Suffering Cross Examined Part 1 (Job)

Joshua Kehler: We are in Job today.

Job 42.

Job 42.

Just run through this short little book.

verse 5.

I'll read five and six, then we'll pray, and then we'll turn to Job chapter one.

Verse five.

I heard you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you.

Therefore, I despise myself, or literally, I reject my previous opinion

of you, and repent in dust and ashes.

This is the word of the Lord.

Father, we thank you for this life right here.

We thank you for this story that's for hundreds of millions of saints

throughout millennia when we encounter the brokenness of this world.

And so Lord, we pray that you would equip us to lean into you, when

the day of calamity comes upon us.

Cause it's not if, it's when.

And so Lord, we pray that you would show us your glory.

That we wouldn't just hear you today, but that our eyes would be lifted above

this earth and the popular opinions of men and good ideas and that we

would see your majesty this morning.

Amen.

So we thank you for this.

Thank you for the other churches that gather in your name.

Thank you that God, you are intimately involved in every saint's life Down

to the minute details of life they're sitting down and they're rising up

We can't wait to meet and fellowship with our brothers and sisters, Lord,

whether that be this side of heaven and glory or whether it be there, but

we just say thank you for the church.

Thank you that you have a blood bought bride of every tongue, tribe,

nation Lord, and that, Lord, you are making a people unto yourself.

And so show us Jesus.

What we need is Jesus.

May He be more precious than anything else in this world.

We love you and praise you in Jesus name, Amen.

So we've been, doing a little series between, before we start our next

book, and that's just been, verses that have impacted and shaped me in

profound ways, in critical times of my journey following Jesus or his journey

and process of dragging me into glory.

And, you don't expect the hard times to hit so sudden and so fast.

Sometimes it's prolonged and you can see it coming.

And even if you prepare for it, you're not prepared.

Because as we'll see, this passage has a lot to give us, in ways of

equipping us and grabbing hold of our faces and say, look at God.

and this was pivotal to me because I felt in the midst of my suffering,

whether it was, losing my sister, at such a young age, just all of a sudden

out of nowhere, or whether it was, losing church family and community.

Once and then twice, you know, there's so much wrestling and there's so much hurt.

There's so much pain that it's suffocating, that you

can't see up from down.

and Job, This book, God gave it to us to grab a hold of

our face and say to look up.

And that's really the point of the book of Job and to equip us in that way

because that's what we forget a lot of the time and what we end up doing is we

start accusing God of, of being behind the evil that we're suffering currently.

And that is the enemy's ultimate tactic, right?

To take us out of the everlasting arms, to take us away from the shield

about us, our mighty fortress, to lure us out into the openness, of

doubt and, disbelief, unbelief.

It's, we come to this scripture.

I'm going to run through just an overview of this book and

just some lessons along the way.

Feel free to jump in.

This is a fun, small group right here.

And we've all, none of us is a noob.

None of us is a novice to suffering in this room.

None of us is a rookie.

you're not a first draft pick, coming up into the ranks, only

to pull your ACL or whatever, everybody, has been down this road.

My memory is jogged.

I was listening to a pastor this week and, he has a similar story and

I, my memory, I probably put it out because it was such a horrible memory.

When we were in Tahoe on vacation, we usually vacation there for

the 4th of July, as a family with Andrea's family, and relatives.

And, my son Ryden, he was super young, probably 7 maybe, and, he had

a cyst on his leg that got infected and was causing him tremendous pain.

And so we went to the urgent care there, and, And they said, Hey, we've

got to, we've got to drain this.

We've got a Lancet and then we've got to pack it.

And, to my horror, I'm like, wait, what does that mean?

What's involved?

And, they said, we've got to inject him with Novocaine

and cut it open and drain it.

And then we have to pack it full of, gauze and stuff.

And I'm like, yeah, he's not going to be down with that.

He's not going to like that very much.

My job was to hold his arms as he cried.

Like he's never cried before and screamed in pain.

Like I've never seen, until it was done, and it's over.

So that is when I get an infection, and poisoned his leg and poison his body.

There was a moment where I'm using my strength to let something painful.

Happened to my beloved son so he would be better.

I thought back on that.

I thought this might be the closest to understanding God and suffering

that he uses his strength To allow pain to make us better the book of

Job James 5 verse 11 James comments and he says, Behold, we consider

James 5:11

those blessed who remain steadfast.

You've heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you've seen the

purposes of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

So James looks at the book of Job and his takeaway from it is that the

Lord is compassionate and merciful.

that's the storyline.

That's the purpose that God is working out in the book of Job.

It's true, there's nothing more inevitable in life that we all will suffer.

All of us will go through suffering, it's unavoidable.

everybody dies, the ratio is still 1 to 1, right?

No matter how much you hide, how much you pour into your health, how much

you do, that day, that appointment, is still looming on the horizon.

And we do everything in this culture to numb ourselves to that fact.

