"Appearances Can Be Deceiving"

Engage

Have you ever had a bad day? A day where nothing seems to go right? One of those days that you can’t wait to see end so you can just get to tomorrow?

Days like these examples:

Days where you drive away from the gas station with the pump nozzle still in your car.

Days when you set everything up to get a cup of coffee from your Keurig without realizing that you’ve put your mug in upside down.

Days when you put that adorable toddler on your shoulders and twirl them faster and faster around as they giggle with delight, without any warning that they just ate.

Or a day like this brick layer describes in a letter to his boss requesting sick leave:

I arrived at the job after the storm, checked the building out and saw that the top needed repairs. I rigged a hoist and a boom, attached the rope to a barrel and pulled bricks to the top. When I pulled the barrel to the top, I secured the rope at the bottom. After repairing the building, I went back to fill the barrel with the leftover bricks. I went down and released the rope to lower the bricks, and the barrel was heavier than I and jerked me off the ground. I decided to hang on. Halfway up, I met the barrel coming down and received a blow to the shoulder. I hung on and went to the top, where I hit my head on the boom and caught my fingers in the pulley. In the meantime, the barrel hit the ground and burst open, throwing bricks all over. This made the barrel lighter than I, and I started down at high speed. Halfway down, I met the barrel coming up and received a blow to my shins. I continued down and fell on the bricks, receiving cuts and bruises. At this time I must have lost my presence of mind, because I let go of the rope and the barrel came down and hit me on the head. I respectfully request sick leave.

Michael P. Green, ed., Illustrations for Biblical Preaching: Over 1500 Sermon Illustrations Arranged by Topic and Indexed Exhaustively, Revised edition of: The expositor’s illustration file. (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989).

Tension

We each are going to have bad days. Some of them will give us reasons to laugh at later when we think about the silliness of what we do at times. Maybe your bad days won’t be filled with as dramatic events as I have shared, but nonetheless, in life there will be good days and bad days. This we know.

But what does one do when a bad day stretches to season of life? Not just a few days in a row with uncooperative hair, but months or even years where one is faced with excruciating physical bodily pain or a state where it’s impossible to fake it until we make it by pretending to wear a smile. Life and the world seems to have dealt a bad hand and it’s not that there are just bad days, but there is true suffering. What does that look like? Well, from exhaustion that rises in the midst of suffering, some have said that they wish they weren’t born and others have very much welcomed the thought of death. The greatest peace their minds can produce in the midst of suffering is a picture of the world without them in it.

And in acknowledging that suffering is a real aspect of life, I want to ask, how does one make sense of this? Or maybe more pointedly, where is God in the midst of suffering? Why does God let suffering take place?

Truth

If you have joined along in the last two weeks’ worth of readings for our church, you’ll be very familiar with Job. Job is a man who is introduced to us as Job 1:1 “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” Job’s life and situation are ideal. He had seven sons and three daughters, livestock aplenty and a team of servants to attend to his estate such that Job Job 1:3 “...was the greatest of all the people of the east.” But in an instant, all of those things were lost. A storm kills his entire family and a neighboring group of people slaughtered all his property. It’s not long after these sad proceedings that Job then is afflicted with sores that cover his entire body. To all the false teachers of our day who at this very hour are calling upon people to give so God can give more, they must not have Job in their Bibles because in no way could anyone conclude that Job was living his best life now.

Upon hearing of the terrible events in his life, a trio of Job’s friends arrive and try to assess what he must have done to bring this suffering upon himself. After they’ve said their peace, a fourth man arrives on the scene by the name of Elihu. Our text this morning finds us reading from this Elihu’s speech to Job after Elihu has already rebuked the three friends and has even rebuked Job. See, what Job has done in response to his continued suffering and the prolonged interrogations of his friends is to suggest that maybe God isn’t perfectly righteous. In other words, Job allows himself to think and suggest that a fair and righteous God would never permit such sufferings to come upon a righteous person as himself. Before we rush to villainize Job, we must remember that he is a human like you and me and what we learn is that trials and hardships expose our hearts—are they hardened by difficulties so that we want to turn back, or purged by them so that we long all the more to press onward into the heavenly land held out before us?

