Thanksgiving with Job the Sufferer

“Give thanks in all circumstances” is the commandment.  And surely Thanksgiving Day is the most appropriate circumstance to pause and recall the many and various gifts of God.  

Alongside considering the gifts and being grateful, it’s also a good day to remember the Giver who is behind all good gifts.  And the biblical character, Job, is a good reflection point to pause and remember God Himself.  

When we meet Job, we can only be impressed with the quality of this man, summed up in a phrase – “fears God and turns away from evil” – and in one habit of his: when his children would gather together to feast, Job would surround their festivities with intercessions for them.  God was in all his thoughts.  

And God Himself wasn’t bashful about His admiration for Job and boasted of him to Satan.  In fact, it was a result of God’s confidence in Job’s loyalty and obedience to Him that – in an arrangement unbeknownst to Job – God permitted Satan to hurt Job: so his kids were killed in a sudden gale, marauders came down and stripped him of much that he had, fires took everything else.  

In the wake of these calamities, after Job sits in stunned silence and then bemoans that he was ever born, Job’s friends arrive to offer comfort and perspective.  But the more they talked to him, the more they talked at him: accusations came to the fore.  Arguably, the hardest thing they said to Job was this, in 8:4: If your children have sinned against [God], he has delivered them into the hand of their transgression.  Job, the reason why God has let this happen to your children is because they’re especially wicked.  

And again (8:20): Behold, God will not reject a blameless man nor take the hand of evildoers.  He will yet fill your mouth with laughter and your lips with shouting.  Job, just as soon as you stop being such a bad guy God is ready to make your life happy again.  

The “encouragement and advice” of Job’s friends are interspersed with Job’s replies to them.  The once Eminent Man is reduced to bitter sarcasm: 6:24 – Teach me, and I will be silent/ make me understand how I have gone astray.  Ok, know-it-alls: tell me exactly what it is that makes me such a bad guy.  

Job can’t get any break from the calamity that has come upon him. 7:13ff – When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me/ my couch will ease my complaint/ then you scare me with dreams/ and terrify me with visions/ so that I would choose strangling/ and death rather than my bones/. I loathe my life/ I would not live forever/ Leave me alone [God].   – Even when I try to escape the terrible reality and go to sleep God terrifies me in my dreams.  

Job can’t understand why God unleashed such pain upon him.  The Creator is a righteous Creator and Job was doing the right thing.  At least HE thought so.  He wants to take God to court and argue his innocence before the Almighty.  But then, 9: 2: How can a man be in the right before God? How can you prove to the One from Whom out of His nature right and wrong are defined… that He is wrong?  Like trying to teach Michael Jordan what a good basketball player is.  

Yet, Job insists: I am in the right…I am in the right…I am blameless

In immense suffering Job realizes how stacked the deck is against him.  9: 11, 12: Behold [God] passes by me, and I see him not/ he moves on, but I do not perceive him/ Behold he snatches away: who can turn him back/ Who will say to him, What are you doing?… – The One who has dealt me such a terrible hand – He’s invisible!  He’s just a word in my mind.  I wouldn’t recognize Him even if I saw Him.  Also He’s stronger than anyone…even if I could show that I’m right He’s just going to do what He’s going to do.  

Sometimes Job’s complaints turn to sobs: I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me.  Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the designs of the wicked?  Why are you doing this?  Is there any good coming from my pain?  You gave me a life and then made it so painful?…  how could my misery help anything?   What are you doing?

Sometimes Job is entirely defeated, and his words become something just above an extended moan: 16: 7ff – God has worn me out…he has shriveled me up…He has torn me in his wrath and hated me…he broke me apart…he runs upon me like a warrior…my spirit is broken

19:7 – I call for help, but there is no justice…He breaks me down on every side

There are a couple more ingredients to Job’s extended complaint.  19: 23 – Oh that my words were written!  Oh that they were inscribed in a book!  Don’t let me just come and suffer and then go…let this be recorded.  At least let me have made some mark.  

And when Job looks around, the plot only thickens: 21 – Look at me and be appalled/ and lay your hand over your mouth…Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?  While God destroys the life of someone who loved and feared him… the wicked are flourishing.  