We avoid it at all costs.

and no book faces this theme of suffering more head on than the book of Job.

and so it teaches us how to maintain faith in the midst of that suffering,

that trust, to learn to trust God even when we can't trace Him, to lean

into His difficult mercy, Job will prepare us for that season of darkness,

that unavoidable day of calamity.

God in his grace has given us a story to help us face the dark seasons of

life so that when the waves crash we won't be crushed beyond repair.

The thing is for many, we come, and this is one of the main arguments

against Christianity, is if God is all powerful, and He's all good, then why

doesn't He stop evil and suffering?

either He's all powerful, but He's not good, so He doesn't care, or

He's all good, and he wants to stop it, but he's not all powerful.

So people call that the great contradiction and it's a real

wrestle in today's culture.

And it's a real wrestle in today's culture because for the first time

sociologists are pointing out that for the like past hundred years,

it might even be shorter than that.

Our culture is obsessed with being happy and happiness has become a right.

It's like a demanded thing.

It wasn't like that in history's past.

the Great Depression, that was just Monday, looking back on that.

It was horrible.

It was crazy.

but that was the way of life.

Life was hard.

Life was Difficult and you enjoyed those moments of respite when you got them,

they're writing books amusing yourself to death or the happiness trap, where

they point out that when you live for happiness, you're not going to hit it.

It's impossible to keep.

we think it's like the stock market invested in good stock.

It's up into the right, continual growth.

Oh, climbing on and on, and all the investors are like, yeah.

And so we buy into this idea that we're supposed to be happy all the time.

And so there's, it runs directly in contradiction for the reality of life.

And when you think that's the case, it sociologists point out,

it leads to more depression.

It leads to more anxiety.

It leads to more heartbreak, disillusion, cynicism leads to all

these things because life happens.

And no matter what people post, they still have difficulty in their lives.

No matter how good it looks.

But we buy into that trap that if I just have this thing, or if I just go on

this trip, or if I have these friends, or if I look this certain way, or if

people respect me here, then, and it's a trap because the wave comes, the

storms come, life comes, life happens.

So, what happens then when it's wartime, when you're in the midst

of it, this isn't an intellectual puzzle that you've got to solve.

But when you have the time, you're an armchair quarterback, right?

And it's an intellectual puzzle.

Why does God allow evil and suffering?

It's this intellectual puzzle that we have to solve.

like how to get a man to Mars is an intellectual puzzle.

The experience of suffering is not an intellectual puzzle,

we know this, it's a journey.

It's like, how am I going to get over this icy, snow covered mountain pass?

you need somebody to tell you, to take you and say, That's not the path.

This is the path.

It's not this intellectual puzzle.

I think we want an answer to the reason for evil and suffering, so

that we can put it in our pocket and feel good about the world.

we want to make sense of it, so then we can move on and feel, okay.

all through the Bible, God does not want you to feel good about the world.

We live east of Eden.

We don't live in Eden anymore.

We are not in paradise.

We are on the east side.

We live on the east side.

it's death and curse and destruction that God is going to reverse and heal and

He's already in the process of doing it.

Showing us that he reverses death in his own resurrection.

The prototype of what's happening and, and what's going to unfold

into all of frustrated creation.

But we are supposed to not be okay.

with the war in Israel.

We're not supposed to be okay with the crime and the death happening

on our streets, people being taken advantage of, people lying and

cheating and getting, we're supposed to groan with the rest of creation.

there's this word, in Hebrew that it's one of the words that it literally means

you like, ah, it's a ha, it's a groan.

It's it's.

you just, it's what happens when the children of Israel

and Egypt and they're enslaved.

It says they just, it's the same thing Romans eight says that the trees and

all creation, they go, ah, they're frustrated, they're groaning because it's

not the way that it's supposed to be.

So it's not this intellectual puzzle.

And I pray this isn't just information, but that we'd see the empowering

strength of a person who actually has suffered and who has been

down this road and has journeyed.

Spurgeon said, I have learned to kiss the waves that throw

me against the rock of ages.

Hmm.

we talked about the paradox last week, and I just want to mention

God is completely sovereign.

Completely.

Nothing is hidden.

He's outside of time.

like the future for God is not some time in the future.

It's a place He exists now.

That kind of blows your mind, right?

that's where God is.

He's in the future.

Fully present.

And yet, He's fully present here.

Right now.

He's outside of that.

He's so sovereign.

He's everything in control.

And yet, there's the brokenness that humans cause because

they believe the snakes lie.

They believe the lie of the enemy.

And all of a sudden, chaos and disintegration came into the universe.

And God holds man responsible for his wickedness.

But then he doesn't power the ship of evil, but he steers it for his

own good purposes and he makes evil ultimately defeat itself by bringing

about good in the lives of people.

It's so yes, but there are extremes within the church where it's man, it is so much

on one side that, like I heard a preacher say, and then I stopped listening to him.

I used to love him.

