The Best Answer to Stephen Fry? Eyewitness Testimony

            One of my favorite movies is Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.  The action is intense and the portrayals of the characters are brilliant.  I normally don’t consider myself discerning enough to assess good acting or bad acting.  I just know I loved that film and much of my love for it involves the way the characters interacted.  This includes the way Stephen Fry played the part of Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother.

            I am pretty sure that is all I knew of Stephen Fry until recently when he was interviewed and the interviewer, knowing Fry is an atheist, asked him what he would say to God if there was a God.  “Suppose it’s all true,” interviewer Gay Byrne asks, “And you walk up to the pearly gates, and you are confronted by God.”  What would the atheist say?

            “Bone cancer in children?” Fry responds, “What’s that about?  How dare you!  How dare you create a world in which there is such misery which is not our fault.”[i]  He goes on to deal with theodicy, the problem of evil and suffering.  If there is a God, Fry would want no part of him or his heaven because God demands adoration and worship from humans while at the same time imposing unspeakable pain on us. 

            At one point the camera pans to Byrne whose looks taken aback, but why would he?  Why would anyone be surprised?  He knew before he asked the question that Fry is an outspoken atheist.  His statement is consistent with his worldview.  Atheists don’t think there is a God.  Outspoken atheism advocates not only don’t believe, but also are hostile toward Christian expressions of God.  They also reject theologies in other faiths, but I will stick to my field of familiarity, the evangelical stream in Christianity. 

            After the video was aired, there was the expected backlash which puzzles me as much as Byrne’s surprise.  Why would Christian leaders speak out in opposition to an atheist saying what atheists say?  One clergyman called him “spiritually blind.”[ii]  Well, no kidding.  We Christians believe Jesus is the Light (John 8:12).  If someone has not put their faith in him and given their life to him, then they are blind.  We could say that about anyone who does not profess faith in Jesus, so billions of people. 

            But, we must say this with humility.  We think the Bible is true.  We think the message of the Bible is wrapped up in a simple declaration: Jesus is Lord.  So, anyone who does not affirm that assertion and live under Jesus’ Lordship is lost.  That’s what we think.  That is a base level evangelical confession.  Nothing Mr. Fry said enlightens that.  Harangues from red-faces pastors may give him a chuckle, but it won’t change his worldview.  The only way Stephen Fry would overcome theodicy would be revelation.  The Holy Spirit would need to get a hold of him in a way that he would see and then choose to respond. 

            I believe the Holy Spirit comes to all people throughout their lives.  I do not believe in irresistible grace.  People can choose.  Judas Iscariot walked with Jesus, saw the miracles, and was himself filled with the power of God (Mark 6:13).  Still, he chose to betray Jesus.  He was that close and still chose another path, one that leads away from God and to death.  Just as Judas has choices, so too does Mr. Fry.  And I do not assume he will always profess atheism.  He may one day turn and follow Jesus.

            He won’t do it because pastors hammer him with scripture verses.  That is the wrong tack.  It always is.  And it won’t work with him because several things he said are absolutely true.  First, he said there is awful misery and suffering in the world.   He’s correct.  It makes one’s heart sick to see starvation, racism, disease, and so many other things that hurt people.  This should be grieved and not shrugged off.  Agony over pain should be brought right to God.

            Second, Stephen Fry is absolutely right in his statement that God expects us to spend our lives worshiping God.  Fry presents this as a burdensome duty that is distasteful because of God’s complicity in human misery.  I think he has no sense of how wonderful worship is but that is not my point here.  I want to affirm that yes, there is pain; and yes, the Christian view is that the proper way humans relate to God is in worship. 

            So, if he is right then what could a Christian possibly say in response?  I’ve seen Fry’s words described as a rant, but I found him to be quite eloquent.  He’s the type of speaker who is so interesting and beautiful in his speech that I think I could listen to him read the ingredients on a canned soup label.  What can I or any Christian say?

            I don’t think we attempt to prove God’s goodness or God’s existence.  If God could be reduced to proofs, God wouldn’t be God.  No, what I think we do is bear witness.  We say that we believe where there is suffering that is where God is.  And we undergird this belief by going to where there is suffering, helping where can, comforting where it is needed, praying constantly, and standing with those who suffer.  We can say God is with those who hurt the most because we have been with those who hurt the most and thus we saw God there.

            I think of the words of the brilliant song by Matthew West.  “So, I shook my fist at Heaven, Said 'God why don't You do something?'  He said, ‘I did, I created you.’”[iii]  West beautifully captures what Christ followers know.  The miracles of God come in the context of real human lives.  Do you want to see a miracle?  Go where God is at work.  If Christians are the leading voices advocating for peace, the leading minds in cancer research, and the leading volunteers on projects to feed and educated the poorest of the poor, and if we do it all in the name of and to the glory of Jesus Christ, we will make our statement about God.  It won’t convince Stephen Fry of anything, not without the Holy Spirit grabbing his mind and heart.  But it will dramatically punctuate our insistence that Jesus is Lord. 

