Sermon Tone Analysis

The End Comes at the End: Job: The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 42:7-17]

NOW WE COME TO the marvelous conclusion of the book of Job.

[stand for the reading of the word]

“After the LORD had spoken these words to Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.

Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves.

And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly.

For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”

So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did what the LORD had told them, and the LORD accepted Job’s prayer.

And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends.

And the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.

Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house.

And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him.

And each of them gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold.

And the LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning.

And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys.

He had also seven sons and three daughters.

And he called the name of the first daughter Jemimah, and the name of the second Keziah, and the name of the third Keren-happuch [ha-puk].

And in all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters.

And their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers.

And after this Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, four generations.

And Job died, an old man, and full of days.”

(Job 42:7-17)

The end comes at the end.

And this is important because although we have reached the end of the book of Job, in our lives we are not yet at the end.

When we wake up in the morning, what do we expect our day to be like?

We may have expectations for a particular day, the prospect of a promotion at work or apprehension about a visit to the dentist.

But in general what do we expect of a normal day?

For a Christian, what ought to be our idea of the normal Christian life?

This is important because our idea of normality will govern whether we end up delighted or disappointed at the end of the day.

The book of Job ought to shape our expectation of the normal Christian life.

We may think that a perverse suggestion since Job is such an extreme book, and yet it is true.

Although the book of Job paints in primary colors how God treats his friends and placards before us supremely how he treats a peculiarly blameless believer, nonetheless we have no reason to expect that he will treat us in any radically different way if we belong to Christ.

We ended our last study at a moment of high drama where the Lord himself spoke to Job and Job responded.

To break off there was a bit like those ice cream vans that play part of a tune and then suddenly stop partway through, and we wait for the end, the resolution, some sense of closure, some rounding off of the tune so that we can relax and go home knowing it is finished.

We want to know what happens next.

In 42:7–17 we have the closure to the story, the resolution, the conclusion, the end.

But what are we to make of it?

On the face of it, it is a bit of an anticlimax.

It goes back from poetry to prose, and frankly it feels a bit lacking in imagination.

After the dramatic imagery and the soaring heights of the poetry, it feels like a bit of a comedown: the Lord has a quiet word of rebuke for the friends, Job prays for them, and they are forgiven (vv.

7–9).

Then it all ends happily: Job is restored to greater prosperity, is given a new family, and generally rides off into the sunset (vv.

10–17).

Is that not a bit flat, a bit sugary even?

And yet there are depths in this conclusion that are neither shallow nor sugary.

Alongside this final prose section of Job, let us take for our text a verse in the letter of James.

James is speaking to believers under pressure; he wants them to persevere, and he writes: “Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast.

You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful” (James 5:11).

James focuses on two people: Job with his perseverance and the Lord with his compassion and mercy.

Let us begin with Job.

The Perseverance of Job

Job’s perseverance or “steadfastness” or patience is an active quality, a pressing on, not a passive sitting back and letting it all wash over him (James 5:11).

I want us to consider two aspects of Job’s perseverance—perseverance in warfare and perseverance while waiting.

Perseverance in Warfare

The book of Job is so refreshingly honest about this.

Although Christians sometimes groan at the prospect of studying Job, again and again they are surprised and refreshed by the sheer honesty of this book.

We have seen that Job the believer is fighting a battle.

There is a battle going on; the Lord has been challenged by Satan, the Leviathan, a monster masquerading as god.

And as they war, it is not so much that Job is on the battlefield; Job is the battlefield.

The battle for the soul of Job is fought out in his struggles as the monster tears at his life.

It is a dark warfare.

Satan fills Job’s mind with images of despair, darkness, death, and futility.

Job is taken through the valley of the shadow of death.

He is taken there as a believer suffering for his faith; he is suffering because he is a believer.

We saw this in Job 1, 2. God singles out Job and says in essence, “Look, there’s a believer.”

Satan attacks Job for precisely that reason.

Job is not about human suffering in general; it is about the suffering endured by a believer because he or she is a believer.

Job is being persecuted not by human enemies but by Satan.

He endures disaster, tragedy, and sickness because he fears God.

Supremely this dark warfare is fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the blameless believer.

And as we see in the Gospels, Satan focuses his attack on Jesus with an even greater ferocity than upon Job.

From Herod’s attempt to have him slaughtered as a toddler through the temptations in the wilderness to the agony of the cross, Satan tears at Jesus—by temptation, discouragement, loneliness, betrayal, misunderstanding, and agony.

Day by day the Lord Jesus awoke to dark warfare.

Indeed Job is fulfilled in Jesus, and every follower of Jesus is called to follow in the footsteps of Job.

Job foreshadows Jesus, and the disciple cannot avoid the shadow.

As Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you [plural], that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you [singular] that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:31, 32).

Jesus did not pray that his disciples would be spared the sifting and that Satan would be forbidden his demand.

Rather he expected the demand would be granted, as it had been for Job.

And he prays that in this painful sifting Simon’s faith may not fail.

We ought to expect this.

Every morning we ought to wake up and say to ourselves, “There is a vicious, dark spiritual battle being waged over me today.”

Satan is very busy; wherever on earth there is a believer walking with God in loving fear, God says, “Look, there’s a believer,” and Satan says, “May I attack him/her?

I want to prove whether this is a real believer.”

And sometimes the Lord grants that terrible permission.

When he does, we ought not to be surprised, “as though something strange were happening” to us (1 Peter 4:12).

So here is one inescapable element of the normal Christian life: spiritual warfare.

That expectation relates to our circumstances.

The second expectation relates to our attitude of heart.

Perseverance in Waiting

Job perseveres by waiting, an active prayer-filled waiting.

In 42:7 God says to Eliphaz, “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”

Now on the face of it this is a surprising thing for God to say.

It is not surprising to us that God says the friends were wrong, but it ought to surprise us that the Lord says that in some way Job is right, for again and again Job says terrible things about God.

And yet in spite of the fact that Job charges God with being a wrongdoer (which is both serious and untrue, and God has rebuked him for it), God can say at the end that Job has spoken rightly of him.

How is this?

It is possible that God’s affirmation refers only to Job’s humble response to God’s speeches (40:3–5; 42:1–6), and it is true that this is “the simplest and clearest explanation” of what God says here.

And yet I think there is a deeper truth here.

It seems to me that God’s affirmation applies somehow not only to what Job has said but to who Job is.

The answer would seem to be this: the friends have a theological scheme, a tidy system, well-swept, well-defined, and entirely satisfying to them.

But they have no relationship with the God behind their formulas.

There is no wonder, no awe, no longing, no yearning, and no prayer to meet and speak with and hear and see the God of their formulas.