But he's God is so holy that if my son doesn't accept Jesus, God on that day

of judgment is going to take my son in front of me and cast him into the hell

for him to burn for all of eternity.

I'm going to stand and applaud.

And I was like, Oh yeah, click.

I'm like, ah, I love your passion.

Yeah.

whoa, did we lose everything else in the Bible?

but that's.

Because we're either or people we talked about that last week or it's so there's

this thing called process theology We actually I've talked to a couple of

people who believe in process theology.

That's that God has removed himself From the constraints of sovereignty

and that he's entered into our time stream and he's this master chess

player So It's all in process.

It's called process.

like he's just so wise and so good.

He's doing a pretty good job guiding the ship down the stream.

that's another end of the spectrum.

But the Bible says a hundred percent sovereign, a hundred

percent responsibility.

And I just want to mention that.

a paradox is a statement that seems contradictory, but in reality may

express a possible truth I cannot see from my limited perspective.

And a paradox is different than a contradiction.

In fact, Niels Bohr, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, said this.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement.

But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.

The spiritual journey proceeds with trembling confidence that God's truth is

too large for the simplicity of either or.

It can be apprehended only by the complexity of both and.

Which takes humility because this is all a mystery.

And the whole idea of problem evil, guess what, nobody knows.

I have spent so much time this week.

I'm gonna crack this one.

And all my life I've spent time.

Now, I'm like, did anybody update this?

Can I?

Thousands of years, people have been actually more than that.

multiple thousands of years from the beginning of time, people have been

wrestling with the problem of evil.

And guess what?

We come to it with humility, but what we know is that God

is in control and He's good.

Climaxing in the cross of Jesus Christ.

what we know for certain is that It can't be because God doesn't care.

Why does He allow this evil and suffering?

Because if He didn't care, He wouldn't have sent His Son to die for us on

the cross when we're at our worst.

It can't be that he wasn't good because he gave his ultimate

to bring us in and to adopt us.

It can't be that he doesn't have control because he said, I planned this from the

beginning of time that my son would die.

so we might not know.

It's not all spelled out for us.

The why that we can put in our pocket and feel good about this world.

But what is spelled out for us is that he is good.

That he cares about us, that he's for us, that he loves us, and that he

is completely, cosmically in control of every single facet of your life,

and the world, and the cosmos, and the universe, and the galaxies that

he holds in the palm of his hand.

I want us to know, though, paradox is all through the scripture.

this isn't a weird one.

that paradox, a profound truth.

The opposite of, is another profound truth, is the tension

of the entire Bible, and in fact, the tension of the gospel itself.

Dr.

Anthony Fortas said, He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

The loftiest and most exalted became the embodiment of humility and simplicity.

The richest became the poorest, that the poor might become rich.

He came out of dry ground to become a fruitful vine.

He feasted with publicans and sinners that they might not starve in sin.

He starved for forty days in the wilderness that we might feast

on the impeccable bread of life.

He taught us to love our enemies, to do good to those who treat us badly.

He emptied himself that we might be filled.

Mighty conquerors with vast armies and terrible weapons have sought

in vain to subdue the world.

He conquered a vast kingdom with simple weapons.

The simple weapons of agape, the lion became the lamb that the

sheep might become, the shepherds.

His heart was broken, that he might bind up the broken hearted.

His body was crushed, that we might be made whole.

We come into the world to live.

He came to die.

The purest one was called illegitimate blasphemer wine.

Biber glutton, imposter by guilty sinners.

The Lord of Lords became a lowly servant to serve the pitiful needs of mankind.

The man of sorrows acquainted with the depths of grief

became the joy of the world.

He was rejected that we might be accepted.

He was bruised that we might be healed.

He was condemned that we might be justified.

He was judged that we would not be judged.

He was deserted for a time by the Father, that we might find access to the Father.

He died as the innocent one, that the guilty might be declared innocent.

By grasping life we die.

Through death we find life.

Glory to the Lamb, the paradox of God.

that's a good sermon.

I want to go to his church.

so I want to briefly this morning look at sovereignty, redemption, and surrender.

Sovereignty.

Okay, so where does this fit in the Bible?

This is beautiful.

Ecclesiastes?

Solomon, the preacher?

Vanity and vanity is all vexation of spirit.

And then you've got Job, right?

And it's beautiful because you've got two ends of the spectrum.

One man gained everything in this world.

Nothing was held back from him.

He had all the resources, riches, wisdom to do it.

Everything.

Read Ecclesiastes.

Only to come to the conclusion that only God is enough.

Everything else is empty.

And then Job lost everything.

And came to the conclusion that only God is enough.

So you have both ends of the spectrum.

Fits into the Bible.

Two beautiful wisdom literatures, right there, for the taking.

And, Job is a lyrical poem about a true story and broken up into three acts.

Act one, a dialogue between God and Satan.

Act two, a dialogue between Job and his friends.

Act three, the climactic dialogue between Job and God.