            I recoiled when I first heard what Fry said to Byrne.  It is sharp.  But I hope the Holy Spirit will whisper this message to all believers who aren’t sure how to best give a different view of God.  I hope the Holy Spirit will tell us evangelicals, “Don’t worry about Stephen Fry.  Pray for him.  And then come volunteer your time to care for kids with bone cancer.  Lay hands on them and pray for them.  Volunteer your time to be on teams that travel to third world communities plagued by blindness, illiteracy, and hunger.”  If we go and serve, both locally and globally, we will see what God is doing.  We will live in that story.  And we won’t need clever comebacks to the articulate atheist.  We just say what we have seen.

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[i] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo

[ii] http://www.contactmusic.com/stephen-fry/news/stephen-fry-god-comments_4566425

[iii] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=matthew+west+do+something+lyrics

A Creative Response to Suffering (Job 10:1-17)

            In the Bible I find several responses to adversity.  King David, whom we read about in 1^st & 2^nd Samuel and 1^st Chronicles and who is considered the greatest of Israel’s Kings and the “man after God’s own heart,” responded by fighting.  When things got tough, David got his slingshot, prayed, and went to war.

            Fighting was not always an option and even it when it was available, it was not always the right thing to do.  We also hear the lonely voice of the prophet speaking God’s judgment, sometimes against God’s own people Israel, sometimes against Israel’s enemies, and in the New Testament, God’s final judgment against Satan, evil, and sin.  Amos, Jeremiah, Daniel, and John of Patmos are some examples of people who responded to adversity with prophecy.

            A third Biblical response comes from the Apostle Paul.  He responded to everything that came up in life the same way: he shared the gospel. Whether Paul was whipped, kicked out of town, imprisoned, well-received as an honored guest, or respected, he responded by talking the salvation available to all through faith in Jesus Christ.  Suffering and adversity brought opportunity.

            There are other responses in the scriptures, but we narrow our focus to the book of Job.  Satan challenged God, saying that the most righteous man, Job, who was a true worshipper, would turn on God and curse God, if God allowed Job to be harmed.  God took the bait and allowed Satan to destroy all of Job’s property, kill all of Job’s children, and harm Job’s body. 

            Job’s three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar come and sit with him and talk with him.  They insist that Job’s suffering is from God.  Job agrees.  They insist that Job must have sinned terribly to have such pain and loss.  His adversity is his own fault.  His suffering came by way of his mistakes and rebellion. 

The three friends in their speeches insist Job must submit to God.  Submission, they say, is the only acceptable response to pain.  Job must submit to God’s lordship, confess his sin, and repent.  Then, he will be made whole.

            Job will not submit.  He agrees that God brought this on him.  His friends accuse him of rebellion and he does indeed rebel.  But his rebellion is not a sinful rejection of God’s ways.  Rather, he rebels against a shallow theology that responds to real-world suffering by retreating to long-held theological presuppositions.  He rebels against his friends’ insistence that he confess.

            Job’s rebellion produces two responses.  First, he laments.  Lamentation is a form of prayer rarely used or even understood in churches today.  Jeremiah, the prophet, offered lament prayers. 

            Here’s an example of Jeremiah praying lamentation:

Bottom of Form

⁷O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.

⁸For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long (Jeremiah 20:7-8).

 

And then here is a sample of Job’s lament prayer.

10“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

²I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me.

³Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked (Job 10:1-3)?

 

 

Job expends a lot of energy in Lament prayer.  It is not though, his only response. The lament expresses injustice sorrow.  It is spoken by one defeated.  It is the ultimate in honesty before God.  We are so concerned with saying the “right thing” from a religious standpoint, we skip the honesty in lament prayer.  We fear it. 

The Old Testament invites us to enter this world of prayer.  More Psalms are laments than are praises.  Those Psalms along with Jeremiah and Job can be read by people today who suffer.  To read those words from the heart, “Does it seem good to you [O God] to oppress, to despise the work of your hands,” is to say what you feel.  This is not a condemnation of God.  It is the reality that you are hurting so badly, you have to vent.  You have to say it.  The Old Testament gives words for when we have to let it out. 

Job then goes further.  After the Lament, Job will bring protest right to God.  Jobs says to God,

¹²You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit.

¹³Yet these things you hid in your heart; I know that this was your purpose.

¹⁴If I sin, you watch me, and do not acquit me of my iniquity.

