Job 2

Introduction

There will almost certainly be moments in your life when the weight of suffering feels unbearable and it seems like all the light in life is gone. It may arrive with a phone call in the middle of the night. It could come in the doctor’s office unexpectedly, or it may arrive at your doorstep when the person you trusted most wounds you deeper than you thought imaginable. When those moments come, they arrive like a dump truck that just unloaded its cargo over the front lawn of your life. Your world feels suddenly chaotic, and what was once stable seems to crumble beneath your feet.

And yet, God’s Word reminds us that nothing unfolds in this world apart from the sovereign hand of Almighty God. Not one moment of suffering, not one trial of affliction, escapes His notice or unfolds without His holy decree. The question for us is not if suffering will come, but how will we, as the people of God, respond when it does?

This evening, we turn to Job 2, where Job’s trial is escalated beyond the trial that began in the previous chapter, as God gives Satan authority to afflict Job’s body. In chapter 1, we saw the extraordinary loss of Job: He lost his children, his livelihood, his possessions — all stripped away in a single day. And still, Job blessed the name of the Lord. But Satan was not finished. In chapter 2, with God’s permission, Job’s body is afflicted, his wife turns against him in bitterness, and his closest friends arrive only to offer silence. And through it all, we see how a righteous and wise man suffers — not stoically or inconsolably, but with a persevering faith that mourns the loss but trusts in God.

I want us to consider this evening what Job 2 reveals about God’s sovereignty and wisdom in our suffering, about the schemes of Satan, and about how we, as Christians, ought to minister to those in affliction. We’ll be looking at this passage with an eye to how we should respond to suffering. For those taking notes, our three points are:

Responding to Disillusion with Faith (verses 1–8) — We will see that while we may not know the secret counsel of the Lord in our trials, we do know His character.

Resisting Division with Love (verses 9–10) — We will see that while Satan delights to sow division in suffering, the righteous respond with truth seasoned by love. Overcoming Distance with Hope (2:11–13) — We will see that while silence is better than empty words, true comfort is found in the hope of God’s promises.

Though Job lived before the coming of Christ, his story was written for our instruction (as Romans 15:4 says), that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Because we know the One who endured the greatest affliction, who was betrayed by His friends, abandoned in His hour of agony, and bore the full weight of divine wrath in our place. Christ teaches us not only how to suffer well but how to love those who suffer.

So my prayer this morning is that as we unpack this text, we would come humbly — not as critics of why God allows afflictions, but as students of His wisdom. That we would leave here with hearts strengthened for the day of trial, with hands ready to lift up the broken, and with eyes fixed upon the hope of glory in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Responding to Disillusion with Faith

Job 2 begins with a rare glimpse of an event taking place in heaven. It isn’t very often in scripture that we see how God interacts with the heavenly host or how God’s sovereign decisions are decided, and even more unique in this passage is that Satan is present, making requests of God, and contending with him over Job. Satan is shown to have been going to and fro on the earth, watching Job in his suffering, while becoming increasingly frustrated that he maintained his faith amid the first trial. God points to Job’s enduring integrity as proof that faith does not depend on material blessing, and yet God permits Satan to escalate the trial by stripping even more from Job.

Job’s children, his possessions, his very livelihood was taken away from him, but where God prevented Satan from touching Job personally, that restriction was lifted, and Satan was granted permission to cover Job in painful boils from head to toe. This escalation of Job’s trial illustrates that while things are bad, they can always get worse.

When you read the book of Job, you can’t help but feel a sense of injustice on his behalf. Job did nothing to deserve this suffering, and further it feels unfair that he would be subjected to these trials for a purpose he would never see. Certainly, we can approach the book of Job and understand that his suffering served a greater purpose in instructing believers, but Job wasn’t aware of any of this. He didn’t see the heavenly scene that we read about. He did not see God’s assurance that Job was fit for these trials. He did not see what God intended to prove.

Much like us when unexpected tragedy strikes, he was left with no clear answers and the fragments of his life. It is one thing to suffer because you did something foolish. In the aftermath of it, you can reflect and learn from that suffering. Suffering with no apparent purpose, however, leaves you disillusioned.

Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian woman that lived through the ordeal of a Nazi concentration camp. She and her family were arrested and forced into one of these camps because they helped hide Jewish families during WWII. In, The Hiding Place, Corrie’s memoir, she recounted how after enduring brutal conditions, witnessing daily deaths, and the suffering of innocent people (including her sister Betsie), she reached a point of despair and felt the weight of hopelessness pressing down on her faith. She describes watching the endless lines of women being marched to the gas chambers, the starvation, the beatings, and her dear sister’s eventual death due to the conditions of the camp. But it was Betsie’s steadfast faith that reminded Corrie of the love of God, even in the darkest place. Betsie would insist that "there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still," a line that stuck with Corrie for the rest of her life.

Before Betsy’s death, she reminded Corrie of this truth in a particularly difficult time. Their barracks were infested with fleas, causing blisters and sores for everyone (not unlike Job), but Betsy reminded Corrie to thank God for everything, including the fleas. As it turned out, these fleas saved many of them from even greater suffering and death as they came to discover that none of the guards wanted to come close to those barracks, which allowed Corrie and her sister to host Bible studies and prayer meetings with their fellow prisoners.

Like Job, Corrie and Betsy did not know God’s purposes in permitting them to suffer, and they likewise were suffering unjustly at the hands of people acting on behalf of Satan. Corrie reached the point of disillusionment because she could not make sense of such suffering and the existence of a loving God, but it was Betsy’s unwavering faith and readiness to receive anything from the Lord that proved that God was indeed trustworthy, even in the darkest place.

When suffering comes, is your first instinct to respond like Betsy and say, “thank God for everything, even the fleas” or is it to respond like Corrie and sit in bewilderment that God could allow this to happen? If I’m honest, I don’t believe I’ve reached the point of Christian maturity to respond as Betsy did, but this is exactly the kind of wise response that Job shows us is the correct response. Betsy was only repeating what Job says to his wife in this passage, “shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil.”

Resisting Division with Love

This takes us to our second point, Resisting Division with Love. It was not enough for Satan to strip Job of everything he owned and to afflict his body with sores. We read in 1 Peter 5:8, that our adversary the devil prowls like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. If you’ve ever seen one of those nature shows voiced over by a posh British narrator, I’m sure you’ve seen how lions hunt. They stalk their prey, walking to and fro, and when they finally hone in on an animal that’s either weak or distracted, they pounce for the kill. This is how our adversary, the devil, likes to attack us, and it is what we see here. Job had been weakened by the trials he was forced to endure, and like a panting gazelle in the savannah, he was spent, exhausted, and I’m quite sure lacking in any fighting spirit. All he could do was sit in the dirt with his shard of pottery, scraping his oozing boils. It’s at this low point that Job’s wife appears.

Many people like to joke that even while Satan was granted permission to take Job’s family away from him, Satan preserved his wife. And the joke is that a nagging wife would cause more suffering than a deceased one. While the punchline is wrong, the setup to the joke is accurate. Satan did in fact keep Job’s wife alive to inflict greater suffering. We must remember that Satan’s objective was not to inflict pain on Job, but to get Job to curse God to his face. To accomplish that, Satan chose to go through Job’s wife, just as he chose to go through Eve to destroy Adam.

In the garden, Satan’s tactic was to deceive Eve into distrusting God’s commands by enticing her with the beauty of the fruit and the promise of wisdom. In this passage, rather than enticing Job’s wife with beauty, he causes her feelings of revilment at the sight of her boil-stuck husband, which causes her to emphatically tell Job that he should just curse God and die - to do the very thing that Satan wishes. We are subject to Satanic attacks like this more often than we realize and this is especially true in our marriages. Satan is clever like a serpent and he knows that if something works, you don’t go and change it. He knows that to destroy us, he must divide us, and there is no greater division that will wreak havoc than the division between a husband and his wife.

Just by way of example to show how Satan’s attempts to divide us affect us, I wanted to share some relevant stats about divorce. If you want to know the sources for these stats, come talk to me afterwards. Divorced individuals are 2.4x more likely to die by suicide; their children have a 66% higher risk of alcohol dependence, are more likely to dropout of high school, have dissociative personality disorders, and to be divorced themselves. I don’t want to cause anyone despair if they are the children of divorce because God’s grace is more than sufficient to break any generational curse, but I want to emphasize just how effective Satan’s strategy of division is in dividing a husband from his wife.

