Perseverance in the Promise

A couple of years ago, Susan and I went to Victoria and one of the things that we did there was visit the BC Legislature while it was in session and watch our MLAs in action. It was an interesting experience. It was part political theatre, as Premier John Horgan (who was premier at the time) and others engaged in debates with each other and we could observe their bantering and body language. There were also some serious discussions, because we were near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and there were important questions directed at our health minister, Adrian Dix.

In a democracy like ours, there can sometimes be a sense of estrangement between ordinary citizens and their governing officials. Living in the Lower Mainland, we might wonder, “What are those people in Victoria really doing? Are they doing anything?” We might think we could live our lives just fine without them at all. But if we consider it a bit more, we realize we could have different forms of government. We could have anarchy, which would be interesting. Or we could have a dictatorship, where our lives would be totally controlled by someone with absolute power. So, we’re blessed to live in a democracy and have people serving on our behalf. 

A similar, but more serious, kind of estrangement can occur between human beings and God. We might wonder, “What’s God really doing anyway? Where is He? And do we need Him?” Some people have decided they don’t need God and others have concluded that he doesn’t even exist. But the relationship between human beings and God is important for us to consider, so we are going to explore it with this question: What does the interaction between heaven and earth look like? To help us as we consider this question, we are going to take a look at the Book of Job.  

Job Suffers

There’s no mention of Israel’s history in Job, so he probably lived during the time of the patriarchs—during the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The events in Job’s life were likely passed down in an oral form for centuries before being written down, probably between Solomon’s reign and the exile. The Book of Job is written as a theodicy. A theodicy is a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil. It is a response to the Problem of Evil, which can be stated like this:

First, if God were truly good, then he would want to rid the world of evil. Second, if God were all-powerful, then he would be able to do it. Third, evil exists. Therefore, either God does not exist, or if he does, he must not be both good and all-powerful. 

A theodicy attempts to refute this conclusion.

I want to also give you a framework for understanding the Book of Job which has helped me to better understand it and I hope this framework does the same for you. Imagine the Book of Job as a live theater presentation which takes place on a stage with two levels: an upper level, which is the realm of heaven, the realm of God, the spiritual realm, and a lower level, which is the realm in which we live.

These two realms relate to each other in certain ways. The beings in the upper realm can see what’s going on in the lower realm, but the beings in the lower realm cannot see what’s going on in the upper realm. The beings in the upper realm can travel to the lower realm and back. The beings in the lower realm are confined to the lower realm. Events that happen in the upper realm impact life in the lower realm. And, a feature which is very important but something which we may not realize, events in the lower realm, the human realm, also impacts the upper realm, heaven.

When we first meet Job, he is a very wealthy man with a large family, and he is also very pious in his faith in God. One day, there is a council in heaven, and God points Job out as an example of genuine, authentic faith. Satan is there—I don’t know why, but he is—and he makes a charge against Job. In a way, it’s a charge against God as well. Satan’s charge is that Job only worships God because of the blessings he receives from God. ‘If those blessings were removed,’ Satan argues, ‘Job would turn away from his faith in God.’

God says, ‘Okay, you can remove those blessings, but you cannot harm him.’ So, within a very short period, several devastating events happen, wiping out all of Job’s wealth and all his children are killed. Job grieves, but he continues to trust in God. Note that by continuing to believe in God, even though he is suffering, Job has proven Satan to be a liar. 

There’s a second heavenly council and, once again, God points out Job as an example of a human being with authentic faith. Satan makes a second charge, saying, ‘Skin for skin. The only reason Job continues to worship you is because he hasn’t experienced any harm personally.’ God responds, ‘Okay, you can harm him, but you cannot kill him.’ Then Job is afflicted with painful boils from his head to his feet. He sits in sackcloth and ashes, and he takes a broken piece of pottery to scrape his sores for some relief from his pain.

Why does Job suffer?

Job has three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, who come to visit him. When they arrive and almost don’t recognize Job because of how afflicted he is. For seven days, they do nothing but sit in silence with him and weep. After seven days, they begin to try to offer some sort of explanation for what has happened. Their explanation boils down to this: God is righteous, in other words, God is always right in everything he does. Therefore, Job must have done something wrong to deserve this suffering.

Now, there are some points that I want to note here. First, you have to be really careful about who is speaking in the book of Job when you look at the verses. Job’s friends are saying things that are in the Bible, and their words do have a ring of truth to them. After all, sometimes we do suffer because of the bad things we do. But that isn’t the case all the time. What Job’s friends are saying is, in essence, karma: those who do good things get good stuff, those who do bad things get bad stuff. That is not faith in the personal God who created you and the entire universe, and you don’t want to build your life on something that Job’s friends say.