¹⁵If I am wicked, woe to me! If I am righteous, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look upon my affliction.

¹⁶Bold as a lion you hunt me; you repeat your exploits against me.

 

            This movement from lament into protest leads Job to the language of a legal trial.  Job takes God to court.  His is a refreshing approach, taken by a man in a true relationship with God.  The friends have become people who choose the rules about God over a relationship with God.  They theologize and come up with rules and then stick to those rules no matter what.  Job will not.  He is so committed to the relational nature of God that he is willing to defy convention and challenge God.

            Just as God accepted the Satan’s challenge regarding Job, God accepts Job’s challenge regarding justice.  This matters because when we respond to adversity through lament, God will hear our lament prayers as God heard Job.  When we challenge God, God will accept our challenge.  God may humble us as God humbled Job.  But as hard as that humbling is, we remember that God humbles those whom he loves; those who treat him as one to be worshipped and loved in relationship rather than as a distant deity who can be reduced to a set of rules. 

            In commenting on Job’s protest to God, Old Testament professor Sam Ballentine quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.  The second brother, Ivan, is an intellectual and an atheist.  Ballentine feels that Ivan Karamazov speaks out the very protest against injustice heard from Job.  Ivan says, “I refuse to accept this world of God’s. …  Please understand, it is not God that I do not accept, but the world he has created.  I do not accept God’s world and I refuse to accept it” (Ballentine 172-3).

            There is a danger in lament and protest.  It leads to us sitting with Ivan the atheist.  The one suffering permanently abandons faith and gives up on God altogether.  Ivan’s words become ours.  “I do not accept God’s world.”

            In tension with this fallout and drift away from faith is a movement toward redemption of God’s world and a claiming of the world for the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus.  This is a very optimistic worldview that believes in the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.  Most of the writing in recent years done along these very positive thought lines comes from theologians, pastors, and spiritual directors who are not writing from the perspective of Job’s pain.  I don’t mean all these authors who have such a hopeful outlook have never suffered.  I don’t mean they all have easy lives.  But the hope that Christians can use their talents, skills, and experience to positively provoke transformation from within the world’s systems – education, politics, business – that hope is not coming from people who are currently suffering as Job suffered.

            It is coming from people who live in joy as their very lives are offered to God.  If you are a teacher, your offering is to be an outstanding, compassionate educator.  If you are a waitress – you are diligent in serving your customers, especially the rude ones.  Your equipment in representing Christ through excellence in your craft is patience, friendliness, and a servant’s heart.  If you are a carpenter – one of the ways you acknowledge the rule of God’s kingdom is to build things that are sturdy, that last, and are of high quality.  Doing what we do well and with absolute integrity is an offering to God.  In this we submit our lives to God’s lordship.

            Some of the leaders in this movement of announcing the kingdom and transforming culture are Andy Crouch, N.T. Right, Richard Foster, Gabe Lyons, and Rob Bell.  This hope-filled theology collides with Job’s perspective of suffering, lament, and protest.  How can the church today live out theologically optimism and at the same time respect and love people who are going through Job-type experiences?  We’ve got to hold onto that theological hope because that’s the stuff of Easter. We are resurrection people.  But even as we live in the Kingdom now, we also have to recognize that there is suffering in the world.  This is a fallen world and we have to respect that people have “Job-sized” problems. 

            This is where the church, ours and Christians in churches around the world, can be all that God is calling us and equipping us to be.  In doing what we do best – our experiences, skills, and training - God’s people band together to create a culture of compassion and care.

            Jesus did this.  A woman was caught in adultery.  The law was clear.  She was to be executed by stoning.  Jesus saw beyond the law.  He saw a woman who had no voice, who probably could not have resisted the man with whom she sinned, and who had no hope.  He did not deny the sin.  Instead he saw the big picture.  He invited all those who were sinless to begin the stoning.  No stone was thrown.  Instead of accusing, Jesus created a new paradigm – a community of forgiveness. 

            On another occasion he was faced with 5000 hungry people and only a few fish and loaves, not enough to even feed his twelve disciples.  Yet, he thanked God for the food and broke it and passed it out.  Miraculously all were filled, there were 12 baskets left over.  Conventional wisdom said, send them off.  Jesus did not send them off.  He asked the people to stay.  He had compassion for them.  He instituted a system of provision. In Acts, we see the earliest Christians continuing this practice, not by miracle, but by sharing.

            How can we creatively respond to Job and the pain in the world today?

            I think of my friend Caleb.  He visited about a dozen orphan care points in Africa.  At the time of his trip, he and his brother were running a Christian school and a Christian recording studio in OK.  They had experience taking students on mission trips to Latin America.  Caleb wondered if he could make a career of guiding church and student groups on these mission trips.  There is not much money in that!  But, he believed that God was calling him. God shouted to Caleb through a Job-type cry of pain, the pain of orphans.

