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Today's reading is from the book of Job, chapter 1, verses 8 to 22.
Then the Lord said to Satan,
Have you considered my servant Job?
There is no one on earth like him.
He is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.
Does Job fear God for nothing? Satan replied.
Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has?
You have blessed the work of his hands so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land.
But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.
The Lord said to Satan,
Very well then, everything he has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.
Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.
One day when Job's sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother's house,
a messenger came to Job and said,
The oxen were plowing and the donkeys were grazing nearby,
and the Sabaeans attacked and made off with them.
They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you.
While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said,
The fire of God fell from the heavens and burned up the sheep and the servants,
and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you.
While he was still speaking, another messenger came and said,
The Chaldeans formed three raiding parties and swept down on your camels and made off with them.
They put the servants to the sword, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you.
While he was still speaking, yet another messenger came and said,
Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother's house,
when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house.
It collapsed on them, and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you.
At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head.
Then he fell to the ground in worship and said,
Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.
May the name of the Lord be praised.
In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Good morning, Christ Church.
It's good to be with you.
And again, if you're here for Explore God,
have come along with a friend or responded to an invitation,
we're super glad that you're here.
Last week, we looked at the purpose and the meaning of life,
and today we're thinking about the acid test of whatever your purpose or meaning of life is.
Have you found a purpose, have you found a meaning for your life that suffering cannot take away from you?
That's the question.
There's nothing more certain than that you're going to suffer,
and the people you love are going to suffer.
Suffering is everywhere.
It's unavoidable.
The scope of it is often overwhelming.
And as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth,
What he's saying there is that really no one's immune from suffering.
No matter what precautions we take or how well we put together a good life
or how hard we work to be healthy or wealthy or comfortable with our friends and family
to be successful in our career,
at some point, those things will be ruined by the four Ds,
disease, disaster, disappointment, and death.
And I appreciate the scriptures because they're just incredibly realistic
about the fact that human life is fatally fragile
and subject to forces that are beyond our power to manage.
As I come to this subject, I've had a very privileged life,
but I do speak as a fellow sufferer,
someone who in my childhood struggled with chronic health issues.
I lost my mom when I was 19 years old,
spent my 20s in a dark night of the soul.
And I would say even the last four or five years of my life in ministry,
I would call a fiery furnace and a valley of shadows.
And so I don't speak to you about suffering in an attached,
like, theoretical manner today.
And I know that some of you are here with raw pain.
And so what you need probably more than this sermon is just a hug, you know,
a church family that can love you through that pain
and mourn with those who mourn.
But when we suffer, it's natural for us to ask the question, why?
Right?
Has anybody ever asked that question?
Why would God, why would a good and just and loving and powerful God
allow misery and depravity and anguish into my life?
And those questions that we have about God,
they actually increase the sense of pain in our hearts
and the doubts that we have in our minds.
And so I want to engage those questions that I think all of us have
through this book and this biography about Job.
There's no book in the Bible, no piece of world literature
that addresses these big questions of suffering
with such emotional realism and spiritual wisdom as this book.
It's a lyric, epic poem.
There's nothing like it in the Bible.
And it's like all good sermons.
It has three parts.
There's an opening dialogue between God and Satan.
There's this long middle dialogue between Job and his friends.
And then there's this final closing dialogue between God and Job.
And what this book tells us is that suffering is this common burden for all of humanity,
and yet it's a lonely burden for each one of us
in its own uniqueness and particularity.
And in this opening chapter, we find some pretty deep wisdom, I think,
about this question of why does God allow pain and suffering?
And more than that, how do we endure the inevitable burdens of human life?
Do you want to know the answer to these questions?
So we're going to talk about the question of suffering for a bit.
We're going to talk about living by grace without a full answer.
And then we're going to talk about looking ahead to the final answer.
So the question of suffering, living by grace without a full answer,
and looking ahead to the final answer.
Let's talk for a moment about the question of suffering.
If you look in verse 8, it says,
Then the Lord said to Satan,
Have you considered my servant Job?
There's no one on earth like him.
He is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.
And this immediately raises for us the question of where does suffering come from?
What is the cause of suffering?
And there are different cultures that have grown up over the millennia
that have explained events or given explanation of events
to give meaning to our experiences of suffering.
And so today, for a moment, I want to kind of compare and contrast
those different cultures of suffering with what we find here in the book of Job.
We all know whenever there's a mass shooting or some sort of act of violence,
there's a typical range of responses
that are derived from these different cultures of suffering
about the cause of pain and our response to pain
and the ultimate resolution of that pain.
