Faith Without Answers: My Redeemer Lives (Job 19:16-25)

Pig-pen’s dust

One of the most fascinating characters in the Peanuts universe is one of my favorites. He always made people feel uncomfortable. In fact, when he’s on the screen in front of us, we feel a bit of an aversion. That’s Pig-pen. He’s the kid with the permanent dust cloud, the one who, as Charles Schulz himself put it, “raises a cloud of dust on a perfectly clean street.” Not a dirty street. Not a back alley. A perfectly clean street. Because the dust isn't environmental. It doesn't come from where he's been. It comes with him. It's his.

On one occasion, Charlie Brown defends Pig-pen when he says, “don't think of it as dirt. Think of it as the dust of far-off lands. The soil trod upon by Solomon, by Nebuchadnezzar, by the kings and the forgotten and the ancient dead. It staggers the imagination.” Pigpen walks through the world carrying the dust of everyone who ever lived.

You may wonder why we’re starting with Pig-pen on Easter morning. This morning we’re looking at one of the most famous passages in our Old Testament… a verse that speaks to resurrection. But too often we forget just what the occasion was for this amazing statement. We’re starting with Pig-pen because he has a lot in common with our prime subject this morning… the man named Job from the book of Job. He also has a lot to do with us. All of us this morning walked in here through those doors carrying our particular cloud — and the question this morning is not whether you have dust on you. The question is whether the Redeemer knows where to find you in your dust.

Job’s dust

Job knew where his dust came from. He wasn't carrying the romantic dust of Solomon's courts. He was carrying the dust of the ash heap — the dust of a body coming apart, of a life stripped down to its last thread, of a self that had become, by chapter 19, the source of its own isolation.

In chapter 19, the center of the entire chapter is verse 17… Job is again giving a recap of his suffering and shame. He has lost everything: his wealth, his business, his 10 children, his health.. all gone in an instant.. one of the earth’s richest men reduced to nothing. His devastation has been total.. he says he’s a many without hope, his life is in ruins… everyone has abandoned him, including his own family…

and to sum it all up… Here’s what he says:

Job 19:17 “My breath is offensive to my wife, and my own family finds me repulsive.”

His own breath — the animating spirit God had breathed into him — had become strange to his own wife. Offensive. Unbearable. The man she knew most closely could no longer be near her without causing her to recoil. Job sits all alone in dust. His dust isn’t the dust of kings. It’s his own dust… a dust that is his world. He is repulsive. He is offensive. No friend in the world to share his misery. Job isn’t just having a rough week. He’s not just a little down. He is… undone.

I’m reminding us of Job’s predicament, because the verse we love to focus on on a day like today is one of the most famous verses in all of the Bible and it’s right here in Job 19.

Job 19:25 “But I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the end he will stand on the dust.”

We love that verse. We write songs about it. We put it on banners. We build Easter around it. This verse is being preached all over the country today. And all that is good. But don’t miss this. That verse is spoken by a guy sitting in the dust, talking about his misery. Nothing has changed since verse 17. Job is still sitting there. Still hurting. Still not hearing from God. Still thinking God has destroyed his life. He’s still in the dust. In fact, after verse 25, he goes right back to his miserable life. Verse 25 isn’t the end of the story. Things aren’t getting better.

We have to see Job sitting in the dust to keep us from turning that verse into a tool. “See? It’ll work out… God’s got a plan… just hang in there.” That’s not what Job is doing. He’s not saying, “I know my Redeemer lives… and now I’m ready to conquer the world.” No. He’s saying it while everything is still broken. And while he is sitting in his misery… in the midst of his dust… his Faith Without Answers blurts out: I Know My Redeemer Lives.

What’s staggering about this statement is that Job has no he has no evidence for it. Job is not making this declaration from a position of recovered faith, restored circumstances, or renewed theological clarity. He is making it from the ash heap, with the potsherd in his hand, with his body wasting, with his wife unable to bear his presence, with his friends sitting across from him insisting that God is his enemy — and the available evidence, every single piece of it, supports their case.

The friends are not wrong about the facts. Job is suffering. Job has lost everything. Job's life has come apart in ways that, by the theological framework everyone in the ancient world shared, indicate divine disfavor. And God has been silent. Not comforting. Not explaining. Silent. The whirlwind hasn't come yet. There is no voice from heaven, no angel, no dream, no word. There is nothing but the ash heap and the dust and the offensive breath and the disintegrating body.

Job’s Faith Without Answers

And from that place — from inside that specific, evidenceless, God-is-still-third-person darkness — Job says I know. Not I hope. Not I wonder. Not someday maybe. I know. That is not the language of a man who has reasoned his way to a conclusion. This is Faith Without Answers, not faith that has been rewarded with answers. Not faith that has been vindicated by circumstances turning around. Not faith that has climbed out of the ash heap and can now look back on the suffering and explain what it was for. This is faith that is still in the ash heap when it speaks. Still in the dark.

Still without a single answer to the questions that have been piling up since chapter one. Why did this happen? God doesn't say. Is God good? The evidence says otherwise. Will any of this be made right? There is no indication. Job gets none of it — not the explanation, not the comfort, not the theological framework that would make the suffering bearable. And from that place of total answerlessness he says I know that my Redeemer lives. This is what faith without answers actually looks like when it is pressed all the way down to its irreducible core. It doesn't look like peace.

