Job No.2 With friends like these

The reading is taken from Job chapter 2, verse 9. His wife said to him, are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die. He replied, you're talking like a foolish woman. Should we accept good from God and not trouble? In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.

When Job's three friends, Elphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Namathite, heard about all the troubles that had come upon him, they set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him. They began to weep aloud.

They tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.

After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. He said, may the day of my birth perish and the night it was said a boy is born. That day may it turn to darkness.

May God above not care about it. May no light shine upon it. May darkness and deep shadow claim it once more.

May a cloud settle over it. May blackness overwhelm its light. That night, may thick darkness seize it.

May it not be included among the days of the year, nor be entered in any of the months. May that night be barren. May no shout of joy be heard in it.

May those who curse days curse that day, those who are ready to rouse the fire than. May its morning stars become dark. May it wait for daylight in vain and not see the rays of dawn.

For it did not shut the doors of the womb on me to hide trouble from my eyes. Why did I not perish at birth and die as I came from the womb? Why were the knees to receive me and breasts that I might be nursed? For now I would be lying in peace. I would be asleep and at rest with kings and counsellors of the earth who built for themselves places now lying in ruins.

With rulers who had gold who filled their houses with silver. Or why was I not hidden in the ground like a stillborn child, like an infant who never saw the light of day? There the wicked cease from turmoil and there the weary are at rest. Captives also enjoy their ease.

They no longer hear the slave driver's shout. The small and the great are there and the slave is freed from his master. Why is light given to those in misery and life to the bitter of soul, to those who long for death that does not come, who search for it more than for hidden treasure, who are filled with gladness and rejoice when they reach the grave? Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? For sighing comes to me instead of food.

My groans pour out like water. What I feared has come upon me. What I dreaded has happened to me.

I have no peace, no quietness. I have no rest but only turmoil. I would be grateful if you'd have your Bibles open at the reading we've just heard from the book of Job.

We'll be centering our thoughts on the latter part of the second chapter, which obviously then leads into that great cry of anguish that came from the gloom that stole over the heart of Job. I confessed last week that one of the reasons why I've left any careful consideration of this book for so long is that it's only perhaps in the more recent years in my own life that I've begun to understand it in any measure, and it has become for me one of my favorite books in the Bible, along with surprisingly and perhaps revealingly enough as far as my own testimony is concerned, the book of Ecclesiastes. This book of Job ranges widely over the complexities of existence.

It seeks to find in the universe that God has made a place for animals as well as for men. It plumbs the depths of human despair. It responds to the moral outrage a man feels, the anguish of what appears to be as a result of his desertion by God.

And by one man's agony, it reaches out into the very mystery of God, who in one sense is beyond all words and all explanation. Finally, you will discover, not only for Job but also for yourself, for all the modern Jobs, that it is only God who can bring joy and restore the joie de vivre. God stands revealed at the end of this book in his hiddenness.

He is still an object of terror and yet paradoxically an object of love and adoration. And Job stands before him, the thirty-eighth chapter and the fortieth chapter, trusting and satisfied. One of the great truths that is almost on every page of this book is the sovereignty of God.

The book itself is unique in the Old Testament Scriptures in as much as it is almost impossible to date, though my own opinion is it's around the time of the patriarchs, around the time of Abraham. There is no mention of the name Jehovah. God is referred to in terms of the Almighty, El Shaddai.

You remember I preached an address on that distinctive title of God some months ago and would suggest that you get hold of it if you want more information. To me it is nothing less than remarkable that a man who was not a Jew who interacts with men who were not Jews has come to an appreciation that there is the God who's over the universe who can only be called in terms of El Shaddai, the Almighty One. At the beginning of the book you start with God.

At the end of the drama when things are now much more rosy you finish with God. And between the third chapter and the penultimate chapter you discover the theater of conflict, this earth and the difficulties of men and one man in particular making his way through. So it was with our Lord Jesus.

You start with God. He allows the Word to become flesh and at the end there is God. He's raised our Lord Jesus in the power of an endless life and in the middle the theater of conflict.

As it was with Job, so it is with our Lord Jesus and so my brothers and sisters it is with you. The beginning, God. And whether you acknowledge it or not at the end there will be God.

