Sunday, November 25,
2012
That’s the message the authors of
the book of Job wanted to leave with the readers in the last chapter. We don’t know a lot about where this book
came from. We don’t know if there was a
man in history named Job or if wisdom writers in Israel or Jews in Babylon
wrote this book. The origins of the book
are uncertain. But we can look at the
final product and see that this book intends to leave us – the readers – with
an unmistakable truth. God sees and
knows us, including our worst flaws. God
will forgive us and invite us into fellowship.
The book of Job hits on an array of topics. This idea of forgiveness and restoration is
among the most important. We are left with this reality. God is a forgiving, restoring God.
In Job chapters 1 & 2, we see
God and the Satan locked in a debate in some otherworldly place. This is God’s first set of speeches. The 2nd is the whirlwind speech in
Job 38-41. In what is one of the longest
sets of God-speeches in the Bible, God recounts for Job His creative power and
His creative interest. The last of the
speeches of God in Job is shorter. It’s
found in Job 42, verses 7-9. God has
spoken to Satan. God has spoken to
Job. Now, once more God speaks, this time
with one of Job’s friends, Eliphaz.
Eliphaz has along with Bildad and
Zophar sat at the side of Job. He
grieved over Job’s pain. For a full
week, he was silent beside his wounded friend.
Then Eliphaz spoke, expounding theology they all trusted. He knew of Job’s virtue, but he, Job, Bildad,
and Zophar were committed to retribution theology. If you are righteous your life is good. If you suffer it is a sign that you weren’t
righteous. You must have sinned. You must now admit your sin and repent. Eliphaz preached this gospel to Job. Job rejected it with everything that was in
him. In the end, God vindicated
Job. Uh-Oh.
Now, God speaks to Eliphaz.
Who wouldn’t want to hear the voice of God? Who wouldn’t want to be Noah or Moses or
Jonah or Paul? God speaks audibly, or in
some way that we can’t miss it. That was
the experience of Eliphaz. The Lord
spoke to Him. The Lord said to Him, “My
wrath is kindled against you.” Uh-Oh.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned in this series on
Job that bad theology is a more serious error than we might think. We can be casual with our speculations about
God, but God takes speech seriously. God
puts a lot on the words of our mouths, thoughts in our brains, and the
reflections of our hearts. Eliphaz,
Bildad, and Zophar had done a lot of preaching, said much about God. Now God looks to them and says, “My wrath is
kindled against you.”
What do we do with that?
We spend a lifetime reading the
Bible from a certain point of view.
Then, through prayer and new teaching, we discover that our reading has
been so thoroughly mistaken, what we thought about God we now discover was the
opposite of what is actually true about God.
We practiced misguided theology.
We raise our families according to
what we think Christianity teaches and we do this over the course of
years. Then we read the scriptures with
greater care and we pray with more receptive hearts and it dawns on us that
we’ve been horribly mistaken about many truths.
We’ve been living a mistaken faith.
We make choices in life based on
what we want – what we desire for ourselves.
We live and choose and construct a morality, and then when our lifestyle
is confronted by the Gospel, it is clear we’ve been totally adrift, far from
God’s ways in the major areas of life.
We have operated under false truth.
Finally God speaks and speaks
clearly. “My wrath is kindled against
you.” At this point agnosticism sounds
nice. You know agnosticism – I don’t
know if there’s a God or a Heaven or a Hell, and I am quite happy in my
ignorance, thank you very much. Eliphaz
discovers, yes Virginia, there really is a God, and this God’s wrath is
kindled! Eliphaz doesn’t say a word
which is good because this angry God didn’t invite a response. God had heard enough from Eliphaz, Bildad,
and Zophar.
“My wrath is kindled against you and 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 for yourselves a burnt
offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer
not to deal with you according to your folly” (42:8).
What does God do when his anger is burning
against these guys? Is this a fiery,
Sodom and Gomorrah situation? Does God
at least go Moses on Pharaoh and
unleash some plagues on the three friends.
No. He invites them to worship. In the process God restores the very
community their misspoken words disrupted.
They sinned against Job and against God by speaking wrongly about God to
Job. This sin is grievous enough to
warrant a personal appearance by God.