            Orphans, especially in places like Guatemala, Rwanda, Russia, and Ethiopia, will end up on the street as addicts.  They will become sex slaves.  There is little hope that a child who grows up with no one to care for him or her in a society where the weak are already stepped on will have any type of positive, meaningful life.  Caleb heard this Joban cry and he knew the answer was provision for these kids from affluent Christ-followers in America.  He just had to do his part – get those affluent Christ-followers to the poor kids. 

            Three years and about a dozen trips later, Caleb is cooperating with God to help kids move from Job-type suffering into the kingdom of God. Start an organization that caters mission trips; that’s your full-time job – who knew that was possible?  Caleb certainly did not.  But, he was following God. 

What skills do you have to care for those who suffer?  If you’re in health care or education you can obviously donate your time to heal or tutor or teach.  If you’re someone who makes a lot of money, you can donate a lot of it, and you should as a part of your life as a disciple.  But what if you don’t have those types of front-line skills or access to financial resources?  What if all you have is time?  God will use it.  What if all you have is energy?  God will put you to work in a creative way, walking with Job.  Caleb did not have anything really except some experience on mission trips, a heart willing to listen to God, and a willingness to step outside the box. 

Some of us may be going through a Job-type of experience right now.  If you need to, turn to Job’s words of lament and protest.  That’s OK.  It is good to be that brutally honest with God.  God can handle it.  That response is better than pretending everything is OK and being theologically dishonest.

Many among us are doing well, not suffering.  We are called to respond to the suffering around us.  From the perspective of Easter, we enter the suffering applying our skills and experience and passion so that through us God creates a culture of care that respects Job and also announces that Jesus has come and there is life in His name.  We are culture makers in the way we reach out to Job.

AMEN

 

God and the Prince (Job 1-2)

 

Sunday, October 7, 2012

 

            There once was a prince.  It was said that he was blameless and upright.  He had many possessions – oxen, donkeys, sheep, camels.  He lived in a time when life was measured by possessions and family.  His land stretched farther than the eye can see, and his 10 children who got along with one another.  Everyone knew of the prince’s wealth, and yet he was admired, not envied. 

To call him upright was to call him just.  Others used their wealth to lord over the poor and expand by dishonest means and grow by power and force.  Not the prince.  He was savvy in business and generous, extremely generous with all people.

What’s more, he was a man of deep faith and true religion.  It was said of the upright prince that he was blameless and feared God.  He turned away from evil.  He would rise early and offer burnt offerings for his sons.  “It may be that my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts” (1:5). 

It was said of the prince that he was the greatest man of all the people of the east (1:3).

 

One day the sons of God presented themselves before the Lord.  The Satan was among them.  We cannot say.  He was the one to whom God spoke, as if God expected him.  God asked, “Where have you been?”

“Walking the earth.”

God continued.  “Have you considered my servant Job?  There is no one like him, blameless and upright; he fears God and turns away from evil” (v.8).

The Satan showed a sinister moxi before the Lord.  “Have you not put a fence around your precious Job?  You protect him – his house, his family.  You bless him and everything he touches increases or turns to gold.  Take it all away, and he will curse you to your face.”

To stand before God, reject God’s observation, and openly, defiantly challenge the Almighty, who would dare?  It’s unacceptable.  God takes the challenge?

“Very well.  All that he has is in your power.  Only do not injure his body.”

 

The prince sat on the stoop with a full mug.  He enjoyed twilight after a day of sweaty labor.  His children gathered together at the home of the eldest.  The thought of them at a party together made him smile.  Maybe he would go and join them.

In the distance, he could see a rider from the East.  As the horse advanced, it became clear there was great concern.  He recognized the rider as one of his servants..  “What’s wrong?” 

The man was out of breath.  “The Sabeans.” 

The prince’s face hardened.  The Sabeans had caused enough problems.  They had no scruples.  But, they had not been seen in over a year.  Were they back?  “How bad was it?” asked the prince. 

“They’re all gone.” 

“All?” 

His man was tearing up, lips trembling.  “All the servants are dead.  All the oxen and donkeys are gone.”

Hard hoof beats interrupted the somber dialogue.  Another of the prince’s servants, this one from the southern fields, approached.  He was black with soot and ash.  He coughed furiously. 

“What’s wrong?” 

“Lightning.”

“I saw it in the distance.  We’ve dealt with lightning before.  I …” 

“Not like this.”  The servant interrupted his master.  “It was fire from God.  It hit on all sides.” 

