How should we respond when tragedies strike those we love?
WATCH
Bad Theology, 2 of 4 from October 12, 2025
“Both God’s justice and love are beyond our capacity to understand.”
Job 11 by Ben Russell (@neighborhoodpastor93)
SUMMARY
This sermon explores the complex themes of God's justice and love as presented in the book of Job, emphasizing how they often surpass human understanding. Pastor Ben discusses how Job's story includes both accurate and flawed human perspectives about God, which are ultimately addressed and corrected by God Himself. The sermon also delves into the suffering faced by Job and the well-intentioned yet misguided responses from his friends, encouraging listeners to find appropriate ways to support those in distress.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 Have I decided to follow Jesus?
💬 Has my sense of justice been transformed by the experience of God’s grace?
💬 What is my response to suffering, whether in my life or someone else’s?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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Good morning, everybody. My name is Pastor Ben.
I am from Pennsylvania originally, but via Sebring, Florida, for the last 13, 14 years. This church has a special place in my heart because it was this church family that gave me my first opportunity to preach about 13 years ago. And so it's always interesting to come back here and to see you folks. And I had to be back in this room that God used in such a powerful way in my life and in so many of y'all's lives. And so if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn to job 11.
Do we have a slide for the prayer, too? I might. Might. No, it's copy. All right, we'll do without this morning.
So we got job 11 this morning. I want to talk about how both God's justice and love are beyond our capacity to understand. I know some of you were here last week. Others of you were somewhere else, specifically Sebring. Just so you know, we brought a couple of our youth students with us last night.
We actually slept here. I slept right there on the floor last night. And so we came up. We all went on a trip this summer to Momentum Youth Conference together as sort of two youth groups combined. And we got to know each other and a number of the students that are getting baptized this afternoon, we went to Momentum together.
And so we wanted to come up and support what they're doing. And also, it's just fun. It's fun to drive halfway to Georgia and come to church on a Sunday morning. So if you're wondering where all of these young faces came from, that's the story. But yeah.
So last week we started this series In Job. And in Job, we're talking about Bad Theology, which is a strange sermon series title, but the point of it is this, that in Job, God accurately records some human ideas about himself that are actually flawed. The Bible is true. Amen. We can trust what's in the Bible.
But sometimes, for instance, like when God records the words of Satan, the actual words themselves are wrong. He's accurately recording wrong words. And Job is an odd place for that, because at the end of the book, after Job's friends come and correct him or come and rebuke him and say all the things they have to say, God basically stands up at the end and says, hey, you guys, you knuckleheads in the front row, you are wrong and you should actually repent for what it is you said. So as we read the speeches of Job's friends, we should be paying attention and know that God actually comes later and says, hey, a bunch of what they said was wrong.
We all know what it's like to get life changing bad news, right? We've probably been there recently with some of the things that are going on in the world, right? We see a post, we see a headline, we hear somebody talking about something going on, maybe it's somebody. The worst version is when it's somebody in our personal lives, right? We get news that somebody has injured themselves, somebody's been in an accident, somebody got a diagnosis, somebody's relationship or marriages is coming apart.
We hate that, right? We hate getting that news. And the book of Job paints this scene that's familiar to us if we've ever been in that situation. In the midst of an otherwise peaceful day, a happy life tragedy besets a man named Job. And it's not just that he got in a car accident.
It's not just that he lost his job. It's not just that his son or his daughter got sick. All of those things happened on the same day. And we're actually told in the beginning of the book that the reason why it happened is because Satan comes against Job and is actually the one who comes and takes away not just his house, but his family, his business and his health all in the same day. So if you think you had a tough week, you may have, but Job can always one up us on suffering.
Imagine you're one of Job's friends. Imagine it's one of your friends. Did you hear what happened to so and so? Your other friend calls. Did you hear what happened to Jackie?