Death takes you not away from God but into his presence to give an account of the fashion in which you have lived your life on this earth. In the middle there is conflict. This is the reason you see why this book of Job has become a very remarkable book for many, many people.

It will not give you an answer to all your problems. In fact, the Bible does not give here a final answer to suffering. It gives some indications, some hints, but there is no adequate solution offered in the Bible that says all that there is to be said and leaves no other statement necessary.

This book gives you a sense of the presence of God. And here is a word that struck me so forcefully in my study earlier this week that I want to share it because I think it's for somebody here. It's a conviction I have come to from this book and from my own experience.

The sense of God's presence is more important than the solution to God's puzzles. The sense of God's presence is more important, more therapeutic than the solution to God's puzzles. And one of the things that the book of Job will tell you is that this God is immediate.

That is, He is not tucked away in the heavens remote from Job. He knows what Job is going through. He has a vista on the scene that Job never has.

You and I have, but Job didn't have. And God demonstrates Himself to Job and to us if we're prepared to ponder and to reflect on Him that He is a very present help in the time of trouble. Job is an international figure.

Perhaps some of you are so familiar with the book that you've lost the dramatic setting of the opening verses when we're told that Job was the greatest man among all the people of the East. That's the third verse of the first chapter. So great is Job that his influence is recognized not only in the world in his day but also in biblical history.

Ezekiel chapter 14 and verse 14 highlights three great men of the Old Testament, and one of those men is Job. And when you move on into the New Testament, you find in the epistle of James that when he is endeavoring to place before his readership an example of patience, he says, consider Job, a Hebrew Christian, writing about an Old Testament non-Hebrew. Here I say in this book is an example of Gentile piety.

Here is a monument of primitive theology. According to this book, there was no man on God's earth who was more favored than Job, for God counted Job, relative to all men, blameless. And there was only one other person who advanced on the blamelessness and the integrity of Job.

And we wait for 2,000 years or so to elapse and then hear a voice from heaven saying of Jesus, this is my beloved son, hear him. You see, those of you who've perhaps not blown the cobwebs off these pages for a long time, you have missed something that is exceedingly wonderful. At the beginning of the human history, there is a man who without the helps that you and I have, without the Bible, without the hymn books, without the books on doctrine, in his own thought, in his own convictions, not a Jew, comes to a realization that there is God and that this God is responsible for all that happens.

Even evil is not out of his control. There is no polytheism in the book of Job. Evil is only a problem to people who believe in a good God.

It is not a problem in Hinduism. Hinduism has a pantheon of gods, and you will not find Hindu philosophers getting involved in the sort of situation that confronts Job. Here is the difficulty.

If this God is all-powerful, if He is El Shaddai, then why does He allow certain things to happen on this earth? It is a timeless question that has been in the human breast since the beginning of our race, and will be there until our Lord Jesus comes, and all truth is conveyed through that final eschatological moment, so that we know as He knows, and understand as He understands. So then we turn once again to this monument of primitive theology, and think especially of Job and his condition. Look at verse four of the second chapter.

Skin for skin, Satan replied, a man will give all he has for his own life, but stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face. What does it mean? Well, simply this. You recall from last week, here is Satan, and he is daring to impugn man before God, as he has blasphemed God before man in the beginning.

Hath God said the words of Satan to Adam? Now the words of Satan about Job to God. That man you call blameless only serves you for what he can get out of you. And so the first test, and his wealth, and his servants, his flocks are taken away.

Ah, but says Satan as he comes back to God. The reason why he is still in his integrity is there is a second skin, and you have ensured that nothing penetrates that second reserve. Let me plunder that, and I will show you that you are whistling in the dark if you believe that you can be glorified in any man on this earth.

And incredibly, God allows Satan to penetrate the barrier and to attack the physical being of Job. Boils, ulcers, bones aching and rotting, chapter 30 and verse 17, are part of the problem that we now discover that Job faces. Acute dermatitis, darkened skin, chapter 30 and verse 2, peeling off chapter 30 and verse 30, erupting chapter 7 and verse 5, and so it goes on.

