Series: When Life Comes Unraveled, #4 Texts: Selected Job 15-21 Valley Community Baptist Church May 5/6, 2012 Avon, CT Pastor Jay Abramson Never Argue with a Sick Man One Sunday morning two men were out in a boat fishing. After several hours without catching a single fish, one of the men says to the other, Maybe we should have stayed home and gone to church this morning. The other man says, Well, I could have stayed home, but I couldn t have gone to church. The first guy asks, Why not? The second guy says, Because my wife is sick. i What we value most in life directs both our actions and our thinking. This is even true when we try to comfort a friend who is hurting. Job s friends each took a turn at comforting him in chapters 4 through 14. Now, in chapters 15 through 21 they try again. However, in their second visit, Job s friends move farther in the wrong direction. Their discussion now becomes an argument. So, first we must see how Job s friends are giving him I. Medicine That Doesn t Heal Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar are Job s three friends. What they have to say in this section is so shocking, it s hard for us to understand why Job doesn t throw them all out. But let s remember, they did do some good caring early on. The fact that Job doesn t end the relationship completely says to me that he recognizes that, especially when this all began, they were there for him in a really good way. But now, we need to see where they each went wrong. First, Eliphaz. He issues Job two warnings. First, he warns Job that he lacks wisdom. He tells him that his words are empty and useless (Job 15:2, 3). Secondly, he warns Job that obviously he has hidden sin in his life because otherwise he wouldn t be suffering (this is simply an example of the wrong logic we made note of last week). On top of this, Eliphaz tells Job that he is responsible for the tragedies that killed his children and wiped out his wealth (Job 15:34, 35). Isn t that just what you want to hear when you re sick? Bildad, the second friend, continues with the same theme, telling Job that death is always God s punishment for sin in this world. Bildad is using the weapon of fear to try to bring Job to repentance. Listen to just a piece of his description of what s ahead for a sinner like Job: (Job 18:11-13) Terrors startle him on every side and dog his every step. Calamity is hungry for him; disaster is ready for him when he falls. It eats away parts of his skin; death s firstborn devours his limbs. Okay, I think you get the picture. There s just one problem: Job has already repented! Back in chapter 9, Job says: Though I were innocent, I could not answer him; I could only plead with my Judge for mercy. (Job 9:15) Like Eliphaz, Bildad refuses to believe that Job s suffering isn t tied to some hidden sin. 1
Finally comes Zophar, who is singing the same song as the other two (that Job is an enormous hypocrite), but Zophar adds a few more verses. Zophar wants to be sure that Job knows that the wicked will live a brief life, that any pleasure they have will be temporary and that their death will be painful. You can t help but wonder where Zophar is getting his information. God waited 120 years before judging the world with a flood and he gave the wicked Canaanites four centuries before he judged them! That doesn t sound like immediate judgment to me! Zophar s Bible facts are just wrong. So, what do we have here with these friends? Well, there s nothing new; really just more of the same, kicked up a notch. You can t help but wonder if there isn t some kind of jealousy at play here. Don t forget, it s not just Job who says that he is blameless. God says he s blameless! Are his friends secretly jealous of Job s great relationship with God and so they re taking this opportunity to try to wring some kind of a confession out of him? Crabbers down along the shore will tell you that when you re crabbing, once you have more than one crab in the bucket, you won t need to cover it with a lid because as one crab gets halfway up the side of the bucket, the other one will knock him down before he gets away. Chuck Swindoll carries a poem with him on this topic to remind himself of what kind of a friend he wants to be. It goes like this: I saw them tearing a building down, A group of men in a busy town, With a hefty blow and a lusty yell, They swung with zest, And a side wall fell. Are these men skilled? The kind you would hire if you had to build? [I asked] He looked at me, and laughed, No, indeed! Unskilled labor is all I need. Why, they can wreck in a day or two, What it has taken builders years to do. I asked myself, as I went my way, Which of these roles have I tried to play? Am I a builder with rule and square, Measuring and constructing with skill and care? Or am I the wrecker who walks the town, Content with the business of tearing down? ii What kind of a friend, what kind of a Christian do you want to be? Yes, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 3, there is a time to tear down and a time to build, but I don t think he was talking about specialized labor. He was talking about the one who tears down also being the one who builds up. We did some remodeling in our house a few years back. I was very careful and very strategic as I did the tearing down because I didn t want to jeopardize what was to be built. In your relationships are you more anxious to tear down, or more anxious to build up? Job s friends were dispensing medicine that could not heal his diseases. What kind of medicine do you dispense? Secondly, we need to see II. Medicine that DOES Heal 2