Did you hear what happened to Jim? And you guys are talking on the phone and they say, we're gonna go visit, we're gonna go see them. Do you want to come? And of course, as a good friend, if our friend is suffering, we would do that, right? We would show up, we would drive across town, we would drive across the state, maybe even through states to go and see somebody that we love who's suffering.
But if you've ever been there, if you've been there recently, you know that as soon as you get in the car, you start to wonder, when I get there, what is it that I'm supposed to say, right? And actually depending on the situation, the worse the situation, the harder it is to figure out what it is that you're supposed to say to a friend who's going through a tragedy.
Job's three friends, I think, actually did the right thing. To start off, I'm summarizing the whole first three chapters of the book of Job here in my introduction. But when they first showed up, does anybody know what it is they did? 7 yeah. They show up to Job.
He's in sackcloth and ashes. He's like. They show up and he's worse than they expected. And they don't say anything. They sit there with him in his suffering for seven days.
For seven days, nobody says anything. Now, I imagine that that was awkward for about 30 minutes, and then it probably turned into one of those games of Ever played the quiet game on a road trip? You ever have an adult tell you it's time for the quiet game? And at that point, now we're just seeing who is going toa be the one to talk first, right? And after seven days, Job is the one who breaks the silence.
And what he says is this. He says, may the day of my birth perish, and the night that it was said, a boy is conceived that day, may it be turned to darkness. So it gives you a little taste of Job's mindset, right after sitting for seven days after losing everything and not knowing why God never showed up and told him. This is why Job's pretty upset, to say the least. We call the series Bad Theology because the advice and the logic of Job's friends is ultimately rebuked by God.
And that means that much of what Job is is God accurately recording the false and flawed thinking of humans. And for that reason, Job kind of stands alone in when it comes to books of the Bible. There's not a lot of books like it. It's not set within the context of the story of God's redemption for mankind through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is not clear who wrote it down.
Some people think Job wrote it down. Some people think Samuel wrote it down. Some people think Moses wrote it down. But we don't know. It's never said.
It's not clear when the events of the book take place again. Many people have theories, some better than others, but we can't know for sure when the story actually happens. ###ed yet in spite of all of that, Job had a clear influence on the writers of Scripture and on the followers of Jesus. Ezekiel 14:20. The prophet Ezekiel says this.
He says, even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, declares the Lord, they would not deliver neither son nor daughter they would deliver, but their own lives by their righteousness. Ezekiel is s talking about a city that was promised for destruction. And what he says is, this place is so bad that even if Job were in it, he wouldn't be able to convince God, because of his righteousness, not to condemn the city. And so Job here makes a pretty short list of what Ezekiel calls righteous people. Noah.
No, it was pretty righteous, right? That was a big part of his story. Daniel. Daniel stands up to temptation. He gets thrown into a lion's den.
And Job. So he's on a pretty short list of righteous guys from the Old Testament. James 5. So this is a New Testament quote. One of the followers of Jesus, James 5 says, behold, we consider those blessed who remain steadfast.
You have heard of the steadfastness of Job and have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful. So even though it's a strange book, even though it's one that we probably have never done, like a lady'or a dude's Bible study through, even though it's maybe one that we don't turn to a lot in our devotions, it's still one that's worth looking at because it's in Scripture and it's had its influence on God's people. The major sections of the book are like this. The story is played out in chapters one and two, the thing I just kind of summarized, and then three through 41. So all of those chapters, the main section of the book is speeches.
It's dialogue. It's people talking. Job talks, Then his friend says something, then Job talks again, then another friend says something, then Job talks, then a third friend says something. And it goes on like this for chapter after chapter after chapter. Finally, in chapter 38, and this is a section we might be more familiar with, chapter 38 through 41, God speaks.
And it's a good one. Like, if you've never read God's speech from the end of Job, make a little note to go do that sometime this week, because it's pretty awesome what God has to say. And then the story gets wrapped up really quickly, just like the beginning in chapter 42. So with the length and sometimes confusing nature of the book, it's not surprising that it doesn't get chosen for a lot of sermons in Bible studies most of the time. And when we hear reference to Jobe, people are talking about either the story at the beginning or God's speech at the end.