This, of course, is something Job says without the benefit of knowing the conversation Satan had with God himself. Back in Job 1, God permits Satan access to Job: Job 1:8 “8 And the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?””

And returning our focus to the speech of Elihu in Job 36:3 says, in contrast to Job’s ignorance and self-righteous wallowing, Elihu declares “I will ascribe righteousness to my Maker.” Elihu goes on to say that he is speaking with the authority of the Lord in Job 36:4, and from what follows we come to understand two aspects of God’s purposes with human suffering.

God uses suffering to correct sinners

The first aspect of God’s use of human suffering is that it is an instrument to correct sinners. Suffering is a divine tool of correction. Suffering is God’s punishment for the unrepentant, who continue to live and operate as if they are kings, denying the fact that Christ is Lord of all. Affliction and suffering are also used by God against the child of God who is living in sin.

We can see this from what Elihu is explaining to Job and his friends in Job 36:8-9 “8 And if they are bound in chains and caught in the cords of affliction, 9 then he declares to them their work and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly.” To say this as simply as possible, God uses adversity and suffering to reveal to humans their sin.

“Well, that’s not a very nice god,” says someone. “I prefer a god who is loving, a god who grades on the curve, a really lenient god,” says someone else. A god like that sounds so nice, doesn’t it? The problem with a god like who is described by those statements is that god tends to look and act and sound a lot like us. Or maybe a god who is a white-haired, elderly man who is ready to just give you a Werther’s candy and suggest to you that it’s all going to be OK.

You may prefer to follow that god, I’ll follow the one true God who has so beautifully revealed to the reader of his Word his great magnificence. You see, God is perfectly righteous and absolutely holy. His holiness cannot permit or tolerate any bit of sin. And that makes for a real dilemma for you and me, because sin is all we know and who we are. We may cry afoul at the suggestion that affliction and suffering is a divine instrument to correct sinners! We may just want to say, “that’s not fair!” Well, I have news for you: God isn’t fair. If he was fair, the entire human experiment would have been rolled up like a piece of paper with God sinking a jumper from his glorious throne right into Heaven’s trash can. Nothing but the bottom of the dumpster after what Adam and Eve did in the garden of Eden.

Do you remember reading that on New Years Day? Do you remember Pastor Carlos’ message 4 Sundays ago? “Well no, I hardly remember what I ate at the brunch where the suffering I faced was denying myself a second cinnamon roll.” Allow me to remind you then, Adam and Eve have disobeyed God in the ONE THING God forbid them to do, and after these first two humans bring sin into the world, how does God come back into the scene? Is he snarling and roaring, “Fee-fei-fo-fum, I smell the blood of two dead people?” Is he hurling lightning bolts?

How can I say God isn’t fair in relationship to sin? How can I tell you that if your picture of God is anything but the one of the Bible, then you’re wrong? Because a holy and righteous God, who cannot tolerate sin, cannot be in the presence of it, reveals that he’s not in the business of being fair, but holding in tension his holiness and righteousness that demands justice for sin that is committed against him, are his natures of grace and mercy. Returning to the garden of Eden after that first and great offense, Genesis 3:9 “...the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?””

Friends, I cannot promise you anything material in this world but I can tell you about God to the best of my ability. It pains me to consider all the sin I have committed and am yet to commit, but God in his mercy and grace sought me out, to save me. In my lowest of moments in life, he spoke those words into me, “Where are you?” And the conviction that fell upon me drove me to repentance and to cry out to God, “Save me!” and in the course of those moments, the Holy Spirit revealed to me that my affliction and suffering was God calling me to Jesus. And the words of the God-man Jesus Christ, upon whom the fullness of the godhead dwelled, suddenly made sense in light of this: Luke 19:10 “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.””

God uses affliction to sanctify his children

The second way God uses affliction and suffering is to sanctify his children.