And people seek to address these dark moments
by focusing on the cause.
Now, I think we may have a slide,
if we can pull that up,
and it'll kind of help make some sense of what I'm going to say here.
But the first culture, the moralistic culture,
says that present suffering pays for past sins,
some failure to live rightly in the past.
An example of this would be Hinduism and the doctrine of karma.
But secondly, there's this self-transcendent culture
that talks about the illusory nature of the material world
and our individual self and our unfulfilled desires.
And an example of that would be Buddhism.
And then you have these fatalistic cultures
that say our circumstances are fixed by the stars,
they're fixed by cosmic forces.
This is what the Greco-Roman Stoics said,
it's what the Northern European pagans said,
it's what the Islam in the Middle Ages said.
And then more recently, you have this secular,
or actually, you have this dualistic culture
that says the world is a battleground
between forces of pure light and pure darkness.
An ancient version of that was called Manichaeism.
A more modern version of that is various forms of Marxism.
And then you have more recently the secular culture
that says this world is all there is,
this world is all that we have,
and suffering is seen as an accident.
It's chance misfortune.
It's just a random interruption of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.
And the universe just looks on with pitiless indifference.
Now, when you kind of look at these different cultures of suffering,
you may notice that secular culture does a pretty bad job
of equipping people to suffer well.
All these older cultures taught that suffering
was to be an expected part of having a coherent life story,
and that through suffering,
suffering was actually a means by which you could grow
and live your life well.
But secular culture is one of the weakest and worst cultures
in human history at providing its members
with an explanation for suffering,
and it gives us very little guidance and resources
for how to deal with it.
And that means that our society is increasingly shocked
and undone and traumatized
by suffering way more than our ancestors were,
because when no explanation is given,
suffering is perceived as simply senseless
and a complete waste.
And then the victims of suffering develop deep
and undying anger and poisonous hate,
and that inevitably leads to serious social instability,
which I think we probably all can bear witness to.
We see that increasing quite a bit in our society.
So I want to ask the question,
as we think about these cultures of suffering
and we place Christianity alongside of them,
how does Christianity deal with this question of suffering
and the cause of suffering?
And I want to look at this opening dialogue
between God and Satan,
and I hope that you can see that the way that this avoids
the various problems and dead ends of this spectrum
from moralism to secularism.
Again, it says in verse 8,
Then the Lord said to Satan,
Have you considered my servant Job?
There's no one on earth like him.
He's blameless and upright,
a man who fears God and shuns evil.
Verse 9,
Does Job fear God for nothing?
Satan replied.
Have you not put a hedge around him
and his household and everything he has?
You have blessed the work of his hands
so that his flocks and herds
are spread throughout the land.
But now stretch out your hand
and strike everything he has,
and he will surely curse you to your face.
And the Lord said to Satan,
Very well, then everything he has is in your power,
but on the man himself do not lay a finger.
Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.
Satan says,
Do you think Job fears you
and is a good servant to you?
Well, if you hurt him
or if you let bad stuff be unleashed upon him,
you'll see that he's actually no good.
And so God says,
Okay, you can do this,
but you cannot do that.
And so Satan goes out
and he strips Job of his wealth and his kids,
as we just read about in chapter 1.
He strips Job of his health and his wife,
as you can read about in chapter 2.
He begins to strip Job of his closest friends,
as you can read about starting in chapter 4.
And we look onto this
and we're horrified
to think that God and Satan
are playing chess with this little pawn
named Job.
But I don't want you to miss the brilliance
and the profound teaching
of these couple verses
that are woven in here
because no other religion,
no other philosophy has this belief
that there's an asymmetrical relationship
between God and suffering.
Whose idea is it
that all this bad stuff
would be unleashed upon Job
and who does it?
It's Satan.
God is not actively,
directly generating suffering.
In fact, when God made the world,
there was no disease,
no disaster,
no disappointment,
no death.
All these forces of darkness
were unleashed at the fall of humanity
and when we turned away from God
and we rebelled against God
and so the fabric of creation
began to unravel,
we are responsible
for all those hard things
that came into the world.
And you can see in this text
that God is not deliberately,
intentionally,
actively desiring suffering
in Job's life.
Satan does.
But God is in absolute control
and he has all authority.
So this is not dualism.
It's not two equally powerful
opposing forces of pure light
and pure darkness
fighting against each other.
God is in charge.
God is sovereign and supreme.
Evil is already in the world
and so God permits it
and he says very well,
Job is in your power.
But God also limits it
and says you can do this
but you can't do that.