Very rarely do people talk about the Thing we're spending these four weeks talking about, which is what did Job's friend say and what was so wrong about it? We should remember, and this is why we picked this Bible reading to start things out, that all scripture is God breath all scripture, not just John 3, 16, right? Not just Genesis 1, not just these kind of like easy sections that we might have memorized all scripture. The whole book Paul says is useful in our lives for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting and training and righteousness. One of my sons, I won't tell you which one, but some of you'already know, is a really picky eater.
How many of you were picky eaters when you were a kid? Some of you still are, right? My son'taught me this, right? You don't have to eat much variety to survive. You can pretty much live if you have access to a carbohydrate and peanut butter.
You will survive. You will live a very sad life, in my opinion, right? If all you eat is bread and peanut butter, or my son's favorite is rice cakes and peanut butter, which tastes just like eating concrete flavored by peanut butter. But you will not starve, right? You will not starve if you have access to those two things.
He eats a couple other things other than that, but he's very, very limited in his diet. And what Paul, I think, is teaching us in this scripture is we ought not to be picky eaters when it comes to the scripture. We ought not to just stick to the easy stuff, the carbs and the sugar, you know? Another text talks about how he talks to a group of believers, and he says, you guys are like babies. All you do is drink the milk.
But you have to grow up at some point and learn how to chew on a steak, right? Learn how to digest something that's got a little bit more to it than that. And this is really what we're doing through this series. So it's going to be a little bit deep, it's going to be a little bit different. But I hope you guys are here for it and can hang as we jump in.
So a couple things more I want to say, because what I've been asked to do is to focus on one of Job's friends and Job's friends. Zohar speaks in two places in the book. He's speaks in job 11 and in job 20. So two chapters. And there's two things, kind of two lessons I want to talk about from what I'm calling Zohar's Folly.
Zohar's foolish words. The first lesson is this how we ought not to oversimplify suffering as a result of God's justice. We should not assume that if something bad happens to somebody, it's because God has it out for them or because they did something wrong and they're getting what they deserve. If we're honest. I can.
If I'm honest, since I was a kid, I had a tendency to think that way. I would think if I got sick or if I hurt myself or something bad happened, it was because God was punishing me in some way for what I'd done. And I would think up, try and think of what thing was it that I needed to say I'm sorry for so that I could get better or this thing would change in my life. And Zofar seems to think that. He seems to have that same thought process.
And we're going to talk about how that's a dangerous way to think about God. And then the second lesson is we're going to spend a very short amount of time on. But it's important too. It's the same idea of justice, that we ought to recognize that our sense of justice is swayed by our sinful desires. We think we know who's in the right and who's in the wrong, but only God ultimately does.
And we're never going to be able to tell who's the good guy, who's the bad guy. We tend actually to be really biased in who we think the good guys and the bad guys are. And Zofar does that. Something you're going to notice is that Zofar seems really aggressive and he's pretty sarcastic. It reads as though having heard all these other guys talk, he now is annoyed that he hasn't had his chance to talk.
Have you ever been in a social situation like that, just waiting for your turn? Sometimes when that happens, we don't have the smartest thing to say. Right? Because what's building up is actually our own pride by the end. Zof far all but accuses Job of being the kind of the ancient equivalent of a cruel Wall street fat cat that deserves to go down with the ship of his own wicked life that he built benefiting off of others and being selfish.
What a friend, right? To think that was your friends, the reason why your friend is suffering. We're going to look at these two lessons, but first we should probably read the passage, right? So let's do that. So this is job 11, verse one through six.
This is job's first sorry Zohar's first speech to his friend Job. So Job just got done talking, and now Zofar speaks up. And what does he say? He says, should a multitude of words go unanswered and a man full of talk be judged? Right.
