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The Speeches of Job's three Friends Part 4 By Andrew Davies

We're in the book of Job, and this evening I want us to do something rather adventuresome, and that is to try to look at the speeches of Job's three friends as a whole, and draw
some lessons from them.
So we'll be looking at chapters four to twenty-seven, not verse by verse.
The book is about faith-facing facts, all the facts, and that means the fact that God may allow in His permissive will the godly to suffer.
And here in the story we have a godly man, battered by events and broken by sickness, bruised by the despair of his wife, bereft of comfort, and bewildered by God's silence.
The sudden shock of adversity is followed by the long hours of loneliness and reflection and anxiety.
That does happen to godly people.
It happened to Job.
So what are we to make of it?
And what do people who suffer like this need from their friends?
How may we help each other when our friends are going through experiences such as this?
Well, as I said, chapters four to twenty-seven contain the speeches of Job's three friends.
We call them friends.
Two of them speak three times, and one of them speaks twice.
And after each of their speeches, Job replies.
All of them, Job included, are struggling with the problem and looking for answers to
it.
The question is, why does God allow godly people to suffer?
And the three friends are well-meaning.
A great deal of what they say is true.
What they say to us is presented in the most sublime and beautiful language.
And the style of their speeches is very impressive.
They're concerned about God's greatness, God's justice, God's wisdom, God's knowledge.
And as I say, much of what they tell us is true.
And yet instead of helping Job, they wounded him, they stung him, they even on occasions
exasperated him.
Well, there are lessons here, therefore, for us of a negative kind.
We are told here how not to behave when some of our friends may be going through very serious
and awful trouble.
Perhaps if we just looked at each of these individuals one at a time, we can then draw
together some lessons from what they were saying, both of a negative and of a positive
kind.
The first is Eliphaz, and we read earlier on his first speech in Job chapter 4.
He actually went on in chapter 5 to continue his speech, and then in chapter 15 he spoke
again and again in chapter 22.
We can call this man the mystic.
You notice that he draws attention to the way in which the knowledge that he was going
to communicate to Job he believed had come to him.
He spoke in verses 13 of chapter 4 and following about a word secretly being brought to him
and his ear receiving a whisper.
In disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night when deep sleep falls on men, fear
came upon me in trembling which made all my bones shake, and then as he's in bed and having
these visions in the night, a spirit passes before his face and the hair on his head and
his body stood up.
Spirit stood still.
I couldn't discern its appearance.
A form was before my eyes.
There was silence.
Then I heard a voice saying, and then the voice.
So he's claiming here to have received the knowledge that he was going to communicate
from a spiritual experience.
A spirit had communicated to him the things that he was going to communicate to Job.
He's the mystic.
It's clear from chapter 15 and verse 10, I think, that he was an older man.
He refers to that.
Both the gray-haired and the aged are among us, much older than your father.
So he was an older man.
At first he speaks quietly and sensitively.
He emphasizes things that are undoubtedly true.
He speaks, for example, in chapter 22 and in verse 12 about the transcendence of God,
that is, not God in the height of heaven, and see the highest stars, how lofty they
are.
God is above and beyond.
He is transcendent, which is perfectly true.
Is it any pleasure to the Almighty, he says in verse 3 of chapter 22, that you are righteous?
Is it gain to him that you make your ways blameless?
He's above us all.
He's transcendent in his greatness and majesty, and of course, he is.
And similarly, the universe is a moral universe.
What he says in verses 7 and 8 of chapter 4 are true.
Remember now, whoever perished being innocent, where were the upright ever cut off, even
as I have seen those who plow iniquity and sow trouble, reap the same.
There is a moral universe before us.
And similarly, divine chastisement is a reality, and we know that to be true from other parts
of scripture.
In verses 21 to 23, he speaks about divine chastisement.
Acquaint yourself with God and be at peace.
Thereby good will come to you.
Receive, please, instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.
If you return to the Almighty, you will be built up.
You will remove iniquity from your tents.
And the Almighty will be your gold and your precious silver.
These are truths that are beyond dispute.
And one of the ways in which God chastens his children is to allow them to suffer.
And we do need to repent of our sins, and none of us is perfect.
So we cannot say that we are beyond divine chastisement.
All of that is true, and Eliphaz, the mystic, draws attention to those truths, but, but,
he applies the truths wrongly.
His application is wrong.
Job's sufferings, he is arguing, must be due to his serious and gross sinfulness.
Whoever perished being innocent, where were the upright ever cut off?
We've already been told that Job was an upright man.
But Eliphaz is saying you are not an upright man.
The proof that you are not an upright man is that you are suffering.