On Job himself,
do not lay a finger.
And why does God allow this?
Well, the answer is not moralism.
This whole book is dedicated
to showing that Job
does not suffer
as a direct cause
of some particular sin
or some specific failure
to live rightly on his part.
If only he'd gone to church more,
if only he'd prayed more,
if only he'd read his Bible more,
if only he'd had more faith,
if only he'd been more diligent.
No, this book is written
to disabuse us
of that kind of religious moralism.
So why did God allow this?
Well, the answer, of course,
is also not secularism,
that Job's suffering
is not an accident.
It's not a chance misfortune.
It's not a random interruption
with the universe
looking on
in pitiless indifference.
Why does God allow this?
He allows it
in order for Satan
to accomplish the opposite
of what he wanted to accomplish.
What is,
what's the result
that Satan wants
by bringing evil
and suffering
into Job's life?
He wants to discredit Job.
He wants to show
and reveal Job's true colors.
He wants to expose him
as a hypocrite
and as a fraud
and show that God,
Job is actually
quite an awful
covenant partner to you.
He serves you
not out of pure,
disinterested godliness,
but out of self-interest.
He's in this relationship
with you,
not for you yourself,
but he's in it
for the gifts
that you can give to him.
He's related to you
not out of conscience
and conviction,
but out of comfort
and convenience.
And when you take
that comfort
and convenience away,
we all know
what's going to happen.
So did,
was Satan right?
Did he accomplish
his scheme?
Well,
here we are
in Berkeley
thousands of years later
talking about Job
as one of the most
courageous,
honest,
resilient people,
human beings
that's ever lived,
living by grace
and faith
in God.
And the point
of this story
is that God
hates evil.
God is against evil.
He doesn't create
a world
in which evil existed,
but He permits Satan
to bring evil
into Job's life
and into your life
in a limited way
and a bounded amount
such that it
completely defeats
Satan's real intention.
God's sovereignty
is such that even
the rebellious
unintentionally serve
his purposes.
And Satan
is only allowed
by God
to defeat himself
and achieve
the opposite
of what he
intended.
The death
of my mom,
the death
of your child,
disease,
disasters,
disappointments
that are in our present
are coming to us
in our future.
God hates
these things.
God weeps
over our suffering.
But,
Job tells us,
God is in control
and He's permitting
and allowing
these things
to come into your life
so that He can defeat
Satan's purpose
for you.
And so that,
like Job,
He can make you
into a righteous
and a wise
human being.
Have I answered
all of your questions
about suffering?
Probably not.
But I think
this is an important
beginning
to talking about
the question
of suffering.
But I want to move
from the question
of suffering
to living by grace
without a full answer.
Living by grace
without a full answer.
When suffering
comes into your life,
it will not leave you
the way that you were
before you suffered.
Right?
When suffering comes,
you're either going
to become better
or worse,
more tender
or more hard,
more,
you're going to have
deeper roots
or you're going to
become more shallow,
you're going to become
more wise,
or you're going to
become more foolish.
And what happened
to Job?
Well, it says in verse 20
that at this,
Job got up
and he tore his robe
and shaved his head
and then he fell
to the ground
in worship.
And this is neither
the self-transcendent
culture that says
the world
and yourself
and your pain
is an illusion,
nor is it
the fatalistic culture
that says
grin and bear it.
No, Job says
pain is real
and he's grieving
with overwhelming grief
and yet
he falls on the ground
in worship
and what does he say
in verse 21?
Naked I came
from my mother's womb
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave
and the Lord
has taken away.
May the name
of the Lord
be praised.
And in all this,
Job did not sin
by charging God
with wrongdoing.
This is astonishing,
really.
He's just lost
all of his money.
He's lost
seven sons.
He's lost
three daughters.
He's in immense pain
and yet somehow
in the middle
of that pain
he's holding on
to a theology
of grace.
Right?
He does not say,
God,
how dare you
take away
my wealth
and my kids.
All of that
was mine
and I sacrificed
much to get it.
No,
what does he say?
He says,
I came into the world
vulnerable
and helpless
and I'm going
to leave the world
that way
and all that I have
has come on loan
from God.
God gave it all
to me.
They're gifts
of his grace.
He's the owner
and I'm the steward
and he has a sovereign
right just as he gave it
to withdraw it
as he sees fit.
That's a very different
way to live.
What this tells us
is that if you build
your foundation
on the stuff
of this world
and if you say
the purpose
and the meaning
of my life
is built on
life and liberty
and the pursuit
of happiness
and what gives me
my identity,
what defines me,
what makes me
who I am
is my work
and my money
and my position
and my name
and my spouse
and my kids
and my family.
