Integrity in Trials: Job's Unwavering Faith

You're listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk

about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Hey everybody, and welcome

to the Bible Guys. Who do I have here? To my right,

my name is Kyle Crenshaw. And Kyle, tell everybody why you're here.

Jeff's out of town. I think that's the main reason. Yeah, out

to but yeah, yeah, So so Kyle works at our staff at a

church that we work at called Heritage, And you've been on staff for how

long now, it'll be six years in August. Yeah, and you are

the all things guru to our MLA City campus. Yeah, the assistant campus

pastor, which is just the everything else pastor. Yeah, that's right.

I think that's how it works. Yeah, that's pretty cool. And so

anyway, Jeff is out of town. He's actually gone somewhere across the country,

you know the Adventures of Marco Polo. And so we are having a

different guest every week just to liven things up. Last week Jeff was here

with Wesley and all throughout the week, and this week I'm here with different

guests. So, so, Kyle, here is the segment for today from

Desiree. Oh boy, Desiree says this Kyle meaning you. Kyle is a

Kansas City Chiefs number one fan. So here's today's question. If you could

swap bodies with any celebrity or athlete for a day, who would it be

and what would you do? Oh? Did you did you know this question

was coming? Ye? Yes I did, and I've been thinking about this.

The correct answer is I wouldn't switch with anybody because I already have an

amazing life, the trophy wife, the amazing kids, and Okay, hey

listen, now that that's out of the way, you know that's not the

assignment. So ah, I think I've got to go with Patrick Mahomes.

I mean, he's just he's mister Everything right now, most popular guy in

the world, five contracts in the world. Do you think he's the most

popular guy in the world. I think so. I think he's up there.

Oh, come on, sports and everything. You think people in Uganda

know Patrick Mahomes over Donald Trump. Well, he's lost to Super Bowl,

So that means there's Kansas City chief super Bowl shirts somewhere out there. That's

true. That is true. Ship them to other places in the world,

but maybe not the most popular person, the most popular athlete. And so

seeing his house the thing. He's got a football field, giant pool,

all that stuff at his house. See, I thought you were gonna say

Travis Kelcey because he's dating Taylor Swift. Now you'd be like, you'd be

like, I just want a chance to hang out with Taylor Swift, maybe

a little kiss on the cheek maybe no. No, I enjoy her music,

but I wouldn't call myself a Swift ye. Plus, I don't know

if you know this. Patrick Mahomes is the reason Whataburger is in Kansas City.

And so the fact is he probably got the amazing, like all this

access to Waterburger. That's my favorite fast food restaurant. So my parents actually

ship me what Burger catch up from Texas. Holy Cattle, I got it

like all the time. Their spicy ketchup is great. But wow, that's

amazing. That is that is a commitment there, shipping ketchup from Texas.

Wow. That's all okay, Well, hey, that's that's that was very

predictable. Thanks for that predictable answer of Patrick. There's only one right answer.

That's so great. Well, hey man, today we are we wrapped

up genesis. Uh uh two days ago, and then last week or excuse

me, yesterday, we talked about Job, and so Job went through this

massive tragedy where God allowed Satan to tempt into it to test Job. And

that's a whole other topic altogether. But either way, all his servants and

his sheep and his cattle, and even his family except for his wife,

we're taken away from him. And then Job has this incredible response. Uh,

it just doesn't even seem natural. It's supernatural. He shaves his head,

falls to his knees and worships God and says, naked, I came

out of my mother's room. Naked, I returned, Praise be the Lord.

And everybody's like, what is happening? Well, today we're talking about

Job's second test, right, this is the second thing that comes Job's way,

And so you're gonna read for us. Yeah, So we're reading Job

chapter two, verse one through ten. But it says one day, the

members of the heavenly Court came again to present themselves before the Lord, and

the accuser, Satan, came with them. Where have you come from,

the Lord asked Satan. Satan answered the Lord, I have been patrolling the

earth, watching everything that's going on. Then the Lord asked, Satan,

have you noticed my servant Job. He is the finest man in all the

earth. He is blameless, a man of complete integrity. He fears God

and stays away from evil, and he has maintained his integrity even though you

urge me to harm him without cause. Satan replied to the Lord, skin

for skin, a man will give up everything he has to save his life,

but reach out and take away his health, and he will surely curse

you to your face. All right, do with him as you please,

the Lord said to Satan, but spare his life. So Satan left the

Lord's presence, and he struck Job with terrible boils from head to foot,

scraped his skin with a piece of broken pottery. As he sat among the

ashes, his wife said to him, are you still trying to maintain your

integrity? Curse God and die? But Job replied, you talk like a

foolish woman. Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and

never anything bad? So when all this Job said nothing wrong? So so

far Job only has said two things in the first two chapters. The first

response is like the perfect and most unbelievable response. Ever, and then the

second is the same thing, right, and so he says, shall we

excuse me, shall we accept only good things from the hand of God and

never anything bad? That is an unbelievable perspective. So when bad things come

your way, Uh, do you always have that response? Oh? Absolutely

not. Usually it's anger, it's frustration, it's why is this happening to

me? A lot of confusion. Yeah, yeah, I would say I

hardly ever have that kind of response, job Baz, Yeah, no doubt.

