Okay, we're going to go back to Job chapter 42. As I said earlier, we looked at the first
six verses last Sunday morning, and we're going to look at from verse 7 to the end of
that chapter under the heading of the surprise of grace as opposed to the shock of repentance.
Because I know it's cheating a little bit to just go into the end of the book, but there's
such a great insight into God's character throughout this book. It's a really unique
book in the Bible in many ways, and very probably one of the earliest books in the whole Bible
in terms of chronology, in terms of its time. And yet it's full of His grace in most surprising
ways. The whole book is a surprise in many ways, because it is a book that deals with
suffering and it deals with Job's suffering. But it is important, and obviously we don't
have time to go into all of these things. But from the very beginning it's a surprise,
because it's Job who instigates the whole experience, that's what it's God who instigates
the whole experience that Job goes through. And there's this curtain pulled back to the
unseen spiritual world with Satan and with God. And what we do find is that God is unfolding
and unveiling His character throughout. His integrity is challenged and is at stake just
as much as Job's is. And we find that God is answering the whole issue of His sufficiency
for us as a Savior in suffering and in loss. And then that huge problem that confronts
all of us in our lives with respect to why suffering happens, at least what we do with
suffering, because we know what happens. And throughout it all, or towards the end of it,
we see His victory and the mystery of His victory is revealed. And it puts out a great
challenge to us in our day-to-day living, both in our relation to suffering ourselves
as Christians. But specifically, we'll look at this evening how we relate to other people
in their battles and in their struggles and how we respond to them and how we respond
with the lens of grace at the experiences other people are going through without being
judgmental. Because grace for us changes everything. It's very similar to what Grant
was saying this morning about we are in Christ. We are in Christ, and that makes a huge difference
to everything that we are because we belong. It's not that we try and do things in order
to belong, it's we belong. We are in Christ, we are united to Christ. And the grace that
has been inferred to us is grace that transforms our character. It's very easy for us to judge
God and judge other people very harshly and justify ourselves in life. And I just want
to throw out a few thoughts this evening on the second half of Job 42 with respect to
the character of grace and how grace changes the way we think about ourselves and God and
other people. And the first thing I want to say about the character of grace that's revealed
throughout the book of Job, but primarily in these last few verses, what does God reveal
about the character of His grace? The first thing I want to say is that the grace of God
has muscle. God's grace has muscle. I think there's a tendency for us to think of God's
love and God's grace as soft and spineless. But that's not really the biblical picture
we have of grace. God's grace has plenty of torque. It's strong and it has muscle. And
in this passage, God takes no shame in blasting the good guys. He blasts the good guys in
this story. In verse 7, after the Lord had spoken these words, Job the Lord said to Eliphaz,
My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me
what is right. He's angry with them. In His grace, as we go on to see, He seeks and looks
and offers their forgiveness. But they made assumptions about God and about God's character
and about God's relationship to Job and about what God was doing to Job and Job's life.
They knew God better than God, or so they thought. They were judging on a period, it's a hugely
significant fact that God is revealing at this very early stage in Revelation, probably
before Abraham, probably before the Covenants as they were formally revealed. God is recognizing
that there is a heart knowledge that is hugely significant and that we can't judge in appearances.
They had assumed that the God that they knew was a God who was made in their own image in
many ways, and they had a closed mind as to what was happening. It wasn't that they were
asking, remember there's been 27 chapters of them telling Job how wrong he was and how
much under God's judgment he was and how he needed to repent of some secret sin that he
obviously was not willing to repent of and that they were representing God in their thinking.