But we also need to see this, because we can also mis this: notice that last phrase, the one we seem to forget.

“At the end, he will stand on the dust.”

At first glance, this looks like Job is talking about the last day… the end of all time.. looking far into the distant future. There is something to that. Job seems to have an understanding of the coming of one who will unmistakably stand as triumphant over the whole earth at the end of all time. He knows there is a Redeemer who will bring an end to his misery… finally. It will not always be this way. The hopelessness he feels is just that… a feeling. There’s coming a day when the Redeemer will make everything right.

But that’s not all.. notice that word "dust". It refuses to let all the end time language become just another piece of theology. He has a reference point: his own dust. It’s too easy for us to insert the word earth there… that someday, Job will see his Redeemer stand at the last day on the earth. Job uses the word “dust”. That means Job is speaking about his own situation… the same ground Job is sitting in at this very moment, the same material that his skin is becoming as it wastes away. It is the dust of verse 17 — the dust of the man whose breath is offensive, whose self has become repulsive. When Job says the Redeemer will stand on the dust, he is not simply pointing to some distant cosmic battlefield at the end of history where Jesus wins. He is pointing down. To the ground beneath him. To his dust.

You see… the Redeemer doesn't stand on human frailty in general. He stands WITH Job. He stands precisely where Job is sitting. Job isn’t saying, “He’ll take me away from this.” He says: “He’ll stand on it.” On the dust. On Job’s dust. He will stand where I’m sitting. Not somewhere else. Not after I clean it up. Not once I get my life together. Right here.

Job’s Moment of Clarity

I’m blown away by Job’s lucidity here. For one brief moment, Job speaks with unbelievable clarity and faith. Job is not being triumphant here. He is not now emotionally settled. He is not “back to normal.” He sees himself truly, death truly, and his need for a Redeemer truly. This comes from a man who has been talking out of anguish, confusion, protest, and near-despair, and suddenly he speaks with total clarity.

“I know.” That is not the voice of a man who has figured everything out. It is the voice of a man whose faith, for a moment, is no longer muffled by the pain.

He speaks for all of us on this Resurrection Sunday. This is the Resurrection FOR YOU and FOR ME today. Not the resurrection as an abstract. Not the resurrection as some past event that has nothing to do with our present or even our suffering. The resurrection is not some reward waiting on the other side of our ash heap once we’ve endured enough or repented enough or cleaned up enough. The resurrection is the Redeemer standing in the tomb 2000 years ago — in the dust of it, in the dark of it, in the absolute finality of it — and the tomb not having the last word. Easter does not begin in the garden in the morning light. It begins in the sealed darkness of a specific grave, with the specific dust of a specific corpse, in the most particular and unromantic and finished place imaginable.

And the women who come in the early morning are coming to tend to dust — to do what you do with a body that is returning to the ground — and they find instead that the Redeemer has already been there. Has already stood there. In the dust. Which means your dust is not the place you need to escape before the resurrection can reach you. It is the address the Redeemer already has. He has been to your ash heap. He knows what it smells like. He stood there before you arrived and he will be standing there on the last day and every moment in between is held by the same promise Job wrenched out of his own dissolution on the ash heap — I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand on the dust. My dust. Your dust. Right here. The dust of hospital rooms and funerals. The dust of broken relationships. The dust of our sin. The dust of lives that didn’t turn out the way we thought they would. All of it.

Christ is Risen… FOR YOU

Easter is not “Christ is risen… and now everything is fixed.” We say: “Christ is risen. Christ is risen for your Monday. For your Tuesday. Tomorrow you’ll wonder what happened to all the celebration and hope. Job is telling you that your Redeemer stands with you in your dust. The same life. Same people. Same struggles. Same stuff waiting for you. The diagnosis doesn’t disappear. The grief doesn’t evaporate. The questions don’t suddenly get answered.

So with absolute clarity we can say with Job, I know my Redeemer lives. A redeemer who gets down with you into your dust. He stands where you are sitting. A redeemer who loves you. A risen redeemer who cares. Christian faith doesn’t have all the answers. Christian faith doesn’t believe the resurrection is an escape hatch with tidy explanations. Christian faith is “I know my Redeemer lives.” Full stop. Faith clings to a Risen Jesus in the absence of answers. The Gospel FOR YOU outlasts the deepest darkness around you. Your Living and risen Redeemer stands on your dust with you. FOR YOU. That’s his promise on this Easter Sunday.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

The Lord's Supper is not a memorial of a distant event or a rehearsal for a future one. It is the end intruding into the present. It is the Redeemer standing in the dust — your specific dust, the dust you carried in through those doors this morning, the dust of your particular dissolution, your particular ash heap, your particular version of verse 17 — and meeting you in it with his own body and blood. Not a symbol of his body. Not a reminder that his body was once broken. His body. Given for you. The same body that was placed in the tomb, in the dust of it, and that the tomb could not hold. That body comes to your dusty hands and your dusty mouth this morning. The last day reaches backward into this Sunday morning in San Benito, Texas, and the Redeemer stands on your dust and feeds you anyway. This is not the table of the cleaned up. This is the table of the ash heap. Pigpen is welcome here. You are welcome here. Come as you are.

Benediction