First of all, what do I mean by heal? Primarily, I mean to heal what the Bible calls the heart, the inner center of our being. God may choose to heal someone physically using His miraculous power or using doctors and their procedures. Or, He may NOT choose to heal physically. He did heal Job, He didn t heal the apostle Paul. He did heal Lazarus the first time he died. He didn t heal him the second time he died. Physical healing is something God may or may not choose to do. But inner healing He will do every time He is asked. This is where Christians sometimes get confused about what God has and has not promised. For example, some Christians point to Is. 53:5 as proof that God will heal all our physical diseases. That verse says: But he was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, And by his wounds we are healed. But what kind of a healing is being promised here? We must let Scripture interpret Scripture. I Peter 2:24 tells us: He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. What kind of healing is it? It s a spiritual, not a physical healing. This is not to say that Jesus doesn t sometimes heal people of their physical diseases today. But, He has not promised to ALWAYS heal EVERY physical disease in this lifetime. He HAS promised to heal every spiritual disease for those who ask Him to do so. So, in Job we see some examples of how NOT to care for a hurting person. Where might we find some good examples? Pastor Warren Wiersbe gives three examples of caring medicine that heals from II Corinthians. First, he says, we need to listen to the hurting friend with our heart not our head. It s not what they say, but why they say it. In II Cor. Paul is telling the Corinthians of some great suffering he recently had gone through. He writes: We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. (II Cor. 1:8b-9) Paul is not asking for advice from the Corinthians. He s asking them to simply hear him out. He shares a deep truth from his heart about how much his recent experience hurt. Are you willing to listen like that? Peter Drucker, the management guru, says, The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn t being said. Karisa Smith and her 4-month-old daughter were browsing through books in their local library. Her daughter was softly babbling as they browsed. Karisa heard an older man sitting nearby say under his breath, Tell that kid to shut up, or I will. Karisa immediately turned and responded, I m very sorry for whatever in your life caused you to be so disturbed by a happy baby, but I will not tell my baby to shut up, and I will not let you do so either. Karisa braced herself, expecting another outburst. Instead, he looked down and said softly, I apologize. He looked up at Karisa and they silently stared at one 3
another for an awkward moment. Then the older gentleman said, My son died when he was two months old. Karisa sat down in a chair next to him. He went on to explain that his son had died of SIDS over 50 years ago. He described how his anger grew, leading to a failed marriage and isolation. Karisa asked him to tell her about his son, which he did as he smiled at her daughter. Eventually, he asked if he could hold Karisa s baby. As he held her, his shoulders relaxed and he briefly laid his cheek on her head. As he handed the baby back to Karisa, he simply said, Thank you and walked away. iii What do you think? Was that a healing experience for that man? Listening itself isn t difficult. It s choosing to take the time to listen that s hard. The second thing a hurting friend needs is comfort. In II Cor. 1, Paul writes: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. (II Cor. 1:3, 4) Here we find another way of deriving meaning out of meaningless suffering or pain. By going through a specific experience of pain, you are immediately qualified to comfort others who one day will suffer the same pain you have suffered. I must tell you how blown away I am by the people in this church who have gone through excruciatingly painful experiences, like having a child die or who go through an unwanted divorce. Then after completing their own grieving process, they turn right around and begin to minister to other people who have suffered in the same way they did. I m not sure I could do that. Many of our recovery ministries here at Valley are led by people like that. They are the living testimonies of the reality of II Cor. 1: 3 and 4. They have personally received the comfort of God in their troubles and so they turn it around and comfort those in trouble with the comfort they have received. This is the second piece of healing your hurting friend will need. We have a testimony from one of our own members who has traveled this difficult road. [Show John Murray video] The third thing they will need to heal properly is prayer. Again, in II Cor. 1, Paul says: He (Christ) has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us, as you help us by your prayers. (II Cor. 1:10, 11a) Praying for others is called Intercessory Prayer and it is encouraged and even commanded throughout Scripture. Just one such verse is I Tim. 2:1: I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone - Do you believe this actually works? Ace Collins, in his book, Sticks and Stones, gives a real life example. In the winter of 2007, a friend of his named Linda was brought to death s door by two aneurysms. For weeks she was on life support, growing weaker every day. As her condition worsened, even family members began to lose hope. Then, suddenly one day, Linda woke up. She looked over at her husband and asked, Where s everybody else? He said, What do you mean? They only let one of us into ICU at a time. 4
Linda said, No, I heard them. They were all speaking at the same time, and there were hundreds of them. Some of them I knew, others I didn t. But they were all around me. They were here! At first, her husband thought she must have been hallucinating, but over time, as Linda began to name names, he realized that everyone she named had committed to pray for Linda s recovery. The reality was that God had granted Linda the rare pleasure of listening in on her intercessory prayer team, as they faithfully lifted up their friend, Linda, before a loving God. iv That s the three-part good medicine your hurting friend needs: Someone to listen to his heart, someone to offer comfort born of real-life experience and intercessory prayers to see them through the night. Let s not let our friends have to follow Job. Let s give them what they truly need. Let s pray i PreachingToday.com, Fisherman s Excuse for Skipping Church. ii Charles Swindoll, Job: A Man of Heroic Endurance (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), p. 156 iii PreachingToday.com Gruff Old Man Carries Hidden Grief for 50 Years. 8/22/2011 iv Ace Collins, Sticks and Stones (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), pp. 207-208 5