Eric
Snow, sermonette, August 3, 2007, UCG Ann Arbor, MI
One
time a swimmer swam far into a large lake.
Suddenly, a thick, freak fog moved in that evening. He didn’t know where the shoreline was! For a half hour, he alternated between half
panicking, by splashing different directions back and forth, and forcing
himself to remain calm while floating to preserve his energy. But then he heard someone speaking
faintly but steadily near the shore.
Then he could he swim his way back to safety. (Drawn from Philip Yancy, Disappointment with God, p. 203)
Like
this lost swimmer, do our trials and tests in life make us feel that we that
we’re lost at sea? Do we doubt that God
cares? Do we wonder what the purpose of
our tests and trials are? Didn’t Job
wonder the same?
S.P.S.: While suffering through trials and tests
like Job, we should not think God has to tell us why we’re going through them
now. We should be faithful and obedient
to God despite being ignorant about the causes of our suffering and pain.
Anyone
going through trials and tests should consider reading Philip Yancey’s book, Disappointment
with God: Three Questions No One Asks
Aloud. The same goes for anyone
concerned about the problem of evil in general. This book is generally written at a very simple, basic
level. But its emotional effect can be
profound in helping us become more content while suffering in this life. My message today is heavily influenced by
Yancey’s work.
Consider
a basic point: Did Job know why he went
through the trials he did? Job knew
nothing about Satan’s challenge to God in the first two chapters of the book
named for him. Yet, we the average
readers can know that. Yancey’s compares these two chapters of the Book of Job
(pp. 163-64) to the director of a play giving us a sneak preview to a mystery
play or “whodunit” detective story. He
tells us the plot, the main characters, their actions during the play, and why
they did what they did. The only real
remaining mystery: “[H]ow will the main
character respond? Will Job trust God
or deny him?” Then the curtain
rises: Job and all his friends know
nothing about what happened in heaven, but we the readers do. We know Job did nothing wrong to deserve
what happened to him.
Job
1:6-12
Here
what Yancey calls “the wager” arises between God and Satan. The basic question (p. 171): “The Wager was, at its heart, a stark
reenactment of God’s original question in creation: Will the humans choose for or against me?” Satan claimed this man only serves God for
what he gets materially from God.
Yancey (p. 172): “Is faith one
more product of environment and circumstance?
The opening chapters of Job expose Satan as the first great
behaviorist: Job was conditioned
to love God, he implied. Take away the
rewards, and watch his faith crumble.
The Wager put Satan’s theory to the test.” God challenges Satan on this score by allowing him to harshly
attack Job. God thinks this man will
still freely choose to obey Him despite being left totally ignorant as to the
causes of his awful trials. Under the
same circumstances, would we do better or worse than Job himself did?
Job
1:21-2:10
Job
holds to God faithfully. God throws
this in Satan’s face. Satan responds by
claiming Job would deny God if Job lost his health also. But Job doesn’t curse God and die, despite
his wife tells him to do that. Note
that neither God or Satan says anything about Job being self-righteous, like
the Pharisees were centuries later. His
personal problem only shows up later.
Self-righteousness can’t be called properly the “cause” of Job’s
trial. God didn’t mention Job as being
in any way sinful, but said he was truly righteous. God wasn’t deliberately allowing Satan to punish Job for any
particular sin.
Job
and his three friends spend long hours debating and thinking about the causes
of his trials. But they never know
anything about this scene in heaven, this prologue to the book. At the end of the book, God doesn’t explain
any of this to Job either. Ironically,
we average readers of the book of Job can know more about why Job went through
these trials than Job himself! God
lifted His curtain some more for us than He did for Job. After all, what was God’s basic response to
Job?: “You don’t know enough about the
universe to judge Me.”
Job
42:1-6
So
now, here comes a key point taught by the Book of Job: If we’re going through trials and tests, can
we still obey God while not knowing why we’re going through them? The answer is obviously “yes.” Do we have to know the purpose of our
sufferings and disappointments in order to stay faithful to God? The answer is obviously “no.” We should stay obedient and faithful to God
despite our ignorance of why we’re suffering may equal Job’s. True, we may suffer for all sorts of
self-inflicted reasons, such as making poor financial decisions, marrying the
wrong person by mistake, and eating the wrong foods and drinks for years. It also may be God is working at correcting
some character flaw or sin in our lives.
But even if we don’t know and can’t know the causes of our suffering, we
should still obey God anyway while in our fog of ignorance anyway.
Conclusion: During our brief and temporary physical lives, we’re swimming out
deep in a lake blanketed by a dense fog that keeps us from seeing our way back
home. But despite our troubles, trials,
and tribulations, we should still obey and have faith in God even when we don’t
know why we’re suffering.