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Review and Introduction

The story of Job so far has been one of tragedy after tragedy.

He lost everything including all of his ten children, his livestock, and his dignity. His wife has betrayed him. His friends are accusing him instead of supporting him.

And God is silent.

The purpose of our study through Job is to gain wisdom by entering into the undeserved suffering of Job. Many people believe that the purpose of Job is to help us understand why bad things happen to good people.

But the message of Job is really to help us to know God better and gain wisdom so that when we or others encounter suffering, we are able to walk through it with confident trust in a wise and gracious God.

We are all hardwired to think that things should be fair. As a child, if you ever got punished for something you didn’t do, and you watched as the guilty party walked away with no punishment, then you know how unfair life can be.

As we get older, we see how the rich get richer through taking advantage of the vulnerability of others.

We see the government make unjust decisions. We watch as the poor and aging are neglected while the wealthy and powerful live it up.

We know that life isn’t fair, but we believe deeply that it ought to be. This deep longing for fairness is a testimony to the justice of God. Yet, as we see in Job, even those who deserve God’s blessings don’t always get it.

That is because there is more to say about God. He is just, but he is not limited to behaving in how we would like his justice should play out in our lives.

Remember, he has a whole world to govern, filled with all sorts of overlapping and colliding problems that he manages not only through justice but with wisdom, patience, and grace.

Today, we are in Job chapters 8-10 in which we see both a speech from Bildad and a response from Job.

Bildad is concerned with keeping Job aligned with a right view of God.

He has God neatly placed in a box of his own imagination, one in which evil gets punished and the righteous are blessed.

Job has experienced a dramatic form of punishment in Bildad’s view, therefore he must have done something terribly wrong.

Not only that, but now Job seems to be accusing God of perverting justice.

So, in Bildad’s view, Job did something to deserve what he got and if he continues to claim he is righteous, he is a heretic and should get the full wrath of God’s justice.

Job responds by talking about why he is holding onto hope, followed by a lament that is brutally honest yet still somewhat hopeful.

Job held a similar view to Bildad and his other friends. He believed the same things about God’s justice.

It’s easy to believe that when life is going well. It’s easy for the prosperous to promote the prosperity gospel.

But, what about when a righteous person suffers? Keep in mind, righteousness does not mean perfection. It means devotion to God, which includes regular repentance and reconciliation, which is how Job lived.

And he is not letting go of this testimony. He believes, and it is true, that he has done nothing to deserve his suffering. This continues to be the great dilemma of the story.

The main message today is that God is not limited to our understanding of him. When we accept that there is much more to God than our limited understanding, we can approach him with humility and honesty.

Only when we seek the truth about God with this posture of humility and honesty will we have a source of hope that can withstand any injustice or suffering we experience.

Let’s begin by reading Job 8:1-7

Harmful Hope (Job 8)

Bildad’s speech promotes a rigid understanding of God’s justice system. He implies that Job is suffering as a result of sin and that his children must have deserved what happened to them.

He is accusing Job of believing that God has perverted justice. The idea of perversion implies a bending or twisting of something that is meant to be straight. In this speech, Bildad is revealing his understanding of God.

His understanding is similar to many in ancient times and even today. We tend to get a hold of some way that God works and we can’t accept any other way.

If someone suggests that God operates outside of our own understanding of how he works, we think it is twisted, crooked, or false.

We believe that God never works in ways that are outside of our own understanding.

Of course, this way of thinking is absurd. Scripture is full of statements indicating that the ways of God are unknown to the human mind.

Isaiah 55:8–9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Romans 11:33–34 “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”

So, it’s best to live with the wisdom of Proverbs 3:5–7 “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil.”

In Jesus’ teachings, particularly in the sermon on the mount, he provided multiple corrections to how the people thought about the law and how the kingdom of God works.

A prime example is the beatitudes in which Jesus makes several statements about how those who experience difficulty are blessed.

The point is not that difficulty in and of itself is a good thing, but that you don’t need to think of yourself of cursed when you experience difficulty.

This would have been a hard statement for those who considered themselves blessed because they are wealthy or successful. Perhaps wealth and success do not imply blessing after all.

And it would have been an encouraging message for those who considered themselves cursed or punished by God because of their difficult circumstances.

In both cases, Jesus revealed something about God that would have been outside of the common understanding in those days. Perhaps the same is true today.

Maybe we have put God into a box that he doesn’t belong in. We judge ourselves and others according to an incomplete picture of how God and his creation works.

The point is not that God is completely unknowable or unpredictable. There are many certainties about God that are very clear in Scripture.

He is eternal. He is the creator of everything. He is both just and merciful. He is generous. There are a thousand statements we can make that describe God.

But, within all of those statements are nuances that do not negate their truth but show that God’s wisdom and goodness is far outside our ability to comprehend.

We may be able to describe God as just, but when his justice operates in a way that is different than how we understand justice, perhaps it is our own understanding that is limited.

This is the case with Bildad. He believes God exercises his justice through retribution. Good is rewarded and evil is punished.

Something bad happened to Job, but if he is truly righteous, then God will restore his prosperity.

At the end of his speech, he is genuinely trying to give Job hope, but once again, it is a misplaced hope: Job 8:20–22

This message dismisses Job’s pain and offers false and harmful hope.