Now, before I go on to show us this truth, I want to help us each understand a $3 theological word I just introduced - sanctification. Sanctification is the process whereby God makes the follower of Jesus progressively holy. God does not sanctify people who reject Jesus, God will use circumstances to bring them to their breaking point where they can do nothing other than cry out to God in faith, confessing “God, I cannot live apart from you any longer, I have defiled myself before you and I trust upon your Son and will follow none other than him.” For the follower of Christ, when they have received the free gift of grace and God has brought life to their dead soul, God gives us his Holy Spirit. One of the works of the Spirit is to make the follower more and more like Jesus.

So when someone has been saved by God, they have been redeemed by Jesus, but he or she is still raggedy. They’re far from perfect. This is just a word for the Christians in the room with a critical spirit about them, and I’m not going to go down a rabbit trail, but I’m going to just point out a rabbit and not chase him. New Christians don’t have the hymnal memorized. Their Facebook posts will still hint at the sinful life God has saved and is delivering them from. The Spirit’s work of sanctification is completed when God calls us home or Jesus returns in all his glory to finally set all things right and make all things new. So God uses things to sanctify us, to grow us in the ways of Jesus.

And this should be an encouragement to each of us, no matter whether we have received salvation or not, for this reason: We know that as we sit, right now, God loves us each the way we are. We know this because God loved the world so much that he gave Jesus Christ, his only Son, as the substitute for the penalty of sin for whoever would believe. Whoever. The door’s wide open. And here’s the beauty of God’s love expressed through sanctification: God also loves us each enough to not leave us the way we are when he saves us. That means whatever you are doing or whatever lies you are believing, God will work to deliver you from.

Now, with that addressed, we have introduced this morning how God is not fair, and have seen how in his actions towards sinners, he actually treats sinners better than they deserve. But we must be equitable in what we’re considering and the conclusions we are drawing this morning. If God can treat those who are living unholy lives better than they deserve, then there’s a flip side to that same coin.

In our text this morning, Elihu is whittling away at Job in extolling the greatness and magnificence of God. What Elihu communicates is that God, Job 36:5 “does not despise any; he is mighty in strength of understanding” and demands obedience to his Word.

We have already seen that Elihu emphasizes that God uses affliction to correct sinners. This is a principle that can be observed many times in the Bible, as well as in the experience of many Christians today. God in his grace does not write off sinners but continues to seek and to save those who are lost (Luke 19:10). God, then, goes beyond this, as he graciously extends the opportunity for repentance and restoration to those who deserve only his judgment. In doing that, God provides an example for us to keep reaching out to those who have sinned rather than writing them off as hopeless.

I was helped greatly by a commentator named Daniel Estes, who writes, “Where Elihu errs is in applying this truth to Job’s specific situation. He assumes that Job’s adversity must be God’s correction, so he challenges Job to respond with repentance. Elihu is unable to recognize that if God treats sinners better than they deserve, then perhaps it is possible for a righteous man like Job to experience adversity that is worse than what he deserves. In other words, if God can treat sinners better than they deserve, then God can subject his children to afflictions as he wills.”

Daniel J. Estes, Job, ed. Mark L. Strauss, John H. Walton, and Rosalie de Rosset, Teach the Text Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2013), 222.

What we should see clearly from this is that God is God and he will do as he pleases according to his will and purposes.

As the apostles went about the Roman empire, preaching Christ crucified and testifying to the resurrection of Jesus, proclaiming that Christ was Lord brought about terrible afflictions upon the early churches that were established by the Holy Spirit. The Christian life is not a bowl full of cherries, in fact, it will invite affliction as we are grown and shaped to be more like Jesus. In Acts 14, Luke writes that Paul and Barnabas Acts 14:21-22 “...had preached the gospel … and had made many disciples... 22 strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.”

Application

Now, some of you here this morning are in situations where you are struggling and lack perspective. In bringing this subject up before the congregation, I know you may be asking which of the two reasons of God’s purposes of suffering apply to you. Some of you may be even thinking that you would like for me to interpret your struggles. I can’t.

You may be in the midst of your greatest struggle and have been in prayer before the Lord, petitioning Lord Jesus to grant you an answer to your single question: “Why? Why am I going through this?” I need you to know, that is a question you will not get an answer to for we are not God and cannot know all of his ways. But this I can assure you, God uses all affliction, all suffering, for his glory.