So your sufferings are due to your sinfulness.
So God is punishing you, Job, for your sin.
That's the reason why you're suffering.
That's the explanation of your difficulty.
Is not your wickedness great, he asks Job in chapter 22, and your iniquity without end?
But we've been already told that Job is an upright and a blameless man.
So according to Eliphaz, Job is reaping what he has sown, and he is a terrible and a gross
sinner, so he must repent of his sin.
That is why he is suffering, and therefore the way to restitution is repentance, remorse,
and confession.
He's unable to see that what is true in some instances, namely that the punishment fits
the crime, is not true in Job's case.
He can't see that.
He can't bring that truth into his theological framework.
For him, godly people must prosper.
The secret of prosperity is godliness.
And because Job is not prospering, he cannot be godly.
That's his basic premise.
Later on, he becomes very critical, and he says things, particularly in chapter 15, that
are quite unkind.
Should a wise man answer with empty knowledge and fill himself with the east wind?
Should he reason with unprofitable talk?
He's really demeaning and disparaging Job.
And he says things there that are quite unkind.
Your iniquity teaches you.
You choose the tongue of the crafty.
Your own mouth condemns you, not I.
Your own lips testify against you.
He's being callous.
He's being vindictive here towards Job.
And later on, he even becomes childish.
What do you know that we do not know?
What do you understand that is not in us?
Who do you think you are, Job?
Do you think you're in the right and we're in the wrong?
He's even full of himself in verse 17 of chapter 15.
I will tell you.
Hear me.
What I have seen, I will declare.
I know the answers to your situation, and you've got to listen to me.
And there's very little compassion there in his voice.
Well, this is Eliphaz.
He's the mystic.
He's received the revelation from heaven.
The Spirit has told me to say to you.
He claims the authority of spiritual experience.
How often do we hear that today?
The Lord has told me to tell you.
I've received a vision.
I've received a spirit from God.
I've been told what your situation is.
How often we've been told that in our modern evangelical world?
The Lord has told me to tell you.
I've received a word from the Lord.
This is the Lord's word for you and for me.
And people claim experience of the Holy Spirit
in order to justify what they're saying.
That's exactly what Eliphaz was doing.
And he was quite wrong.
And Job knew he was wrong.
The mystic claiming the authority of mystical experience
and direct revelation from the Spirit.
And then there's this second man, Bildad.
We are told about him in chapter 8 and 18 and 25.
If Eliphaz was the mystic, then Bildad is the intellectual.
He's a scholar, and he's a thinker,
and he's reflected on the meaning of life.
And he loves to read history.
He says that in verse 8 of chapter 8.
Inquire please of the former age and consider the things
discovered by their fathers.
He's a historian, and he loves to read history.
So he claims the authority of the past
for what he's going to say.
And he's a theoretical man, an intellectual man.
Notice all the ifs in chapter 8, verses 4 to 6.
If your sons have sinned against him,
he has cast away for their transgression.
If you would earnestly seek God and make your supplication
to the Almighty, if you were pure and upright,
surely now he would awaken for you
and prosper your rightful habitation.
If, if, if.
He's the theoretician.
He's the intellectual.
He's the great thinker.
And for him, God is just and God is righteous.
So that wickedness will be punished.
It's as simple as that.
He says so in verses 11 to 19 of chapter 8.
He's talking about the fact that all who perish, perish
because of their iniquity.
He puts it in beautiful language.
Can the papyrus grow up without a marsh?
Can the reeds flourish without water?
While it is yet green and not cut down,
it withers before any other plant.
So are the paths of those who forget God
and the hope of the hypocrite shall perish.
Whose confidence shall be cut off
and whose trust is a spider's web?
He leans on his house, it doesn't stand.
He holds it fast, it doesn't endure.
He grows green in the sun.
His branches spread out in the garden.
His roots wrap around the rock heap
and looks for a place in the stones.
If he is destroyed from his place,
then it will deny him saying, I haven't seen you.
It's his way of saying that God who is just and righteous
must punish iniquity.
Godliness will be rewarded.
He says that in verse 20 to 22 of chapter eight.
God will not cast away the blameless.
He will not uphold the evil doers.
He will yet fill your mouth with laughing
and your lips with rejoicing.
Only of course, if you repent,
only if you acknowledge your great wickedness,
those who hate you will be clothed with shame
and the dwelling place of the wicked will come to nothing.
But you've got to repent of your wickedness
if you're to experience any of that.
And in chapter 18, he actually becomes angry and resentful
and accuses Job of great wickedness.
And in chapter 25, which is one of the most beautiful
chapters in the whole book, even though it's a short chapter,
he indicates that he's got the whole thing completely wrong.