“It’s been so dry,” the prince said quietly. 

“I …I,” the servant stammered, “I am the only one.  The sheep.  The other servants. Only I made it.”  The prince collapsed onto the stoop where had been relaxing, resting in his wonderful life.  His mug fell, beer spilling.

The silence was shattered by screaming coming from the Western hill.  A man covered in blood fell as he tried to run down the hill.  The prince’s servants rushed to him and helped him into the house.  One ear had been severed and he was cut in several places.  After they calmed him down, he explained that raiding parties had come and made off with the camels. 

“The Chaldeans?”  The prince couldn’t believe it.  “We have had a truce with the Chaldeans for five years.  The business dealings have been good for them and for us.” 

“Sir,” said the now calmed servant.  “They came with swords.  They planned to execute us all.”  He shook his head.  “I barely made it.

The four, three rattled servants and a completely discombobulated prince had a start when the door of the house slammed open.  The prince felt the color leave his face.  It was his most trusted servant, master of all his northern dealings.  This servant lived on his eldest son’s land.  He had been a part of the family since that eldest was a newborn.  Now he stood before him, hair disheveled, unsteady on his feet.

The prince shivered.  “Tell me.” 

“Tornado, sir.  Worst I’ve seen.” 

The prince held our his hands, words failing him.  “The house collapsed.  Everyone is dead.  All the servants.  All your children.  Dead.”

Job’s head fell into his hands.  Slowly, from deep within, a primal scream arose and erupted forth from him.  His fists shook.  His ripped the hair from his own head.  Then, with shears he completely shaved himself and dumped ashes on himself.  He went back outside.  As his servants looked on from the house, he ripped his clothing off and fell into the dust.  Kneeling, he looked to heaven and said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

It was said that in all these things, the prince never sinned with his lips nor did he charge God with any wrongdoing.

 

The sons of God presented themselves before the Lord.  The Satan was among them.  “Where have you been?” The Lord asked.  “Walking the earth.”

God continued.  “Have you considered my servant Job?  There is no one like him, blameless and upright; he fears God and turns away from evil.  Though you convinced me to destroy him for no reason, still he keeps his integrity”.

The Satan was not impressed.  “What stand did your Job make?  People crack like eggs when their lives are on the line.  He was fine losing stuff.  Now, stretch out your hand against his body.  And watch him break.  He will curse you to your face.”

To have the audacity to question the Almighty – and God went along with it and God’s prince Job passed the unreasonable test.  Now this adversary pushed harder, and inexplicably, God goes along again.  “Very well,” God said to the Satan.  “He is in your power; only spare his life.”

 

The prince’s wife returned from her sojourn to her husband’s grief.  She had planned to tell him of her journeys, all that she saw, including the disease in far-off lands.  It was horrible.  The skin would dry up and flake off leaving gaping, open sores that filled with flies.  Dogs would lick the oozing wounds of beggars who lined the road.

The next morning, she awoke just before sun up to the sound of moaning.  Her prince was not at her side in the bed.  She roused herself, threw on her robe, and found him, out on the stoop.  The four servants, all that were left, had a fire going.  In the glow of the light, she was horrified to see the disease she had seen in far off lands was now all over him, her prince.  It was worse than anything she had encountered.  How could that sickness have followed her here?  How could they lose all they had, their children, their servants, their livestock, their land, and now this?  How? 

The prince, weeping unhelpful dry tears, used a pottery shard to scrape the flaking skin off.  His eyes looked into the flames, looked faraway, looked nowhere at all. 

The primal anguished cry that erupted from him the day before now burst forth from his wife, crushed as she was.  “You keep on with holiness and worship and reverence,” she snarled at him.  “And for what?  Now go on.  Curse God and die.”  Her entire body shook.

Calmly, almost vacantly, without taking his eyes off the fire, he said softly, “Foolish woman.  Shall we receive the good from God, and not the bad?”

It was said that in all this, he did not sin with his lips.

 

The sun began to rise on that morning after.  The prince was now reduced to ashes.  As the song goes, he swept the streets he used to own.  Rays of daylight cut through the thick fog, but was this light of a new day, or a new deception? 

The servants saw them, coming, in the distance.  From three directions they came, Eliphaz from the land Teman, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar from Naamath.  Three princes came and took up vigil alongside their friend.  For a week, they sat in ashes, sat in silence, grieving with Job. 

 

 

Now what?  This story is from the Old Testament. After the first tw0 chapters, we won’t hear from the Satan again.  The wife will be referenced, but she won’t have any more comments.  For the next 39 chapters, Job and his friends will talk – a most contentious, acrimony-filled conversation.  A young thinker will barge into it.  Another, unnamed but extraordinarily important figure, will not speak.  But Job will hint at what he might say or do.  And we will hear from someone else.  The Sabeans and Chaldeans, like the Satan, have done their damage.  They’re now done in the story.  But Job’s children are not.   