The Book of Job is about suffering and sovereignty, about providence and pain.

This book tells us so much about the gospel.

There is not a piece of literature that handles the problem of pain and

suffering with as much realism, honesty.

An integrity system than Job.

So verse one to five, the character of Job.

There was a man in the land of us whose name was Job, and that man was

blameless, woo and upright when, who feared God and turned away from evil.

They were born to him, seven sons and three daughters.

He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3000 Campbells, 500 Yoka oxen, and 500

female donkeys and very many servants.

So that this man was the greatest of all people of the East.

His sons used to go in and hold a feast in the house, each one on his day, and

they would sin and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them.

And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would sin 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.

Isn't that amazing?

it's not only him, he's like, I'm an inner my kids.

and I love him.

They may have sinned in their heart.

On the outside, everything looks good, but he's Oh, I know myself.

I know them, man.

I'm not going to take any risk on this.

So we're introduced to this amazing man who is described as blameless

and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

He was a good father who loved his kids, cared about their spiritual

condition and relationship with God.

loved his wife, had a good marriage, extremely blessed, people loved him.

He had friends.

He was extremely blessed.

So the author of the book can say in verse three that he was the greatest

of all the people of the East.

that's the perspective.

So we're introduced to this character.

Now these first five verses are so important and blows the religious

response to suffering out of the water, which says it's the karmic response.

If you do bad, you get bad from God.

If you do good, you get good from God.

from the very first five verses, God's take on it.

His suffering is not tied to punishment for bad behavior.

Now, we're introduced then in Job 1, 8 to 12, the cosmic scene.

Now, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves

before the Lord, and Satan also came among them, and Satan answered, and

in Hebrew it's HaSatan, the accuser.

Right?

answered the Lord, said, Does Job fear God for no reason?

Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and

all that he has on every side?

You have blessed him, blessed the work of his hands, and his

possessions have increased in the land.

But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will see your face.

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.

So there's this dialogue, this thing that we get to see that Job never sees.

Remember, Job doesn't get to read this in his lifetime.

Job never gets an answer.

He's never told, Hey, I'm doing this big plan that's gonna comfort

hundreds of millions of Christians.

I'm gonna use your life to comfort hundreds of millions of

Christians through millennia.

He has no idea.

Never told.

In fact, God doesn't come to him and give him an answer.

God comes to him and reveals his majesty.

Job doesn't get an answer, he gets a revelation.

It seems like what we need in those moments.

So God said to Satan, have you seen my servant Job?

Now, if Job heard what was going on, he'd probably say, I know, I'm good.

No, yeah, I'm good.

No, please, Satan's

He said, Job only serves you because you bless him.

If you take everything away, he will curse you to your face.

He doesn't love you for you.

He loves you for your gifts.

He loves you for what you give him.

He does not love you for you.

And I love because this also points out it isn't a random universe.

Even with Hasatan, the accuser who has power, God is in complete control.

He sets boundaries.

He says, You can do this and this, but not this.

And he has to abide, the snake has to abide, no matter how devious,

powerful, cunning, crafty he is, those are the boundaries.

And, it's Satan's idea that all these bad things should

happen to Job, also notice that.

God's not hey, should we test him?

Hey!

No, the enemy's saying, he only loves you for the stuff you give him.

And again, God is only going to allow into Job's life.

The very opposite of what the snake wants to accomplish.

It's going to refine Job.

It's going to remove pride from his heart.

It's going to make him see a greater revelation of God than he ever had.

Like it literally is going to accomplish the exact opposite.

He is only going to give the snake enough rope to hang himself.

When God created the world he didn't create death or suffering

Yeah, God is in absolute control.

God is in total charge.

He permits it, but then he limits it.

He overrules Satan Timothy Keller says God only allows Satan to accomplish the

Opposite of what he set out to accomplish.

Satan wants Job discredited and to be found a fraud.

You're a fraud.

He only loves you for what you give him.

He doesn't love you for yourself.

God hates evil and is against it.

That's why Jesus came to destroy it and smash the head of the snake, but

he permits it to completely defeat Satan's real intention and accomplish

this opposite of what Satan wanted.

God ordains suffering only to the degree that it defeats itself

and makes you more like Christ.

Remember, He doesn't give us beyond what we can handle, but man, this comes close.

The Day of Calamity, 13 and 19.

Now there was a day when the sons of daughters were eating and drinking

wine with their oldest brother, uh, in their oldest brother's house.

And there came a messenger to Job and said, The oxen were plowing and

the donkeys feeding beside them.

And the Sabians fell upon them and took them and struck down the

servants with the edge of the sword.

I alone have escaped to tell you.

While he was yet speaking.

There came another and said the fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the

sheep and the servants and consumed them and I alone have escaped to tell you.

While he was yet speaking there came another and said the Chaldeans formed

three groups and made a raid on camels and took them and struck down the

servants with the edge of the sword.

I alone have escaped to tell you.

