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This has been a really great school year, all things considered. Every year has its challenges, but the Lord has been faithful to give us a relatively peaceful year here at Grace. I’m extremely grateful for His goodness.
I know for some of us, there have been challenges and sadness, illnesses, financial difficulties, and death. To be transparent, while there have been many things to rejoice over, this year has been painful for me as well. As I’ve shared in the pages of this blog, my father passed away earlier this year, and walking through life without him has been grievous. The challenges of walking through my middle daughter’s injuries have left their marks on my soul. And, as a senior leader, the Lord has been challenging me to surrender the ways I’ve led for 20-plus years in order to prepare and, hopefully, inspire the next generation of leaders at Grace to continue God’s beautiful work here long after I’m gone. That process is humbling and, at times, frightening.
God always knows what we need as we walk through these seasons, and He loves to comfort us in painful times. I’m part of a Wednesday morning Bible study in which, believe it or not, I’m the youngest guy. We work through the Daily Chronological Bible, and for the past couple of months, we’ve been studying the Book of Job. Nothing is more paradoxically comforting than Job.
You know the story. Job is the most righteous and blessed man of his time and place, even offering sacrifices to God on the off chance that his family might have done something wrong that day. Satan seeks the opportunity to tempt Job to curse God, and, for reasons we don’t and will never fully understand, God consents. Job, the most righteous man, endures the most hardship any of us can ever imagine: losing everything he owns, everything that matters to him, and his health, all in one fell swoop, one afternoon. Job finds himself sitting on a pile, everything gone, scratching himself with a pottery shard to relieve the boils all over his body, grieving more deeply than anyone has probably ever grieved.
Job’s wife is no help; she calls Job to curse God and die. Neither are Job’s friends. They start off strong, sitting quietly in a “ministry of presence” circle, saying nothing for days. Apparently, however, they’re just dreaming up ways to blast him, because they then come after him for what seems to be several weeks of “accountability.” In their economy, God rewards good with good and evil with evil. Job has clearly done something wrong; otherwise, he would not be receiving bad things. If Job would just relent and repent, God would forgive him, and he would be restored. Simple, right?
In our pride, this is the way we all wish it would be. We’d love to get good things from God by being good people, and only get bad things if we’ve done bad things. We would love, in our pride, to be able to manipulate and control God that way, to get Him to do our bidding by our conduct. This is the foundational principle of virtually every non-Christian religious order throughout time. If I can get a good harvest, or a woman, or the job I want through my sacrifice or good works, that’s good religion, right? I mean, it’s terrifying to think that’s not how it works. Because if it isn’t, it means that God might actually be God, and that I don’t control Him, and that He may do what He does in ways that I don’t understand, ways that are beyond my reckoning. I may actually suffer when I haven’t done anything wrong.
That’s what Job’s friends are afraid of, and that’s why they offer simplistic solutions. But that’s just not how life works, then or now. Even then, Moses suffered, Noah suffered, and David suffered. We all suffer, even when we try to live good lives. Even when we love Jesus. God’s people suffered then and now. This life and worldview of suffering that Job’s frenemies are trying to sell him never works.
In the midst of it all, Job remains faithful. He cries out to God, asking Him why He’s enduring this pain when he’s done nothing wrong. Job isn’t saying he’s perfect, only that he loves God and wants to serve Him (which God agrees with, as we see at the beginning of the story). But, in the midst of his pain, Job isn’t perfect either. He says, “Though God slay me, I will trust Him.” We read that in English and think, “That’s lovely and amazing. No matter what God does to him, Job’s hanging in there. Yay, Job!”
I read an article in Christianity Today several years ago that said that the Hebrew actually translates this passage, in its entirety, as Job railing out to his criticizing friends, “Keep quiet, I will have my say; let what may come upon me. How long! I will take my flesh in my teeth; I will take my life in my hands. He may well slay me; I may have no hope; Yet I will argue my case before Him.”
This one phrase not only makes more sense within the text, but changes our view of Job’s attitude altogether. Instead of claiming steadfast hope in God, Job is demanding an accounting from Him. He knows those who appear face-to-face before God don’t fare well–they are usually obliterated in their own sin as they stand before a perfect, holy God. Job knows this well, and yet Job demands that God explain to him why He would allow God to suffer despite being a righteous guy. Even if he is obliterated, Job says he will seek an accounting from God.
Job is saying what we may have felt in our pain, but never dared say aloud to God, much less to others about God- “God owes me an explanation.” And, yet, we think it, don’t we? Doesn’t the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” functionally demand an accounting from God, the only one who can actually answer it?
The amazing thing here is that God gives Job an explanation. God actually answers Job! Instead of slaying Him, God answers in the only way Job’s human-sized brain will understand- by explaining through a series of unanswerable questions about God’s creation that God is God, that He is awesome, that His ways are beyond our comprehension, and that He is good. God speaks poetically, in metaphor: the lightning bolts report to Him; he holds the waters of heaven in jars, waiting for them to tip over in His timing; He binds the Pleiades and loosens the belt of Orion, yet is there when every ewe on earth bears her young. He beautifully illustrates that He is an all-powerful, all-mighty, always-in-control-of-everything God of creation, and nothing escapes His gaze.
In the face of this withering, yet loving response, Job is laid low. He repents and accepts God’s sovereignty. And God commends Job for coming to Him, for crying out to Him, even for demanding an account from Him. God rebukes the other guys, saying they have not spoken of God rightly, as has Job. He’ll forgive them only when Job intercedes for them. God affirms Job, not them.
What happens below the surface of this story is that Job is healed. Yes, he gets a family and new stuff back, but that’s not the true healing. He still bears the scars of what he’s lost. But he’s gained something precious in the pain. Even though Job is “upright and blameless,” his response in the face of suffering clearly indicated he believed his righteousness entitled him to only good things in life. Like the older brother in the prodigal son parable, on some level, Job believes he is owed good things from God because of his upright conduct, rather than those things being the gracious, unearned gifts of God. Job needs healing from feelings of entitlement and manipulation, as do we all, and God uses the cauldron of suffering to heal us of them, as He must for all of us.
Job’s story brings comfort and healing to all of us in the midst of our pain and suffering, because it shows us that we serve a God who can handle our cries, our pain, and our questions. He can’t give us all the answers, because we won’t understand why any more than a two-year-old understands quantum physics. As His response to Job reveals, God operates on planes and dimensions and in levels of complexity we can’t even begin to imagine. He doesn’t answer to us, but He does answer us. He is not silent. His answer is to provide beauty and presence in the midst of pain, and to send His Son to suffer even more than Job, an eternity of everyone’s damnation in one afternoon, to show us He knows and loves. And He’s clearly big enough to hold our fears, doubts, heartache, and anger, all while remaining perfectly and completely good and in control.
God is both compassionate and confrontational in the midst of our suffering. That’s the way love really is, and in the depths of our souls, we really wouldn’t want Him any other way.
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