“Taking the Good with the Bad”

A sermon based upon Job 2: 1-10

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin,  Pastor

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Proper 22, October 7, 2012

Sometimes the Bible just “puts it out there” and we have to wrestle with it, whether we want to or not.

Today’s Bible text from Job puts a conversation out in front of us that none of us would ever want to overhear, but we must.  The discussion going on between “the LORD” and “Satan” is that they are talking about one of us…a human mortal named Job.  Job’s a good man.  He’s a righteous man.  The LORD even says, “There is none like him on the face of the earth.  He’s a blameless and upright man who fears God has done nothing wrong (2.3).  But Job is suffering great loss.  He’s lost everything.  He has nothing left but his good name.  This is where we find in in this text.  But Job still persists in his integrity, even though God has been trying to “do him in” for no reason at all (This is what the text actually says in 2.3 NRSV).  The only reason we are given for Job’s calamities is that Satan thought it would be a good idea to see how much Job could stand before he lost faith

I warned you that this was not a conversation you would want to hear.

Of course, up to this point, God has not yet laid a hand on Job, nor has Satan.  The Lord has taken away everything Job has--his children, his wealth, his home--everything!  But Job still holds on to his faith.   Now, however, Satan suggests that that the stakes should be made higher—that they should go after Job himself---to inflict him with great pain and suffering.   “Skin for Skin”(4.4), Satan suggests to the LORD, “touch his bone and his flesh and he will curse you to your face.”   With this proposal, we come to words I don’t want to read again, but I must.  The LORD gives in to Satan’s desire to hurt Job saying: “Very well, he is in your power, do with him what you will, but only spare his life” (4.6).  Do you see what is happening?  Satan has just convinced the LORD to bring all kinds of physical pain into Job’s life.   The LORD who loves Job and the LORD Job loves has left Job to suffer whatever hurt Satan’s desires, as long as Job is still breathing. 

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Such a story in the Bible gives theologians and preachers a fit.  Most of us don’t like to preach this story (I wouldn't be preaching it either, except that it is the lectionary text for today).  But It helps to know, right up front, that the real point of this story is not that God actually submits to Satan’s destructive, devilish wishes, but point is it that life can appear this way.  Sometimes the pain and hurt of life can be so overwhelming that it actually feels like God or Satan, or both of them are out to get us.  Life is not always fair and it can seem like God is losing and the devil is winning.  Read the newspaper lately?  Have you gone through a difficulty or lost a loved one?   Sometimes situations of life put us between the devil and the deep blue sea and we can’t figure out why.  We haven’t done anything to deserve this.  There is no reason for it.  Things are the way they are without any explanation.  Like Job, all we can do in that moment is take our seat “among the ashes”.  Have you ever found yourself there?  Have you ever had your faith tested?  If you haven’t, you will.  The question is not “if” but “when” and the only question is will we pass the test?

Last year a television station did a feature on an Army officer, a quadruple amputee at Walter Reed. The story elaborated on his lifelong enthusiasm to serve his country, his extensive training, his men’s confidence in him, and his record of high achievement before a hidden bomb blew his arms and legs away in Afghanistan. He approaches his “rehabilitation” saying, “This is the story I have been given to live.”   What story have you been given?  We don’t always “choose” our story.  Sometimes we do.  Sometimes it gets chosen for us?  How do we try to make sense of our story when everything that we thought we had nailed down comes loose---when life has become like one of those airliners where the seats have worked loose and could be hurled around at us and others like missiles?  

The book of Job is one attempt to tell a story when no story makes sense, when there is no good reason to make a situation reasonable.  We can find some “bad” reasons things happen, but those are never enough.  We can’t live by “bread” or “bad news” alone.  Something in the human spirit desires to find some “good” reason even for the bad that takes place in the world.  During the Bubonic Plague of the 14 century, called Black Death, medieval Europeans wrestled with fact that so many were dying and how they died so quickly.  One person graphically described how many who died would have breakfast with their family in the morning, and had supper with their ancestors by evening.  Perhaps the greatest pandemic in human history, it was believed to have started in China, where it killed about 30% of the population, then traveled the Silk Road to Europe, where it killed up to 60% of the population.  But even though so many died and so many struggled, there was one thing none of them struggled with.   In the middle ages people knew “why” they people suffered and died.  The King of Sweden spoke the answer for such a horrible situation by saying, “God for the sins of men has struck this great punishment of sudden death.  By it most of our countrymen are dead” (As Quoted in “What Shall We Say”, by Tom Long, 2011, p. 6).   