Should your Babel silence men? And when you mock, shall no and shame you. For you say, my doctrine is pure and I am clean in God's eyes. But O, that God would speak and open his lips to you, that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom, for he is manifold in understanding. Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.
So what I'm going to do is kind of give us. I'm going to attempt to divide up his speeches in a couple sections and sort of summarize it, which is inherently a bit challenging and potentially flawed, but that's where we're going. The first thing that I think Zofar believed that was wrong was this. Zofar believed that Job actually deserved worse than he got. Did you catch that?
Did you catch that? Especially at the end of what he said, he basically all but says it. He says, know then that God exacts of you less then your guilt deserves. If you've ever been stabbed in the back or kicked while you're down, know that you've been in the good company with righteous Job. Here's his buddy who's come from who knows how far away to come and sit, wait seven days for something to say.
And the first thing he says is actually Job. I think if God was actually fair, he had just killed you, basically, right? You got off easy, Job. He says to Job, who lost all of his kids, lost his business, everything but his breath and his wife, and neither of those were much good to him. If you've read the first two chapters, you know why?
Because his wife comes out to him and says, why don't you just curse God and die?
He's experienced almost a. You know, it's. I shouldn't say that. You know those cartoons where the guy, like the bad guy at the end, he already like Tom and Jerry, right? He already can't get the mouse, but he, like, steps on like a mouse trp and he gets, like, his hair all shaved off and some incident, and then at the very end, a piano falls on his head, right?
It's. What happened to Job is so bad, it's almost like, how could this be right? I don't know if you ever had a day like that, A week like that, a month like that. Like, really, we're gonna have this thing we say when stuff, bad stuff happens to our life, that they come in threes, right? And so here you are, Job, and you're being accused by your own friends that maybe what's wrong is you're just a bad guy and God has it out for you.
Now, some of us reading Zohar's words would say, and well, maybe we were't first day. Maybe say we first we'd pull out our Bibles and we'd start searching around and maybe we'd pull up Romans 3, 3, 10, where it says, none is righteous. No, not one. One turns. No one understands.
No one seeks for God. All have turned as they have become worthless together. No one does good, not even one. Or Romans 3, 23, where it says, for all have sinned, how many all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Or maybe the words of Jesus in Matthew 5, where he says that if anyone who is angry with his brother, anyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.
Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council. And whoever says, you fool, will be liable to the hell of fire. Now, I have eight brothers, and I can tell you that I have said the modern equivalent of you fool to my brothers. And how many of you would say I'd done the same to my brother or sister, right? All of our hands go up.
We have siblings. We've all said it, we've fought it, we've said it. We've said way worse than you fool to our siblings. Jesus says, if that's true of us, then we deserve to go to hell. So maybe Zofar isn't wrong.
Maybe Job did deserve worse than he got. In systematic theology, we talk about the doctrine of total depravity. It's the idea that no one is able to have a relationship with God in their natural state. Apart from God's work of salvation. There's nothing good that we can do.
There's no way we can earn our way back to God. There's no, nothing that we can do. We are totally depraved. It's the idea that we're not unlike what you might have heard in our culture, basically good people at the core. We are actually sinners by nature and choice, and we're deserving of God's eternal wrath.
All that's true. Yet what the Scriptures also makes clear is that we live in a state of grace. When Adam and Eve sinned against God in the Garden of Eden, he says, you shall surely what? Die? And spiritually, they did die.
But did they die physically? No. He sends them out of the garden and he promises that he's going to restore humanity through somebody who's going to come from Eve. Metaphorically speaking, of course, the son of a woman isnna come and he'snna trample the serpent's head.
And so the problem for us humans, limited by time and space, is that from the outside looking in into God's plan, this grace thing creates a problem where though we're all deserving of wrath, we're all deserving of hell and destruction, God has given us his grace because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. And that grace applies to us specifically as Christians, when we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that he's risen from the dead. But it's applying all around all kinds of people constantly that don't even know Jesus, because if life was fair, we'd all be in hell. I don't think that's Zohar's point, though. I think Zofar thinks that there's something specific going on in Job's life that led him to the destruction that he saw.