God was interestingly in the whole, if you read the whole book of Job, go through the
whole book of Job, you'll find this challenging because you'll want to agree a lot of time
with them. You will, I guarantee it. You'll want to agree often more with them than you
will with Job. And yet interestingly here, God's is justly angry with them and not with
Job. There's a complete turnaround in God's revelation of his character. They're the ones
who needed a mediator. They're the ones who needed to offer sacrifice. They're the ones
who God asks Job to pray for. And that's interesting and that's challenging for us. God is working
in each of their hearts to change their attitude to God but also their attitude to Job. And
that's hugely significant and hugely important. And within that, we see that God is also working
in Job's heart. Not only is God revealing that he wants his grace to change them but
Job also has to recognize that he's been worked on by the living God as well. He's not allowed
to gloat. He's not allowed to say, well, I told you so. Or say, well, I was right all
along. And isn't that our natural response when we find ourselves being justified by
someone maybe greater than us and other people being exposed as being wrong? We kind of want
to say, well, I told you so. Or to be angry or vitriolic against those who have spoken
against us. Would that not have been our natural reaction to the three friends of Job for the
27 chapters of relentless opposition that they offered to him? Job is not allowed to
gloat. Job is asked to pray for them. Huesily significant and important and interesting
command by God for Job. Job is to pray for them and to recognize that he not only has
repented, they must repent and that they are actually all in the same boat together before
they're living God. It's so easy for us, isn't it, to think it's just other people in the
battles and struggles and oppositions that we face. It's easy for us to think that it's
other people, if only other people recognize their need of forgiveness and their need of
a Savior. And yet God always brings grace to play in our hearts, even when we're wronged,
even when we're the ones who are innocent before each other. It's also easy for us to
know better than God or presume we know better than God to judge the motives and intentions
of the hearts of other people. We do it all the time. We judge people's motives and intentions
all the time. We make snap judgments and we come to a conclusion about why they have done
what they have done. And when we're wronged, we also have to recognize that God will be
dealing and needs to deal with our own hearts. So there's a great sense in which grace has
muscle here in this chapter. It's also a recognition for us that grace and the grace of God as
He's dealing with these characters is something that sees our God in His grace, sees into our
hearts and recognizes who we are in our hearts. It's interesting that twice in verses 7 and
8, He speaks about Job and reveals what He knows of Job in His heart. He says twice,
He says, Job, my servant, my servant, Job, the one who's mine. He's my servant and He's
spoken. He says, He's spoken of me what is right. God is revealing Himself as the one
who looks into the heart of Job and He's spoken of me what's right, which is very interesting
because He's all, what does that mean? Because He's already challenged Job in chapter 38
saying, Who is this that speaks to me with words without knowledge? So it seems to be
contradictory, doesn't it, that God is exposing Job for speaking without knowledge and then
here He says, Job is the one who has spoken of me what is right. How can we deal with
that? It seems in contradiction here. Well, we know that Job is already repented before
God because he realizes who God is and how little he does actually know. But the reality
is God is reminding us here that He sees into the heart and He sees the trust and faith
that Job has expressed even in the ignorant cries of his anguished heart. He is see and
he understands that Job took his doubts and his questions and his ignorance to the living
God in prayer and in cries and in frustrations. And that revealed a heart that had faith towards
the living God. It's not here when he says that Job spoke of me what is right. It's
not talking about perfectionism. It's not saying that Job was faultless. It's saying
that Job was honest and trusting. He takes his wrong words to the right place. He repented.
And it reveals that the job here as a disciple, as a learner, that's what a disciple is,
it's just a learner. And that's a hugely significant recognition for us in our own understanding
of our relationship with God, is that we don't hide anything from Him. We don't take to Him
perfectionism, but we recognize that we will speak right in God's presence when we take
all our doubts and fears and cries into His presence with acts of faith and trust and
of repentance when He reveals to us His character, His grace and His goodness. And it reminds
us that others are learners too. We are quick to often associate ourselves with Job and
being learners and making mistakes, but slow to recognize the same characteristic in others.
We're all learners in this kingdom following Jesus Christ, and therefore we reflect that
in our attitude towards the failure of others. Grace sees into the heart, and grace also
we see restores, it's the great passage of verse 8, now therefore take seven bowls, seven
rams, go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves, my servant
Job shall pray for you, and I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according
to your folly, for you have not spoken of me what is right.