He utters great truths,
but he's quite wrong in his application.
Listen to chapter 25, just six verses.
Dominion and fear belong to the Lord.
He makes peace in his high places.
Is there any number to his armies
upon whom does his light not rise?
How then can man be righteous before God?
Or how can he be pure who is born of a woman?
If even the moon doesn't shine
and the stars are not pure in his sight,
how much less man who is a maggot
and the son of man who is a worm?
All true, but he's saying this to Job,
to this man who's going through torture
and turmoil and bewilderment.
All these great truths are true,
but the sermon is missing the mark.
The application is wrong.
Job is being thundered at.
He's not being spoken to.
Job is a case to be filed in the intellectual cabinet.
There's no warmth, no sympathy here.
Here is the theoretician, the intellectual, the historian,
drawing lessons from the past.
And the lesson is still the same.
The punishment fits the crime, the crime,
the punishment fits the crime.
You have sinned, Job.
You're being punished because of your sin.
It's as simple as that.
And history proves it.
So we need to be careful about the weight
and the authority that we attach to history.
If we need to be careful about mystical experience,
demonstrating to us what we think is true,
we need to be careful too about history,
proving our own case,
because we can read history in our own way.
Somebody said, history is really historiography.
That is to say, history is all about the way
in which people write it
and the way people present it to us.
And here is a man who is presenting history
in his own way to prove his own case.
That's Bildad, the intellectual.
And then we move to the third man so far,
and he has two speeches in chapter 11
and again in chapter 20.
And I suppose we could call him the pragmatist.
He's a practical down-to-earth man
and very dogmatic and harsh into the bargain.
A lot of what he says likewise is perfectly true.
For instance, in chapter 11, verses 19 and 20,
you cannot take exception to that.
What he's saying there is perfectly true.
You would also lie down and no one would make you afraid.
Many would court your favor.
He's talking there about the way in which Job
would realize the blessing of true repentance
and true contrition.
If only you would admit your sin,
if only you'd put out your life before God
and turn away from your iniquity,
then, then you could lift up your face without spot.
You could be steadfast and not fear.
You would forget your misery and so on.
You would lie down.
No one would make you afraid.
Many would court your favor,
but the eyes of the wicked will fail
and they shall not escape,
and their hope, loss of life.
Now again, you see, in certain circumstances, that's true,
but it doesn't apply to Job.
It's missing the mark again.
He becomes angry with Job in verse two
and verse three of chapter 11.
Should not the multitude of words, your words be answered?
Should a man full of talk be vindicated?
Should your empty talk make men hold their peace?
And when you mock, should no one rebuke you?
You have said my doctrine is pure.
I am clean in your hands.
Oh, that God would speak and open his lips against you.
He wants God to put Job right.
He's angry with Job
because Job has advocated his own innocence.
And he claims to know, verse seven to nine,
can you search out the deep things of God?
Can you find out the limits of the Almighty?
They're higher than heaven.
What can you do deeper than Sheol?
What can you know?
The implication is I do.
I know I've got the answers
and I'm gonna tell you what the answers are,
but you don't, Job.
He speaks of God's omniscience there.
Let Job repent therefore.
And if he does, blessing will follow.
And in chapter 20,
if you have it so clearly presented to us there,
the answer as far as Zophar is concerned is this.
Job is an evil, wicked man.
He clearly hasn't listened.
This man, Zophar, he clearly hasn't listened
to what Job has just been saying.
It's amazing to me that chapter 20
should follow chapter 19.
Now, that isn't because I'm no good at math.
It's simply because what Zophar says
in reply to chapter 19 is just plainly astonishing.
You know the great climax of chapter 19?
I know that my Redeemer liveth those glorious words.
Job maintaining his integrity and his confidence in Christ,
though he had not yet come to know him
and see him as we have, his great Redeemer.
That's almost the pinnacle, as it were,
of Job's great cry of faith and confidence.
Immediately, it's followed by Zophar in chapter 20,
telling him off, rebuking him, telling him he's evil.
What a response to the wonderful truths
that Job has been expressing in the previous chapter.
Well, this is the pragmatist, Zophar,
dogmatic, harsh, and rather knowledgeable
and supercilious into the body.
Here, then, are the three men, Eliphaz the mystic,
Bildad the intellectual and the historian,
and Zophar the pragmatist,
and they're all combining the same theme,
and they're all bringing the same message.
Now, what do we make of that?
How do we understand what these three men are saying?
I'm sure when you've read the book of Job,
as you must have, you must have struggled as to,
well, what are these men saying?