Well,
when all of that
is taken away
from you,
where does that
leave you?
Who are you
and what are you
without those things?
But you see,
if you,
like Job,
if you build
your life on God,
it says in verse 8
that Job fears God.
He has an awe
in God
as his maker.
He has a sense
of wonder
before God
as his judge.
If you build
your life on God,
then your ultimate love
is not your loved ones,
but it's the love
of God.
And your ultimate wealth
is not your money,
but it's knowing God.
And your ultimate status
is not in your position
and your health.
It's in your relationship
with God.
So that when all
of these things
are stripped away
from you,
the people that you love,
your wealth,
your health,
your position,
your work,
you can still be you
because you still have God.
And you have an identity,
you have a meaning
that suffering
can never take away
from you.
When you read
the rest of this book,
you'll see that
life for Job
does not get any easier
after chapter 1.
It actually gets
much, much harder.
He loses his health,
he loses his wife,
then he starts to argue
and wrestle with his friends
who are, you know,
well-meaning
but miserable comforters
who try to talk to him
about God.
And Job's like,
what do you know
about God?
And at the end
of this book,
Job has his own
encounter and dialogue
with God.
And what does God say?
It says in Job 38,
verse 1,
then the Lord spoke
to Job out of the whirlwind,
out of the storm,
and he said,
who is this
that darkens counsel
by words without knowledge?
Brace yourself
like a man.
I will question you
and you shall answer me.
And in that moment,
God does not say,
hey, listen Job,
I realize that all this
has been really hard on you
and Satan,
what's been happening
is Satan's been trying
to destroy you
because he believes
you don't really love me
but you love all the gifts
that you get from me,
your wealth and your health
and all those things.
And he thinks
that the moment
that you lose those gifts,
you're gonna walk away from me
so I'm allowing him
to unleash these things
in your life
because I know
that you fear me
and I'm letting this
fiery furnace of suffering
come in
so that you can become
one of the greatest people
who's ever lived
and changed countless lives
for eternity.
Is that what God says to Job?
Does God ever reveal to Job
why he's suffering?
No, Job has to learn
to suffer
even though he does not know
God's infinitely wise
and knowledgeable reasons
why he's suffering.
Because if Job
knew all the reasons,
he'd be serving God
not for God
but for the benefits
he's getting out
of his suffering.
And the only way
to be sure
that you can know
that you're serving God
for who he is
and not what you're getting
out of him
or out of the relationship
is if you're in a position
where serving God
is actually giving you
nothing.
In fact,
serving God
may be making your life worse
and you're getting
nothing out of it
at all.
And that's what happens
with Job.
For 37 agonizing chapters,
Job does not find God
even though he's seeking God
relentlessly.
And he has to learn
to struggle with God
who's in control
and whom he cannot control
and who is silent
for a very, very long time.
And Job must learn
to just simply trust in God
out of sheer faith
even when experience
and appearances
seem to contradict
his faith.
And friends,
we too have to embrace
the mystery that
we're not going to know
all the reasons
why our all-knowing
and infinitely wise God
allows our suffering.
But this is precisely
how we become true
and full
and deep
human beings.
You see,
Job fights his way
through to God
so that the deeper
his darkness,
the more his grip
tightens on God.
And I'll just give you
two high points
from Job.
He says these two things
in the midst
of the brute facts
of his unmerited suffering,
in the midst
of his friends
who are reproaching him
and assigning wrongdoing
to him,
in the midst
of the world's intolerable wrongs.
Job says this
in Job 23.
He says,
if I go to the east,
God is not there.
If I go to the west,
I do not find him.
When he is at work
in the north,
I do not see him.
When he turns to the south,
I catch no glimpse of him.
But he knows the way
that I take.
And when he has tested me,
I will come forth as gold.
My feet have closely
followed his steps.
I have kept to his way
without turning aside.
I have not departed
from the commands
of his lips.
I have treasured
the words of his mouth
more than my daily bread.
That's a man
who's suffering
by grace
without a full answer.
And then his most famous
saying of all
in Job 19,
he says,
for I know
that my Redeemer lives,
and at the last
he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin
has been thus destroyed,
yet in my flesh
I shall see God.
You see,
if you build your life
on things,
then suffering's gonna drive you
away from your source of joy.
But if you build your life
on God,
then suffering's gonna drive you
deeper into him,
deeper and deeper
into your very source
of joy.
I wanna close.
