A New Way of Being Human (Romans 4:23-5:5), 3rd Sunday of Lent

Someone messes up and he’s really hard on himself.  “I can’t believe I did that!”  I’ve experienced this and you probably have too.  I fumble or say something I shouldn’t, something hurtful.  Or, I forget something, and it’s the 4^th time.  My forgetting disrupts things for other people.  My mistakes hurt not only me, but others. 

            “I’m such dope,” I say, being hard on myself.  But then a friend comforts me.  “Don’t worry about it,” he says trying to smooth things over, “You’re only human.”

            Only human.  Is that the mark of humanity?  Do we understand our humanness by the blunders we commit?  You’ve heard that old saying.  “To err is human, but to forgive is divine.” 

            God had something else in mind when humans were created.  “Let us make humankind in our image,” God said (Genesis 1:26).  To err is human?  Not according to God.  From God’s standpoint, to be human is to be the zenith of creation, the high point.  To be human is to be that created being that is most like God and related to God in a way no other created thing is. 

            I make a mistake and shrug it off, “Well, I am only human.”  No says God.  When we sin, we’re something other than what God intended for humans.  But we all sin and history has shown we don’t have the will power to stop.  We give in to temptation.  We say hurtful things.  We turn away from God’s path.  We lie, cheat, steal, and hoard.  Some even kill.  We disrespect, disregard, withhold help, withhold forgiveness, and withhold love. 

            That’s why Jesus came.  The only way to conquer sin was to allow it to reach its ultimate consequences – death.  When Jesus went to the cross, he carried sin with him.  When he died on the cross, he killed the eternal effect of sin.  When he rose, he conquered death.  In 2^nd Corinthians 5:17, the Apostle Paul writes that in Christ, there is new creation.  Commenting on this and on Paul’s concept of what happens when we turn to Jesus, the scholar N.T. Wright says, “Paul points to a new way of being human.”[i]  

            However, when we think back to God’s original creation intent, this ‘new way of being human,’ which is, I think the correct way of seeing Paul’s vision, this new way is actually a reclaiming of God’s original idea.  It’s not that we go back to Eden and live the way Adam and Eve did there.  But, we have the life with God that God always wanted humans to have with Him.  To be human is to be in relationship with God, free from sin and with no fear of death.

            Let’s follow Romans 5 to see how Paul presents a new kind of humanity that we experience and live when we give our lives to Jesus and decide to follow him as our master and Lord. 

            First we must refer back to Romans 4.  There Paul talks about Abraham the great man of faith in the Old Testament.  Paul’s point about Abraham is that he was considered righteous by God, but not because he did anything great.  Abraham did not earn the righteousness credited to him.  God gave Abraham favor because Abraham believed God (4:3).  Abraham trusted God and changed his entire life because God told him to.  Abraham moved his household to a new place because God told him to. 

At the end of Romans chapter 4, Paul writes this was true not only of Abraham, but also of us.  When we believe in God who raised Jesus from the dead, when we follow Him, and when we give our lives to Him, we are counted as righteous. Everything Paul writes about Abraham and about faith applies now to people who follow Jesus.

What does this mean?

To be counted as right with God because we believe in Jesus and live in his grace means we have peace with God.  Sin makes peace with God impossible.  When we benefit from lies and deception and get ahead in life by pushing others back, we can’t have peace with God.  When we participate in racist systems and fail to fight the evils of our day, our relationship with God is injured.  When we speak harshly to one another and do not show love, we’re cut off from our Heavenly Father.  But in Christ, all sins are forgiven and we have peace with God. 

Because of this peace, it says in verse 2 that we have access to God.  God may be a mystery we will never fully understand, but we are invited to step into that mystery.  We become a part of it. Within that mystery, because of Jesus, we are sons and daughters of God.  We stand in grace, and though we have made mistakes in life, those sins no longer cling to us or color us.  We are seen differently.  At the end of Romans 5:2 it even says we share the glory of God.  I don’t honestly know what that means.  I only have glimpses.  But I joyfully hold on to the promise that I will know more and more of the glory of God as I grow in Christ and even more when I enter the promised resurrection.  The blessings are here and then more so in the future. 

Yet this is not just feel-good, pie-in-the-sky, babble divorced from reality.  Paul knew better than most the hardships of life.  In 2^nd Corinthians 11 he recites his own resume of pain, suffering that came precisely because he was Jesus’s disciple.  Shipwrecked, flogged, beaten with rods; it all came about in the course of following Jesus.  In our reading, Romans 5, Paul declares the benefits of even these painful experiences. 

