First Trust

Job 2:3-10

April 22, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

“If it bleeds, it leads.” This phrase, one that seems to govern much of the workings of the news media, is not as old as you think it is. The first verifiable use of the phrase was in a 1989 article in New York Magazine. The article was called, “Grins, Gore, and Videotape: The Trouble with Local TV News,” written by journalist Eric Pooley. In that article, Pooley pointed out what we already knew but few were willing to admit: “The thoughtful report is buried because sensational stories must launch the broadcast: If it bleeds, it leads.” What Pooley noticed, though, was not some vast conspiracy by the news media, or even early hints of “fake news.” Rather, he tapped into something true about human nature: that, for many reasons, we are fascinated by devastation, death and horrific circumstances. You know that; you’ve been in a traffic jam that was caused by a car accident, and when you get up to the accident you learn that the only reason the traffic is slowed is because people are “gawking” at the accident. On the traffic reports on Chicago TV stations up where we used to live, they would always talk about the “gawker’s delay.” It’s human nature; we’re fascinated by the terrible. In fact, sales of news periodicals have been shown to increase 30% when bad news is reported over good news.

And there is plenty of “bad” in our world to focus on today. When I began in full-time pastoral ministry in 1993, I would never have imagined that we would have a meeting of the Leadership Council like we did a couple of weeks ago, where we began the work of putting safety policies in place, and determining a plan of action to follow in the event of an active shooter at church. I would never have imagined that we would have a church insurance policy that contains a terrorism clause. Parents are often afraid to send their children to school because without warning schools can and have become places of danger and death. An ever-growing segment of parents are described as “helicopter parents,” constantly hovering and checking on their children to make sure they are safe in an unsafe world. Technology has only increased the size of this phenomenon. (Yes, the app “Find My iPhone” is on my first screen on my phone and I can find where my kids are at any time—or at least where their phones are.) Add to that the ever-present threat of online stalking or identity theft, and the more medically-oriented crises like cancer or other life-threatening illness and it becomes clear we live in a world that is frightening and far from the world we hope for—not to mention being far from the world God meant for us to live in. Probably the worst part of all of this is that we want desperately to understand why these things happen, hence the ages-old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We want answers; we’ll even settle for strong, credible suggestions. And so, because we’re people of faith, we pray when we feel threatened or when life gets difficult, and a lot of times it seems as if we hear nothing, no matter how hard we listen. How do we pray in the face of a world where everything seems haywire, where everything seems to be falling apart?

That’s the question we want to confront this morning as we continue this series of sermons called “First.” We’ve been asking questions and seeking answers about this strange yet compelling practice we call prayer, this spiritual resource we should turn to first in any situation. Last week we talked about getting quiet enough to listen to God, and two weeks ago we talked about creating a framework for prayer, but sometimes the framework falls apart. What do we do then? How do we make prayer a priority—and what kinds of prayer do we pray—when everything in the world makes no sense? To try to answer that question, we’re going to turn to a story in the Old Testament, one of the oldest stories we have in the Bible, about a man named Job. I want to learn what Job knew about prayer and about trusting in God even when things get tough.

In our reading this morning, we sort of came in on the middle of a story. Chapter 1 begins much like Chapter 2 does, with Satan (literally, “The Accuser”) coming before a Heavenly Council to make his report. Obviously, whether it happened just this way or if this is a product of the writer’s creativity sort of depends on how you understand the inspiration of the Bible—and it’s not an important matter to settle right now. One thing is clear: there are decisions being made in this Council that Job does not know about. In fact, he never learns about them in the whole 42 chapters that make up this book. Whatever happens here between God and Satan is kept from Job. In his wanderings on the earth, Satan’s attention has been drawn to this man named Job, whom God describes as “blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil” (1:8). Satan decides that if he just takes everything good away from Job, Job will turn away from God. So he tries that, after God allows it, and still Job relies on God. This is where we get that famous phrase, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” (1:21, KJV). It’s a sign of Job’s trust that whatever God allows is for his good, and that no matter what happens, God is worthy of praise.