But here’s the repeated refrain: God is far from me.  He’s doing me wrong.  23 – Oh that I knew where I might find [God]…I would lay my case before him…HE would pay attention to me…Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him – WHERE’S GOD?  

Chapter 29 is especially heartbreaking as Job remembers how things used to be.  29 – Oh, that I were as in the days of old as in the days when God watched over me/ when his lamp shone upon my head and by his light I walked through darkness…

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!  Pretty bleak words for a day of celebration.  Reading across the millennia our heart goes out to this sufferer.  Man, did Job suffer.  And darn, do all humans suffer, even if not to Job’s extent.  We not only have painful things happen to us, because we’re bearing God’s image, we’re also saddled with accompanying reason… but that just makes everything even more painful.  Sensations of pain, bad enough…but then followed by why?  To what end?  Where is God?  Why target me?    Painful reflections.

But in Job’s story, things take a sharp turn in chapter 38 when God finally begins to speak.  We wonder, after God has listened to paragraph after paragraph of Job’s bewilderment, will He reply with words of consolation or words of explanation?  

Well, neither.  38:1, 2: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?  Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me.  God says – a lot of talking been happening.  A lot of questions about how I’m doing things.  My turn now to ask questions.  Prepare yourself!  

And then we have chapters 38, 39, 40, 41 – four chapters of only God’s questions.  Surprising questions too, that take Job on a tour of the universe and its history.  Starting with where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?  Tell me, if you have understanding.  Who determined its measurements – surely you know!  

God immediately widens the focus from Job’s problems and pans out to the beginning of space and time.  Thus, Job is immediately exposed as someone who sees only the tiniest of slivers of reality…and thus can’t understand.  

And so it goes: through God’s questions Job is brought into the prehistoric, the heights, the depths, the whimsical, the savage, the monstrous…  His eyes are opened to the order of the Creation, he’s reminded of the boundaries that God has established, he hears of what he didn’t know, of what he might’ve known but took for granted.  

Brought before God the primeval Shaper, God over the great forces of the world, God who has constellations on his leash, God who – in a phrase that reaches the frontiers of our reason and imagination – numbers the clouds.  Who father-forths rain.  Who hunts in the hunting of young lions.  And so it goes.  

So Job is brought before the sheer power that’s afoot, the intricate order among the great mysteries of nature that yet keeps them mysterious, the implacable strength so that nothing goes beyond what is ordered.    

So many questions that it takes four chapters to hold them!  You’d think that, before anything else, people in pain require comforting.  At least some answers to ‘why?’.  But here’s what God knew about Job: my boy needs to be shown greatness, wildness, majesty.  

Also: look at Job 38.  1-3

Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?  Do you observe the calving of the does?  Can you number the months that they fulfill, and do you know the time when they give birth, when they crouch, bring forth their offspring, and are delivered of their young?  Their young ones become strong; they grow up in the open; they go out and do not return to them.  

I always set up this paragraph this way: Job has lost his kids.  Property – demolished.  We haven’t even mentioned that some debilitating, aggravating health condition has settled on him.  Onto these injuries his “friends” have piled on pious cruelties.  Job’s sad, angry, frustrated, dispirited.  And to this suffering man God says, do you know how long goats are pregnant?   Then goes on to describe the birth of a goat and after the days that it puts on meat and muscle…and finally strikes out on his own.  

No theological or philosophical sentences.  But rather, look at the pregnant goat, Job.  I know the gestation period of the goat.  I see…no, I write the scene when mama goat crouches in the bushes, pants, and then that out sticks a snout, then forelegs etc.  It’s all familiar to me, Job.  I’m there.  I’m over it.  In me the goat lives and moves and has his being, Job.  

Remember this?  Oh that I knew where I might find [God]… Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him!

God’s response: Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?

Herman Bavinck: The strength of God comes not from afar but from nearby; it is an omnipresent strength.  God is present with all His excellences and with His whole being in the whole world and in all of His creatures.  In Him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28).  He is not far from any one of us (Acts 17:27).  He is a God at hand, and not a God afar off.  No one can hide himself in secret places so that the Lord cannot see him.  He fills heaven and earth (Jeremiah 23: 23-24).  Who could go from His Spirit or fly from His presence?  He is in heaven and in the realm of the dead, in the uttermost parts of the sea and in the deep darkness (Psalm 139:7ff).  His maintenance, His sustaining power, extends to all creatures: to the lilies of the field (Matt 6:28), the birds of the sky (Matthew 6:26), and to even the hairs of the head (Matthew 10:30).  Every creature exists according to its nature – as it exists and so long as it exists – through the power of God.  Even as it is of Him, so it is through Him (Romans 11:36).  The Son, through whom God made the world, continues thereafter to uphold all things by the word of His power (Heb 1:2-3).  All things consist by Him who was before all things (Colossians 1:17), and they are created and renewed by His Spirit (Psalm 104:30).

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God’s people belong in lots of places.  But in all the places where God’s people belong, they especially belong outdoors.  There’s a little phrase buried in the gospel of John.  When the people arrest Jesus they do so in a garden “which he and his disciples often entered.”  It seems that Nick Topor is taking signals from Jesus in doing a lot of so-called “spiritual” teaching, outdoors.  

Humans – the priests of creation – thrive around the majesty, the wildness, the mystery, the vitality of the outdoors.  On a sign in my office is the sentence from the naturalist, John Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.”  Seeing and studying the works of God in nature do much to soothe us: it does us deep good when our individual experiences are set into the widest context.

This Thanksgiving, taking cues from the story of Job, I’m thankful for the outdoors.  

And I’m grateful for old suffering Job – by his story I realize again how God has created and set up things:  God creates and stands outside what he’s created… and yet remains intimately involved.  All of “Nature” testifies to God’s creativity and expresses God’s providential care… but does so without a voice.  Man stands between God and Nature as a meaning generator, who receives voiceless signals from Nature and – taught by God – translates them into the Creator’s praise.  Fundamentally, this is what humans are for.

Job shows that through suffering, human beings can become better at being human – in pain we become better priests between Nature and God.  Under God’s direction, pain can open our eyes to and establish our camaraderie with Nature… …. so that sometimes we look up and greet brother sun and sister moon, so that when we bring down a buck our joy is mixed with gratitude to and sorrow for him.  

And also… spurred by our pain we come out of self-absorption and near-sightedness to behold and express the wonders of God in all that He’s made.  

This Thanksgiving we’re grateful for another sufferer, Jesus the Christ.  His suffering didn’t just show us the possible goods of pain.  “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God…”  “For you were straying like sheep but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.”  

Christ’s death didn’t just set an example but actually brought us to God.  In our sin we were away from God.  We were unrighteous humans in that we were failed priests.  We lived among Nature unfeelingly, ungratefully.  Even when we saw its splendor we didn’t connect it to its Creator.  We destroyed Nature rather than expressing its praises; we worshiped and served the creature rather than stewarding it under God.  Instead of pain leading us to attention and worship, it fed our self-pity, it entrapped us further into selfishness, it thickened the darkness.  

But through his suffering, Christ brought us to God.  In Christ, we have returned to the Overseer and Shepherd.  And let’s face it: God is key to our being human.  The God who explains the world to us so that we can express the world back to Him.  The God who consoles us in our pain by showing us His greatness.  The God who presses us with questions that open us up to reality – what is actually there but we couldn’t see or had ignored – which then leads us back to Him.   The God who during our suffering saves us from self-pity, from small-mindedness, from a pinched, shallow perspective…and brings us outdoors into a wide-open space where we can run in the way of his commandments.  And yes, the God who won’t forever form us in suffering, but one day will think it’s the right time to wipe away all tears from our eyes.

Brothers and sisters, we come to the table of our Lord Jesus Christ, the One who brings us to God.  Because it is His table, we extend an invitation to every baptized believer who is in fellowship with a local church – even if it’s not SBC – to join us at this table.  If the confession of faith we recite expresses what you believe, then we would be delighted to celebrate this Communion Meal with you. 

Christian what do you believe?

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God,

the Father almighty,

Creator of heaven and earth,

and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,

who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died and was buried;

he descended into the realm of death;

on the third day he rose again from the dead;

he ascended into heaven,

and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty;

from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy universal Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the body,

and life everlasting.

Amen.

I’ll ask _____________ to thank God for the broken body of Jesus Christ.