Why call the one who challenges God as “the Satan,” and not just “Satan?”  Job was written in Hebrew, and “Ha-Satan,” is a title, not a name.  Thousands of theology pages debate exactly what “Ha-Satan” means in Job.  The Hebrew means ‘the adversary,’ or ‘the accuser.’  It has legal connotations.  Some commentators believe that when God called the divine beings together, ‘the accuser,’ was doing his God-given job by accusing Job. 

The popular belief is that this one, the accuser or the Satan, is in fact who Jesus refers to as the Devil.  He’s the serpent in the garden of Eden who deceived Eve.  That may well be so, but that connection is not made in scripture until the 12^th chapter of Revelation, the very last book. 

In the Old Testament the concept of a being who personified evil is not one that was held from the beginning; it is an understanding that developed.  Why doesn’t Abraham or Moses or Joshua ever talk about the devil?  They did not know there is a devil. 

My own belief is that there really is a devil, Satan, whom Jesus calls “the enemy.”  I believe the enemy has demons under his command and he tried to strike at God by hurting who God loves humans.  However, I think that Satan’s identity has developed over time.  I don’t know how developed it was when Job was written.

My own take on the Satan we meet in Job is that he is not an accepted member of God’s inner circle.  I do not believe that in the story he serves God’s purposes by accusing Job or challenging God. Rather, I think the writers of Job set the Satan up as a shadowy figure that works schemes to goad other humans into rejecting and cursing God.  In the book of Job, the Satan is an agent of evil. 

Why does God go along with his schemes?  Why does God allow suffering?

In upcoming weeks, we’ll examine the conversations in the book of Job.  Leading into that, I urge a couple things.

First, I urge honesty in our thoughts and talk about God and to God.  One of the great tensions in Job is theological assumption.  I pray, I tithe, I read the Bible, the give to the poor and give to the church.  I should have a blessed life.  So why did some hit me and total my car as I drove home from the appointment where the doctor told me I had cancer that would be extremely painful and terminal?  Faithful living should lead to blessing. Then that happens.  We have to say that.  If it makes us mad at God, we have to say that.  If suffering drives us to doubt the existence or goodness of God, we have to say that. We cannot understand Job and we cannot live in true relationship with God unless we are so dreadfully honest that we’re willing to question everything we’ve ever believed.

Second, I urge that we remember who we are as we read Job.  We are resurrection people, Easter people. We trust ourselves to Jesus, who, we have discovered, is God in the flesh.  He died for our sins and rose to life.  In him, our sins are put to death, we are born anew, and we will be resurrected after our bodies die.  That reality hovers as we read Job.  It is a dark book and we are entering the darkness, but we never get to a place where we cannot see Easter’s light if we look for it.

Committed to honesty in prayer and in our God-thoughts, and always remembering we are Easter people, I make one final plea.  As we read Job, each one of us must be conscious of our own reactions to suffering we have seen in the world and suffering we have personally experienced.  Job is ineffective when it is disconnected from our reality.  We have to read it where we live and the story becomes part of us.  Where do we see Job speaking in our own story? 

Read it all the way through this week.  Honestly, prayerfully, read Job with eyes open and earnestly seek God as you do.  Next week, we dig deeper into the question of what do we do when our life experience calls into question the foundation of what we thought was true about God?

AMEN

Turn to Jesus

            Mark Galli, managing editor of Christianity Today magazine, discusses a question millions of people wonder about: how can I trust that there is a God and that this God is good?  The wondering comes out in a sentence repeated countless times daily.  “I could never believe in a God who would _____” and you fill in the blank.[i]

            “I could never believe in a God who would allow children to die.”  We know children die by the hundreds of thousands every day. 

            “I could never believe in a God who creates gay people then declares gay relationships a sin.”  Every one of us knows someone, probably someone we love, who is gay.  I recently in a sermon offered what I think are two Biblically sanctioned forms of holy sexuality – a heterosexual marriage and celibacy.

            “I could never believe in a God who stands by idly while innocent people suffer.”  We know from Hurricane Katrina to the Indian Ocean Tsunami to the Haiti Earthquake to Japan where there was an earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown that suffering hits people with full force – people who did nothing to deserve such suffering.

            You could make your own version of the sentence: “I could never believe in a God who ______” and you name an injustice of particular interest to you.  Galli in the Christianity Today article points out the obvious.  God’s existence is not dependent on us believing.  Nor is God’s existence on our sense of justice. 

