The Old, Old Story - 3 - God’s Challenge

Scripture: Job 38:1-7, 34-41

Job 38:1–7 NIV

1 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said: 2 “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? 3 Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. 4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? 6 On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— 7 while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

Job 38:34–41 NIV

34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? 35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’? 36 Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the rooster understanding? 37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens 38 when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together? 39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions 40 when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket? 41 Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?

10/20/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Special Music

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 3: Special Music

Brandy?

Opening Prayer:

Creator God, you are wrapped in light as a garment, clothed with honor and majesty. Enlighten us with true faith and humble obedience that seeks to serve others in your name. Amen.

God's Challenge

Couch Coaches

Have you heard the term couch potatoes? In this football season, we have a special version of them called armchair quarterbacks. This week, I stumbled upon a podcast hosted by a church out west called Couch Coaches. I skimmed through one of their episodes, and it was four gentlemen who admit their football process peaked during high school who now dress up in their favorite NFL jerseys and get on a Zoom call each week to discuss all the troubles their favorite teams are facing and what they think should be done about it.

There are a couple of books of the Bible, in the Old Testament in particular, that sometimes feel like couch coaches. People show up with many things to say, no specific experience to justify their expertise, and a lot of silence from heaven. We yearn for Genesis and Exodus when God‘s voice thundered from the mountaintop or the burning bush. It makes us wanna hurry up and get to Jesus and hear Him speak with real authority. But instead, we get the couch coaches.

Those friends of Job were good friends, and they exercised wisdom when they sat with him quietly and mourned his loss with him. In these middle chapters of the book, though, they open their mouths and show themselves to be couch coaches, speaking about things they didn’t know. Even worse, they dragged Job into their little session, tempting him to talk about God in ways beyond his authority.

We can find ourselves among the ranks of spiritual couch coaches, especially when faced with questions about things far bigger than we are. It seems that every time a natural disaster leaves tragedy in its wake, somebody gets online or on the radio or TV and declares to the world that these disasters occurred because someone sinned. They act as if it’s Noah in the flood all over again. They failed to see God‘s mercy in scripture and our lives. And I cannot understand why God has mercy on them and doesn’t strike them down for speaking blasphemy. Jesus took our sin upon His own broken body so that we could stop playing the blame game and learn to live in the grace of God. Anything beyond that is couch coaching.

Our passage in the scripture today marks a turning point in this episode of Job‘s life where God steps in and speaks for Himself because too many words have been misspoken in His name. Job and his friends, along with us and the rest of the people in our world, bicker and debate about the suffering we see in experience, questioning whether God is unwilling or unable to prevent it in our lives. If you’ve never been in one of those philosophical debates, let me tell you you don’t have to. You can read the book of Job and realize that that’s a short dead-end road with a merry around at the end that you’ll never get off until you repent and come back to where you started. Jesus has traveled that road many times to bring lost sheep back home. He knows that road well. God is big enough and secure enough to handle all of our questions and doubts, but at the end of the day, He remains sovereign and fully in charge, regardless of our circumstances, and we have to come to grips with that truth.

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Power

God was not happy with Job’s friends, but Job was the one who He called out specifically. I think that’s because it was Job whom He bragged about being so faithful in the first two chapters of this book. He had higher expectations for one who was faithful as Job had been. He tells him to sit quietly because Job will not break into heaven‘s throne room in question God. God will ask the questions, and Job will be expected to have an answer.

“Where were you,” God asks him, “when the foundations of creation were laid? Were you the one who measured it to ensure it was right? Were you the one the angels and the stars sang about in marvel of its beauty?”

“Did you call forth the clouds and cause them to pour down torrents of rain? Do the lightning bolts run to you whenever you call them?”

Two themes run through these questions God interrogates Job with, and the first theme is power. Are you big enough? Strong enough? Resolved enough? Powerful enough to make this world the way it is and hold it in place? That’s a bit of a showstopper question right there. And it’s a rhetorical question as well. It stops us all in our tracks, humbles us, and makes us remember that we are just dust in the wind, here today and gone tomorrow, barely able to leave a mark that will last the small span of years we walk the Earth. Like couch coaches, we cannot make a difference in many things we care about and then get hung up on. We can talk a big talk, but at the end of the day, we often have nothing to show for it.

It may not be polite to point that out. It may not be politically correct. But how much time and energy do we spend trying to fix things far beyond our pay grade? Even setting money aside, think about how many lives have been spent fighting wars and trying to fix problems on a global scale that we still face today because those problems are bigger than us. I’m not suggesting we should stop caring or ignore the world’s problems, but I am suggesting that when we refuse to ask God for help and jump in and fix it ourselves, lives are wasted, and sometimes more than just our own. It is no use trying to change the world if we are not under the direction and empowerment of the one who is in charge of the world. We weren’t there at the beginning to make the world, and as much as the devil would like to convince us, we don’t have the power to remake it the way we want it to be. We can follow the rules, or we can face the consequences.

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Wisdom

The second theme of God‘s questions is wisdom. Who taught the animals how to find food? Who knows just when the dry earth needs to be covered with rain?

