who do good are persecuted as things go from bad to worse.  History tells us that those societies eventually collapse, though there is usually a lot of death and grief before that happens, usually on a huge scale. 

2. Without an understanding of universal sin, people will not respond to the gospel.  Human invented religions show this, as they generally all show the same three characteristics in the end:

1. “Religion” is the system by which we distinguish between “us” and “them”, where “us” is the “good” people and “they” are the “bad” people.
2. “Religion” is the set of special rules, that if we follow them God is made our debtor.  In other words, we “earn” our way to heaven, which then God is obligated to give us as our reward for following them, and
3. “Religion” is the framework that we can use to feel good about ourselves and whatever we choose to do in life. 

Remember that Jesus spoke of the “religious” man in his parable of the Pharisee and the Publican praying.  The “religious” man, Jesus said, did not go away justified before God, because he spent the entire time telling God how good he was, instead of throwing himself on God’s mercy, begging forgiveness for his sins.

Now think about what happens when we get rid of the sovereignty of God.  If God is not in charge of the universe, there is no universal hope, and no ultimate hope for meaning in the universe.  Yet we choose this because it makes certain hard questions about life seem easier.  This last week a radio host that I enjoy listening to had an internet talk show where he took calls from the audience.  One of the things I like about him is that he has a clear moral framework from the Bible as he is a devout Jew and is in fact currently writing a large and scholarly commentary on the Torah.  He often takes questions about religion and morality and he is very friendly with Christians and others.  This week he was asked the age-old question “if God is good, how can there be evil in the world?”  This is not an easy question, and theologians have struggled with that question since the fall. His answer was very clear: God did not know that that would be a result of giving people free will – he quoted the OT verse that spoke of God’s regretting having made man and took that to mean that God was surprised by all of the evil that humans did.  This is by no means a unique point of view, but people prefer it to a God that could have prevented all of the evil that we see and did not.  That He might have a plan that is good but won’t explain it to us is absolutely unacceptable to us.  One famous philosopher put his frustration at this question this way: “If there is a god, then he is a devil”.  But in the end, we are left with an imperfect, doddering God that can only try but in the end is just not very good at what he is doing and we have no assurance about the future.

Note that there is even debate among evangelical, bible-believing Christians on this point, which deals with the issue of whether God predestines people for salvation (as described in many verses, including Romans 8, Ephesians 1, Acts 13:48 and other verses.  There is a long tradition on both sides of this issue, with many good Christians on each side, but it ultimately comes down to the same issue as we have just described – if God is in control, how can He really be good?

In the end, we demand answers from God, but sometimes we go ahead and answer for Him (to help Him out) if He doesn’t answer us clearly.

With that introduction, let’s get to the book!

 

II “The Book of Repentance”

Background: The book of Job is colorful but enigmatic.  It comes from great antiquity, and is considered by many people to be the oldest book in the Bible.  We don’t know the author, and though it appears to be a true story about real people, it is written as poetry. It is from the time of patriarchs, and it is even possible that Job was a contemporary of Abraham (Ironside – before knowledge of God had faded) 

The theme of the book

• The traditional view: why do the righteous suffer?
• My encounter with H.I. Ironside in Except Ye Repent chapter 2 “The Book of Repentance” (general) 

The Book of Job has six distinct parts:

1. Dispute in heaven and the integrity of Job  (1 - 2:10)
2. Job’s three friends and their arguments  (2:11 – 25)
3. Job’s defiant defense (26 – 31)
4. A young man (Elihu) speaks for God (32 – 37)
5. God makes a challenges Job  (38 – 41) 
6. Job’s repentance and restoration (42)

The story initially goes back and forth between heaven and Earth, giving a rare “behind the scenes” view of events.  We are first introduced to the main character of the book, Job:

Job 1:1 ESV   There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

In a world filled with darkness and evil, Job is described as having excellent moral characteristics.  The introduction continues, describing a man with a large family (7 sons and 3 daughters) and great wealth, including many servants.  God had evidently blessed him greatly in life, so much so that he was literally “the greatest of all the people of the east”!

Not only was his family a close one, Job was constantly concerned with their spiritual state, working as a priest for his family:

Job 1:5 And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, "It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts." Thus Job did continually.

So it appears that Job was making God first in his life, was concerned about sin, was blameless and upright, and concerned for others.  Later in the book we learn that he was a respected member of the community with a strong reputation as one who dispensed justice and cared for the poor, the orphans, the sick and the widows of his community.

But things were not to stay idyllic in Uz for this great and noble man.  Up in heaven we see a drama unfold when Satan (who is called elsewhere “the accuser of the brethren” comes before God.  Evidently he is trying to bring a bad report about things on Earth, and the conversation goes like this:

Job 1:7 The LORD said to Satan, "From where have you come?" Satan answered the LORD and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it”.

But before he can present any accusations, God throws a question to Satan:

Job 1:8 And the LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?".

Now if there was any doubt about Job’s righteousness, God has settled that for us by his own testimony.  He himself declares Job to be blameless and upright and good, so we can say without doubt that this was a really good guy.  Since God had pointed him out, we could say that he was the best person on Earth!

But Satan did not believe it for a minute.  He immediately counters that Job was only good because of God’s goodness to him.  It was merely a quid-pro-quo:

Job 1:5, 9-11  ⁹ Then Satan answered the LORD and said, "Does Job fear God for no reason? ¹⁰ Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. ¹¹ But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face."

What follows is, for us, one of the most inexplicable things in the entire Bible.  God removes his protection from Job and gives Satan permission to prove his accusation!

Job 1:12  And the LORD said to Satan, "Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand." So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.

Not needing to be told twice, Satan immediately returns to Earth and ruins Job’s happy life, killing all of his children and ruining him by taking away everything that he owns.  The story is heart-breaking as he gets news of natural disasters and attacks one after the other until he is left standing, poor and destitute, with only the clothes on his back and his wife at his side.  But God is vindicated by Job’s reaction:

Job 1:20-22   ²⁰ Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. ²¹ And he said, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." ²² In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.

Note that Job was hurt and in mourning, but not only did he still bless God, he maintained that God had every right to do what He had done, thanking God for having blessed him so much previously, even if He had now taken back his gifts.  But Satan was not done (and God was not either):

Job 2:1-5  ¹ Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the LORD. ² And the LORD said to Satan, "From where have you come?" Satan answered the LORD and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it." ³ And the LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason." ⁴ Then Satan answered the LORD and said, "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life. ⁵ But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face."

God had already been vindicated, but Satan basically said “No fair! That’s not enough.  He’s still healthy! ‘If you have your health, you have everything’!”  So God once again gives permission to Satan to attack Job:

Job 2:6-8  ⁶ And the LORD said to Satan, "Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life." ⁷ So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. ⁸ And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes.

At this point, even Job’s long suffering wife throws in the towel, but Job will have none of it: 

Job 2:9-10  ⁹ Then his wife said to him, "Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die." ¹⁰ But he said to her, "You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

Now the story moves on to the main section.  Three good friends of Job, presumably also rich community leaders in their own right, come to comfort Job as soon as their hear about his calamities.  They felt sorry for him and wept with him and mourned with him.  They kept vigil with their suffering friend, sitting on the ground with him for an entire week without speaking, because “they saw that his suffering was very great”.

Ironside introduces the friends like this:  “Each proved true to his own clearly defined character.  Eliphaz of Teman was distinctly the man of experience.  An observant student of natural law, he again and again declares, “I have seen.”  Bildad of Shuah was the typical traditionalist.  As the fathers, he says; they are wiser than we.  They shall teach thee.  Zophar of Naamah was the cold, hard legalist who considered that God weighed out calamity in exact proportion to man’s sin, and dispensed mercies only according to human desert.”