It sounds true what they're saying.
It sounds correct, it sounds orthodox.
They speak with such certainty,
and yet, at the same time, we're perplexed,
because what they're saying wounds the man deeply
and intensifies his sufferings.
Well, I think there are these negative lessons
that we are to learn from them,
and the first is that we need to beware
of false claims to authority, false claims to authority.
One man claims the authority of a vision.
I've received a vision.
The Spirit has told me what to say to you.
The Lord has given me a word for you,
an experience, a vision, a dream.
Well, of course, not all experiences are spiritual.
Not all words come from God.
Not all visions are from heaven.
There are such visions as we might call
soulish visions, soulish dreams.
There are experiences that are soulish,
that they're not spiritual, but soulish.
That is to say, they come from the psyche
of a particular individual,
and from the psychosomatic unity,
the body-soul knowledge and experience of that individual.
There are some people who are actually
more mystical by temperament,
more mystical by the way they're made.
You have a lot of mysticism in certain parts of the world.
You have such a thing as Indian mysticism.
There are people who have a mystical way of living.
But those visions, those mystical experiences are soulish.
They're not from God at all.
They're from the psyche, from the soul of the individual.
And we need to be careful that we don't claim
for visions and experiences that are soulish
the authority of the Holy Spirit.
And we know, of course, about the possibility
of demonic deception and of other spirits
than the Holy Spirit giving people authority
and telling people what to say.
So we need to be discriminating and careful
before we imagine that it's the Holy Spirit
who is speaking to us.
The apostle Paul, I think, gives us some guidelines there
when he writes at the end of his second letter
to the Corinthian church.
And you remember those wonderful and remarkable
claims that he makes about himself in chapter 11
when he's advocating his own authority as an apostle
against undermining and critical thoughts and comments.
And then he goes on to talk about visions
and revelations of the Lord.
And he says, it is doubtless not profitable for me to boast.
I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.
And then he speaks about the vision and the revelation
from the Lord that he'd received 14 years before
when he'd been caught up into the third heaven,
into paradise.
He hasn't spoken about it for 14 years to anybody.
How much of a contrast that is to modern claims
to spiritual experience?
People can't, as it were, get off their seats
before telling you about them.
But here's a man who had an experience of God
14 years ago, and he hadn't said anything to anybody.
That's more characteristic of a genuine experience of God.
There are other characteristics of it as well,
but that's one of them.
He can't even speak about himself.
I know a man in Christ.
He doesn't claim any credit for this.
This was given to me.
This was an experience that I didn't ask for.
It was given to me.
And it was given to me entirely by God's grace.
So we need to be careful about false claims
to authority and claims that people make
to be speaking in the name of the Spirit
need to be carefully watched, carefully analyzed.
Is it the Holy Spirit?
Is it simply a soulish experience
that people are talking about,
or is it a demonic spirit?
We need to be able to discern visions.
So the authority of visions isn't in itself
of any great value.
I remember the book, The Vision,
written in the early 1960s by David Wilkerson,
in which he actually stated
that certain things were going to happen.
He claimed that he'd received this vision from God,
and he was speaking in a kind of charismatic knowledge
of God having communicated these truths to him.
And in that book, he told us things
that were going to happen in the 1970s and the 1980s,
none of which has happened.
But he claimed the authority of the Holy Spirit
and told the world about it,
and misguided and gullible Christians lapped it up.
We need to be aware of false claims to authority,
and visions are one of them.
A lot of visions, a lot of experiences are soulish.
I didn't go on to read the next verses this morning
there in Ecclesiastes.
If you were here this morning,
we were quoting from the book of Ecclesiastes there
in the way in which the writer tells us
to come into the presence of God with reverence
and not to be rash with our mouths
and to utter things hastily before God.
And he adds in verse three of Ecclesiastes five,
a dream comes through much activity,
and a fool's voice is known by his many words.
There are dreams that are simply the result of overwork
and too much cheese in the night before we go to bed.
And we mustn't claim that they're from the Holy Spirit.
It's ridiculous if we do.
And then if there is the false authority of visions,
there's also the false authority of reason.
That old witch, Lady Reason,
that's the way Luther spoke of reason.
And he wasn't disparaging reason as such.
He was simply saying that reason needs to know her place
and scholarship, while it's of value, cannot pontificate.
Because very often theoretical knowledge
is theoretical, and it's clinical,
and it's unrelated to reality.
But the intellectual has a problem.
The intellectual's problem is intellectual pride.
And that was part of the difficulty
that Bildad himself had to contend with.
And we need to be careful about the authority of reason
and people who claim the authority of reason.