In God, these two themes of power and wisdom are forever intertwined. Every story ever told about someone gaining power without wisdom ends in tragedy and usually ends with that power being taken away. Power of any kind ceases to be creative and good and instead becomes destructive and evil without the wisdom of knowing when and how to use it. And, as God points out in this passage, that wisdom and aspects of that power were created to be shared. If God taught the animals, how to feed themselves, He probably wants us to learn and grow and be able to feed ourselves as well. He does not selfishly keep His wisdom and power to Himself. Instead, He generously gives us all the wisdom we are willing to ask for, and no more power than we can safely handle.

Yes, God could come down and fix everything right now. He wouldn’t even even have to come down. He could fix everything with a word. End it all. Start it all brand new without you and me to cause problems. He has the power and might to make right, but in His wisdom, He chose to show this world that might never make right, and we see that every day in the symbol of the cross, and we experience that everywhere in the presence of Jesus, the lamb who was slain for the sins of the world. His power is made perfect in weakness, whether it is weakness that He takes on Himself or our weakness that He chooses to work through. His wisdom is so far beyond what we can ever understand that it looks absurd to us. It is foolishness by our standards. But He sees more, knows more, and can truly hold us all together, no matter what our day looks like.

In the Bible, God is never scared. He’s never surprised or shocked by our sin. He never gets anxious about the incredibly destructive power we sometimes wield or the glimpses of wisdom we think we see. The only moments in the Bible that caused God to raise His eyebrows just a little bit in wonder are the moments when people who were weak and foolish recognized their need for Him and followed Him faithfully into places they are too weak to go themselves and too foolish to understand why He wants them to go. Faith, without excuses, faith beyond our ability, face beyond our understanding… That’s what gets God excited. And that is precisely where Job was at the beginning of the story. Faithful beyond his own ability.

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Provision

In the days long before Jesus, and probably even before Moses in the Ten Commandments and that miraculous delivery from Egypt, Job had faith in God based on what? He had faith that God provided. In Job’s own words, the Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. How can we expect blessing and not trouble? God provides.

We cannot make it through life without Him. We never understand how and why God provides the way that He does. We cannot force His hand or persuade Him to follow our lead. There are days that we pray for rain to water our crops while our neighbors pray for the sun to shine so they can wash their cars, and God carries out His plans without considering our votes. As Jesus taught, the flowers don’t spin or sew, but God adores them all in colors that our best tailors cannot match. The sparrows don’t sow or reap, but God provides food for them all. Not one drops without His notice. And we are worth so much more to Him than sparrows.

In our world, which teaches us to chase after power and wisdom, how do we hold fast to the faith that God will provide for us? We put ourselves in the place of those little birds and look for the hand that feeds us. We don’t look for the store that sells the birdseed or the warehouses where thousands of bags are kept. Our God feeds us by hand one day at a time.

The short prayer that Jesus taught us to help us trust in God’s provision says this:

Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil.

That prayer, along with the whole Lord’s prayer, could have been and maybe should have been the daily mantra of the Hebrew people from the moment they were set free from Egypt and through every day of their journey to the promised land. God gave them bread from heaven every day. Just enough for the day, so they would learn to trust Him with their tomorrows. He modeled that with them for 40 years so their children would never remember a day God did not provide for them. In that way, God made faith normal.

In our world, there have been seasons when we have made trust in our government and authority figures normal. We have made trusting in the church normal. We can sometimes teach trusting in our communities, neighbors, and families normal. But it is a challenge in every generation, family, and person to make faith that God will provide become normal. Often, we are no different than Job; all it takes is a sprinkling of suffering or a tiny tragedy to shake us up. While we may be strong enough to suffer quietly ourselves, sometimes the suffering of others shakes our faith.

Every situation is different. And we are no better than Job’s foolish friends when we try to offer one-size-fits-all solutions. However, in every case, our help comes from the same place—the hand of God. We can look far and wide or deep within ourselves, trying everything to make things work out. But we will eventually run out when we try to do it alone. But if we can take half of that time and energy. No, not even half. One day a week. A 10th of what we have to work with. And use that to look for the hand of God and receive in faith what he’s offering you. That is the life of God intended for you.

Will you experience suffering and face loss? Yes. Jesus promised we would. What difference will it make then? All the difference in the world. The suffering we experience faithfully following Jesus will grow and shape us in a way that will leave us with a humble wisdom to see things a little more like He does. And if we persevere in following Him, that faith will give us the power to free us from the chain of pain, suffering, and death that has affected our lives. Instead of living our entire life running from pain and death, doing everything we can to avoid it, we, like Jesus and His disciples, have the power to receive it when it comes. And like Jesus and those whose lives He transformed, we may find ourselves with the power to offer the gift of unfailing love, salvation, and eternal life to those around us with her dying breath.

Where do you see the hand of God providing for you today?

Most of us have a long, winding road ahead of us. There may be several moments when we discover what we were made for. Our suffering can be a vehicle to remind us of how much God provides for us every moment of every day. Just like Job, we, too, will stand before God someday, and He will have questions that we cannot answer. And in that moment, when we, as the dust of the Earth, stand face-to-face with the God of the universe, we will know what it means to be truly loved.

Closing Prayer

Lord, You are beyond our comprehension. In the times when we hurt for ourselves and for others, You can feel so far away, and we feel powerless to reach you. And when we recognize your presence, we are sometimes fearful and ashamed and try to hide because we know who we are is not who You created us to be. But you are bigger than our suffering. You are even bigger than our failure to respond to our suffering well. Lord, help us today to see and trust in the ways you provide for us by your power and wisdom so that we can share all that you give us with those who struggle around us. In Jesus name, amen.

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