If we read carefully, we'll hear these questions. Throughout the speeches of Job, he says, you'll hear things like, why do good people sometimes actually flourish? Doesn't that bug you? I'm sorry, I said it wrong. Why do bad people actually sometimes flourish?
You read on the news about the billionaires and the zillionaires and all the people that they abused to get all their wealth. And we think, why does God let this happen? At the same time, we wonder you, why does God let good people suffer? Somebody like Jobbo, somebo like our friend Max, right? Why do things happen?
These seemingly random things happen. Do an otherwise, otherwise good people. Matthew 5. Jesus says this. He says, you've heard it said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. God says you're like God, you become like, like your Father in heaven. Just like, has anybody ever said, you're just like your dad or you're just like your mom? Doesn't that bug you? Rem when somebody says that sometimes, if it's for a good reason, we're kind of proud, right?
If it's for a bad reason, we might get feel embarrassed. But Jesus says, you want to look like your heavenly Father, you want to look like God. Be a godly person. Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. Why?
Because God loves his enemies all the time. God shows his grace to people who don't deserve it all the time. God prays for people, right? He is concerned for people that hate him all the time. He continues, he says, for he that is God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust.
Says everybody that's ever gotten a paycheck, God provided that whether they admit it, that came from God or not. Every time the sun comes up, God's the one that sent it up. Every breath everybody has ever breathed came from God, whether they admit it or know that or not. And so God in His grace shows unmerited favor. For God to show grace at all means that we will struggle to understand how that plays out in individual situations.
Why do some of our friends who get cancer survive? They recover, they go into remission and go on to live happy lives, and then others don't. Why would God allow a child to die in an accident where their car that they were in was hit by a drunk driver, but the drunk driver walks away? Why did these things happen? These are real questions that God answers.
Rather, he honors throughout his word without attempting to give a simplistic answer. For he doesn't give a simplistic answer. Zofar tries to give a simplistic answer. He says, when bad things happen, it's because you're getting what you deserve. God comes back and corrects so far and says, actually, dude, you're way oversimplifying things.
What's the next thing he says? He says in verse seven, can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limits of the Almighty? Is it higher than heaven? It is higher than heaven.
What can you do? Deeper than she? What can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth it is in broader than the sea. If he passes through and imprisons and summons the court, who can turn him back?
For he knows worthless men. When he sees iniquity, will he not consider it? But a stupid man will get understanding when a donkey's cultt is born a man.
What I think Soofar is saying through this next section is this, that God sees our sin and that there'no way to hide it. There are certain things, certain parts in these speeches where the friends are actually spot on with what they're saying, but the application is wrong. They're saying something that's true. It's just misapplied truth, you know, May ever. Maybe you've received advice like this before that might be true.
It just isn't helpful for me in my situation that we're dealing with right now. Of all the faults friends that the friends have, fear of God is certainly not one of them. They had that down. They had fear of the Lord. And what Zofar says here is, listen, if you have sin in your life, you think you can hide that from God.
You think you can get away with something, pull one over on God. And then we see his lack of tact and his sarcasm start to kick in. In verse 12, when he says that a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey's cold is born a man. Basically what he's saying is this. Some people are so dumb, there's a better chance of a donkey having a human child than them getting any smarter.
And he doesn't say, and that's you, Job, right? He doesn't call his friend Job dumb. But by making that joke and being that sarcastic and laying that out there, what is he doing? He's by implications saying, job, if you think you can hide from God, you're a special kind of stupid.
Which is a great thing to say if somebody really was hiding something from God. And by the way, if that's you this morning, no, that's true, right? If we think we can hide something from God, we are a special kind of stupid. We're a special kind of foolish. The problem is we know if we read the beginning of the book what the friends couldn't know, and that's that God said from the beginning Job's suffering wasn't because of any sin in his life.