So, the next time the Heavenly Council meets, Satan is there again, disgruntled because his plan didn’t work. This time, though, he’s decided it’s because he wasn’t allowed to hurt Job himself. It’s one thing to take away a man’s crops, wealth and even his children, Satan says but it’s a whole other thing to hurt the man himself. The Accuser puts it this way: “Stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face” (2:5). This, to Job and his world, would be a sure sign of either a punishment or that God had abandoned him (cf. Walton, NIV Application Commentary: Job, pgs. 101-102). Despite this, God allows it, which ought to cause us to pause for just a moment here and ask, maybe, not why bad things happen to good people, but where those bad things come from. The traditional assumption is that bad things come from the evil one, the Accuser, Satan himself. In Job, that certainly is true. God doesn’t cause any of the bad things that happen to Job to take place, but he does allow it. There are a lot of questions that come from that realization that we don’t have time this morning to adequately deal with, but the question the book of Job confronts us with is this: “Why does God allow bad things to happen?” That gets us into the “deep weeds” theologically, and has caused all sorts of people to struggle with the goodness of God.

Let me tell you the answer this book gives, the answer Job himself gets, and we can dialogue later about whether that answer satisfies your soul or not. The answer that comes at the end of the book is this: God is God and you are not. All throughout the book, Job demands and angrily calls for God to talk to him. If he could just present his case to God, Job says, he would surely be vindicated. It doesn’t help that his friends, at that point, are basically saying bad things are happening to Job because he did something wrong. He sinned, despite Job continually saying he didn’t sin. Eventually, at the end of the book, God does show up and talk to Job, but he never gives Job an answer. What he gives him instead is a series of questions that start like this: “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me” (Job 38:2). Basically, God says to Job, “You don’t get to ask the questions here. You have very little understanding. When you can do what I can do, then we’ll talk.” Job gets no answers.

And so Job is us. Job is you and me, grieving in a world seemingly gone mad, worshipping a God who does not see the need to explain himself to us. God gives Satan permission to take everything away from Job except his life, and that same God asks Job to trust him in the midst of it all. So Job does what you do in that culture when you’re sad, when you’re mourning. He sits in a pile of ashes and scrapes himself with broken pottery to relieve the pain of whatever disease has attacked him. When three of his friends come over to comfort him, they hardly recognize him. The pain and the disease has changed his appearance (2:12). At the end of chapter two, Job is not the same man he was at the beginning of the story. He is broken, he is hurting, but he is still hanging onto God.

His wife is nearby. So far, she’s stood silently by as all these horrible things happened to him. She’s not unaffected, but in the story she has kept quiet—until she can keep quiet no longer. She’s angry. She’s hurting. She’s lost her children and now seems to be losing the man she loves. When you’re hurting, you often say things you don’t mean, things that are more hurtful than intended, and that’s what happens here. Some commentators ask the question why Satan took away Job’s family but left his wife, and many conclude that Satan could use her words of condemnation and anger. Those words would cut the deepest into Job’s heart. That’s probably true. Imagine the scene when she comes to him, sees the state he is in, and cries out, “Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!” (2:9). Preachers are often quick to condemn Job’s wife, but think about what she has to be feeling. They have both lost everything. Her husband is suffering some sort of wasting disease. What is there left to live for? Maybe you’ve been there. I know I have. Both times in my recovery from heart surgery, I reached a place where I didn’t think I could go on. I thought I would be ready for it the second time, but it snuck up on me again. I was sick, I was in pain, I was tired of listening to the click, click, click in my chest, and I remember laying on the bed at home and crying to Cathy, “I just can’t do this. It’s too hard.” So I get where Job is coming from. I imagine you do, too. The news of the disease ravaging your body or the body of a loved one weighs heavy on your mind. The one you thought you would spend forever with has walked out the door. The bank account is empty, the cupboard is bare, and the pain is too much. “Are you still maintaining your integrity? Curse God and die!” We understand Job’s wife. She is us, too.

