A Resilient Devotion

Then Job replied: “If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery be placed on the scales! It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas— no wonder my words have been impetuous. The arrows of the Almighty are in me, my spirit drinks in their poison; God’s terrors are marshaled against me. Does a wild donkey bray when it has grass, or an ox bellow when it has fodder? Is tasteless food eaten without salt, or is there flavor in the sap of the mallow? I refuse to touch it; such food makes me ill. “Oh, that I might have my request, that God would grant what I hope for, that God would be willing to crush me, to let loose his hand and cut off my life! Then I would still have this consolation— my joy in unrelenting pain— that I had not denied the words of the Holy One. “What strength do I have, that I should still hope? What prospects, that I should be patient? Do I have the strength of stone? Is my flesh bronze? Do I have any power to help myself, now that success has been driven from me?

Read Job 42:1-3

Job 42:1–3 NIV

Then Job replied to the Lord: “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.

Let’s pray.

It only feels appropriate that we should be reading and studying from the book of Job on the Sunday morning when Daylight Savings Time begins because I’m telling y’all what… this is an injustice that my soul cannot quite take! Y’all feel me? And I’m pretty sure the people that hate this thing the most have to be pastors and worship teams because it never falls on a Monday, does it? Y’all can sleep in if you really wanted to, but I’m really glad you didn’t.

In all seriousness though, this is how we can be isn’t it? We can take everything as some kind of slight that is directed specifically at us at times, and we don’t even realize it until after we’ve done it or maybe even never at all. But the one person where that kind of personal affront can be taken with some seriousness has to be Job. I mean the dude endured some pretty extreme hardship and for a seemingly ungodly reason. It is a tough story for us to read - especially in the light of a more modern understanding of God as being all good and all loving and all providing for all people. We don’t believe in caste systems where some people are just born to be downtrodden and serve a higher class of people, we live in a country built on a Christian mindset that all are made equal in the eyes of God. So, it can be tough for us to read a story like Job that is based on the very idea that Satan questions the faithfulness of Job being based on the favor God has shown him and God, as a way to – seemingly – prove that Job is more faithful than Satan believes him to be, let’s Satan do what he will to Job. Job loses this wonderful life he has and is left in shambles in the opening moments of this book, and it is a very unique book!

It is the oldest book of the Bible; we have no manuscripts of any book that date earlier than what we find about the book of Job. On top of that, it features no Jewish characters. Job and all of the “friends” that Job has conversations with are all non-Jewish names and are, seemingly not Israelites at all, but this story is specifically Jewish as God is being referred to and described in specifically Jewish terms. So, in a way, it becomes this book that is completely unrelated to anything and yet everybody can relate to it.

But, to sum it up quickly, the story of Job tells the story where God and Satan make this deal, and Satan turns Job’s life into a shambles where it was once quite fruitful. From there we see Job respond to what has happened and he’s pretty upset. He’s always been an upright and faithful follower of God, and he is feeling the full weight of the injustice of his situation. After expressing his feelings of injustice, three “friends” meet with him and there is this ongoing dialogue where a friend will try to help Job understand how this is just and how God works, creating a very simple view of God and God’s justice, to which Job replies each time about how the friend is wrong, leading to a conversation with God himself where Job expresses how unjust God is and the world God created is. God gives Job a quick overview of creation and what all is being seen and managed and how great the responsibility of being the all creating, all knowing, all powerful God really looks like and then, in a beautiful twist of writing, God asks Job if he wants to take a shot at it and if Job things he can do a better Job at correctly and justly running the world than God, writing each and every perceived wrong at the moment it happens.

Job, seeing the error of his understanding, finally has this moment where he apologizes to God and relents and submits to God’s understanding being greater than his own.

There is an epilogue that sums up God’s response to everything that has happened in Job, but the greater questions of Job still remain. The questions all have to do with that original thing we talked about when we started talking about Daylight Savings Time: justice. We feel like it is unjust for us to switch back and forth between dark evenings and one really early morning, and I use it jokingly, but it is a small example of the injustices we feel each and every day. The injustices that are the realities of this world that cause Job, us, and everybody else we know to ask the questions, “Is God just? If so, what does His justice look like and do we or don’t we see it in this world? If God is perfect and all knowing, then why even allow injustice to begin with?”

I think those are questions that we can all connect with and wrestle with ourselves, and these are the questions that Job is wrestling with in the story and the ones that we need to ask if we’re going to be resilient followers of God. Followers who are resiliently devoted to God. Because if God isn’t a just God, then what are we doing this for. We have to believe that, in the end, justice will reign because God is just. All the promises we see from Jesus, all of the promises we see in the Old Testament, we want to know that those promises of justice – the justice that we don’t yet see occurring in this world are real – and who better to help us understand that than the man who has faced more injustice than us all. The man who God let Satan torment.