            So, the children die, people have urges and impulses and deep desires that lead to lifestyles the Bible says are sinful, and the innocent suffer through no fault of their own.  The follow-up proclamation is “well, I’d rather spend an eternity in Hell than worship a God who stands with his hands in his pockets while children die or  a God who imposes misery by not letting people marry who they want to marry or who a God does nothing while innocents suffer.”  It’s another version of the same frustration.  “I’d rather go to Hell than worship the God who does that” whatever “that” is. 

            Really?

            It sounds tough when Han Solo or Dirty Harry or one of the X-men brazenly says to his foe, “I’ll see you in Hell.”  I can just hear Charlton Heston saying, “They can take my gun when they pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.”  I remember the t-shirt from my basic training days.  “God said, ‘Let there be infantry,’ and the gates of Hell opened.

            Really?  It sounds fine from Charles Bronson or the Rock or the Marlboro man, but let’s be thinking people for a moment.  If we don’t like what God does, we’ll just do without him?  If we get mad at God and say, “to Hell with you,” it’s an exclamation.  If he says back, “To Hell with you,” well, then we’ve got a problem. 

            We either believe in God or we don’t, I don’t think goodness is a sufficient reason to believe in God and I don’t think pain is a sufficient argument to reject the notion of God.  Do we believe there is a God?  If yes, what do we believe about that God?

            In his magisterial work Institutes, the great 16^th century reformer John Calvin writes, “God has sown a seed of religion in all men.”  Furthermore writes Calvin, God has “revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe.”[ii]  The way God made us, we are inherently disposed to belief in Him.  So any atheism is a direct rebellion in how we were created.  We’re made to believe in God.

            Because of the Fall – Adam and Eve’s original disobedience and fall from innocence – we do rebel against God’s creative intentions.  But even when we do, Calvin says that because God is so clearly seen in nature, “[we] cannot open [our] eyes without being compelled to see Him.”  This point comes from the New Testament, Romans chapter 1.  “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made” (v.20).  We are created to believe in God’s existence.  The creation around us is evidence of God’s existence.

            Some continue to hold to atheism, that there is no God, but if we accept that God exists then we still have to deal with some painful truths.  Children starve to death.  Disasters happen and millions suffer, including good people.  Young adults in their prime come down with cancer and other deadly diseases.  Cruel dictators inflict persecution and death on people in their own nations and other nations. 

Mark Galli points out that such non sequiturs, horrible happenings occurring in a world ruled by an all-powerful, all-good God lead to the Gospel of Job.  This is the opposite of “I’d rather go to Hell than worship a God who allows ___ suffering of some kind.”  In Job’s gospel, Job, the virtuous man of the Old Testament suffers tremendously and unjustly.  If anyone had reason to gripe to God, it was Job.  He loses his kids and is afflicted with disease and he did nothing to deserve such misfortune. 

So, he expresses every emotion under the sun.  He complains, wishes for death, wishes he was never born, and then demands an audience with God.  God finally grants that meeting, but in it, Job never speaks.  He meekly listens as God recounts his creative, omnipotent, omnipresent glory.  That means God can do whatever God must do, and Job is too small to understand. 

Job accepts that conclusion.  Even though Job suffered unjustly, after God speaks, Job says, “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6).  Many who go through the paces of (a) belief in God, (b) refusal to believe because of evil and suffering in the world, and then (c) resolution to reject God because God is bad.  Of those who go through these steps of faith, many end up here.  We end up where Job is.  “I cannot understand things, so I just blindly worship God and say that God is good and God is love.”  If I look around and see pain and see suffering, I stop looking around because God is good and God is love and I have to hold to that no matter how much the reality of the world demands another story.  I’ll deny that reality so I can God is good and God is love.

Fortunately, there is more to the story because that blind faith is a sure fire way to drive unbelievers away from God in droves.  It’s not that the Gospel of Job is not true.  It is true that people sometimes – often? – suffer unjustly.  It is true that next to God, each one of us is impossibly small and cannot understand God’s ways.  But, this story, by itself, is not Gospel.  Gospel means good news.  This isn’t good news.  It’s fatalism.  It’s resignation.  It’s the surrender that says, we just want to survive this world, as bad as it can be. Survive and make it to Heaven.

What’s missing?  Jesus!  Jesus is the completion of Job’s gospel.  Job’s defeated submission before God is not good news until we read the Gospel of Jesus Christ – God come earth in human flesh.  Galli points that “I could never believe in a God who ____” is a sentence missing something.  So too is “God is good and God is love and I’ll believe that and ignore any evidence that suggests the world is falling apart.”  Both sentences talk of God, but neither mentions Jesus, and Galli feels and I agree that Jesus is the key.