If you put all this together, it could keep Dr. Ruth Hearne busy for a while, just getting all the characteristics of the symptoms in order that she can diagnose what is the basic problem. The consequent difficulties of the boils that smite him are nightmares, chapter 7 verse 14, sleeplessness, chapter 7 verse 4, bad breath, chapter 19 verse 17, failing vision, chapter 16 verse 16, rotting teeth, chapter 19 and verse 20. He has the looks of a haggard person.

He's a tormented and a disfigured man. And well might you think, although you would be wrong, that Scripture was really looking on Job when it causes someone to say, I looked for a being to have pity on me. Now this is the man who was the most important influential international character of his day.

His life has changed so radically that he makes a statement about the way that he evaluates his circumstances. Verse 8, then Job took a piece of broken pottery, presumably to attend to the itch in his body, scrapes himself as he sat among the ashes. He goes into a sort of voluntary quarantine.

There is only one place where a man who is at his point physically can feel at home. He's part of the refuse of the world, so let him go and sit amongst the cinders. And yet, when the hiss of the evil one and Satan is only present in the first and second chapter, after which he's done his damnedest and he's off in his restless pursuit of other victims, when he is hit, Job is able to say, naked I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall depart.

The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away. May the name of the Lord be praise. Here is distilled wisdom coming from a man, one of the ancient of days, so to speak, one of the ones who rubbed shoulders, at least historically, most probably with Abraham.

Naked I came, naked I shall go. He realizes the philosophy of twin nakednesses that our politicians and our businessmen, the tycoons like Maxwell, Bob Maxwell never recognized. The question was once put to Maxwell's daughters, what happens when you talk to your dad about his human frailty? And the answer is classic, he gets angry.

Job recognizes he came naked and he'll go naked. And really, the only thing that matters between those two conditions of nakedness is the relationship that he has kept with his God while he's been in the theater of conflict. Now, this is almost mind-blowing.

On the second occasion when the stakes are much higher and the conflict is much more difficult, and in presence of his beloved wife, Job says in the tenth verse, shall we accept good from God and not trouble? My friend, at the height of the biblical revelation, you have a man whose maturity is utterly staggering. Can you do that? Can you accept trouble in your life as though it was from the hand of God and realize that ultimately he will achieve his purposes by what he has allowed you to pass through? If you can do that, then I tell you all your bronze turns to gold. All your bits of glass become like diamonds.

If you can live your life with this philosophy, shall we accept good from God and not trouble? If you retain your integrity before this great holy El Shaddai, only have him ultimately to explain. Well, that was his condition. What about his contemporaries? I've already dipped into the case of his wife, handled very badly, I think, by the great Augustine, even worse by John Calvin.

They think of her as being a mouthpiece of Satan. I guess the same sort of situation they envisage for her is that which is more accurately understood in terms of Peter when he becomes a spokesman for the devil and Jesus says, get away from me, Satan man. But no, I see this woman in more different terms.

I see her as someone who loves her husband and would rather have him dead than go through what he's going through. You see, I've been there. I know what she means.

There are people for whom I've prayed for their death because to see them as they are creates so much difficulty in coming to terms with the pain and the indignity from which they suffer. I nominate Job's wife as a feelingful woman. But her feelingfulness does no good to Job.

You're talking like a foolish woman. He's going to retain his belief in God. He will accept what comes, whether it's evil, seemingly so, or good.

It comes from the Lord and Job will cope, and the reason for Job's problem has nothing to do with sin whatsoever. So, in come his three friends, and later on in the thirtieth chapter or thereabouts, his fourth friend. They come from three different countries, don't they? Look at the eleventh verse, Eliphaz the Timonite, Bildad the Shuite, and Zophar the Naamathite.

According to tradition, they were kings. Whether that's the case or not, it's hard to establish. But they were very important personalities, as you would imagine, bearing in mind who Job was.

They made an appointment to see him. This was not something they did capriciously. They knew one another.

They set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. Let's just pause there for a moment. You see, some of you are very blessed in terms of good health, middle or younger years, and you've got a fair lifestyle.

So, here is my question. According to James, true religion means that you will visit the orphans and the afflicted, those who are in disagreeable circumstances. You will ensure that amongst your entourage of friends you have those to whom you minister, rather just those from whom you receive.