While he was yet speaking there came another who said your sons and daughters

were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother's house and behold

a grin crossed the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house

and it fell upon the young people.

I And they are all dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you.

Job is sitting there, maybe with his wife, maybe he's getting ready to offer

those sacrifices that he talked about.

And he sees dust in the distance coming from four corners.

And one gets there first.

And gives bad news, and then bad news, and then bad news, and bad news.

He experiences in one day the loss and suffering that comes from violence and

war, the loss that comes from natural disasters, the fire from God thought to

be lightning that started a forest fire, the wind a tornado, the loss of all his

material things, and still worse, the death of his children, not over a period

of years, but all of them in one day.

Job's response, verse 20 and 21.

Then Job arose and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped

and 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

His response is emotionally realistic.

He's hit by the freight train of trial and many of us know how that feels Something

physical is on our chest weighing us down and it's hard to take a breath.

If you've ever had a panic attack, I've always counseled people who

had panic attacks till I had one.

I was like, Oh, that's gnarly.

Like what's happening to your body.

Your body's revolting.

It's protesting your existence at that moment.

Your body is rising up over your brain and saying, We protest the circumstance.

We protest the suffering.

We protest this pain.

we pro protest the situation.

his emotional outburst is not condemned.

God doesn't say get ahold of yourself, toughen up.

No, he doesn't say that at all.

In verse 22 and all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.

He's coming apart at the seams is not wrong and sinful.

50 percent of the Psalms are this.

They're the language of suffering, they're the language of grief and working

through it by looking at God, right?

Nowhere does the Bible brush lightly in regards to pain, and then all of a sudden

in chapter 2 we get the cosmic scene, part 2, Hasatan, the snake, is there again, the

accuser, and maybe God's Do you hear that?

What is that?

Blessed be your name, a land filled with suffering, He gives and takes away, God's

like, well, looks like you failed, Satan.

And he says, it's because he has his health.

Let me touch his body.

And he'll curse you to your face.

So the Lord says you can have his body, just don't kill him.

And in chapter two, he becomes terribly ill, boils all over

his body that are swollen to the point where he's not recognized.

They're pussy.

They smell awful.

So uncomfortable that he sits in ash to get some kind of relief.

And he scrapes his sores with pieces of broken pottery.

Just don't kill him.

Ongoing suffering.

So not only suffering out there, but now suffering in here.

No preparation.

Just one day on top of the mountain of blessing and the next day in the valley

of Sheol suffering beyond comprehension.

His tragedy and suffering came on him like a thief in the night, and

suffering is like that, John Piper says, Pain and loss are bitter providences,

sometimes until the head throbs and there are no more tears to lubricate

the convulsion of our amputated love.

I think that's such a good picture of loss, amputated love, something

you always depended on, something that was there, it's gone now.

It's gone.

The Book of Job is not designed to answer a question about the problem of evil,

not to give us an intellectual answer that we tuck away, make us feel good

about the world like we talked about.

What's fascinating is that as we're east of Eden, we have the God man who

comes and joins us on the east side.

He wraps himself in human flesh and he sees all the pain and the

misery and the brokenness and he gets angry multiple times.

You see it in the Book of When he meets the leper and the leper is I know

you can do it, but are you willing?

He's am I willing?

That's why I've come.

But the religious leaders of the day had said, Oh yeah, you know what you do is

you chase the lepers away with rocks.

Cause they're unclean.

So they're representing God as we do not want you in our presence and

we'll stone you to drive you away from any presence of God's people.

Or his temple, or where he is, and Jesus is angry when he's at the tomb of Lazarus.

The word there says, he grunts like a horse digging in its hoof, or

like a bull getting ready to charge.

It's like this, but he's never angry at the Father, he's angry at the snake.

All the way through, he's always angry at the snake.

He calls him a bandit.

I'm a strong man.

He calls him all the, he's coming in and he's going to overthrow the snake.

So it's fascinating because Jesus has such a big picture.

Jesus is God in human flesh and he knows all things right and yet his response

to evil and suffering and injustice.

the lie of the snake that, all the way back, you follow every road of

every brokenness, every bit of evil and suffering ends up right there in

the book of Genesis, the first three chapters in the garden, when we believe

the lie, he's going to smash that because the snake, That's what he came to do.

That's the Proto Evangelion.

That's the, the first gospel, they call it.

the, the seed of the woman.

The woman doesn't have seed, so it's talking about a virgin birth.

And the book of Genesis is going, his humanity, his heel will be bruised, but

he's gonna crush the head of the snake.

The head of the snake's this system that has been built of systematic injustice,

of systematic self centeredness, of systematic, Consumerism of systematic

war and violence and bitterness and hatred toward people who aren't like

us to people with different opinions and different backgrounds, the system.

He's breaking it.

He's breaking the snake system.

He's breaking the snake's head.

He's breaking the death and sin itself.