There's this great restoration for both parties here, or both parties, Job and his three friends,
because at this point Job's identity almost seems to have been obliterated in his suffering,
but he's immediately given dignity and purpose and belonging as God restores him into this
place where he hears God saying, this is my servant, and where he sees this is my mediator
for these people, please pray for these three friends of yours and be the one who mediates
on their behalf, and I will hear your prayers on their behalf, and I'll accept your prayers
even though they've done what's wrong. His prayers therefore are powerful and effective
and restorative, as is the task he's been given by God, restoring identity and significance
to him. And in many ways, in this act Job himself becomes a type of Christ. He becomes
a mediator, pointing forward. We remember everything as an ever-present to the living
God, and we know that God knew what was to lie ahead with the Savior, and that this is
a whisper into Job's own plea for a mediator in Job 930, who will mediate between me and
God. And Job becomes a mediator here, but pointing forward to the role of God the Son
who himself without sin becomes the sacrifice and a great high priest, and who now lives
to, in the same way he lives to intercede for us through our suffering and through her
sin. And there's that great restorative character to God's grace, both in the dignity that he
gives to us, in the work that he gives us to do, in the inheritance that he gives us,
but also in the work of prayer and restoration of others. We speak about grace being restorative
and God's grace being restorative, but that isn't something that is hyper-spiritual. It's
something that involves the body of Christ, and it involves you and it involves me in
the way that we deal with and treat others who have wronged us, so that we see a restorative
power through suffering and through darkness and through opposition. Because we often talk
about Job, the book of Job as being a book that speaks about the suffering that he went
through, and that's right, because we say he lost his wealth, he lost his family, he
lost his income, he lost everything that he had, his dignity, his position. But we often
forget not just that suffering, but the great hurt that he experienced from the rejection
of his friends and from the wrong diagnosis spiritually that they made in his life. So
there was a huge relational element to it. Now I would say to you, the vast majority
of churches and Christian communities are broken and divided and often separated relationally.
Not always about how God has dealt with us, but very often where we are wronged and have
been wronged individually within a Christian community, and that's a huge part of our experience.
And yet we need to recognize and see our role in being restorative and our role in being
mediators to bring restoration and bring harmony within the Christian community. So Grace
restores, you're always looking to restore the lives and the hearts of those who are
Christ. And Grace we also see is beautifully profligate. It's profligate. The end of Job's
life, which there are quite a lot of difficulties in understanding exactly the blessings he receives,
but the end of Job's life or the latter part of Job's life was uber-blessed, more so than
his earlier life. And it was real. It was real blessing, but I would suggest again it's
almost typological. It's pointing forward to a bigger picture of the end game of Grace
in the life of every believer. That for every... It prefigures, I believe, spiritual truth about
God's plan for all His people beyond this present veil of tears. I know it was physical
and practical and real for Job, but I do think that there's a spiritual dimension that is
pointing forward in the same way that the land flowing with milk and honey was a real
land that they entered, but it spoke forward to greater and new heavens and the new earth
within dwells righteousness. And there's a sense in which the blessing of Grace that Job receives
here is a whisper of life to the fool in God's purpose and plan for us in Him. The joy, the
community, the wholeness, the sweet touch of God's unbroken love. I don't think this speaks
into a health, wealth and prosperity gospel which some would take it maybe to refer to.
That's far too small a vision of what is being spoken of here. But it's encouraging us to
point forward to something far greater that we can look forward to and ought to be looking
forward to more and more in this life. And it's an old quote I've probably used it here
before. If I haven't other people I'll see. As Lewis in the weight of glory, it would
seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures
fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us like an ignorant
child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what it meant
by the offer of a holiday at the sea. Far too easily pleased. We don't see what lies ahead.
We don't grasp the great unimaginably wonderful future that we have in Christ that this speaks
of the movement from suffering and difficulty into blessing and joy that is spoken of here.
So grace is beautifully profligate. Very briefly then, what does grace mean for us specifically
as we consider it in our own lives, as we consider God's working in our lives? Again,
just to reiterate what we've done, I think God's grace warns us about being surfers on
a sea of faith and no offence to my aquatic friends. But the danger is that we're just
living on the surface in a similar way to the... I think a similar way to the comforters.