And I ask you, have you a niche in your monthly calendar where you visit people like Job? Otherwise, I declare your religion as being null and void. For if faith in God and belief in what our Lord has done does not change us and make us sensitive towards other people, then there is no way in which we can have received that Spirit of God, which changes us more and more into the character of our Savior, who was always for the broken-hearted, who was always alongside the leper and the diseased on the offscouring of this world. They can hardly recognize their friend.

Verse 12, they saw him from a distance. And it was not just the thing done in those days, the sort of etiquette that you would expect that causes them to weep aloud and to tear their robes and to sprinkle dust on their heads. This was a felt response to all that they saw of the disagreeable circumstances of Job.

They were in one sense almost like our Lord Jesus in this respect, that they could understand something of Job's sorrows, and they entered into them themselves. And sometimes, my dear friend, even though you are not gifted as a counselor and words do not easily come to your lips, let me tell you this, that when I need help, the greatest help that ever comes is one who will just put an arm around my shoulder, will say nothing. But just be something.

The acme of counseling is being rather than talking. There are times when just drawing alongside is all that is necessary. And for you to feel a failure because you could say nothing is really to do harshly with yourself.

Your presence is all that was required. Whether Job had leprosy or not would be difficult to finally decide. If it were so, then these men were risking a great deal and again anticipating our Lord Jesus as they sit on the ground with him for seven days, when according to the standards of the ancient world you did not have any physical contact with someone with contagious disease for obvious reasons.

Seven days, he cannot give to them the hospitality they've expected before. There is no Hilton hotel that's available. Job is on a rubbish tip.

But these friends are such that they will camp out with him and enter into his problems. Seven days is a long time, is it not? When Ezekiel saw the plight of the Hebrews, Ezekiel chapter 3 and verse 13, he is so stunned that for seven days he says nothing, nothing at all. These men are stunned as they face not so much the abstract mystery of evil or the moral problem as to why it's happened to a man like Job, but as they see something of one man's physical existence in a state of bodily pain.

Campbell Morgan, a great man, preceded Lloyd-Jones at Westminster Chapel. He says, I like these men. I like Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar.

I like them for these reasons. First of all, they came. When their friend was in distress, they came.

You see, if you've plundered the rest of Job, you will discover that there are on several occasions his reference to people who were his associates before, the fair-weather friends who didn't want him when he was in need, but these men came. Thank God for faithful friends. Also, says Morgan, when they came, they said nothing.

And he's really emphasizing a point that I anticipated. They came out of sympathy. They heard of his calamities, and they had the grace to keep their mouth shut, at least for a while.

And then, Morgan likes them for the third reason, that when they came, and ultimately they did open their mouths, what they had to say to Job, they said to his face and to nobody else. And that, I tell you, is a mark of friendship that's rare. How easily we break the silence about someone else when they are not present.

You see, you can learn a lot from these men. I think they've been done badly by a lot of commentaries. I find them as orthodox theologians.

I think that some of the things that they had to say were the distillation of wisdom. This is my problem, you see, why I've left facing this book for so long. I didn't know what to do with these men.

I didn't know how to interpret them. But I find them as orthodox theologians, doing their best, as I have tried for 20 years or more in this pulpit to do, with the little bit of theology that they understand. You can't do more than that, can you? Answering as much as you can and where you can't answer, well, maybe then they should have left it alone, but they went a little further than they really had the right to do.

But you and I have often done that, have we not? So these are these men who have so much that can be said positively about them. Their mistake was they tried to put him, Job, in a philosophical category which will not hold him. They tried to attribute their concept of evil and good and the fact that good men never have evil circumstances to pass through, and actually it's hollow.

It's not true. It wasn't then and it isn't true now. That's why I have little patience with the healthy, wealthy, prosperity gospelers or those who tell me that there is no possibility of a man or a woman ever contracting sickness because they are Christian.

You're dealing too simplistically, my friend. You're not where the Bible is, nor are you where you are, actually. What the Bible tells us is that wherever we are, we can sense the presence of God, and in every situation He is sovereign, and He can flush His divine power down and lift a man from his leprosy and from his blindness and take him from his coffin if He wishes.