The question we each must ask in the midst of our sufferings is not why but what now? Because of this, what am I to do in response, Lord?

For the lost sinner, God afflicts them to bring them to an awareness of their sin and call them to repentance and obedience. God is glorified when sinners repent and turn to Jesus Christ in faith as Job 36:10 “10 He opens their ears to instruction and commands that they return from iniquity,” accepting his gracious forgiveness.

God is glorified when his children give him honor and praise even when their world is crumbling and the final enemy, that being death, may be drawing near. There is nothing more precious in the sight of the Lord than the death of his saints.

Inspiration

I want to offer this encouragement to you, if you find yourself wondering where God is in your struggle. There can be a thought that would believe that you are alone in suffering.

This was the question of grief-stricken parents, who during World War II, following word that an only son had been killed in action, invited a pastor to their home. The father, pacing the floor, weeping, in anger demanded, “Where was God when my son was being killed?” There was silence in the room. Then the ministering pastor replied, “I guess where He was when His Son was being killed.” The calm, profound answer impacted the father, for it brought God out of remoteness into the circle of real life.

G. Curtis Jones, 1000 Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1986), 147.

God is present and near you, loved ones. You may not sense his presence, but he is there.

Action

God uses affliction and suffering to earn himself glory. There are two words here for us if we are to respond rightly this morning.

The first is for this church, the body of God’s redeemed children, to learn from those who speak to Job that we won’t always be able to know why suffering is taking place in any one person’s or any one church’s life, but we have a responsibility as recipients of the love of God to join in the affliction of others. We walk alongside and encourage them in the midst of trials. I’ll leave as homework to you to read 2 Thessalonians 1:1-11 to shape how we are to approach this subject. I will say, as one final point, if you are a member of this church and are clueless as to whether anyone here is struggling, I have to ask, why are you a member of this church? If you truly believe the Holy Spirit has placed you here, then he has called you to a people, these people, not this building. Get involved with the lives of others. Belong to a Sunday school class. Attend the studies we offer on Wednesday evenings. By God’s grace, we have classes and studies for every age group represented this morning, so having kids or grandkids is not an excuse. Be a real participant in the life of a gospel-centered church by involving yourselves in the lives of others.

The final word is for the sinners this morning who have yet to confess Christ as Lord and Savior. Do not hear me wrong or suggest that I am misleading in any way. Suffering is inevitable for us each. With what I am about to extend to you, I’m not hocking fire insurance. What I can tell you is that living your life apart from Christ will result in ruin. Those things that you are struggling with, God knows them and he is mighty enough to shoulder them because, be honest, you can’t. You’re tired of trying. It may be difficult to understand in your specific situation, but the appearances of affliction and suffering can be deceiving. It’s hard to believe that any good can come from such bad or evil or pain.

In the kingdom of God, what seems a bad circumstance is ultimately good. The supreme instance of this is the death of Christ on Good Friday, through which an apparent catastrophe became the means by which the sin of the world was taken away. Would you call upon Christ as Lord and Savior today, receiving the free gift of grace that God extends to you? Your difficult circumstances may give the appearance of rejection by God, but that is a lie from the evil one to deceive you. The door to salvation and a relationship with Jesus Christ is open to you.

Follow the Lord’s lead. Do not harden your heart. Surrender your all to him.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, give me a deeper repentance, a horror of sin, a dread of its approach. Help me quickly to flee it and jealously to resolve that my heart shall be Yours alone.

Give me a deeper trust, that I may lose myself to find myself in You, the ground of my rest, the spring of my being.

Give me a deeper knowledge of Yourself as Saviour, Master, Lord, and King.

Give me deeper power in private prayer, more sweetness in Your Word, more steadfast grip on its truth.

Give me deeper holiness in speech, thought, action, and let me not seek moral virtue apart from You.

I have no master but You, no law but Your will, no delight but Yourself, no wealth but that You give, no good but that You bless, no peace but that You bestow.

I am nothing but that You make me. I have nothing but that I receive from You. I can be nothing but that grace adorns me.

Mine into the depths of my being, dear Lord, and then fill me to overflowing with living water.

Amen

— Adapted from The Valley of Vision, “The Deeps”