He's destroying it all, he's angry, just going toe to toe with it.

just an interesting thing, and I think one of the victories of the

snake is that we're angry at God!

He deflects.

Oh, it's the woman you gave me.

Oh, it's the man, it's the snake.

He's right on there, oh, it's God!

He's in control, he says he's in control, you read the Bible!

When we see, and the other thing is like, When we This theology isn't

to comfort us out of our anger.

There is a righteous anger that fuels us, that we're supposed to have.

We're supposed to groan with the trees.

Every time you hear a tree creak and a branch is we should, yes,

thank you for the reminder.

Thank you for preaching to me today.

We should groan too.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

This is not Eden.

No matter how much we fix this world, it's not.

Until

the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven and heals this world.

Because right now it's under bad management.

Have you ever been to like a restaurant and they've got

the thing and it's amazing.

It's like a mom pop shop.

And they've got like the burger or something and they're using ostrich meat.

I don't know.

it's just amazing.

It's like nobody else is doing it.

And so there's a line out on the Miracle Mile.

We have this icy place.

Still haven't been, but there's a line like down the block for icies.

I'm like, and you're like, I gotta go.

What do they have?

I've had Icy's a lot, And then what happens is it becomes popular, so then

places pop up around it, and they're like, Oh, we've got our ostrich burger too,

and ours is grass fed, or whatever it is.

And then, and then the people, who work there, they they're like, Oh, you're all

about money, and so they're, they quit, and there's, new management, and then

it becomes a hole in the wall, and it becomes a, A shadow of its former self.

they say the worst place to get, Philly cheesesteaks is Philadelphia.

the worst place to get, because it just, it becomes so popular that then

it becomes commercialized and then it becomes a shadow of its former self.

But what we don't do is we don't say, what we need to do to that restaurant is

we need to incinerate it to the ground.

No, what do we need?

We need new management.

We need somebody who will bring it back to its intended

purpose and its original design.

And there is such a person, King Jesus, who all the trees bow to, who all, every

leaf worships in the wind, awaiting the day Paul is using like Exodus language.

Their liberation, the Deliverer is coming.

The Deliverer is coming.

The Deliverer is coming.

He's going to take us out of bondage.

He's going to set us free.

we can't lose our anger and yet we look for an answer to take our

anger away for being mad at God.

You see how we like, just, it's not the right perspective.

We need our anger.

We need to be angry at the snake.

And we need to groan with the rest of creation and call

out, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

We're coming up to where we long for the coming of the Messiah,

even as the ancient Jews long for the first coming of the Messiah.

And it, I don't know why I can't think of, what is it, babe?

Christmas.

Advent!

Yes, the Advent, Christ is coming, thank you!

And so we're, even though Christ has come, we join in that ancient

longing, it's the spiritual discipline we have, where we say, we groan,

because we live in the, already in the not yet, the overlap of the ages.

Come quickly Lord Jesus, you're our only hope, you're our only answer.

Calm and heal this land.

Make every crooked path straight.

Wipe every tear from every eye.

Lord, the evil injustice it grows.

And I think God's kingdom grows as the tares grow with the wheat.

and God's gonna harvest them at the end of the age.

Keep getting brighter as God keeps winning victory after victory and

harvests of souls come into his kingdom.

How the body of Christ grows.

Guys, in the last hundred years, the body of Christ has grown by

millions and millions of people.

it's mind boggling how many people are in our family.

but also the power structures of darkness are going to continue to mature

and age and dominate And so we yearn and we say yes more souls harvest the

harvest plentiful the labors are few.

I want to be a labor That's why I'm here.

I'm all here for your mission come quickly the Lord people are hurting.

There's injustice There's child trafficking.

there's like present day slavery happen there's so much evil, unspeakable evil,

come, you're the only one who can rescue and heal and make things right again.

So you understand, we need to be angry at the suffering, but not at

God, but angry alongside God at it.

I love somebody, I used to ask the question, what is God doing

about anger and suffering?

And the pastor said to me, what are you doing about suffering?

It's Oh, that's a good question.

That's a good perspective.

That might change my life a little bit.

God's going to remove some hidden pride in his heart.

through this process, So again, strike three against, the snake.

he's just, man, he's just striking out.

You'd think he'd give up.

Jesus wrestled in the garden, the perfect one.

Looking into the cup that he's about to drink.

Becoming the sin substitute.

Taking on the sin of the world like that scapegoat.

And then, taking the judgment for that.

and he wrestles.

The perfect one in his humanity.

It's as he, his capillaries burst.

there was so much anxiousness and stress.

Overlooking into that cup that he literally sweat as

it were great drops of blood.

the Under that much pressure.

And he's father, dad, can we do this any other way?

I don't want to do this yet.

Not my will, but your will be done.

And he leans himself into those everlasting arms, even knowing

that in a couple of hours, those arms won't be there.

And, he does it for you and me.

but they're really.

That is the real experience of suffering that even the God man suffered.