But He is God, and you do not dictate to this God. There will always be a sense of terror and awe when you think of this great God and Father of our Lord Jesus. There will also be a blessed understanding of His nature that enables you to come so close to Him and embrace Him as He embraces you because you recognize that along with His great characteristics of righteousness and omniscience, He is a compassionate and merciful God.

These men ultimately made conditions worse for Job. They sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word because they saw how great his suffering was, and then they started to speak.

But actually, in his immediate presence, Job is glad that these men have come. It seems to act as a catalyst for him to say something. Here is the agony of his own spirit.

It has been boiling up there. It needs the cock to come out so that he can let the steam and speak the words out into the universe, May the day of my birth perish and the night it was said a boy is born. He is disclosing the very secrets of his heart in front of these three men.

Surely they will understand. He can tell them they have come on long journeys. They have made an appointment.

They seem to be sympathetic. And when Job's volcano of emotion erupts, and you trace it all in every stanza of the third chapter, then he has the heartbreak of realizing that after all these men don't understand. They handle him in a way that would cause him to blame himself and question the integrity of God, and that he cannot do.

So, let's move on to the third aspect of my sharing with you this morning. We have looked at the contemporaries of Job and his condition. Let me think about the mystery, the mystery of suffering.

You see, this book, I reckon, and these opening chapters are an exposition of providence. They are an example of patience, and in one sense, they are possibly depicting a type of Christ in the person of Job. This book is an eloquent commentary on the inadequacy of the human mind to reduce the complex problems of suffering to some comprehensible pattern.

It's a book where men achieve more when they are quiet than when they speak. And here we find Job standing out as a human being stripped and in agony. And all these three men have to say does not actually reach them, does not actually reach him.

His experience defied the thinking of philosophers to cope with it. They did their best with the theology that they had, as you and I must, as I mentioned before. And these three men were great thinkers.

These are not phony men. But they finish with a position of stalemate. They do not really understand.

And Job is a great thinker too, and he has been allowing his circumstances to permeate his mind, and he too is without conclusions. And later on, a young man, Elihu, gets up and he said, well, friends, I've let you have your say because while you're older and it's right for old people to make a contribution, but you've all misunderstood it. Let me tell you from my limited experience what the solution is.

And God gives a little chuckle and lets the young man continue for a couple of chapters and then he interrupts and speaks. And when he speaks, the storm is calmed. Not because of the solution, but because of the underlining of what I told you a few moments ago, that God is present in the whole situation and it's the presence of God rather than the solutions of God which are of help to Job and will be of help to you and to me.

Morgan says, I think it is a fair speculation that Job in the life beyond thanked God for all that he passed through. Do you not know that there is a most somber stuff I've attempted from this pulpit? There is a vast area of human misery which is neither pineal, nor remedial, nor redemptive, but seemingly meaningless. Our Lord is brought face to face with the problem of a man who is sightless.

And in the theology of the day, which is a reflection of the theology of Job's three friends, the question is put, who sinned? This man or his parents? You see, locked up in those options is as far as human philosophy, even Jewish theology has gone to that point. There is blindness, therefore there must be sin, because sickness is as a result of either something that's remedial or redemptive or it's pineal. But did you ever think that there may be a sense in which suffering seen from our worldly vantage point is meaningless? Jesus said, "'No one sinned, but this man is blind so that God can be glorified.' Not remedial, not punitive, not pineal, not even corrective.

At the point of seeing this man, it seems to be meaningless. But,' says our Lord Jesus from the eschatological viewpoint, from God's viewpoint, it is so that God can be glorified. Now translate that from the New Testament, push it through to the old, bring it to Job.

Why is he as he is? Not because of any punitive measure on the part of God, not because it's corrective, but from Job's vantage point, it is meaningless. But from the vantage point of God, it is for his glory. For God perceives what Job does not know, that out there in the theater of conflict, there is a struggle between the forces of righteousness and the forces of evil.