Given their proclivities, we could guess what was going through their minds during their seven days of silence.  Why had God stricken their friend with such evil?  They had to know what the reason was, and their minds must have been trying to figure it out.  We all want to have all the answers, and their answers become very clear in the next 24 chapters.  What other explanation was there but that their seemingly righteous friend was hiding great secret evil in his life?  God must always reward good service in this life with riches and health, right?  Everyone knows God only lets bad things happen to bad people.  And we can imagine that Job knew their thoughts, and that that was what finally caused him to speak out, cursing his own birth and proclaiming his innocence.

We all know the rest (if we have read Job), how through chapter 25 we see a debate back and forth where a friend accuses Job of sin and Job defends his innocence.  Ironside takes up the story again: “Sturdily, honestly, sometimes ironically, Job answered them, denying their accusations, assuring them of his confidence in God, though admitting his sore perplexity.  He even went so far as to declare that, if their philosophies were right, then God was unjust in His dealings with him.  At last they were silenced when by his final speech he met all their accusations and vigorously maintained his own righteousness.  In three chapters (29-31) he used the pronouns “I”, “me”, “my”, and “mine” 189 times.”

Now a newcomer is introduced, a younger man named Elihu.  He had listened to this debate with increasing frustration as Job’s friends were unable to get anywhere by their traditional arguments and Job had continually justified himself.  But he had not spoken out of respect for his elders.  Now he unleashes a “masterly address”, exalting the wisdom of God, (as Ironside writes) “who is not obliged to reveal beforehand His reasons for chastening.  And he pointed out that the bewildered soul is wise when he asks of God – waiting for Him to instruct, rather than attempting to understand His ways through human reasoning.”

[At this point I am reminded of a story from the gospels.  In John chapter 9 Jesus and his disciples were leaving the temple and they see a man blind from birth.  This particular kind of situation was a sticky theological issue for the rabbis and teachers of that day.  Since blindness was due to sin, how can a newborn baby be punished for sin (as they saw it)?  Was the baby punished because something his parents did, or did he actually sin in the womb?  This kind of question is the kind that gives philosophers headaches.  The need to have an answer for everything causes us to invent entire new religions.  In Eastern religions they have come up with the concept of Karma, in which they might propose that the man was born blind because of sin in a previous life. This kind of philosophy has its own kinds of repercussions, like the caste system in India.  If you receive evil in this life it is because you are paying off a Karmic debt.  So lifting someone from a low caste to a higher position in life can be seen as hurting that person by dooming them to another suffering life.  In that case, the Christian view is much more likely to lead to charitable ministries than one that believes that suffering in this life is all earned.]

But in our John 9 passage Jesus would have no part of such a debate, declaring instead:

John 9:3  “… It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

This answer is ultimately unsatisfying to someone who wants to understand all of God’s purposes, and it offends because God is seen by us as a “meanie” who doesn’t run the universe the way that we would.  But Jesus’ answer is very consistent with God’s answer in Job.  Elihu’s speech is ended in chapter 38 by wind and thunder as God Himself comes and gives Job his answer.  But he does not answer any of Job’s questions.  Instead, He poses a series of unanswerable questions to Job to demonstrate Job’s lack of qualifications to question his motives at all. 

Ironside writes: “As a sense of the divine wisdom and majesty comes over the patriarch’s afflicted soul, he exclaims: “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer Thee?  I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.  Once I have spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no further”.  But God was not yet through.  He speaks again, bringing before Job’s soul a sense of His greatness and power, of His glory and omniscience.  As Job contemplates it all he gets a new conception of the holiness and the righteousness of God.  His own littleness is accentuated.  That God should look at all upon sinful men now amazes him.  “The end of the Lord” is reached at last, and he cries out: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.  Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes”.

So how does this affect the supposed main theme of the book of Job?  Certainly the book is about the suffering of the righteous.  There was no more righteous person than Job in his day and yet God allowed Satan to clobber him.  But if the main theme of Job is “why do the righteous suffer?”, it actually fails at its task, because we don’t get an answer.   Think about that.