It is hope based on the rigid, transactional, and impersonal view of God. It is hope based on Job’s performance and the belief that God will reward good behaviour.

But God’s love is not transactional. He’s not waiting for us to do the right thing so that we can receive prosperity and blessing. More than anything, he wants relationship.

So, let’s turn now to Job’s speech. Let’s read Job 9:1-22.

Holding Onto Hope (Job 9)

Job immediately turns to the idea of entering into legal action with God. He uses the language of a courtroom, as if he is trying to argue his case before God.

He explores how he might prove himself right and get justice.

This is what Job wants to do. He wants to plead his case before God.

But he is worried that if he faces God in court that God will not hear his case.

He then goes into a hymn of praise about the power and majesty of God as an explaination for why he fears taking God to court.

He mentions evidences of how God has exercised his justice against evil through natural disaster.

He speaks of constallations which were included in pagan worship.

They believed that the stars were used by the gods for judgment. But God is above all that. He created the stars.

Job has a clear sense of God’s power and wisdom. And this is why he agrees with Bildad to some extent.

Yes, it is true that it would be a fatal mistake to challenge God’s justice, yet he can do nothing else because he knows he is innocent. His view of God and his experience have collided.

This all but crushes Job’s hope to be restored. His only hope is for a mediator, someone to represent him.

At this point in the story, without looking ahead, it seems impossible for Job to be restored.

But, we know the end of the story. Job is fully restored in the end. Before we get there, let’s take a look at chapter 10 which is made up of an honest expression of lament that continues to show Job’s belief in the retribution principle of justice.

Let’s read 10:2-12.

Honest Hope (Job 10)

Job speaks directly to God, face to face, in raw lament. His words sound bitter and demanding. He wants God to not make a final decision that Job is wicked.

He first wants God to present the evidence for what he did to deserve his suffering.

In his mind, because of the retribution principle, the tragedies that happened represent a guilty verdict against Job. So, he accuses God through a series of questions.

These questions express honest confusion. He doesn’t understand why God would turn his back on an innocent person.

Although he has a limited understanding of God’s justice and wisdom, he is right to express this confusion.

Job realizes that what’s blocking his hope for fairness isn’t just God’s power or greatness, but an unsuppressed anger that God has directed at him.

This anger is like a forceful opponent in a battle, using everything at God’s disposal against Job.

And while Job’s plan to settle things in a legal case against God fails on a logical level, emotionally the struggle is just beginning.

For the first time, Job openly feels God’s anger, and that stirs up a fierce anger inside him as well. Intellectually, Job is stuck, but emotionally, everything is still at stake.

There is more to come in Job’s courtcase against God. He has not given up hope entirely because he is still alive and still believes that God is truly just.

Conclusion

Earlier, I said that we know the end of the story.

Out of the whirlwind, God will speak to Job. His opening words in chapter 38 are, “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?”

Then he goes on to show all the ways that Job’s understanding of God and creation is limited.

In Job 38:31–33 God refers back to Job’s statement from chapter 9 about God being the maker of the constellations:

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s Belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?”

God is asking whether Job is able to bring about justice through the manipulation of constellations that, in the common view of the ancient people, determined the distribution of wealth and prosperity on earth.

All this is to say that Job’s hope is based on a justice system that he can’t understand or control.

Yes, God is just, but he will exercise justice with wisdom that is far beyond our comprehension.

Our hope is not in understanding all the ways of God, but trusting that his ways are good.

In the end, Job will be restored, not because he is innocent but because God decided to restore him. Job’s innocence has nothing to do with the blessings of God.

Although Job’s understanding of God and how we operates was incomplete, the point is that he sought God for restoration.

And, in the end, all who call on God will be restored. Not because of our righteousness or comprehension but because God wants to restore anyone and everyone who wants to be restored.

And this generosity and grace does not undermine his justice because in God’s wisdom, he made a way to be both just and gracious.

Romans 3:23–26 says, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”

Real hope is not found by trying to obey our way to God’s favour or putting on a show to make ourselves seem righteous or prosperous.

Real hope is honest with our difficulties and the challenges of life.

And in this honesty, we can call out to God and he will answer from within our difficulties. He speaks from the storm.

It’s not always what we want to hear, but it’s what we need to hear so that we can orient our perspective from God’s wisdom instead of our own.

This week, speak honestly with God about what you are experiencing and what you want.

Don’t tell him what you think he wants you to say. Pour out your heart to him. You will not offend him with your honesty.

You will offend him by taking your honesty out on someone or something else when he is the only one who can truly comfort and restore you.

You will offend him by denying him the opportunity to speak from the whirlwind of your troubles.

As we prepare for the closing song, I want to read a prayer that gives you an example of how we can experience honest hope.

“True God of all truths, how we desire certainty in the midst of confusion. We think we could make it if we just had one thing we could know without a doubt. Yet, this desire for certainty reflects our desperation for control rather than trust in your wisdom. We pray, therefore, not for certainty but for hope and joy knowing that you have heard us, you see us, and you have given us a path to follow in the midst of confusion. May we be content with your presence. Amen.”

Benediction

May the God of justice and wisdom bless you and keep you, may his generous and loving presence be your satisfaction, and may the hope of complete and eternal restoration be your strength. Through Jesus Christ, our mediator. Amen.