Does that mean Job was perfect? He never sinned? Of course not. But there was no specific problem, no hidden sin, no secret thing between God and Job that caused him to suffer. He was suffering, actually, in spite of the fact that he was righteous.
So this wisecrack isn't exactly fair. He'd be good to know Zofar. Would have been good to have learned from the words of Solomon. When Solomon says, a cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bone, well, give soo far the benefit of the doubt, because at the very least, he gives Job away out. He calls him dumb, but then he tells him how he could be smart.
And what he says is this. He says, if you prepare your heart, if you stretch out your hand toward him that is God, if iniquity is in your hand, put it far away. Let not injustice dwell in your tents. Surely then you will Lift up your face without blemish, and you will be secure and will not fear. You will forget your misery.
You will remember it as waters that have passed away. And if your life will be brighter than the noonday, and your life will be brighter than the noonday, its darkness will be like the morning. And you will feel secure because there is hope. And you will look around and take your rest and security. You will lie down and none will make you afraid.
Many will court your favor, but the eyes of the wicked will fail. All way of escape will be lost to them. And their hope is to breathe their last.
So Zohar believed this, that when we suffer, when something goes wrong in our life. This morning I woke up. I was sleeping on a floor last night, and I woke up and I picked up my son James, who's 3 and weighs about 35 pounds, and my back went like this.
Something about the way I slept last night, you know, meant that just. You ever get that happened, something normal? And it's just like Zoar believes. It's like when something bad happens in our life, we can always associate it with something bad, that we did something we need to give and confess to God. He says it's always that way.
He says, and by the way, if you want to be happy, just never sin. Oh, well, that's easy enough, right?
Having diagnosed Job's suffering as the result of hidden sin, Zohar's prescription to alleviate his suffering. Is confession and repentance all you got to do. If you're behind on your mortgage or if you're going through a relationship problem, or if you're dealing with pain physically in your life, all you got to do is confess your sin and God will restore you. Oh, if it were just that simple. But it's not.
The advice is sound, by the way. If you're hiding something from God this morning, if you have sin in your life that you have hidden from God and from others, the advice to bring that to God and to put your sin away from you, that is sound advice, right? That's what the Holy Spirit will call us to do. But if you're here this morning and you're in pain and you're struggling and you've got suffering in your life, no, that's just part of living in a broken world that Jesus is coming back to restore and to remove all of that pain and all of that suffering and all the results of sin from our lives. But in the meantime, we have this.
This challenge, right? That life doesn't work by karma. We'd love for karma to be true, right? We would love for good things to happen to good. You know, for everything to have a response.
If you do a good thing, you're going to get something good. If you do something bad, you should get something bad for it. But that's not how life works. We want life to be fair. We want suffering to be the direct result of wrongdoing.
That way, we can control our situation. Right now we're in the now we're in God's seat. But the truth is that the Bible says that life isn't fair. I know. Unfortunately, your grandpa was right.
Life isn't fair, but God is just. Life isn't fair, but God is just. And this leaves us with the uncomfortable truth that God's perfect world, which we forever marred with our sin, is not organized in a way that avoids suffering. Sometimes you just get that crook in your back. Sometimes your car just breaks down.
Sometimes your body is just aging, right? There's all these results of sin around us. God is not in the business of explaining our suffering, and he's not in the business of totally preventing it either. But that shouldn't be confused with the idea that God doesn't care about our suffering. See, when the friends come together to care for Job, in their attempts to care, they proved the imperfect nature of human love.
When I show up to visit somebody in the hospital, there's very little that I can do for what's going on in their body, right? Does prayer have power? Can I pray and can God heal? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, we've all been in that situation in a hospital bed, feeling helpless, right?
And sometimes when we show up and we try and say the right things, and sometimes we don't have the right thing to say, we can't empathize or sympathize with our friends who are hurting into a lack of pain. It's not going to work. But God is there too. Jesus was there too, with Job and the friends listening the whole time. And he was the only one who could heal and restore Job.
And he does at the end of the book. Spoiler alert. Sorry about that. His waiting to respond mirrored how he was waiting just for the right moment to intervene. Not just in Job's story, but in the story of humanity, the whole story of suffering and sin.
As it says in John 3:16, God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Because God didn't send his son into the world. To condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.
So God doesn't stand apart from our suffering. He wrote himself into the story of suffering and became the ultimate example of suffering for us on our behalf. The only person who could ever one up Job on the suffering chart if it was a competition, would be Jesus. Right? God is just even though life isn't fair.
But through Jesus, God wrote himself into the story of humanity, entered the stadium where the game of life was being played. He endured the unfairness of life under the sun so that no one could ever accuse him again of being uncaring and distant. He would respond to Job's suffering in due time. And he has through the cross and the resurrection. And you just got to think about right when Job ultimately ends up in glory, when he ends up in heaven when he meets Jesus.
They probably had scars to compare and to share with one another. Really quickly I want to talk about this last idea, that we ought to recognize that our sense of justice is swayed by our sinful desires. Look at verse two. So flip forward to chapter 20. I promise I'm going to do this quick.
Oay chapter 20. Zoar has to wait another nine chapters to get a word in again. And when he does, it doesn't get much better than what we just read. What he says is this. He says, therefore my thoughts answer me because of haste within me.
He says, I'm in a hurry, I got something to say, so it's appropriate that I'm in a hurry too. I hear censure that insults me, and out of my understanding a spirit answers me. Do you not know this from old since man is placed on the earth, that the exalting of the wicked is short, and that the joy of the godless is for a moment, though his height mount up to the heavens and his head reach to the clouds, he will perish forever like his own dung. You didn't think you were re going to hear that in church today, did you? Those who have seen him will say, where is he?
He will fly away like a dream and not be found. He will be chased away like a vision of the night. The eye that saw him will see him no more, nor will his place anymore behold him. His children will seek the favor of the poor, and his hands will give back his wealth. His bones are full of his youthful vigor, but it will lie down with him in the dust.
If I was to summarize what Zopfhar just said, it's this Zofar believed that wicked people might have A good time, but it never lasts long and they will always get what they deserve. Now, how many of you could just say just by reading that, that it's not accurate, right? He says, you know, there might be evil, villainous type people out there on Wall street making their millions off of the backs of hardworking people and lying and cheating and stealing and their life might look great. Wall Street Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. But you know what?
They always get what they deserve in this life. Is it true that we'll always get what we deserve? Ultimately God's Che, right? Yeah. But he says it doesn't always happen.
Sometimes they get away with it. People literally do get away with murder, get away with all kinds of things. The justice system doesn't always work and sometimes the guy who did it goes free and some other guy ends up in jail for what they did. And what's fascinating is if you read Zofar's speech in 20, what becomes really clear is that Zofar is actually jealous of Job's riches. The things so far gets stuck in in chapter 20 is, well, you know, Job, how many Cadillacs do you really need?
You know, how many different pools in vacation homes and all this stuff? And, you know, you had your fun while it was time, and now God's coming to straighten things out. What a friend, right? What a nice guy. He sounds like somebody who needs to remember what Jesus teaches in Luke 12 to take care and be on guard against all covetousness.
For one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. He finishes out the speech in 1220 this way. He says, though evil will be is sweet in his mouth, and though he hides it under his tongue, though he is loathed to let it go and holds it in his mouth, yet his food is turned in his stomach. It is the venom of cobras within him. He swallows down riches and vomits them up again.
God casts them out of his belly. He will suck the poison of cobras, and the tongue of a viper will kill him. He will not look upon the rivers and the streams flowing with honey and curds. He will give back the fruit of his toil and will not swallow it down. For from Prof. From the profit of his trading he will get no enjoyment.