And while I would love to spend all day dissecting this fascinating story, I think we can get to the bottom of what we need to understand by examining these two interactions we read this morning. The first is Job’s response to his friend Eliphaz and you can tell that he is just not feeling it. He is not good with God, he’s not good with Eliphaz’s attempt at helping him come to an understanding and he is all but ready to give up. I love this part because I feel like we can relate with it and in relating to it we can learn something from it. We relate to it because we’ve felt this way before. Each of us, in our own personal way, has delt with anguish and loss, and each of us, in our own way, has thought or said something to the effect of what Job says here: “This is so bad that there can’t be any more. How could it get any worse? My anguish is so deep that if you could weight it, it would weight more than the sand in the ocean.” And yet how many of us have been real with God the way that Job is here? So real that, in an effort to find words to express it Job actually apologizes to God for not having the words to express it so he has to use words that are “impetuous” or unseemly when speaking to and about God. And even though Job may not be happy with his words, we can’t help but be happy with the reality it presents us. The reality that we are invited to be real and truthful with God. He doesn’t want to know us in the lights, he wants to know our darkness so He can light it up, and when we have the honesty to share that with Him. Yes, He knows it, but when we choose to share it with him in open, honest prayer and confession it makes way for us to experience real healing and restoration with God. It shows him that we are truthful, honest, and loyal to Him with our honesty. I don’t know if I’ll find myself using descriptors like donkeys braying and oxen bellowing, but I can see the beauty of what Job is engaging in here and why God receives it so beautifully throughout the story. He doesn’t get mad or wrathful like we’d expect, or we’ve been taught to expect. Instead, God continually insists upon Job’s heart who He really is, and we see that Job never really forgets it. Because within this long complaint, in the deepest of Job’s woes where he is asking God to end it all because it can’t get any worse, Job seems to remember who God is.

In verse 10, he says, “Then I would still have this consolation – my joy in unrelenting pain – that I had not denied the words of the Holy One.” He remembers and states that if he were to die amidst the unrelenting pain and agony his soul had been suffering, he would still die with joy in his heart because he never stopped knowing and believing in who God is. In his weakness he finds God’s strength, in his failures, he sees God’s successes. He finds his surrender in understanding his own limitations and capabilities and relying on God to see him through it instead. And in what follows, his eyes are opened.

They’re opened as God takes Job on this virtual tour of Creation. And in the tour Job starts to see and understand that as much as we wish Justice was black and white, far often than not it is completely gray. God shows Job how the world keeps turning, how the lion feeds on the zebra, how the sun rises and sets, how the wind blows across the plains, and how the plants seek the rain and the sun. He shows Job all of this and Job starts to see that God has to see to all of this. And just as the zebra feels the injustice of the lion’s teeth, the lion must eat, or it will feel the injustice of starvation.

God is showing Job and showing us that justice is far more difficult to understand when you have to consider the justice for the entire forest rather than just for the perspective of the tree. The true beauty of the story is that, in allowing Satan to test and tempt, it wasn’t that God was allowing injustice, but that his justice we being showed to an even higher degree beyond the understanding of even the angels’ understanding. God holds the justice of all of these things while acknowledging to Job and to us through this story that this current world, as we know it, is not perfect and, therefore, not entire just. But that God’s justice is pure and one day it will be perfect.

And the most wondrous part of it all is that despite all that God has to hold in the balance, all of the justice that God has to hold in his plan and oversee, he still sees Job. Despite how vast the forest is that God has to look over, he still sees and knows every single tree. He sees and experiences every single injustice of this world and sent his son to experience and receive the greatest injustice in all of the world. He counts it all and He promises us that it will one day be reconciled when His order is restored once more. He does this because he is a devoted God who is relentlessly devoted to his Creation.

And, just like Job, we are called to remain devoted to him as well. To relish in our difficulties because just to know that we hold onto our faith in God is joy enough alone. Because when it comes down to it, we know that we cannot lean on our own understanding. We know that far too often, like Job, we speak things we cannot understand. But what we do know is that God is far more wonderful than we can ever imagine. That he is far more complex than our simple ideas of him, and his justice, just like his love and his faithfulness, is perfect.

So this Lenten season, this season where we are called to remove extraneous things and focus on the Lord, let us grow in our devotion to him. Because he is resiliently devoted to us, and He shows it each and every day that the sun comes up and we take another breath of air in our lungs. Let us find a devotion like Job because we know that God reigns and his justice does to.

Let’s Pray.

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