2/12/12 “Studies in Pain 2: The Joy of Job” Ecclesiastes 7:14
I. Introduction
A. Review
1. This past September I realized that I was walking around in pain and not dealing with it.
2. We are better off in pain with the comfort of God than living painlessly.
3. One of the first things I did was give up my regular Bible reading program. I decided that I needed to go to the places in the Bible where it addresses pain head-on. So I decided to read Job and Ecclesiastes.
B. Review Job
1. Supremely righteous man
2. Rich and blessed by the Lord: many children, even more possessions
3. Unbeknownst to Job, while he was enjoying his blessedness and living in righteousness, there were heavenly conversations taking place about him.
4. God was boasting to Satan about Job and what a righteous man he was. But Satan objected that it was only because of Job’s bounty that he was being so good.
5. So the Lord gave Satan permission to destroy Job’s bounty, which he did in one day, leaving Job childless and penniless, and with a wife who urged him to curse God and die.
6. But Job didn’t curse God. Instead he worshiped God and submitted to this painful turn of the divine will. 7. However, when God pointed out to Satan how Job had successfully passed the test, Satan claimed that Job’s success was only because God had prevented Job from experiencing any bodily pain.
8. And so, God gave Satan permission to inflict Job with sores all over his body, which caused him distress to no end, such that he would use pieces of broken pots to scratch himself.
9. This lasted quite a while, and Job’s pain was increased by counsel he received from visiting friends, who kept insisting that Job must have turned from God or committed some secret sin in order for all this to happen.
10. But Job kept insisting this wasn’t true, and, ignorant of God’s purposes in the suffering, though the reader is informed of it, he even began to question God’s justice, in allowing a righteous man to suffer like he was suffering. But Job’s objections to these seemingly unjust sufferings were only met by heavenly silence.
11. In the end, after more suffering than any of us can imagine, God spoke to Job, challenging him about his objections on the basis that Job didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
12. Job is overwhelmed by the force of God’s challenges, and he repents of his presumption and his questioning of God’s perfect wisdom and justice.
13. And, of course, God restores Job’s health, and gave him twice as much wealth as he had had before and gave him ten children in place of the ten he’d lost.
C. We have to acknowledge that there is a sad lesson we must learn from Job.
1. Life isn’t all fun and games. Life is hard and there’s plenty of pain.
2. The expectation, of course, is that the unrighteous are going to have lots of bad days.
3. Job teaches us that even the best of us sometimes have a really bad day. No person can be good enough to escape the harsh realities of life on this earth.
4. And it’s even worse than that. Even if we are more righteous than we are now, our sufferings could be even worse than they are now.
5. “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. 14 I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. 15 What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted. 16 I said in my heart, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ 17 And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. 18 For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Eccl.1:13-18
a. v.15 This world is twisted and it can’t be straightened out. And we can’t even come close to fixing it: you can’t even calculate what is lacking.
b. Wisdom and knowledge lead to sorrow!
6. When I did an inventory of the pain in my heart, I found that one kind of pain was the pain of knowing:
a. Kenya, West Africa
b. persecuted Christians
c. Street children who fight with wild dogs over food scraps in the trash, chocolate slaves, sex slavery
d. News: Burma, Sudan
e. people who are hated because they're different
f. people who can think as well as anyone but who never talk and so get treated as hunks of flesh
g. Battered women who have nowhere to turn
h. Inhuman things which have been done to people, some in the name of Christ
i. I’d rather walk around with a broken heart than live in the world pretending everything’s fine.
D. Joyful lessons from Job
1. We are so blessed to have Job, and the rest of the Bible.
a. One of the things we see in Job is the pull of the human heart when it is subjected to intense suffering. We begin to feel cheated. We begin to judge God for not doing a good job in our lives.
b. But we have the Book of Job to stop us from moving in that direction, to call us to trust in the One who remained silent for a long time but then spoke to Job and made clear that He was in it after all, and that He had everything in control and that He knew exactly what He was doing.
c. Why didn’t God tell Job the secret? All He did was tell Him that He knew was He was doing & no one has a right to question His wisdom. Why didn’t God explain the whole thing to Job about the conversation with Satan and all that?
d. Because ultimately God’s answer was for us, not for Job.
e. If God told Job about His deal with Satan, how would that have helped us?
f. The secret of peace is not in knowing why it’s happening, but in knowing that God is behind it and He is all-wise and knows what He’s doing.
g. The joy of Job? I’m talking about the joy that is ours because we know the story of Job.
h. We may not be as righteous as Job, but we have a lot of advantages he didn’t have. And one big one is that he didn’t have the Book of Job in his Bible.
i. The rich treasure of the word of God for those in pain to keep us on track.
2. Suffering is for others, not just for ourselves.
a. Job suffered for us, to bring us joy.
b. The value of pain for others
c. Benefitting from others’ pain
d. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2Cor.1:3-4)
e. When I was in the midst of dealing with my pain, I felt like I needed to talk to one of my pastor friends about it. And the one I felt compelled to go to was one I knew had experienced a lot of pain.
f. Parents’ pain for children
g. Jesus the pattern: He suffered for us.
3. God wants us to live in peaceful uncertainty.
a. Job from one day to another: It can happen to you!
b. “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.” (Eccl.7:14)
(1) Not only is there a purpose in bad days, but there is a purpose in the strange mixture of good days and bad days: God doesn’t want us to know what tomorrow will bring.
(2) Tomorrow could be the best day of your life. Or the worst. God knows, but He doesn’t want us to know.
(3) We can’t base our hope on what we expect to happen tomorrow. We are left with basing our hope only on the One who has already planned out tomorrow, and has done so out of love for us.
c. If we are sinners and God is perfect in righteousness, if we are greatly limited in our perspective and He knows all things from here to there, from beginning to end, if we are foolish and He is perfect in wisdom, then we should expect at times we are going to disagree with God.
(1) We are going to think this way when God is thinking that way.
(2) He’s going to arrange things in a way that we don’t think is best.
(3) His thoughts are high above our thoughts, and His ways far beyond our ways.
(4) Even Jesus had a differing perspective than His Father in heaven: Can we find another way to do this? “Not my will but Yours be done.”
(5) So it’s going to be confusing. It’s supposed to be confusing.
d. Ps.23 Sometimes He leads us by still waters and green pastures. Sometimes He leads us through the valley of the shadow of death. But our comfort wherever we are is in His rod and His staff, by which He is leading us, and walking with us through it all.
II. Conclusion
A. You might think that no one ever had a day as bad as Job’s day. But there’s actually one person’s day that was worse. It was the day Jesus was nailed to a cross and forsaken by His Father.
B. And He was even more righteous than Job.
C. But God turned His pain into our gain. So much so that we call that worst of all days ‘Good Friday.’
D. Pain as a cause of bitterness against God