And uh. And first of all, let's address this the fact that,

uh, you know, somebody might read chapter two and think perhaps that

God that Satan has the power to persuade God, because after all, in

the first chapter, uh, you know, God and Satan were having a

conversation and uh and and God said, do not touch his health, right,

just don't, don't. Don'tthing to him or his health. And in

this chapter God decides to say, okay, fine, all right, do

with him as you please, but spare his life. And uh. And

so the answer is not that God can be persuaded by Satan. The answer

is is that God already knew the outcome before everything happened anyway, And so

really the progression here of learning isn't from God. The progression of learning is

from Satan himself. Because Satan was absolutely convinced that there was no man on

earth that would worship God if he was, you know, if he had

all those things taken from him. And so God said, hey, go

ahead and do it and watch and see. And then and he says,

but don't touch his health. And it was God perhaps reserving reserving that his

health because God already knew that Satan would get to that point and say,

oh, well, you know it's only because his health, right, So

Satan is the one learning in degrees, not God. God withheld his health

and then allowed Satan to attack his health because God knew from the very beginning

that Joe would never sin and always honor God. Well, that's what the

whole in verse four when he says skin for skin like, that's what that

whole thing stands for. So in chapter one we see that he takes his

his his kids die, his animals are lost, like basically all of his

personal property is gone. And so Satan has his opinion. This is what

the note says in here, is that Job's response to the loss of his

family or Satan still held to his opinion that Job was faithful only because of

God's blessings. And so Satan is believing that if I go after Job's health,

then surely this guy is gonna fall like he's not everything that God really

says about him. So that's really where that whole skin for that these notes

on here are really good. So yeah, which, by the way,

you can reverse engineer this and actually try to, you know, create a

scenario in our own lives today and say what happens when your blessings are taking

away? When your blessings are taken away, will you still praise the Lord?

You know, there are a lot of people, a lot of good

friends of mine who you know, when tragedy strikes through the form of you

know, let's just say like job loss or or you know, or maybe

a big health scare and diagnosis that leads to job loss that leads to financial

strain and then consequently trickles down to losing things, losing opportunities, losing you

know, the ability to travel and making memories and everything else. And so

when blessings are taken away, you know, you can reverse engineer this and

say, Okay, will I be the person who would still praise God in

spite of my blessings being taken away? It's a great question. Yeah,

I definitely think that it's a good one to wrestle with because I think that

it's really tough. You know. It's it's easy to say I would be

that person, but when when the reality comes, it's hard to know what

you would really do. Yeah. Well, and even in Job's situation,

it's not like he's lost his kids, and it's not like his wife is

being the most supportive person either, even says, you talk like a foolish

woman, Like I'd never say that to my wife, Like even if she

said something that I didn't think was smart, like I'm not gonna go out

and call her a fool. But Job is so so his integrity is so

strong, and he's so focused on the fact that God provides everything and all

those things can be taken away as well. So he doesn't even have a

positive like influence around him that is encouraging him and helping him through this.

And we'll see this later on in the book of Job that even his friends

kind of turn against him and start saying things about him. So yeah,

I like, I like what he says, like a foolish woman. And

the King James version, I think he says woman, yeah, yeah,

and so and so it's so funny. How you know here she is,

you know, her life is spared. In fact, the note in the

Life Application Study Bible, which we don't get paid to promote but we probably

should, says making a joke there. It says, why was Job's wife

spared when the rest of his family was killed? And then I love this

answer. It says, it is possible that her very presence cause Job even

more suffering. But then you continue to read on though, and then he

says, threw her sorrow over all they had lost. So at first when

I read that, I thought, oh, his wife is a nagger and

she makes his life worse. But that's not what it's saying. It's saying

witnessing her grief was actually just as you know, horrific, as maybe even

worse to deal with in his own grief, right to witness his wife,

you know, in the loss of her children. Yeah, and and again

it's it's it's a terrible thing to even uh think about, Like, like,

why would God allow this, And you know, to be honest with

you, I have a problem with this book. I have a problem with

it. You know. It's it's the age old question, why would a

loving God allow evil and suffering in the world. And it's the it's the

why thing that always, uh, you know, it takes place, and

you could really, you could really do that for any book in the Bible,

like like why did God allow that to happen to Joseph? Right?