He sees God in the suffering and the suffering produces endurance.  He finds out who he is as a man in the most trying of times.  I have sat with people in hospital waiting rooms, visited people incarcerated, had conversations at the funeral home; people often have their most profound moments with God in these hard places.  From righteousness affixed to us by God when we believe, to an invitation into the mystery of God, to the audacious promise of sharing in God’s glory, to the sense that we even meet God in times of suffering, we grow into a knowledge of how life is different when we follow Jesus.

Without Christ, we think money, or the things money can buy, or the security money and power can provide will give us peace.  We are told fantastic experiences like a trip to Hawaii or sky diving or a golf vacation, or even simpler things like a “gold-level” credit card or a certain kind of look or body image will bring happiness.  I am not railing against vacations or material prosperity.  I am not railing against anything.  I am suggesting that the things we can buy are not the things that will give our lives meaning.  Nor are materialistic delights the source of transcendent joy. 

When we talk about the different kind of human, the people we will be in the Kingdom of God, maybe the distinction is most easily seen in how individuals orient their lives.  The woman or man who is of the world has happiness as his or her ultimate life pursuit.  The new kind of human, the one living as God intends his image bearers to be has love as the determining force in his or her life.

Why love?  We’ve talked about sin being nailed to the cross and death defeated in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.  We’ve talked about the ways our life shifts when we are in Christ. We have peace with God, we have access to God, and in our sufferings and in hard times we grow closer to God.  Why we would claim that love is the ultimate value for the new kind of human?

Romans 5:5 says, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  Note the direct connection between love and the Holy Spirit.  With the Holy Spirit in us, love is in us.  Imagine you are a coffee mug, one full of fresh, glorious, hot coffee; full to the brim.  Now imagine someone pouring a brand new pot into you after you’re already full.  It flows out everywhere.  That’s the Holy Spirit pouring into us.  That love of God keeps coming and coming until it spills out, and those around us are drenched with God’s love. 

Some Bible readers rightly point out that the term ‘trinity’ is never mentioned in the Bible.  So, they ask, why do we insist that we know God as three – one God existing in three distinct person, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  I think the answer is love.  Jesus – God the Son, God in human flesh – was asked, what is the greatest commandment?  He answered, “Love.”  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.”  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Jesus gave these as the ultimate commands for how human beings should live under God, but Jesus also knew that it would be impossible us to keep this command on our own power.  He never meant for us to live on our own power.  To be the kind of people wants us to be, we live in constant contact with God, depending on God for help in all things.  When Jesus gave these commands, he add this: we are to follow Him.

When Paul writes Romans, Jesus has already risen, ascended, and is seated in Heaven at the right hand of the Father.  But thought he has gone there, that does not mean we are without help.  At the end of John’s Gospel, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto his followers (20:22).  In Acts chapter 2, the Holy Spirit spread like a wild fire to the hearts of people and they became followers of Jesus.  And here in Romans 5:5, it says God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus came, died, and rose, why?  Because God so loved the world.  Jesus in the flesh is God’s expression of love for us.  When asked how we should live life under God and into eternal life, Jesus said, “Love.  Love God and love people.”  Paul writes that love is poured into us by way of the Holy Spirit.  What holds the Trinity together?  Love.  How do the persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, work together to redeem humanity?  God shows love, exercises love, and gives love to the point of overflowing.

This brings us back to the quote from N.T. Wright I shared at the beginning.  Romans 5:5 is but one of many places where Paul hints at this new way of being human.  Filled with God’s love, love then pours from us in hundreds of ways.

·         A mom is forced to travel to another country and so has to leave her oldest child in charge of the younger ones while she’s gone; another mom brings that family food while she is away.

·         A husband takes a week of paid vacation so he can sit by his wife’s side as she recovers from a difficult surgery.

·         A small church offers financial help to a woman who cannot pay her medical bills.

·         A community of believers comforts a grieving family when the mother/grandmother dies.

·         A small group rejoices when one of the members gets a new job and throws a celebration/goodbye party.  At the party there is laughter and congratulations along with tears because they are happy for him and at the same time sad because he is moving.

·         A young professional who is just starting to make money in his first job, sets aside part of his paycheck to sponsor an impoverished child in another country because he wants that child to have a chance in life and to know Jesus.

These things are not exceptions and they are not few and far between examples.  These are normal occurrences for followers of Jesus because that Holy Spirit love has filled the church’s heart and now is pouring over.  When love floods out of the church, all in its path are blessed. 

N.T. Wright recalls the famous quote from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.”  Paul’s teaching about God topples over this old axiom.  My existence is not affirmed by the fact that I have self-awareness.  That I think is not proof of my existence, and more importantly it is not why I exist.  Per Romans 5:5, we say, “We are loved, therefore we are.”  Love is why God does what God does, and when we are in Christ, love is why we are who we are and why we act as we do.