Sometimes there is no explanation for suffering, and we don’t want to try and give an explanation where there isn’t one. We don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives or in the world around us, and when we try to explain suffering we can end up sounding like Job’s friends, whom he calls his “miserable comforters.”

Job rejects what his friends are saying, and not only worships God in the midst of his suffering, he also has hope in God for what is beyond his suffering. He says, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that in the end, he will stand on the earth. After my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh, I will see God. I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me.” (Job 19:25-27) Job’s hope is resurrection life from God, and he’s looking forward to that even as he suffers. 

Job makes his final defense to his three friends and cries out to God, and his friends are silenced. Then a fourth person shows up, a young man named Elihu, who is angry with Job because he keeps insisting that he’s innocent. Elihu makes the same kind of accusations against Job as Job’s friends did, insisting that Job must have done something wrong to be experiencing all this suffering.

And then God shows up. The Lord speaks and says to Job, “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer me.” (Job 38:2-3) Imagine what we have here is a courtroom case, and God is making His defense. What God is essentially saying is this: If you know enough to bring such a charge against me—think about this, human beings making a charge against the Creator of the universe—then you are claiming to know what I know. And if you know what God knows, then you should be able to explain how all the great and wonderful things of creation came into being. And Job’s response is, “You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” (Job 43:3)

Please note here that Job is still suffering, but now God has shown up, and Job is content with that. As Billy Graham used to say, each of us has a God-sized hole within us that only God can fill. When that God-sized hole is filled by God, we actually don’t need anything else. We can be content with God because that’s the way God created us—to be in relationship with Him.

It is after Job is already content that God restores his health, and family, and God doubles Job’s blessings as he restores him. 

What does this mean for us?

First of all, the goodness and the greatness of God—if we think about this through the lens of the book of Job—are proven in the spiritual realm through the selfless faith of His people. In the spiritual realm, you are the evidence of God’s goodness and greatness.

Second, our faith–the faith of God’s people–rests on the goodness and greatness of God as revealed to us in this realm. We know that God is great because He reveals that to us through His wonderful creation, from the tiniest living cell to the cosmos. And we know that God is good because he reveals that to us in His gracious compassion for us. Just like God came to Job when he was suffering, so also God comes to you and me, and everyone else who looks to him in faith, when we suffer. He carries us through whatever suffering we face and brings us to a better future that He has for us on the other side.

Therefore, we can confidently trust in God, regardless of how good or how bad our circumstances may be.

Jesus is God’s Anwer to the Problem of Evil

You see, dear friends, God’s answer to the problem of evil is to come into this world, become one of us, and suffer in our place to take away all the power of evil to truly harm us or to separate us from him and his great love for us. 

God did this in the person of Jesus Christ, who is both God the Son and fully human. Jesus took all the punishment for our sins as He hung on the cross and suffered the abandonment from God that we deserve because of our sin. Jesus did all this so that you would know, whenever you are suffering, that the suffering you experience is not punishment from God for sin, because Jesus has taken all your punishment away. You can also know that your suffering will never separate you from God because Jesus died on the cross and rose again to give you the assurance that he is always with you, regardless of what is going on in your life.

With Jesus, suffering can become a blessing to us because it clarifies our priorities. When we’re suffering, it becomes very clear that many of the things that we used to think were very important are actually not very important at all. Suffering can also help you to realize that the most important thing is that Jesus is with you, He loves you, and you are forever safe with Him. Nothing can take that away from you. And when we get to the other side of suffering, whatever that looks like, with reordered priorities, we’re able to live life in a new way because of our experiences and God’s compassionate care for us. He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. 

Because of Jesus, we get to live the “God with us” life right now. Every human has both a physical and spiritual aspect to their being, and Jesus has brought our spirit to life through faith in Him. Jesus has also poured out the Holy Spirit upon us, and it’s the Holy Spirit who helps us to persevere in the promises of God, in good times and bad.

The challenge I wish to leave with you today is this: use your Spirit-empowered faith to trust unwaveringly in God’s goodness and greatness, in His faithful presence with you, and in the promise of resurrection life that we all have in Jesus.

With God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, we live in the way that Paul described in one of his letters to the church in Corinth: “Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18) Amen.

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(This message was shared at Walnut Grove Lutheran Church in Langley BC on May 19, 2024. For more info about WGLC, please go to wglc.org.)