Instead, what Ironside proposed in his book was that the main theme of Job was repentance.  Why is this a good place to prove the universal need for repentance?  Certainly if any of us wanted to find a story to teach repentance in the Bible, this is not the place where we would go!  Instead Ironside pointed out many more intuitive examples.

King David is the classic example in the Old Testament.  Though he was “highly exalted” and “greatly blessed” by God, he fell into a horrible series of sins, including adultery, lying and murder.  When confronted by Nathan the prophet he was convicted by God in his heart and his statement of repentance in Psalm 51 is dramatic, eloquent, and powerful.  He completely condemns his own behavior and vindicates God’s righteous authority to condemn him, thanking God in that and several other Psalms for his great loving forgiveness.

Or we might think of Manasseh, the son of the righteous king Hezekiah, whose wickedness was so terrible that he led his entire nation into such sin that God declared their irrevocable judgment.  Yet when convicted of his sin he repented and humbled himself before God (probably as a result of his father’s prayers “offered so long before”) and delayed God’s judgment on the nation for a generation.

In the NT we would look at Saul of Tarsus, a man who though blameless before the law was filled with such hatred that he went from town to town arresting and persecuting Christians until God revealed the depths of his sin and he repented – his entire life a song of thankfulness and praise to God for His mercy – though he always considered himself “the chief of sinners”.  Surely Paul is a great example of repentance.

But in the end, each of these examples, though inspiring in their own right, have one problem. In each case we can look at them and say “well, I never did anything that bad!”

 

II A Sovereign God

Very quickly we need to point out the second doctrine that is strongly supported in Job – the sovereignty of God.  When Paul talks about the unbelief of his own people, the Jews, and of his own sadness about this, he declares that it is part of God’s plan, so that the Gentiles can be saved. He goes on that therefore we Gentiles should be careful not to look down on the Jewish people because God is still planning to save them as a people and that our own salvation is due to that same sovereignty.  He then says:

Romans 9:19-24  ESV  ¹⁹ You will say to me then, "Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?" ²⁰ But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" ²¹ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? ²² What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, ²³ in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory -- ²⁴ even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

This language is reminiscent of God’s treatment of Job, but Paul is actually using an example used by Isaiah and Jeremiah:

Isaiah 29:15-16  ¹⁵ Ah, you who hide deep from the LORD your counsel, whose deeds are in the dark, and who say, "Who sees us? Who knows us?" ¹⁶ You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, "He did not make me"; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, "He has no understanding"?

 

III Conclusion

On another of his “Fireside Chats” Dennis Prager was asked about the similarities and differences between Jewish and Christian theologies.  He quite rightly and honestly pointed out that Jewish thinking about sin is that God does not so much care about what is inside of as He is about our actions.  We can, in his way of thinking, have bad motives, but if we act righteously we will be considered by God to be good.  He then with great clarity pointed out that Jesus taught the opposite – that God was concerned about the state of our hearts.  (Mr Prager also said that the only real commandment that had to do with feelings was the commandment about coveting).

Certainly I can see how they can get that out of a literal reading of the law of Moses, but the OT is filled with statements about God’s not being happy with “idols in your hearts” and we could argue that the foremost commandment – “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might” implies more than deeds.

But in the book of Job God clearly establishes that God is completely in control (even Satan only operates by his permission even in his rebellion), that God has not explained all of his righteous reasons for what He does (and we probably would not agree with Him in all of them anyway) and that ALL people are in need of repentance (and by extension, forgiveness).

We not should be surprised that in the earliest written book of the entire Bible God establishes these two great doctrines that are so well established and prepare our hearts to receive the gospel.  In this book we see that even the most righteous and good person on the entire planet, one that God HimselfI personally refer to as blameless, still needs to repent.  In a very real sense, the book of Job in this sense is the Romans 3:23 of the OT.  All have sinned – including you, unless you think that God is up in heaven listing you as the best person on the entire planet Earth.  ;-)