Job does not fall for this tick, however. He gives us an example of how we overcome division with truth and love. Listen carefully to his response. He says to his wife, “you speak as one of the foolish women would speak.” He isn’t calling her a foolish woman even though what she’s saying is foolish. He’s telling her that she is speaking out of character and he’s reminding her that this isn’t the kind of woman she sounds like. She did, after all, marry a wise and righteous man. His response here is one steeped in love. He tries to draw her away from foolishness and back to faith, the very thing that a loving husband should do. In Ephesians 5, Paul instructs husbands to love your wives as Christ loved the church - by washing her with the Word - in other words, reminding her of the truth and wisdom of God. Job washes his wife with a reminder of who she is and that we ought to receive both the good and the bad from God because he is the Lord and we are not.

For the married men here, do you wash your wife in the Word of God in the spirit of love when tensions flare? Perhaps this month’s income doesn’t cover all your expenses. Do you remind your wife of God’s faithfulness and remain steadfast in trusting God, or do moments like this become occasions to bicker and fight? Satan will use moments of weakness to destroy your marriage because he wants you to despair and lose faith. Will you allow him?

Overcoming Distance with Hope

This brings us to our final point, overcoming distance with hope. While Satan failed to get Job to curse God through his wife, Job was still left to wallow in his suffering. His trial was not yet over. Thankfully, Job had friends, who upon hearing of the devastation he suffered made an appointment to meet him, show him sympathy, and to comfort him. Eliphaz the Temanite (Israel), Bildad the Shuhite (Syria), and Zophar the Naamathite (Arabia). Remember that Job does not take place in Israel. It takes place in Uz, which is just East of Sinai in the land of Midian where Jethro, Moses’s father in law was from. When you look at a map, and where all these friends are coming from, you are struck first that Job was able to have friendships spanning such large distances, but more importantly, that they would traverse such large distances to be able to offer comfort and sympathy.

An immediate takeaway for all of us here is, when a friend, family member, or brother in Christ is in distress, are you prepared to be inconvenienced to offer care? This reminds me of a beloved teacher at People’s Christian Academy who passed away a number of years ago. When he got the diagnosis of brain cancer, he shared this news with loved ones and, as these things do, it made its way to a friend of his, who was thousands of miles away on vacation. Upon hearing this news, he promptly ended his vacation and flew home to be with his friend. I was struck by this story when I heard it because I immediately knew how moved and comforted I would be if a friend went out of his way to be with me in my hour of trial. I not only want that for myself, but I want to be that kind of friend for the people I call friends as well.

Job’s friends here respond exactly as friends should: They overcome vast distances with the intention to offer comfort in Job’s hour of need, but when they approach their beloved friend, they’re aghast at what they see. Even before they get close, they are deeply troubled. They don’t see the resplendent, wealthy and wise Job, who they would have remembered with bright robes of linen, carrying a joyous disposition. They see an afflicted man, covered in boils. And at this site, they are overcome - they begin to cry and mourn by covering themselves in dust while they tear their robes. Afterwards, they sit with Job for seven days and seven nights, underscoring that they are in complete disbelief at what has befallen Job.

Job’s friends are cut deeply by what has happened to their friend but we have to ask, is their response correct. Is it appropriate that they should sit in absolute silence for an entire week? I don’t believe that is so. I think there is a subtle temptation to join in the misery of the people we care about, to become so sympathetic to their troubles that we forget the perspective we bring. We may think to ourselves, “If I was in this situation, there isn’t a word anyone can say that can help my situation” and then conclude that we should just remain silent. There is a certain wisdom in that too. Proverbs 12:18 reminds us that rash words are like sword thrusts. But in the next breath, it says, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

Brothers and sisters, Job is a book of wisdom, and when we see our brothers and sisters afflicted, we need to bring healing, and this healing comes through what we say. We cannot remain silent like Job’s friends here. It is like in the Garden of Gethsemane during Jesus’s hour of agony when he asks his three friends to pray for him. Similar to Job’s friends, they are silent and asleep. Jesus tells them, “my soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here and watch with me,” but the disciples fall asleep yet again. When we or others face sorrow, we need to approach the throne of grace in prayer and be reminded, “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything through prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

There are many people in our congregation that are suffering. We prayed for some of them this morning. Do you sit back in fear of saying something rash? Have you become so sympathetic that you have lost sight of the truth of the gospel? We need to be a people that prays for one another. As David preached this morning, every genealogy ends with death, but for those of us that call God our father, we have life eternal. Jesus sits on the throne with all authority in heaven and earth given to him, so we can go forth into the world and bear our cross because Christ has gone ahead of us. Death is no longer the final word, after which silence comes. But rather, we with all the saints and angels in glory shall repeat glory, glory, glory, is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory”