Back Roads of the Bible: Job, Part IV First Baptist Richmond, October 28, 2018 The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost Job 42:1-6, 10-17 Job said to the LORD, I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before. Last week I quoted from Kate Bowler s bestselling book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I ve Loved. There s a moment near the end of that book where she remembers getting ready to go into surgery for Stage IV colon cancer, and asking her doctor to tell her about heaven. What he said to her in that moment seemed like exactly the right answer, so that, as soon as she could, Kate called her mother and blurted out, He told me the secret! But when her mother pressed her for details it became obvious that Kate was, as she says, on a lot of exciting painkillers, and that she had forgotten the secret entirely. And then a year later, out of the blue, his words came back to her, Don t skip to the end. That s what her doctor told her about heaven: Don t skip to the end. i I don t want to do that today, but if you haven t been with us for this trip along the back roads of the Bible, and especially these last three weeks in the Book of Job, it might seem that way, as if I m skipping all of Job s suffering in the first 41 chapters of the book just to get to the happy ending in chapter 42. So, let me at least give you a recap: 1
Job, as you know, lived in the land of Uz. He was a blameless and upright man, one who feared God and turned away from evil. But as Satan said to the Lord, Why wouldn t he? You ve given him everything. If you took everything away from him he would curse you to your face. So, God gave him permission, and in one day Job lost his 7,000 sheep, his 3,000 camels, his 500 yoke of oxen, his 500 donkeys, his many servants, his seven sons, and his three daughters. But in all of this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing. He said, Naked I came from my mother s womb and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But that s because he didn t suffer physically, Satan complained. People will do anything to save their own lives. Stretch out your hand now and touch his flesh and he will curse you to your face. So God gave him permission, and Job was covered with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, so that he ended up sitting on an ash heap, scraping his skin with a piece of broken pottery. His wife said, Why do you persist in your integrity? Curse God and die! ii But Job said, Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad? In all of this he did not sin with his lips. His three friends came to see him: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. When they saw him from a distance they didn t recognize him. They raised their voices and wept aloud. They tore their clothes, and put dust on their heads. They sat with him for seven days and seven nights and no one spoke a word, for they saw that his suffering was very great. But then Job broke the silence, cursing the day he was born, and that gave his friends permission to offer their own explanations of why he was suffering. They believed that everything happens for a reason, and that Job 2
was suffering for some secret sin he had committed. Job protested, but they persisted for nearly thirty chapters! In Chapter 32 the mysterious Elihu shows up and gives the longest single speech in the book, saying the same thing: that Job must have done something. And so Job begs for an audience with God. Oh, that I knew where I might find him! he says, that I might come even to his dwelling. I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments. In chapter 38 Job gets his wish: God speaks to him out a whirlwind, but what he says is not what Job wants to hear. Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? God thunders. Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you, and you will declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? For four chapters God makes it clear that he is God and Job is not, and at the end of it all Job whimpers, I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes. And that s when everything starts to get better. If this world really is a vale of soul-making, as Irenaeus claimed, iii and if one of God s hopes for our life in this world is that we would grow a soul, then Job has come to a pretty good place. He was a righteous man before. He had done nothing wrong and he knew it! But he was not necessarily a humble man. Through the experience of losing everything, of suffering physical affliction, of being rebuked by God, Job is humbled. As I ve told you before that word humility comes from the same root as humus the dark, rich soil in which almost anything can grow. Job says that he repents in dust and ashes, 3
but maybe that s just the kind of place where he can grow a soul, and maybe he did, because look what happens next. 1. The Lord rebukes Job s friends. He says to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against you and your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has. They have to go to Job and apologize, and offer sacrifices, and ask him to pray for their forgiveness. And he does! Job accepts their apology and prays that the Lord might not deal with them according to their folly. 2. His brothers and sisters and all who had known him before come to see him. They eat bread with him in his house. They comfort him, show him sympathy, and each of them gives him a piece of money and a gold ring. 3. The Lord restores Job s fortunes, blessing him with twice as much as he d had before: 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, 1000 donkeys, lots and lots of servants, seven sons, and three daughters named Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren-Happuch. In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job s daughters, we are told. 4. After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children s children. And Job died, old and full of days. That s the end of the book, and to almost everyone s surprise it is a happy ending. Some people don t like it for that very reason. They say it isn t realistic. If they were telling the story Job would have died broke and bereaved, covered in sores and sitting on an ash heap. Now, there s an ending for you! But maybe that isn t realistic either. As I thought about it last week I realized that in Old Testament times people had no concept of heaven. They didn t believe in a blessed afterlife. They thought that when you died you went to a place called Sheol, a kind of huge, underground warehouse for the dead (which 4
doesn t sound like a happy ending at all). But Job s story requires a kind of justice, doesn t it? What happened to Job wasn t fair and we all know it. We also know that God was the one who did it, or at least allowed it. We want God to make things right. And in an odd, Old Testament kind of way, God does: God vindicates Job s righteousness; God restores Job s good name; and God gives Job twice as much as he had before. It s not a perfect ending (you can t really replace lost children with new ones), but it may have been as close to perfect as the author of Job could imagine. For us it s different. We do have a concept of heaven, and one of the easiest answers to the problem of suffering in this world is to say, Well, in the next world things will be better. But where did we get such an idea? If Job didn t have it, why do we? The biblical evidence for an afterlife doesn t begin until the Book of Daniel, the last of the Old Testament books to be written, where it says, Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt (12:2). But by the time Jesus was born, two centuries later, the concept of an afterlife was well established. The Pharisees believed in it. They also believed that this present evil age would one day give way to the age to come, when God s messiah would sit on the throne of his ancestor David and Israel would enjoy unprecedented peace and prosperity. Jesus had bigger ideas. He didn t talk about the age to come. He talked about the Kingdom of God. But one of the things he wanted people to know is that when God s kingdom came there would be no more sickness, no more suffering, no more death, and he shared that good 5
news by healing the sick wherever he went, sometimes raising the dead, cleansing the lepers, and casting out demons. I call it Kingdom Show and Tell. I say that wherever he went Jesus was showing and telling people how the world would be different and better when God had his way. Do you remember that scene from Luke 7, when the disciples of John the Baptist come to Jesus asking if he is the one to come or should they look for another? Luke writes: Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them (vss. 21-22). It was one of those moments when heaven came to earth; when Jesus showed us what the world would look like when God s Kingdom came. Sometimes people ask me, If Jesus healed all those people then, why won t he heal me now? Because that wasn t really his mission, I say. He wasn t sent to heal all the sickness in the world; he was sent to establish God s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. He didn t heal everyone then and he doesn t heal everyone now. He invited people to enter the Kingdom of God by letting God be king. Get down off the throne of your own life, he might have said. Let God sit there instead. Let him be king of your heart, king of your home. And if enough people had listened to him God s kingdom might have come then and there. It might still come that way. But one thing seems clear: when that kingdom comes there won t be any more sickness, or suffering, or death. At the end of the book of Revelation the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband, and a voice from the throne says, See, the 6
home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. That s what happens when heaven comes to earth. But until that day we Christians believe that if heaven won t come to us we will go to heaven. I think that s what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples in John 14, I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. In my Father s house there is plenty of room. It s the comfort we have in this world, this vale of soul-making, where we are often humbled by the circumstances of life, crushed by suffering and sorrow, ground to powder, burned to ashes, and scattered on the earth. We have this hope that the end of this life is not The End. We come to the funerals of friends and loved ones and weep like there s no tomorrow, but then we hear from the pulpit that there is. We hear it in the words of Jesus who said, I am the Resurrection and the Life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, shall live. We hear it in the words of Paul who said, O Death, where is your victory? O Grave, where is your sting? And when we stand to sing at the end of the service we sing hymns about heaven, with tears trickling down our cheeks. There is an answer to the question of suffering and it s this: it doesn t last forever. It doesn t last beyond death. But as Kate Bowler s doctor said to her, Don t skip to the end. My friend, you are in this world for a reason. Maybe the reason is to grow a soul, and if that takes some suffering so be it. If that takes cancer, so be it! Maybe the reason you are in this world is to humble yourself, to repent in dust and ashes, like Job, to get off the throne of your own life and let God sit there instead. Maybe the reason you are in this 7
world is to let God s kingdom come in you as in no one else, so you can show others the way. I don t think everything happens for a reason, but I think there is a reason you are here, in this world, right now. So, please, Don t skip to the end. Jim Somerville 2018 i Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for a Reason: and Other Lies I ve Loved (New York: Random House, 2018), pp. 158-160. ii It occurred to me for the first time that Job s wife may have been on his side when she said this. She tells him to curse God and die, implying that God not Job is at fault in all of this. His friends have just the opposite view, that it is Job not God who is at fault. iii See last week s sermon (https://www.fbcrichmond.org/files/1515/4022/3885/2018-10-21-job-partiii.pdf). 8