We talked about
the question of suffering
and living by grace
without a full answer,
but I also wanna
talk about looking ahead
to the final answer.
This long, painful season
in Job's life
is not gonna be
the last time
that Satan assaults
a human being
and particularly
God's chosen
and beloved
partner.
And centuries later,
we see a cross
outside of the city gate
of Jerusalem,
and there on that cross
is God in the flesh
dying,
naked,
and he's crying out,
my God,
why have you forsaken me?
And when that question
is launched
from Jesus' lips,
the Father does not give
his son an answer
to that question,
at least not right away.
And you see,
when Job suffered,
he was relatively innocent,
but Jesus here
in this moment
is the absolutely
holy,
innocent sufferer.
Job felt abandoned
by God,
but here's Jesus,
the man of sorrows,
truly abandoned
by God,
even though he's
the only one,
the only human being
who ever truly served
God for nothing
because there was
nothing in it for him.
And so when you are suffering
and you don't know why
and your heart is crying out
in pain,
I want to encourage you
to look at Jesus,
this innocent sufferer,
because the Scripture's
startling message
is that the deepest
revelation
of the character of God
is actually in the weakness
and suffering
and death of Jesus
on the cross.
It's the exact opposite
of where humanity
expects to find God,
right?
Christianity is alone
among the world religions
that claims that God
himself knows firsthand
despair,
rejection,
loneliness,
poverty,
bereavement,
torture,
imprisonment,
rejection,
and death.
And here in Jesus Christ,
God is experiencing
the greatest depths of pain
far beyond what any of us
can ever imagine
or will ever go through
because here on the cross,
Jesus Christ
is losing the infinite love
of the Father
that he's had
from all eternity.
He's experiencing
the endless exclusion
from God
as a penalty
for our sin.
And you see,
in death,
Jesus Christ,
God in the flesh
is suffering
in love
for us.
He comes to identify
with those
who are abandoned
and God forsaken
by being himself
abandoned
and God forsaken.
And yet,
Jesus did not die
renouncing God
like so many victims
of suffering.
Even in his fiery furnace
of agony
and affliction,
he did not surrender
his faith in God
but he expressed it
in this anguished cry
which is actually
a cry of affirmation,
my God,
he says.
So in death,
God
is suffering
alongside of us.
God is suffering
for us.
Why does God allow
pain and suffering?
Well,
when we look at
the cross of Jesus Christ,
God is certainly
not indifferent
or detached
from our condition.
He takes our misery
so seriously
that he's willing
to take it on himself.
And when God
raises up the body
of Jesus
from his tomb,
he's assuring us
that our sins
have been paid for
so that someday
God can indeed
end evil
and suffering
without bringing
an end to us.
That we,
like Jesus,
will live on
with him forever.
And this gives us
an incredibly deep
consolation
and deep strength
to face the harsh
realities
of life
as people of hope.
This, I think,
is what distinguishes
Christians
from the people
around us
is that we are
people of hope.
Secular culture
says that in the future,
there is no coming
restoration after death
or after history.
That's it.
It's done.
Ancient cultures
say that one day
we're going to lose
our individuality
when we return
into the all soul
or that we're going
to have some sort
of ethereal,
disembodied bliss
and consolation
with our ancestors
somewhere.
But Christianity
is completely different.
Christianity says
that we're looking
for the resurrection
of the body
and the restoration
of our lives
and the reversal
of all of our experiences.
That our Christian hope
is a material restoration
of the body
and the life
that you never had
but that you always wanted.
And that one day
every horrible thing
that's ever happened
will not only be undone
and repaired by God,
but God will in some way
use it
to make your eventual glory
and joy
even greater
than it could have been
without evil
and suffering
in your life.
I'll close with this quote
from Dostoevsky,
this great novel,
The Brothers Karamazov,
and I think it's a beautiful
expression of this Christian hope.
He says,
I believe like a child
that suffering
will be healed
and made up for
and that all the humiliating
absurdity
of human contradictions
will vanish
like a pitiful mirage,
like the despicable fabrication
of the impotent
and infinitely small
Euclidean mind of man
that in the world's finale
at the moment
of eternal harmony
something so precious
will come to pass
that it will suffice
for all hearts,
for the comforting
of all resentments,
for the atonement
of all the crimes
of humanity,
for all the blood
that they've shed
that it will make it
not only possible
to forgive
but to justify
all that has happened.
This is our great hope.
Let's come now
to this table
that's set for us
with the broken body
and the shed blood
of our God,
Jesus Christ.
In the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit,
Amen.