Like somebody translated that, he's a sympathetic and high priest.

They said, Jesus knows that it's scary to be you.

That's a good translation.

He knows it's scary to be you in this broken world.

Two things.

Somebody, I was, somebody said the Bible, 66 books of the Bible,

all of them have the same message.

And this message can be summed up in three words,

God with us.

Like every message of the Bible, Psalm 23, although I walk through the

valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.

Like every book is Emmanuel and culminates in Emmanuel, God with us.

tabernacle and every, like the point of the Bible, the storyline

is God with us, like you're saying.

It's like that is the point.

The point isn't to Sometimes, we're like, God's making missionaries and

ambassadors, like on a factory assembly line, to go out and to represent them so

that we can fulfill the great commission.

The point of the whole story is God with us, right?

And when you're with him, he rubs off on you.

Can't help it.

It's like Moses in his presence.

He glowed, right?

and, he had to hide that he wasn't doing his devos.

They put a, something over his face.

Cause the glory started to fade.

that's a joke, but, about the devos, number three, Augustine said, great

theologian, said, for us, it's like standing with our face up to a stained

glass window, we see some color and we see a whole lot of brokenness.

We see broken glass everywhere.

And the problem is because we're finite.

We can't get back far enough to see that.

It's such a beautiful picture.

It's such a beautiful thing.

It's perfect!

And we gotta know that.

You know the saying, here today, gone tomorrow?

We're like, today, gone tomorrow.

Like we're so finite.

Like we're we have such the tiniest perspective on the vastness

of the infiniteness of God.

he's playing, a billion degree chess, on every level and, our minds are just fried.

I just, even our life is just like a blip on the screen.

Yeah.

A vapor that's due on the grass.

And then by noon, you're gone.

And yet we shake our, it's comical.

If it's not so tragic that then we shake our fist at God and What are you doing?

Because I can't see any good purpose in what you're doing is that there must be

no good purpose in what you're doing.

that is insane.

If we really believe in God, like an infinite God, just because I can't think

of any good reasons, doesn't mean an infinite God doesn't have good reasons.

It's a seven year old going to a rocket, a rocket NASA at NASA watching

the, Launch and he's yeah, that's never gonna that's never gonna work.

Okay, you know just because the tiny brain you can't comprehend like the vastness

of it take that times a million and Job doesn't give us an answer to our whys it

tells us what God is doing about evil and suffering and not the why Because again,

we don't want to put the Y in our pocket and feel good about the world that's

still broken and needs to be rescued.

Job's wife, chapter 2, 9, Then his wife said to him, Do you

still hold fast to your integrity?

Curse God and die.

Get it over with.

I love this response.

I used to be hard on Job's wife.

I was like, And she was left?

Another form of suffering.

Which is horrible, can I trade him, trade her for the family dog?

No, I used to be hard, but listen to his response in verse 10.

He says, but he said to her, you speak as one of the foolish women would speak.

Shall we not receive good from God and shall we not receive evil?

And all this Job did not sin with his lips.

He says, this isn't you, honey.

This isn't how you talk.

You're talking, I get it.

You're grieving, you're suffering.

You're talking like the foolish people.

This isn't you.

And maybe that's what she needed because she disappears from the story

and Job doesn't have to intercede for her like he has to do for his

friends at the end of the book.

You know at the end of the book, God's like, Job, please pray for

your friends, the three of them.

Dad, Zophar, and yes, because I'm going to destroy them.

That's how bad their advice is.

and so Job intercedes on their behalf and prays, a prototype for the greater

Job, who also free, intercedes.

With his arms outstretched for his stupid friends and for me.

at first, Job bore these calamities with amazing submission.

121, the Lord gave, the Lord has taken away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

210, shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?

But as the misery drug out over months, Job wavered in his

confidence that God was for him.

The wind was blowing hard and he was slowly falling.

Job's friends, his friends showed up and just sat and wept with him for seven days.

And man, if that's all they would have done.

That is what you do as a friend.

You don't tell your friend, God works all things together for good.

You just sit and you weep.

You weep with those who weep and you rejoice with those who rejoice.

We'd again, we don't need answers in those moments.

We need presence.

We need presence.

And man, we would have named our kids Eliaphaz, Bildad, and Zophar

if that's all they would have done.

I don't know of any kids named this, but what they offer, to Job through

their arguments is looking around at the circumstances instead of looking up.

And that's the religious response, very briefly.

Eliaphaz, it can all be summed up like 30 chapters.

A life that says to Job in Job 8, Remember, who that was

innocent ever perished, or where did the upright be cut off?

As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.

You hear it?

It's the cause and effect.

It's the sowing and reaping of karma.

it's good.

I do good, I'll get good.

If I do bad, I'll get bad.

It doesn't take into the nuance or the complexity of fallenness of this world.

And it also doesn't take into the beauty and the majesty of God's grace.

That interrupts the sowing and reaping process.

Praise the Lord.

Do you hear it?