They had an intellectual and a philosophical knowledge of God but they didn't allow the
mystery of God to penetrate into their own hearts and into their own needs. They had
a programmatic response to the suffering of others. They tended to be impatient, judgmental
and increasingly frustrated with Job rather than reflecting grace and they were probably
their best when they were silent. But let's not be harsh on them because we're all like
that. That's how we are naturally. We're much more like Job's comforters than we are like
Job himself. And it's a warning to us not to keep our relationship with Christ skin
deep. God doesn't just want our minds and our knowledge and our intellects and our ritual
and our attendance. He wants our hearts. They're dirty, broken, selfish and damnable. And that's
what He wants. That's where He wants to shine His light. He wants to shine His light into
the depth of our hearts to live like that matters, that that's important and not just
to live thinking, if only everyone else changed. He's saying, no, no. Look at our own hearts.
That's part of the conception we have here of God. It is God too wonderful for us. I
doubt that for most of us. Is our hearts at our hearts no go areas for the living God?
Is the light of Christ shine too deeply and we just don't go there? Is our faith simply
a worldview or should repentance as spoken of here be a way of life for us? It should
be as we allow His heart, His grace into our hearts because His grace probes deep into
our beings that there isn't, there can be really such a thing as cheap grace, grace
that doesn't work into your core, isn't going to change you. And when you're wanting to
get fit physically, you need to work on your core and to allow that foundational physical
part of your body become fit. And so it is spiritually, we've been gifted life, but
within that life, there is the pain of His healing. There's idols to be smashed. There's
pride and security and power and bitterness and grace as it's revealed in Job is all about
us changing and even in suffering, molding us towards Him rather than away from Him.
But we also need to remember that His grace as we saw is also profligate. It's overwhelmingly
good for us. It's full of His blessing and His generosity. Job had three named daughters,
new named daughters here and their names, I mean peace, fragrance and beauty. And he,
we presume, broke with convention, certainly convention that later became part of ancient
Near Eastern convention where property was left to the sons and he shared his inheritance
with his daughters and all his family. He shared what he had, his blessing. It was something
that he embraced. Even it talks about his brothers and sisters who probably hadn't been
terribly sympathetic to him and yet he embraces them all back and his grace is poured out
to all those around him. He's not embittered and he's not merely surviving as a believer.
He understood grace. Holiness, holiness is never aligned to meanness. Financial, social
or attitudinal. Grace is profligate and outrageous and I think we've often tamed it far too
much and made it far too mean. We often serve with a grimace and we allow ourselves to be
bitter and angry and mean and small-minded and yet hold on to salvation as if it's ours
by right and our God is a miser. We've kind of got a, sometimes we can have a miserly
God and that's reflected in the way we think and we live.
So we have here an amazing picture of grace in many ways. So early in Revelation history
God puts down a marker about the reality of, and the mystery of suffering yet reveals his
sovereign presence and victory in and through it. And who could have envisaged even at this
early point in humanity that his ultimate and complete answer to the suffering was he
himself nailed to a tree? Experiencing the suffering that unbridled and defeating the
power of hell and death on the cross. Who could have ever have imagined the God of Job,
the God of chapters 38 to 41, being the same God who'd been nailed to a tree in order to
be a redeemer? So please walk with Job for a week or two, reread the glorious book from
beginning to end, particularly the conclusion, and ask the Holy Spirit to let the prayers
and the revelation of God and of the characters involved be something that continues to transform
you and me and allow it to sink into our lives. I mean, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we ask
and pray that you would teach us to learn more from the mystery of your word and not
come to our own conclusions based on our understandings and our presumptions about you. We recognise
and the book of Job certainly doesn't minimise and treat tritely or loose lightly the reality
of suffering. It devotes a whole book to the mystery and the brutality of it. And yet
we find that it is moulding a picture of grace that is only finally understood on the cross
for us and a God who enters into our suffering in order to redeem us ultimately from it.
And as we battle in this world, mixed between what we already have and what is yet to come,
He promises never to leave us or forsake us and indeed to use the bleakness and the battles
to transform us and to renew us. And we pray that we would always look into our own hearts
and allow His grace to transform us. Huge battle. It's huge to how much easier, Lord,
we confess it is to challenge you and to find fault with others than to sit or to kneel or
to lie prostrate and simply ask you to deal with our own hearts. Give us the courage and
the strength and the grace to do that and to see our union with Christ and all that
it means in this world. Amen.