Why did God allow the children of Israel to be enslaved only to be delivered

by Moses for three hundred something years? You know? Why does God allow

those things to happen? You know? And a lot of times what God

does in the Old Testament is a picture of a foreshadowing of what is to

come for us. A lot of times we look and we see life lessons,

we see a picture of Christ. We see the children of Israel wandering

in the desert, you know, going through and of course that was a

consequence of their own sin. But still it's just there's these things that happen

and we say why. And I remember I wrote a message one time,

and I think that God gave me this thought, and I've never let go

of it since and this was twenty years ago. And that is when you

can't know the why, just trust in the Who. That's good, right,

So the why is a thing that will never know this side of eternity

in a lot of cases, right, like, why do this happened?

God? And I think it's natural to say if I just knew why.

My wife worked on the oncology floor at Beaumont Hospital, a local hospital here

in the area. And I remember one time she told me a story about

a guy who she get to know their family regularly, but then his wife

passes, and then through a series of conversations, he leads a nurse into

a relationship with Christ. And then he made this weird and audacious comment and

he said, now I know why my wife died. She died so that

I could lead this nurse to Christ. And I thought to myself, Okay,

listen, that was definitely something great that came out of that tragedy.

But don't you dare try to lay at the feet of God the why?

Right, as if we should presume to know every reason why your wife passed

away, Right, she could have just passed away because it was a consequence

of death and decay, as Roman Aides tells us right that we're under the

bondage and curse of sin. But just like God always does, God will

bring beauty from the ashes. Yeah right, he'll bring. He'll bring grace

from sorrow. He'll bring you know, he'll the flower is gonna bloom in

the midst of the chaos. You know He's gonna do that every time.

But that doesn't mean that that's why. So whenever you don't know the why,

then just trust in who God is. Trusting the who well. And

I think it's when we look at Jesus's life and you know, when he

shows up at Mary and Martha's house, when he goes because he hears his

friend Lazarus is sick, and there's the famous verse in the Bible. It's

the shortest verse. It's it was always my favorite, one favorite one to

memorize, like in a wanna growing up and everything. It's just Jesus wept,

and you know, you always kind of wonder as a kid, like

why did Why is Jesus crying? Like Jesus is God. Jesus knows everything.

Jesus knows that he can heal him and raise him back. From the

dead, which he eventually does. But I truly believe it's because Jesus is

fully human as well and feels that exact same emotion, that sadness that sin

brings on the world, the fact that death is a reality because sin,

because of our sin, because of our rebellion against God, that we don't

live in a perfect world and things are going to happen. And so Jesus

has a very human moment where he feels that sadness because he's in a world

that isn't the way that God originally designed it. Got originally designed it to

be perfect. And so when we look at Job's life and we see the

things that he's going through, and we look at our own lives and troubles

that come, problems that come, I think first we kind of have to

look like, Okay, are these the consequences of things that I'm doing?

What is the source of the suffering? Is it something a decision that I

made, a decision that somebody close to be made. The Life Application Study

Bible, which isn't this one, but it has some cool notes on basically

looking at the source of suffering and where that comes from, and so is

it from somebody a decision I made, or decision a friend made, a

family member made, and then sometimes in Job's case, like this suffering came

from Satan because God allowed it to. And this is something I tell our

students on Wednesday nights. It's like when you are at your closest to God,

when you are on fire. And usually you see this with a lot

of people, like after salvation, you know they're ready to go. They're

sharing their faith with their friends, their family, they get baptized and have

this big public proclamation. That is when they get hit the hardest, because

Satan knows that we are dangerous, that God has chosen us the church,

to be the ones that are going to change the world, that he wants

to use us to change the world. And so the fact is is like

when we face suffering, I think there's hope that we can see in it.

Like, yeah, it stinks when hard things happen, when you lose

a job, when a family member you find out they have cancer, But

to look deeper than that and know that as long as it's not a consequence

of your own action, that you are being attacked because as Satan knows that

you're dangerous and God wants to use you to change the world. I think

that adds a completely different perspective. Yeah, it definitely does gets you fired

up a little bit. You know. I had mentioned before that so far

in two chapters, Job really only talks twice. Yeah, and he has

these unbelievable, inspiring and almost perfect responses. And you know what I always

think when I read this is I always think to myself, I wonder if

I would be that guy, Like if that were me, would I react

and say the same thing. And I remember one time, you know,

because you always hope to be that guy. Unless you're in that situation,

you don't know how you react. Whenever I watch movies and there's always like

a brave hero that runs into the burning building, and you know, I

always like to think, like, gosh, I hope I would be that

guy. Right. I remember I was in a car with a person.