It's like the story of the man born blind.

Boom.

Mark, John 9.

The man who was born blind who sinned.

they said, who sinned?

This man or his parents?

They had already decided.

It's one or the other.

It's either or, right?

Did you get mad that they did something bad and you punished this man?

The religious response of moralism, and what does God say?

He says, neither.

No, that's, no, that's not how the world works.

He tells him, that's not how the world works.

it's much more complicated and complex than that.

And the religious response or moralism, why is it punishing me?

What am I doing wrong?

If I pray more, do more, if you live a good life, good things will happen to you.

And unfortunately, we teach that in church.

I was re thinking back on how, the church I grew up in, we would know that the

sermon we had like a rating scale, the worse we felt, the better the sermon, And

I remember our pastor teaching at like a men's conference and we just saw the

shoulders start to sink and the heads and and me and my brother looked at each other

and we're fist bumped and we're like, he got him, And it was just like this.

People were like, God, and we're like, yeah, exactly.

Unfortunately, a lot of religious people sound like job's, friends.

If I read my Bible more, behave better, have more faith in God's,

then God's punishment will be relinquished and I'll gain God's favor.

Good people are blessed and bad people are curse.

God.

I still struggle with this.

My default, like I'm like, something will happen and I'm like.

I should have given money to that guy at the drive thru like a week and a

half ago as I'm on my way to the doctor and I'm like, it's gonna come back.

I got cancer.

I'm sorry.

your default is like you just did, it's still in there hiding,

it's still rears its ugly head.

then there's the irreligious response.

I'm a victim of a random universe and a meaningless existence.

God is out to lunch, doesn't care, there's no God, so I just eat, drink,

and be merry for tomorrow we die.

This is all there is.

That's similar to Job's wife's response.

Curse God and die.

that's the irreligious response, It's all meaningless, it's random, nothing matters.

it doesn't matter what you do.

If there is a God, then he isn't good, or if he is good, he's not in control.

And in defending himself against the bad theology of Eliphaz,

Bildad, and Zophar, he said things about God that were not true.

He began to insist on his own righteousness at the

expense of God's justice.

In Job 13, 22 24, he says,

Or let me speak to you and you reply.

Tell me.

What have I done wrong?

He's talking to God.

Show me my rebellion and my sin.

Why do you turn away from me?

Why do you treat me as your enemy?

All of a sudden he's got this little self righteousness that springs

up and he's What did I do wrong?

What are you doing?

in Job 23, two to four, my complaint today is still a bitter one.

And I try hard not to groan aloud.

If I had only known where to find God, I would go to his court.

I would lay out my case and present my arguments.

And God's okay, Job.

Job 24 1.

Why does the Almighty bring the wicked to judgment?

Why must the godly wait for him in vain?

and then Elihu, this young like upstart from Bible college breaks in, and he

starts just like a seven chapter rant.

He says, and Job's friends, he says, your guy's theology sucks.

And Job, you're being self righteous, and you need to deal with that.

You've lost the plot here.

God can work good through suffering and pain.

It's not cause and effect, and it doesn't mean God's evil.

Job, you're starting And so Job's three friends had taken the position

that the severity of Job's suffering must be the sign of some grievous sin.

in his life that God's punishing Job that he has skeletons in his closet.

they try for 30 chapters to drag it out of him.

come on, Job.

We know there's something there.

and, Elihu's point of view is that Job is a righteous man, though not

perfect, and that he's loved by God.

God is not treating him as his enemy.

enemy, but as his child and friend, we've seen God originally allowed Job's

suffering to commence in order to show Satan in the armies of heaven, that Job

cherished the worth of God more than his possessions and his family and his health.

God only allows suffering to allow Satan to accomplish the opposite

of what he wanted to accomplish.

But after Job showed that he did in fact love God more than all else in the

world, there was another purpose that God sought to achieve by letting his

suffering drag on for several months.

That purpose, according to Elihu, the good friend, was to purge out of Job's

life a residue of pride that had lain quietly at the bottom of his life.

When Job was shaken by suffering long enough, the sediment of pride

was stirred up into his life, and it showed itself when Job tried to

justify himself at God's expense.

Suffering sandblasts us to our core, and the true stuff we are made of is revealed.

Suffering lobs a hand grenade into our self centeredness.

Laying our souls bare so that we can better be bonded to our Savior.

We're never more like Christ, never more filled with His joy, peace, and power

than when sin is uprooted from our lives.

Steve Estes says, God permits what He hates to accomplish what He loves.

It's a friend of, Johnny Erickson Tada.

Toward the end of Elihu's speech, a thunderstorm is gathered.

and filled him with awe.

It is though his senses, he senses the approach of God in the storm

and brings his words to a close.

And sure enough, somehow out of the world, when comes the voice of God

to Job, and we come to the climactic dialogue between Job and God, and we

see that the answer to Job's problems was not an explanation about God,

but a revelation of God himself.