Probably, the writers of the story of Job were
hearing all sorts of really bad prophecy spread throughout war-ravaged Israel
and among the exiles in Babylon. To
combat such destructive theological speech, they presented God’s rebuke of
Eliphaz, but the story does not end with Eliphaz writhing in pain that God has
inflicted as a punishment for sin. God
allows the loathsome sores to fall on Job, the righteous one, the one who can
take it. Job suffers and his faith
stands. These weak-souled ones who spout
erroneous ideas about God are invited to worship! They mumbled uniformed thoughts about a God
they did not know. They are ushered into
the presence of that God.
Eliphaz has to tremble. My
wrath is kindled against you. But
then he is summoned to worship. Worship
is fellowship with God and with the community of God’s people. God tells these three sinners to do what they
had been telling Job to do: repent and turn back to God.
As we follow this movement – announcement of
wrath, invitation to worship – we come to a key moment. This is the human response. Job 42:9 - “Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the
Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite went and did as the Lord had told
them.” We fall into trouble and are
confronted in our sin. That serious trouble
becomes absolute, out-of-control calamity when our response to confrontation is
to try to cover up, make up stories or excuses, or to shift blame. When we do everything but accept the truth of
our sin and when we try to escape the punishment, then our trouble mounts and
builds until we are crushed.
Job’s friends did exactly as God commanded. They humbled themselves with a guilt offering
and they asked Job, the one they’d sinned against, to pray for them. The humble response of these three is
extremely important.
So too is Job’s response. The narrator does not tell us his words or
his attitude. Maybe a part of him was
thinking, “O sure, you jerks. Now that I
am vindicated, you three clowns who did not suffer what I suffered – now you
want me to pray for you, now that you’re in trouble.” The narrator doesn’t say any of that. He does not tell us Job’s speech at all. We simply know Job prayed. Whatever emotions boiled up in the man, he
acted on behalf of his friends. He
prayed for them just as in chapter 1 he had sacrificed and worshiped for the sake
of any sins his children might have
committed.
God accepted Job’s prayer. God restored Job’s fortunes. Friends and extended family came around
Job. His was a happy ending that
included 10 more children.
Much of Job topples the conventional theology of
retribution – the righteous are rewarded with prosperous lives and the sinful
are punished with bad fortune and bad health.
But that theology is operative in other Old Testament texts that are
concurrent with Job. And at the end,
righteous Job is richly blessed. Theology
is never simple. There’s never one set
of ideas that disproves all others. God
is bigger and more complicated than that.
But that reality – the complexity of truth and
complexity of God – is all the more reason why this encounter with Eliphaz that
begin with God’s wrath in the end is such good news for you and me. Job the righteous man prayed, and God
forgave. One more righteous than Job
prays for each one of us.
In John 17, Jesus prays that God would protect
his followers. We read the
scripture. Because of the prompting of
the Holy Spirit and the word we have from the scriptures, handed down from the
first Christian communities, we are Christ-followers. We are disciples. Jesus prays that we would be protected from
the evil one. He says, “Father, I desire
that those you have given me may be with me where I am, to see my glory” (John
17:24).
And we read in Romans,
We do
not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us
with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who
searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because[a] the
Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (8:26b-27).
And
in the book of Hebrews,
Christ
has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true
things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our
behalf (9:24).
The
community that preserved the story of Job for Israel knew, in spite of all the
losses Israel endured, that God is good and that God’s anger is not the
characteristic that predominates. Yes,
Israel had sinned, but in seeing Eliphaz and the others forgiven and restored
as Job comes to a close, Israel can hang on to the hope that they will be
restored and forgiven.
Do
we make the mistakes that Eliphaz made?
Do we produce wrong ideas about God?
Do preach when care is what is needed?
Do we try to force God into our previously held ideas instead of humbly
seeking God daily? We sin. And it costs.
But
it is not Job who is praying for us. It
is Jesus, the Son of God himself. As we
close the book on Job for now, we open the book on hope. We look to Advent, the
season of celebrating Jesus’ birth and anticipating his coming at the end of
time. We know God will do new things in
our lives – as individuals and as a church.
Job’s
life is doubly blessed. In Job we see
that that God is unpredictable. We also
see that God can be trusted. Life is
full of twists and turns, ups and downs.
In all of it, God forgives, calls us into worship, and into fellowship
with Him and with one another. When we
forget that, Jesus steps for us. We have
the Holy Spirit calling both us and the Father back together because God truly
wants relationship with us. That is the
good news of Job and it is the witness of the entire Bible.
AMEN
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