Transcription
you have to love God for himself alone. That's what Satan is saying to God is not true of job. What Satan says is job doesn't really love you. He loves himself and he's just using you. What's happening in the Book of Job is that you'll see to some degree Satan's right because at a certain point job gets really close to saying, "I've been a really good guy and what good has it been?" But he never goes there.
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Hi. We are continuing our series on discovering the gospel in every book of the Bible. And last time I mentioned that Esther is a not the kind of book you expect in a spirit spiritual U set of writings. Job is the same. Uh, it starts off by God and Satan having a dialogue about job. And God says, "Have you seen my servant job? There is none like him in all the Earth." And Satan basically comes back twice. This happens twice. And he says, "Does job serve God for nothing?" You know, the old King James, which I learned as a child, uh, Satan says, "Does job serve God for not? Does he serve God for nothing?" Um, no, he's really, he's doesn't. He's not really serving you. He's serving himself because you give him so many good things. He's not really your servant. He doesn't really love you. He's just, he's, he just, he's in it for the for the blessings.
And then what God allows is for Satan to bring a lot of suffering into job's life. And, um, when you first read that, you say, "What?" This is like, I said, there's many books of the Bible that just show that the Bible is not a tame book. Just doesn't, uh, fit our stereotypes, I think, or categories. Then what you have are three friends that show up to try to, oh, lament with job, but instead they come after job and they accuse him of wrongdoing. They basically say, "God would not be letting these things happen unless you were a bad guy." Uh, their basic argument is, if you are, uh, having a worse life than other people, that must mean that you are a worse person than other people. Cuz good people have good lives and bad people have bad lives. And that was their argument.
Job goes back and forth with these three guys, Alfaz, Bildad, and Zofar. And there are the a year chapter and chapter of cycles in which one person speaks, job responds, one person speaks, the second person speaks, job responds, and so on. And that goes on, um, all the way to chapter 31. Uh, so you have the original, uh, suffering of job in chapter 1 and 2. You have job talking with his dialoguing with his friends, or I call him his F emies, friends that actually end up being enemies, uh, from chapter 3-31. In chapter 32-37, the truth starts to come out when a man named, young man named Elihu shows up and speaks and critiques both job and the friends. And finally, in verse 38, chapter 38-42, God shows up in a whirlwind. Uh, he speaks the truth. And in verse, chapter 42, he actually restores, uh, job's health, and he restores his wealth, and he restores his family.
Now, how does this actually move the biblical story line along? Here's something I think is rather subtle. There are two or three books like, especially I just mentioned job and Ecclesiastes, that are necessary balance to books like Proverbs. Because when you ask the question, "How does sin actually affect us? How badly does it destroy, um, our world?" Uh, if you read just the Book of Proverbs, it sounds like it's saying if you obey, then good things happen. So the Book of Proverbs will say, "If you work hard, you will, uh, probably prosper. If you, um, if you, uh, love your family, you will probably have a loving family." So, I mean, the Book of Proverbs actually is constantly saying, "If you do this, these good things will happen. If you do these good things, good things will happen." And if you read The Book of Proverbs, you might get the impression that job's friends are right.
The Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes both show us that suffering can be, uh, can happen to innocent people, or at least unfair suffering. Both the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job say you can act get out there and do everything right, or pretty much right. Um, but the fact is that suffering is not distributed the way, uh, you might think. It's not just that if you live a good life, good things will happen, and if you live a bad life, bad things will happen. That's really just not the case. Both Ecclesiastes and job say that that sin has broken the world so much, it has broken the created order so much that there's not a nice, uh, you know, simple formula to say, "If I, if I do good things, then good things will happen to me." Things are just too bad for that. And therefore, there really is unfair suffering. There really is actually innocent suffering. There are people who are suffering who are innocent and shouldn't be suffering. That's one of the themes.
But the second theme of the book of job, which I think is extraordinarily important, is that you have to love God for himself alone. That's what Satan is saying to God is not true of job. What Satan says is job doesn't really love you. He loves himself and he's just using you. What's happening in the Book of Job is that you'll see to some degree Satan's right because at a certain point job gets really close to saying, "I've been a really good guy and what good has it been?" But he never goes there. Never.