In a word, Satan is trying to say that God can never be glorified through a man because men want God for what they can get out of him. And the genius of Job is, and the wisdom of people in the 20th century, even at Worthing Tabernacle is this, to be able to cope with what seems by some people's reckoning to be punitive from the hands of God, and to realize that they have got it wrong. It is meaningless at this moment, but ultimately in the eschatological moment when Jesus returns, then you will understand why what has happened has been allowed.

What I do now you do not know, but you shall know. You've got that from the throne room, not from the preacher, thank God. That's full inspiration.

It comes from Jesus. What I do now you don't understand, but you shall. And here is Job, don't you see? Don't you understand why I get excited about this man right at the beginning of time, without the aids, without the props, without Bible exposition, without the experiences of the great saints of the Old Testament, and the New Testament, and the church era.

And he reaches, and he struggles, and he believes that this God, El Shaddai, will demonstrate himself and show that he has been faithful in all Job's dealings. You see the ineptitude of these men, and even Job's wife who says to Job, curse God and die. He can't think of the sin that has caused this punitive measure.

What does he have to do? Make something up to please this God? Then what sort of confession will this be? This is the end of their counseling. This is the end of their genius. It's the end of their wisdom, and it's the talk of fools.

So Job passes by their advice, and passes by even the loving remonstrance of his wife, remonstration of his wife, and hangs in. And he anticipates the writer of the Hebrews who will tell you that no, punishment no, chastisement no, no negative thing that comes from God seems at the moment of reception to have any blessings to it at all, but ultimately it will bring a fruit, a fruit of satisfaction. There will be that blessed afterwards when God will demonstrate that all that you have been through is worthwhile for his honor and for his glory.

There are passages in the Bible which postpone the incongruities and tell us to hang on until the end. This book, I conclude, takes its place in the testimony of the ages that there is a blank in the human heart that only Jesus can fill. Did you hear that? There's a gap in the human heart that only Jesus fills.

You see, he humbled himself. For what reason? That he might take a greater glory at the beginning, God, at the end, God. But what about that teeny weeny little bit of history that's locked in between the birth and the death of Jesus Christ, the assaults of the evil one, the horror of Gethsemane, the vileness of Calvary? Don't you see that Job really is anticipating a greater than Job? And Jesus will also not impugn God.

He will not curse God and die. And when the devil comes along and slips his innuendos and brings his temptations, the greater than Job will always deal with Satan and send him packing. It was the joy that was set before him that caused him to endure the cross and take the shame, persecuted by men and devils, seemingly God-forsaken.

Don't you see that Jesus did what Job wanted? Job says of this God, if the Jew would become man and understand and experience what I have gone through, if you knew this hell, is there not a mediator? Is there not one from heaven who can take upon himself the sort of thing that I'm going through? And down the corridors of time the answer comes, yes, Job, there is. And Job, Jesus comes. He knows what it is to say, my God, my God, why? Why have you forsaken me? Listen, the sufferer is nearer to God than anyone else in this world.

The innocent sufferer is nearer to God than anyone else. I say that because God suffered. He took upon himself the loneliness and the anguish.

Jesus is the final answer to Job and all Jobs. And that's why, in an incredible fashion, at the beginning of time, God singles out one man, not a Hebrew, stranger from the commonwealth of Israel, one who does not automatically enter into the covenants of promise. He takes a Gentile and he says to Satan, consider that man, he's different, he's blameless, he's mine.

And God wants that sort of man today. Let's pray. I'm sure that this book delivers us from the criticism that's sometimes made unthinkingly in evangelical circles, that it is wrong ever to question you.

Job questioned you for so many chapters and you released your presence in an unprecedented fashion. Lord, some of us have questioned you and still do. We don't understand certain things.

They seem meaningless. But we will not curse God. We will not doubt your integrity, nor will our own be brought into balance by those who criticize us.

We believe that you are in control at the beginning and at the end, and your spirit permeates life's journey in the middle years. Help us, Lord, to continue as Job continued, and help us to glean the best from his three friends and minister and counsel others to the degree that they tried to be of help, and where they went too far. May that be a negative example for us to correct our own reactions to other people's problems.

Teach us all to be more loving and more kind, and help us, Father, to trust you when we cannot trace you, and to believe that in the end, you'll explain the whole of life's mystery. In the name of Jesus, your innocent, suffering Son. Amen.