For he has crushed and abandoned the poor. He has seized a house that he did not build because he knew no contentment in his belly. He will not let anything that is in which he delights escape him, and it goes on from there. But I think we get the idea that Zofar believed that the wicked rich will pay with suffering because they harmed others. And in Zofar's thinking, if Job had everything that was taken from him, had all of his money taken from him, all of his wealth taken from him, it must be because he got it the wrong way.
And so now God is making justice happen by taking it away from Job. Again, Zofar is guilty of misapplying truth to an innocent man. There's plenty of scriptures that talk about how God hates injustice, right? Go read James, chapter five and you'll hear James talk about how God hates it when people get abused. He sees every little old lady who gets frauded out of her money.
He sees every insurance deal where they were supposed to pay out and didn't. He sees every little way that we as people rip each other off. And he hates it because he's a God of justice. But yet the promise of Scripture is that God is just. He demands a payment for not just those sins, but for all sin.
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But you know, that's not the end of that verse. When I was a kid, my mom asked me once, what's your favorite verse, Ben? And I said, Romans 3:23. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
What a happy, cheerful kid I was. You know, my favorite verse is, mom, the one that says how we're all evil. And the frustrating thing is that, like, that's a great verse, but it's actually the first part of the sentence. The second part of the sentence goes. It goes.
The whole thing goes, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And all are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. This was to show God's righteousness because in divine forbearance he passed over former sins. And it was to show his righteousness at the present time that he might be just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ Jesus.
Jesus sees all the sin. God sees all the sin. And what was his response? To come and to die on the cross. But we do this thing as believers.
We have our moment, right? And some of us are getting baptized later today. And we've come to recognize our sin, our need for a Savior. And we get down on our knees and say, God, I need you. I can't do this without you.
We make that decision and we become a believer we might even get baptized. But what we're tempted to do a week later is what? Judge somebody else. Yeah, I might need a savior. I might need God, but I don't need them as bad as they do.
And that's what Zofar was guilty of. Comparing people, comparing sins. Well, you know, you're really worse off, because, after all, look at all God took from you. You must have really done something bad.
In Job, God allowed a man who did nothing wrong to suffer in order to illustrate his own character. Does that bother you? I think it's supposed to bother us a little bit, right? It doesn't seem fair that God would allow a man who did nothing wrong to suffer just to tell a story about his character. It feels wrong.
It feels unfair until we remember that in Jesus, God allowed the only man who was ever sinless to suffer so that we could be united with him. So Job's story of suffering as a righteous person isn't a weirdo story in the. In the book, right? In the Bible, it's actually a foretelling, a little shadow, a little reflection of what was coming in Jesus. I'm gonna ask you guys to close your eyes and bow your heads.
The band's gonna come for. We're gonna sing a song. But I just have a couple questions that I want to ask us as we close our time together. The first one is this is. Ask yourself this question.
Have I decided to follow Jesus? Have I accepted his payment for my sin that he made possible on the cross? Have I given up my life over to him to say, I can't do this. I deserve condemnation. I deserve the bad things that happen to me.
Yes, it's true. But God so loves you that he sent his son to die in your place for your sins. So if you've never done that this morning, if you've never accepted that payment, if you've never made that decision to follow Jesus, I'd encourage you to do that in the quietness of this moment. If you need somebody to walk you through what that looks like, I'd love to talk to you after the service.
The second question is, this. Is my sense of justice been transformed by an experience of. Of God's grace? When we hear about suffering, when we hear about somebody that's hurting, when we hear another story that it just doesn't make sense, can we fill in the gaps with God's goodness, with his grace?
We have this need to explain things that we'll never understand.
Then the last one is this. What's my response to suffering, whether it's in my life or someone else's. Maybe you're in that spot or you've just come out of that spot and it was like a faith shaking time. Take that to the Lord this morning and allow him to move. God, we know we need you.
We know that you have all the answers and we could never understand them even if you gave them to it us. So help us to trust. Help us to know your love. Help us to see your grace. And Lord, thank you for coming and suffering on the cross, dying in our place for our sins, so that we could be united with you, so we could have eternal life.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