I was actually a used car salesman at the time, and I was with

a guy taking a test drive. Anyway, he gets in a massive wreck.

We just get in this massive, huge wreck. Air bags go off,

and bags actually have like a chemical, like a powdery smoky chemical that

that shoot out, And to me, it looked like the car was on

fire. Okay, So so we get in this massive wreck. We t

bow in this other truck and then uh uh you know these air bags deploy.

Uh the car fills up with this smoke, right yeah. And I

so I started screaming, and I said, the car's on fire or the

truck. The truck's on fire. And I unbuckle my seatbelt and I run

out and I run all across the street. And the guy who's driving,

who is like a customer, right, he's stuck in the front seat.

Well, his window is halfway down, so I could see the smoke,

which wasn't really smoke, it was this chemical gas, but it was coming

out of the window. I said, I go, hurry up. I

go unbuckle, get out, get out. The car is gonna blow,

right and he and he shouts out the window and he goes. My seatbelts

stuck. Now, you would think that I would be the person like,

like, wouldn't you like to be the person that runs over, opens the

door, reaches in and helps them. You watch the movies, you see

I stand on the other side of the street and I yell, just mash

really hard, just just mash it good luck if he's not doing that,

all right, right, right, right right, And so I and then

and then afterwards he gets undone and I find out that the car really was

on the truck wheel was on fire, and I actually then it was only

then that I realized, I'm like, I can't believe I was that guy,

Like I wasn't the guy to run into the flaming truck which was not

on fire and help the guy. And it was like, I just was

so embarrassed. I thought to myself, gosh, real quick, I'll tell

you another thirty second story. One time I visited a guy at the hospital

who who I knew was gonna pass away. He was just three four days

away from dying. And he was there with his wife. And I'm the

pastor, and I'm supposed to show up and I'm supposed to encourage this guy,

pray for this guy, right, And I showed up, and I

thought to myself, what am I gonna say? Like this guy is literally

gonna be dead in like three or four days, and we all knew it.

And so I walked into the hospital bed. His wife was shampooing his

hair. He was leaned over into this you know, cup, and she

had a bottle of water like I have right here, and she's pouring over

his head and they're both cracking up. They're laughing. They're having so much

fun. He and he's laughing about the soap that they're using. It's in

his eyes. He's like, it's in my eyes. And I walk in

and thinking, oh, this is different than I thought it was going to

be. And then we talked and he looked at me and said, well,

he goes, uh, he actually said the sentence. He goes,

well, he goes, I will expire in a couple of days, he

goes, and my wife will carry on and she'll be well taken care of.

And he goes, oh, I'll pray that this is this is what

the way she'll live. And he goes, I'll be with Jesus, and

the blink of an eye, honey, i'll see you again. And they

both smiled and hugged each other, and then we just joked and laughed,

and he could tell that I was uncomfortable because I'm supposed to be the guy

encouraging him, but he's encouraging me. So then he perceives this, and

then he stops and he looks at me and says, Chris, you know,

he says, it's times like this that you know, and he just

starts encouraging me. You know, we should have this perspective, We should

lean on God, we should believe, even trust him more in times like

these, more than ever. And I thought to myself, is he encouraging

me right now? I'm like, that's not his job. It's my job

to encourage you. It's my job to pray for you, you know.

But he saw that I was distraught. And I'll never forget that, Kyle,

to the day I die, I promise you, unless I get a

disease that causes me to forget, I will never forget that, because on

my deathbed, if I am confronted with death, just like Job surely thought

that he was, I want to be the guy that everybody talks about long

after he's gone. Yeah, and says what a faith? Yeah right,

yeah, Well, and that this integrity that Job had. It just didn't

happen, this relationship with God, it just didn't like just pop out of

nowhere. It was years of his life cultivating that relationship, digging deeper,

growing closer to God's communing with him. And we have the same opportunity every

single day. So when we're in that situation and where somebody comes to encourage

us, when we're going through hard times, we have the chance, if

we have that close relationship with God, to turn it around and you know,

do what happened to you, right right, right, yeah, Well

Jeff always says you can't threaten a Christian with heaven. Yeah, right right,

so you can't do that. And then also you know that whole idea

of like, whenever you can't find the why, you so desperately you're looking

for it and you can't find it, just just lean into the who God

is. God is still a God who loves us, who wants what's best

for us. He's faithful, he's just. He is a God who who

is righteous in every way, and he is worthy of our trust. Yeah,

even without the why. Yeah absolutely, Well, hey listen, that's

our time and so we will see you next time on the Bible, guys,