As we sing our final song, think about how you have experienced God’s love and how the experience has changed your life so that you live differently now because of it.  If you’d like to, go to the witness wall, as we are singing.  Go write a little note about how you’ve been changed as a result of experiencing God’s love. 

If you don’t know what I mean, come and pray with me or with one of the others waiting to pray with you.  Come and ask God to pour His love into you today.  Come and do that as we sing.

AMEN

---

[i] N.T. Wright (2005), Paul: In Fresh Perspective, Fortress Press (Minneapolis), p.173.

The Good News in the Book of Job

Sunday, November 25, 2012

             Here is good news.  We have the hope of new life.  Do things look bleak?  Is life hard, depressing, and unfair?  God promises there will come something better.  Are the troubles are due to our own bad choices?  Do we suffer from mistakes we have made?  There is one who will pray for us and God will listen when that one prays and we will receive forgiveness. 

            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 2^nd 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

Houses of Clay (Job 4:17-19)

If there is a single Biblical vision for humanity, it is shalom.  Shalom is peace: living in right relationships with neighbors and with God. 

            To have shalom, one must be righteous.  What is ‘righteousness?’  Obedience to God?  Yes.  Is it proper worship?  Yes.  Is righteousness acting justly and being humble toward other people?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.   Righteousness is hard to obtain and harder still to define.  Yet shalom – the goal of humanity – is impossible without righteousness.

            Job’s friend Eliphaz stands before Job as Job suffers from loss, heartbreak, shock, and physical pain.  No one has suffered like Job.  He maintained that he was suffering unjustly because he had been blameless.  God said exactly that in the gathering of heavenly beings in Job chapter 1. 

            But Job’s friend Eliphaz does not believe he is without fault.  We can dismiss Eliphaz because we know he contradict God, but we shouldn’t write him off too quickly.  “Can mortals be righteous before God?”  Eliphaz asks.  God does not even trust his angels.  How can He trust us, humans who live in houses of clay whose foundation is dust” (4:19)?

           

            Each human being from the president to the guy driving the trash truck; we are houses of clay.

 

            In the days of the prophet Jeremiah, God asked,

            ⁵Then the word of the Lord came to me:

⁶Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

⁷At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, ⁸but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. ⁹And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, ¹⁰but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.

¹¹Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings. (Jeremiah 18:5-11)

 

            “Just like clay … so you are in my hand.”  We can ignore  Eliphaz, but God is the speaker in Jeremiah.  God says to his people, “Now … I am a potter shaping evil against you.”  It was because of sin, but even so, does God do evil?  Well, how we can ask such questions?  We’re clay.

            The Apostle Paul, in Romans:

 

But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is molded say to the one who molds it, “Why have you made me like this?” ²¹Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?  (Romans 9:20-21)

 

 

            Are we angry?  The preacher says we’re nothing but clay, mud.  No, not the preacher, the Bible.  Jeremiah, Job, Paul; it seems there’s Biblical consensus that humans aren’t much in the grand scheme of things. 

            We go back to Genesis, back to the beginning; we need some help here.  We’re just clay?  That can’t be right.  What does Genesis offer?  From Genesis chapter 2:

 

“The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:7)

 

            Eliphaz’s question is blaring now.  Can a mortal, a mere house of clay, be righteous?  We are formed, created.  There was a time when there was no Rob Tennant.  In 1969, no one had ever heard of Rob Tennant.  I had not existed.  I was born in 1970.  If I live 83 years, I’ll in die in 2053.  I am a blip on the screen of history.  I will die and my corpse will be consumed by maggots.  I am dust, clay, earth.  Can a mortal be righteous and enjoy Shalom?  Can Job?  Can I?  You? 

            What does ‘clay’ mean in the book of Job.  Eliphaz says human beings are houses of clay.  Zophar, another friend of Job’s, like Eliphaz and Bildad before him judges Job to be guilty.  He rejects Job’s innocence saying that God’s wisdom is unattainable for humans, and it is by God’s wisdom, Zophar implies, that Job is found guilty.  Job says to Zophar, “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes, your defenses are defenses of clay” (13:12).  Clay when dried crumbles and blows in the wind like dust.  When hardened it is weak and easily smashed.  Dust; nothing; weak. 

What about the young man Elihu?  He says to Job, “Before God I am as you are; I too was formed from a piece of clay.  No fear of me need terrify you” (33:6-7).  Job, I’m clay like you, nothing to fear.  Nothing to be impressed by.  Nothing. 