Then, people knew what to say and what to do about suffering and pain.  If God had caused the Black Death, then only God could stop it.  Do you know what the medical therapy was for the plague?  In that medieval world people were told to do acts of penance, take religious pilgrimages, or find a way of propitiation by literally whipping and scouring their own flesh to take away sins.  Today, we don’t even know what penance is, we take vacations and not pilgrimages, and who can even define the meaning of the word propitiation?  If you have a bad case of the flu you would be very shocked to have your doctor advise you to “Take Tylenol every four hours, drink plenty of fluids and say your prayers of confession, since God has made you sick for your sins.” But this is exactly what people used to believe about pain and suffering.  People were once absolutely sure that if something bad happened, they had done something wrong and God was out to get them.        

Our text has the LORD and the Satan having a conversation about just how bad sick Job will become. God is not going to do the deed himself, but God puts the power directly into the hands of Satan.  Any way you look at it, it’s a very ugly and scary picture.  If we take this story as it stands, Satan is mastermind of evil and God goes along with the plan so Job’s faith will tested, and then, Job’s faith will either be destroyed or proven true.  Yet, this storyline of the Lord God and Satan making wagers about the fate of a human being has a coarseness, crudeness, and even cruelty to it.   It even sounds a little like one of those jokes about two guys hanging out in a bar.

“Hey, how about my Denver Broncos?” says one.  “Yeah, they’re great,” says the other, “Payton Manning’s great too, but take him out of the lineup and your team falls to pieces.”  “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks it doesn’t!”  “You’re on!”  God says: “Hey, how about my servant Job?” says the LORD, “There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (2.6).  Sure he’s a virtuous man,” says Satan, “but virtue pays off for him and pays him very well. When the blessings stop coming his way and he is no longer under your protection he won’t be such a faithful churchgoer and all around great guy. He’ll spit in your face!”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t” God says.  “You’re on,” says the Satan.

Having Satan placing his bets against you and having the good LORD betting on you is not the way I want to envision my odds in this life.   While I do like the idea of having God on my side, if God allows Satan to make faithful, good people into punching bags, just to prove our faith, it doesn’t make me want to be close to God.  This scene reminds me what one person wrote to an editor of the New York Times, “If God exists, who needs enemies, I’ll take … Lady Luck.”  I don’t go that far, but reading these negotiations can make me want to run and hide, if there was any you could.   

Also, when we read this story of Job, we cannot help but shudder at all the collateral damage we see lying all around.  If it is really a test that Satan plans and God approves, it sounds sadistic and heartless.   It’s not just one man suffering, but:  “Seven sons and three daughters dead….seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants slaughtered in cool blood.” (In this storyteller’s own imagination the servants aren’t even significant enough to count their losses!)   Should such a “dreadful” story be placed right here in the middle of our nice Bible?  But I will at least say this: It’s pretty brave for the Bible to dare tell a story that doesn’t make real any final sense of everything.   

“Are you a card player?” the doctor asks his patient. 

“Sometimes,” the patient answers, not sure where this conversation is going.

“Then you know what it’s like to be dealt a bad hand.”

WILL YOU “CURSE GOD AND DIE”?

This story about God and Satan placing their bets for and against Job leaves Job with a “bad hand” and us it also does not leave us with a very flattering portrait of God.  We can understand Satan’s role, but why does God allow the game to be played and the hand to be dealt in the first place?  This is something Job’s story simply does not tell us.  Why these things happen is unanswerable to Job and remains unanswered up to the very end when God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind: “Job, How dare you make everything darker with all your questions….Stand up, act like a man and let me question you!... Where were you when I made the world?  Could you understand it all, even if I told you?”  (Job 38: 1-3).

Although Job’s story begins with God betting on Job, but it doesn’t end there.  God’s tells Job there is no explanation about what God allows or about why bad things happen.  In fact, if you read on in the story, Job’s three friends get into really big trouble because they try to explain things.   The real point in Job’s story seems to be that nobody knows why.  Life can very much seem like the devil is out to destroy us, while God does nothing but stand back and bet on us.   But I hope you don’t settle for this kind of answer to evil because this is not the point.  Job’s story does not explain evil, but it questions how good people like Job and us will respond when trouble comes into our good lives, when trouble comes for no rhyme or reason and with no logic or sense.   The main focus of this story is not on what God does, but it’s on Job.  What will this human person named Job do when life falls apart and when he only feels the pain?  Even Job’s “foolish” wife is wondering.  She plays the fool for all of us when she asks Job what we all ask of ourselves:  "Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die" (Job 2:9).  This is the question, not the answer, which the book of Job brings home to us as all human eyes are on this person of faith in pain to see what he will do next.