The one we may have more trouble understanding is Job himself, because the temptation is to just give up on our faith when it seems as if God has failed us or as if God is against us. It’s in those times we wonder why we even bother praying. If God isn’t listening, if he’s already made up his mind, if he seems to be set against us, why do we pray? Why talk to God and for heaven’s sake, why bother listening to him? The book of Job stands as an eternal testimony to the fact that difficult times come, but it’s also meant to remind us that it’s in those times when we think God is furthest from us that we most need to pray. Because God is closer than you can imagine. That’s why Job responds to his wife the way he does: “You are talking like a foolish woman” (2:10).

Now, let’s be clear on what she is saying here. “Cursing God” is not just about using God’s name in vain, or saying what we might call “cuss words” toward God. What she is suggesting here is the equivalent of denying God’s existence. It’s not saying bad things about God; it’s living as if God doesn’t exist. That’s what “cursing God” means in this context. That’s why Job calls her foolish, because as it says in the Psalms, “The fool says in his [or her] heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). But in her heart, she knows that without God, there is no life. Hence, “Curse God and die.” She doesn’t believe God will strike Job down if he “curses” him. She knows deep within her that without God, there is no life. Deny God, Job, she says, and just give up. To which he responds, “You are foolish. I cannot live like that” (cf. Smick, “Job,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 4, pg. 886).

Job and his wife are a study in contrasts. His wife is ready to give up, but Job is determined to trust. His heart cries out in trust of the God who seems, at first glance, to have deserted him. He is determined to remain in the relationship, to trust, and to await what God has next for him. “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (2:10) he says. Are we only in it for the good, or are we willing to trust when the storm clouds roll in, when we find ourselves sitting in ashes, when everything good seems to be gone? Are we able to trust that God is still good and God still wants good for us even when every piece of evidence points to the contrary? Can we pray in trust and confidence even when the bottom drops out?

Maybe we need to ask, “What is trust?” Well, depending on who you ask, there are a wide variety of “elements of trust.” In other words, if you want to know what it takes to trust someone, you’re going to get different answers from different so-called “experts.” It may be that our experiences shape, to a great extent, what we need to be able to give trust. All of the experts so seem to agree, though, that once trust is lost (between human beings) it is a hard thing to regain. But the things that make for a relationship of trust between people are also the reasons we can trust God. Let me tell you what I mean. One element of trust is reliability: does the other person do what they say they will do? Reliability has to do with keeping promises, with being true to our word, and we know from the Scriptures and from our own experiences that God keeps his promises. Peter wrote this: “But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:8-9). God may not keep his promises on our time frame, but, Peter says, he always keeps his promise. Peter got that faith from his Hebrew heritage. Way back in the book of Deuteronomy, the people of God were told, God “is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments” (Deuteronomy 7:9). God keeps his covenant, his promises, to those who follow and do what he asks us to do. God is reliable, and so, the witness of Scripture says, you can trust him. Job knew that, which is why he hung on in spite of how things looked.

Another element of trust is sometimes called acceptance; it means you will be welcomed and respected for who you are, no matter what. Some of the internal questions we might ask when we are making a new friend or meeting someone new are these: are they going to judge me for my past? Do they want to know me as “me” or just because of who I am or what I can do for them? Will they still like me when I have a bad day? Not only do we want to know those things about other people, we want to know that about God as well. Will he still love me even when I mess up or when I run away? And the Bible’s resounding answer is, “Yes!” Jonah was a prophet of God who was called to do a difficult task, to preach to a bunch of people he didn’t like. So he ran away. He listened to God’s command, and decided he wasn’t going to do it. He tried to go as far as he could away from God, and yet God never gave up on him. God redirected him, brought him back and helped him get back on track. Saul was a religious zealot, thinking he was doing exactly what God wanted him to do by killing the followers of Jesus. And God broke into his life, redirected him and used him in incredible ways for the spread of the good news about Jesus. Peter denied that he even knew Jesus, and yet Jesus welcomed him back into the company of the faithful. There is nowhere you’ve been and nothing you’ve done that excludes you from God’s acceptance of you. In Celebrate Recovery, there are regular testimonies of people whose lives were about as difficult as you can imagine, and yet when they turned back toward God, they found welcome and acceptance, no matter what their past looked like. We often say around here, “God loves you so much he’ll take you as you are, but he loves you too much to leave you that way.” He accepts you; you can trust him.