You and I, church, we are houses of clay.  Can we hope to be righteous?  Can we hope to live in right relationships with God and with each other?  Our best efforts shatter as does a clay pot if it dropped onto concrete from just a few feet in the air. 

Is clay mentioned any more in the book of Job?  Actually, yes, by God.  Knowing Job has no possible answer, God asks,

 

¹²“Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, ¹³so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? ¹⁴It is changed like clay under the seal, and it is dyed like a garment.  (Job 38:12-14)

 

            In God’s remark, the feature of clay is different than what we’ve previously heard.  In the mouth of Eliphaz, humans, houses of clay, cannot possibly be righteous.  Whatever shalom we enjoy is a gift from God we should accept.  We also accept any misery that fills our lives because that too is from God.  To Job, clay is fragile, weak, nothing.  To Elihu, clay is unremarkable, unworthy of any reknown.  But God says something different.

            God says clay is something that can be changed.  By who?  By the potter.  Who is the potter?  Obviously there is just one, God.  Why is this important?  When we meet God we change – we become something we were not before the encounter happened.  Lost people are those who resist the influence of God on their lives.  In the book of Job, his friends, the young man Elihu, his wife – they all refuse to change.  They believed certain things about God, humanity, and the world.  As Job goes through his horrendous ordeal, they stubbornly hold onto a theology that does not fit the reality around them. 

            Job realizes his life is in the hands of a dynamic, real, living God.  God is not a far off deity who set things in motion at the dawn of creation, set up the rules, and has been hands off ever since.  God is right here, active in the affairs of humans right now.  Suffering helped Job see that.  And he realized his only hope was to turn to that God in prayer.  Sometimes it was angry prayer.  Some things said would have to be reconsidered.  But Job knew his hope was not in the commonly held beliefs of his day.  In fact his only hope was to disrupt those beliefs and reach out to God because his fate was in God’s hands.  So too is ours.

Again, Genesis 2:  “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” We are not just houses of clay; we are houses of clay filled with the breath, the Spirit, of God.  To be human is to be animated by God’s spirit.  From the very beginning we were made for relationship.

What’s the Biblical goal? Right relationship: peace and love and harmony with God and with others.  How do we attain that?  Through righteousness.  Can humans be righteous Eliphaz asks?   No.  But we can be in relationship with God who is perfectly righteous.  In fact the very reason we exist is to be in relationship with God and each other.  That’s why we are here.

Rick Warren writes, “God was there as an unseen witness, smiling at your birth.  He wanted you alive” (Purpose Driven Life, p.63).  Leonard Sweet says of faith, “Faith is not a problem to be solved or a question to be answered but a mystery to be lived – the mystery of a real, live relationship with God.”  God desired this so much He bridged the gap. 

First God chose a nation – Israel and wed Himself in marriage to His chosen people.  Then God became one of them.  Jesus is a house of clay just like you and me.  God lowered God’s self.  Paul writes in Philippians, “[Jesus] emptied himself taking on the form of a slave, born in human likeness” (2:7).  He did it because previously only remarkable individuals in history became true friends of God – Job, Abraham, Moses, Elijah.  Each one of these was blown away by God.  The house of clay cannot “know” intimately the potter.  So the potter became a house of clay. 

From Job we learn to tenaciously hold onto even the slimmest of hopes in God.  When all else is lost, we, like Job, reach to God.  There is nothing else to do.  But the lesson is incomplete if it ends there.  In our reaching, which includes full acknowledgement of all our mistakes and limitations, full confession of all we’ve done that is wrong and harmful, in our reaching we realize God reached that much farther when he came to us.

We houses of clay, animated by God’s creative spirit, become sons and daughters of God when in Christ, we are redeemed and made new by that same Holy Spirit.  We are changed.  Paul says, “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17).  God told Job that clay is moldable, but that’s a good thing.  Job and you and I are molded by God.  God makes something of us.

He does this through Jesus and it is the love and forgiveness of Jesus in us that makes us what we are.  Job was not blessed to live with knowledge of Jesus.  We have that knowledge.  Jesus makes us righteous and through him we have right relationships.  Paul says that as we carry Jesus and share his love and his gospel, we houses of clay become signposts pointing to God’s glory.  “We have this treasure [Jesus] in jars of clay, so it may be made clear that this power [eternal life] belongs to God” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

Can mortals be righteous?  No, Eliphaz, we houses of clay cannot be righteous.  But we are animated by God and saved by God in the flesh, Jesus.  So we can be in relationship with God.  His righteousness is sufficient for us and because of him, we can and will live in shalom forever.

AMEN