And one of the things I learned from my Old Testament professor many years ago at Gordon Conwell was he said, "You can read the book of job and a lot of times job says some pretty nasty things to God." He said, "You know, I cursed the day I was born and you're being unfair and why are you doing all this?" And at the end of The Book of Job, God shows up and vindicates job and tells the his friends, "You're wrong and job is right." And you look back and you say, "Why is he being vindicated? Job sounds like many times he practically lost it and he doesn't always sound all that, you know, kind and loving and respectful to God." But my Old Testament professor said, "But you're forgetting something. Job isn't just talking to the air. He's praying. He's talking to God. He's complaining about God, but he's talking to God about it. He's questioning God, but he's talking to God about it." And that's actually how you ought to handle your suffering.
Everybody, on the one hand, you do not walk away as if you know better than God about how things ought to be going in the world. But on the other hand, you have every right to question. You have every right to pour out your, your, your misery. You don't sit there and say, "Oh, I don't want to complain because I just want to trust God. I'm sure he's working all things to get." No, no. The Book of Job promises and shows that God understands how we talk when we're desperate. That's why he shows up at the very end and says, "I'm vindicating my servant job because, because even though he expressed his grief, he stayed with God and he did it to God." And that's what you do. Don't walk away from God. But at the same time, don't try to, you know, hide your feelings or deny your feelings. You know, cry. And if you do that, eventually, here's what's interesting. Job in the end shows that Satan's a liar. That God can make us, can bring us to the place where we love him for himself alone. Isn't that great?
Um, so the biblical story line is, it teaches us something about the fall. You know, the biblical story line is creation, fall, redemption, restoration. And it teaches us something about the nature of what it means that be have fallen and that the created order is broken. That does mean that can be, there can be innocent suffering, and you could be suffering unfairly. But it also tells us something about how you handle it. Um, what is the principle of grace? Well, I've already mentioned it, but let me point this out. I believe only the gospel can actually put you in a position where you're loving God for himself alone. But how do you love God for himself? If you're saved by your good works, then what you're really, why are you doing your good works for God? It's, you're not doing it for God, you're doing it for yourself to get into heaven, so he'll answer your prayers.
The only way you love God for himself alone is if you suddenly realize, if you come to realize, "I'm already saved. I'm saved in Jesus Christ." And now, why do I want to obey God? I now want to obey God because I want to please him, because I want to honor him for what he's done for me. And you see the motivation is radically changed. Uh, the only kind of identity that can create that kind of positive motivation for obeying God is an identity based not on your performance, where your performance and your obedience is actually getting God to, uh, make, make, making him owe you, making him bring something into your life, a blessing. When you know that you're already blessed in every good thing in Jesus Christ, you're all, you're already in a sense blessed in everything. And, uh, there will be no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And it's all secure. Then what's your motivation? You know, I've had somebody say to me once, "Well, if you, if, if a Christian really isn't afraid that he's going to go to hell, then what's his motivation for living a good life?" And I say, "Oh, if you're telling me that you wonder why, if all your fears go away, you'd have any motivation to live a good life, that means the only motivation you have for living a good life is fear." I got a better one. It's love. When you're infinitely loved, you want to infinitely love. And that's the gospel.
Lastly, how does this point us to Christ? Job was a relatively innocent sufferer. And because he was true to God, relatively true to God, uh, in a pretty imperfect way, he brought about great good. What was the great good? Well, obviously he was raised up at the end of his suffering and his family was restored. But it's also true, by the way, that, uh, there have been hundreds of millions of people over the years who have learned from The Book of Job and have been helped by The Book of Job. Job's suffering, he didn't know why he was suffering. And somebody once said to me, "What if somebody had shown up and said to job, 'Job, hey, by the way, even though you're going to suffer here for a while, it's going to make you one of those famous people in the history of the world. Everybody's going to read about you. You're going to help everybody.'" And then, then Joe would have said, "Oh, okay. I didn't know that. Okay, then I'll, I'll just hold it." Well, if he'd done that, what would that have meant? It would have meant he was, he wasn't loving God for himself alone. He was doing it in order to get fame.
But what's fascinating here is that Joe, because he relatively innocently suffered and relatively faithfully suffered, brought great good. But Jesus Christ is the true innocent sufferer, perfectly innocent, who is completely, uh, faithful to God, never questioned, and brought about infinite good. Infinite good. And that's the reason why, though Jesus' suffering doesn't completely eliminate our suffering now, it will eliminate it someday. We're going to live with him forever, and every tear will be wiped away. Every tear will be wiped away.
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