First John 5:5 – “Who is that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.”  The very next verse states that Jesus came by water and blood.  It makes me think of His baptism.  Like all people who want to trust in God, he was immersed in the water.  But he’s the only who, when he came up from the water, elicited a remark from Heaven.  “You are my son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).  God spoke when Jesus was baptized.  God was there, a proud father honoring His son.

To say Jesus came by water and blood also calls to mind communion.  When we take the juice and are reminded that he said, “My blood that is poured out is the blood of the New Covenant.  Take and drink.”  Water and blood – Jesus truly is God, and he came for us.  In Jesus, God came for all people. 

At the same time, 1^st John’s declaration that Jesus came by water and blood is a declaration of Jesus’ 100% humanity.  When he died on the cross, one of the Roman soldiers thrust  spear into him, and water and blood gushed from his side (John 19:34).  This was a human being nailed to a real cross on a specific day in history, dying a real death.  In 1^st John, the confidence of this telling depends on the witness of the Holy Spirit.  Verse 9, hearkening to Jesus’ baptism and the other moments when God spoke in the gospels adds that God the Father also testifies to that Jesus is the Beloved Son and the Anointed one.  The flow reaches a climax in verse 12.  “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.”

It’s all about Jesus.  When children die, we turn to Jesus.  When we feel we are imprisoned in a life that isn’t fair and imposes on us impossible expectations, we turn to Jesus.  When disaster strikes, evil lurks, pain rises, and we feel like hope is quickly running out, in prayer, with other believers, in scripture, and in a panicked cry from the depths of our hearts, we turn to Jesus. 

This is not another version of simplistic surrender to fate.  “I just hope Jesus gets me to Heaven.”  Of course we hope Jesus paves the way for us after death.  In fact, we don’t hope that; we confidently declare that he will go and prepare a place for us as he has promised.  But this mantra, turn to Jesus, is for living today.  First John says, “Whoever has the Son has life.” 

In turning to Him, we see the cross, the flow of water and blood, and we see that he has suffered.  He was betrayed.  He was mocked and abandoned.  Physically, he was tortured and killed.  He knows suffering.

His love is perfect and His vision is expansive.  We read statistic that so many thousands of children die of preventable causes.  In turning to Jesus, we discover he knows every one of those children by name.  He knows which ones are good soccer player.  He know which ones laugh loudly, which are talented musicians, and which have scientific genius that would have made discoveries for the good of all humankind had they not succumbed to malnutrition.  We lament the fate of the children.  Jesus eternally weeps with a sadness deeper than we could realize, but we see it when we turn to Jesus. 

When someone is stuck in life, we recall people Jesus met – the woman with the blood flow; blind Bartimaeus; Zaccheus the tax collector; the woman by the well.  These people turned to Jesus and their lives were unstuck.  In turning to Him, we come into a life of joy, laughter, and fulfillment that completes us the way nothing else possibly could.

And there are still unanswered questions.  Why did the tornado hit my house?  And sometimes God still overwhelms people from the whirlwind as he did Job.  But’s that not the only way God speaks.  In Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, God brings grace, mercy, peace, hope, and love to all of us.  When a question is unanswered, we look to the character of Jesus.  That has not changed.  His character was loving and merciful and it still is.  He loved children, weak people, fragile people, the rejected, and the lost.  He still does.  We can cite all kinds of rules about who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell, but a better approach is to turn to Jesus.  We trust His character and His wisdom about the afterlife.  We turn to Him today because we have to make it through today and we don’t want to do that alone. 

Pain guts us – Jesus help me with this.

Injustice frustrates – Jesus, what I do?

Loss devastates us – Jesus, I need you.  And he’s there.  We ask Him to walk with us, and He does!

My whole case here rests on Jesus’ character.  First John is the same way.  The letter’s entire argument rests on the belief Jesus really is the Son of God, really loves us, and really can and will help and be with us.  Life is only truly lived when Jesus is at the center of it. 

As we conclude five weeks in 1^st John, each of us is welcomed to bring our lives right to the Word, right to the cross of water and blood, and right to God’s throne room.  All our hopes, all our disappointments, our frustrations and anxieties – we bring it all because he loves us and will guide us in life so that His joy is in us and our joy is complete. 

The final word is similar to what we see in John’s gospel.  This is written to us so that we who believe in the name of the Son of God may know, absolutely, confidently know that we have eternal life with Him (1 John 5:13, paraphrased).  Turn to Jesus and receive eternal life and eternal joy.

AMEN

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[i] The conversation on page 1 of this message come from Christianity Today, Mark Galli, “’Crucified under Pontius Pilate,’” April 2012, p.32-35.

[ii] Institutes, book 1, chapter IV.1 and V.1.