Another element of trust is honesty. Can you believe what the other person has told you? I’ve had experiences, and I’m sure you have too, where the other person tells you just what you want to hear. Sometimes you know right away that they are lying to you, and other times (at least for me) it’s months later when you realize that everything they said to you was, if not an outright lie, a misdirection. In today’s world, where it seems people will tell you anything just for image’s sake, we long for someone who will be honest with us. Here’s the witness of the Bible: what God says is true. Jesus, the Son of God, said he was the way, the truth and the life (cf. John 14:6), and those who have walked with him for a long time have found that his way of life is the one that leads to real life. He was and is telling the truth. And you may expect a preacher to say that, but let me share the witness of someone who spent the early part of his life as a strong atheist. In fact, he was determined not to believe, but he also knew he needed to give the Christian claims a fair hearing. Once he did, he could not escape the reality that the Christian faith represented the truth about the world, the way it was and the way it should be. He called himself “the most reluctant convert.” He didn’t want to become a follower of Jesus, but he could not avoid the truth of this faith. His name was Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C. S. Lewis, one of the keenest minds of the 20th century. After investigating this Jesus thoroughly, Lewis wrote this: “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

Because God is faithful to his promises, welcomes us as we are and is always honest and truth-filled, we can trust him. And because we can trust him, we can, as Job learned to do, offer our deepest needs to him in prayer. Without trust, prayer is simply wishful thinking. When we add in the kind of trust Job had, prayer becomes deep conversation and rich friendship with the creator of the universe. So, let’s try something. “Trust” is a difficult thing to experience, or to make tangible, so I really struggled with how to wrap up this morning. But here’s what I settled on; I hope it’s helpful.

On the bottom of your insert is an empty box; if you haven’t gotten that out, I’d invite you to do that now. I’m going to give you a few moments to prayerfully reflect on the places you’ve experienced God to be faithful and trustworthy. Think about the times when you have gone through difficult circumstances, whether that was something that happened to you or to a loved one. Just jot a note or a word down on the left side of the paper, enough to remind you of each event or the period of your life. Some of those times might have been relatively minor in retrospect, but in the moment they probably felt huge. Take just a few moments and make some notes. When were the times you have experienced God to be faithful, trustworthy? When has God come through for you?

Now, we’re going to take a moment and I’m going to lead you in a prayer of thanksgiving for God working in your life in these many ways in the past. If you want, you can place your list on top of your open hands, as if you’re offering this list up to God in thanksgiving. Let’s pray.

Now, on the right side of the paper, I invite you to jot down the biggest challenge, the biggest obstacle, the main struggle you find yourself facing right now. Someone has said that we are either in the midst of a struggle, just coming out of one, or preparing to go into one; that’s just how life is. What is it in your life? Again, you don’t need to write it in detail; just a word or phrase that brings the situation to your mind.

Now, I invite you to get into a comfortable position for prayer. That may be sitting right where you are, or perhaps you want to turn and kneel at your pew or come up to these steps and kneel. Whatever position you find helps you pray best is what I want to invite you to do now; as Pastor Rick said last week, it’s not about posture, it’s about presence. So as you find a place and a position in which to pray, we’re going to pray a prayer of trust, asking God to help us grow in our faith, to believe what the Scriptures say: “God…is faithful to do what he says” (1 Corinthians 1:9). So, let’s find our place, and let’s pray.

BENEDICTION: 

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

(1 Thessalonians 5:23-24)