William Sloan Coffin was once a well-known preacher from New York City.  He grew up surrounded by the Christian faith.  His grandfather and uncle were preachers; a seminary president and a professor.  But Bill Coffin did not go along with this faith stuff when he was young.  He had money and wealth.  His father owned a company in New York.  He thought faith was for sissies, for weaklings, and for people who needed a crutch to get them through life.  Bill was an activist.  He was a man of action.  He had been in the CIA.  He lived a life of adventure and felt free from needing to have any kind of faith.  Then one day, one of Bill Coffin’s friends died.  Bill attended the funeral.  During the funeral message he heard the preacher quote this very testimony from the first chapter of Job, “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!”  Suddenly, Bill Coffin heard those words differently than ever before.  “O.K. Coffin”, a voice told him deep inside, you’d think it’s silly to worship a God who gives, but you could you worship a God who takes life away from you!   It was like God was saying, “Now, you have received the good up to this point, but can you now receive the bad?   It was then, Bill Coffin came to realize, “Hey, I’m the one who has been the sissie!”  “I’ve been the weakling!”  “I’m the foolish one to thinks that faith is just about “getting things from God!”  No, true faith is not just about getting, it’s also about losing and letting go  (As told by Will Willimon at Elevation Preaching Conference, Gardner-Webb University, September, 2012).

Life will always test our faith.  Faith is not just about worshiping the God who gives me what I want, but true faith is about worshiping the God who will allow everything to be taken away from me.  Faith is anything but for sissies.  It takes a lot of guts to worship a God like that.  The truth is, only a sovereign God who gives and who takes is worthy of worship.  In an honest reading of the story of Job, we are not given any answers, but Job's story keeps asking us:  What will we do?  How will we live?  How will we suffer?  Will we still have faith?  Will we pass the test?  Will we look around when it seems that God has abandoned us, but still obey and trust him to the very end of pain or life?  Can we answer life by living our own questions as Job did his, when he answered his wife in his faith: Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad" (2:10)?  This is Job’s testimony and it is the only witness true faith can have: “The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord!” (1.21).

WILL YOUR PERSIST IN YOUR INTEGRITY?

Since Job’s wife sounded foolish, let me end with a story about a woman who decided against being foolish.   She was nurse in a tuberculosis hospital.  She once resigned her JOB, or I mean job (play on words intended).  She resigned her job because she has fellows in her care with only one lung, half of one lung, or less; little bitty guys lying up in bed.  At night, sometimes with nothing on but pajamas and robes, these guys tie sheets together and sneak out through a window, door, or any way; go to a liquor store; get all liquored up; and come back in the chill of the night, wheezing and coughing.  She gets the oxygen, she nurses them, she goes over another eight-hour shift.  She’s a beautiful woman, but her legs have those big knotted veins from standing sixteen hours to bring this little frail fellow back to breathing again.  Finally it clears up.  He’s breathing again; she takes away the oxygen; and he ties the sheets together and goes out the window to the liquor store.

            And she quits.  Why should I care?  He doesn’t care!  Let him die.  The next morning, the day after she has resigned, she goes back to work (From Fred Craddock Stories, p. 41).

None of us can control what happens in life.  Neither can we control what people do.  But we can receive the bad as we have received the good.  We can let God be God, and we can and keep going on and working with what we have to work with.  Letting God be God can be good news, but it’s never easy news.  We must take the bad with the good, but faith says the good we receive is still worth the bad that can come.   Isn’t this why Job did not “sin with his lips”?  Isn’t this why Scripture says that Jesus’ “went around doing good” (Acts 10.38) no matter the price he had to pay for doing it?  “Isn’t it better to suffer for doing good, if suffering is God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil” says Peter (1 Peter 3.17).  Paul also, claims to know something, which kept him going, when he said: “If God is for us, who is against us?  He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? (Rom 8:31-32).   What the likes of people of faith like Job, Peter, Paul, and most of all, Jesus can teach us is that when there is love and hope in God, life can be worth the difficult price humans must pay.  Even the broken heart has said in hard won wisdom, “It is better to have love and to have lost, than never to have loved at all.”  That’s part of what it means to keep the faith, like Job.  We can’t understand it.  We don’t have to answer anything with our lips.  We just have to take it as it comes and wait on God for “everything else”. 

Will we have faith when faith is all we have left to give?  Job answers the way faith must answer: "Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?"… "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD"… In all this, Scripture says,  Job did not sin with his lips (2.10).  He did not “charge God with wrongdoing” (Job 2. 10, 22-22).   Job didn’t blame God.  Jesus didn’t either.  Jesus didn’t even blame us, or those who crucified him.  Remember his final words were  not, ‘God is going to get you for this, but, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  The answer faith knows is that promise and hope comes from blessing not from blaming.  Faith’s final answer to suffering is this: “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  Amen.