You know, the assured results of biblical criticism.
Still old enough to remember reading books
about biblical criticism in which you heard
those kind of sentences.
The assured results of biblical criticism.
Biblical critics.
They had decided, for example,
that there was no such thing as one book of Isaiah.
There were three authors of Isaiah.
They had decided that this verse in Isaiah was not Isaiah
and that verse was Isaiah.
I remember one of my lectures in university
going through the book of Isaiah
and telling us all, well, Isaiah wrote that
and he didn't write this and he wrote that
and he didn't write that.
And he went through the book of Isaiah
with a pair of scissors, and he told us exactly
what Isaiah had said and what he hadn't said.
And I remember in a lecture asking him how he knew.
I shouldn't have asked the question.
I got a ear bashing.
I was really told what a fool and a nincompoop
and a tyrant I was.
For even questioning the authority.
The pope had spoken.
The oracle had spoken.
And all the students had to bow down
in reverence at his feet.
Well, now we need to be careful
about the authority of reason.
Reason is a great gift from God,
as indeed genuine experience can be a great gift from God.
And the last thing I want to do is to say
that there aren't genuine experiences of God,
the Holy Spirit, there are.
And reason is a beautiful and a precious
and a valuable thing that God has given us,
but it's a bad master.
It's a good servant, like fire.
It has to be kept in its place.
It helps us to answer the question how we think,
but it doesn't help us to answer the question what and why.
We really need to keep reason in its place.
The authority of reason, that can be a problem sometimes,
and we need to be just careful about it
lest it is unrelated to the authority of scripture.
And then, you know, the third man,
the pragmatist, the practical man,
the man who'd learned from experience,
who had his feet on the ground, as it were,
the man who'd worked with his hands.
I remember the old saying in Britain,
did you have it here in Australia?
The answer lies in the soil.
The agricultural answer,
the man who knows a little bit about nature
and about working with the soil.
There used to be a program in Britain,
and the answer of the pragmatist, the agriculturalist,
was always the answer lies in the soil.
Well, again, you see, this can be dangerous.
The practical common sense approach
may be wrong, the know-it-all approach,
in which the practical man who's seen life
and understood a bit more about life
than the children who know very little about life
can easily become the doctor, you see,
and everybody else will avail of patients, poor patients.
He's the schoolmaster, he's the professor,
everybody else, they're the students in the class,
and you listen to the authority, the oracle.
Common sense is a wonderful thing, great, great gift.
It's lacking very largely today
because people nowadays have to be told
in almost minute detail what to do in every situation,
as if they haven't got the common sense
to work it out for themselves.
Common sense is a very valuable thing.
But again, it can be dangerous if it becomes the authority.
So we need to be careful,
that's the first negative lesson,
about false claims to authority.
They may be wrong despite their claims.
People sometimes are too correct, they know too much.
I object to Christians, said Aldous Huxley,
they know too much about God.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
And then if that's a negative lesson, there's another one,
the negative lesson of being careful
about a partial understanding of great truths.
We can get hold of one aspect of a truth
and divorce it from the whole picture.
And it's always dangerous to do that.
Isn't it true, for instance,
that sin will ultimately be punished?
That there is moral retribution in a moral universe,
that God is the judge of all the earth
and he will do right, of course.
But sometimes the ungodly prosper.
Sometimes the righteous suffer.
Psalm 73 is a beautiful Psalm
in which the Psalmist struggles with that.
Why do the ungodly prosper?
They're fat and sleek.
And why do the righteous, why do they suffer?
The ungodly don't suffer rather and the righteous suffer.
What's the explanation of that?
Well, God allows the unpredictable.
And we must take that on board.
We don't know everything and we don't know why.
And we mustn't pretend to be experts.
Therefore, whilst it is true
that there will be ultimate retribution
for sin and wickedness,
in Job's case, his sufferings were not due
to his gross sinning.
So that truth of moral retribution in a moral universe,
though it is true ultimately,
in Job's case, didn't fit the fact.
It wasn't actually happening in his case.
So we need to just include a theology of suffering
as well as of healing into our thinking.
We need to include the unpredictability of life.
And we need to remember that we don't have all the answers
to all the questions.
I don't know whether any of you have ever read
the excellent little book by Gaius Davis called Stress.
Gaius Davis was consultant psychiatrist
at King's College Hospital in London for many years.
And he's written some excellent books.
That's one of them on stress.
He's a committed Christian.
Gaius lost a daughter, beautiful girl,
highly intelligent girl.
And she died of cancer at the age of 17.
And he was broken hearted as you could imagine.
And his minister at the time was Dr. Lloyd-Jones
and he poured out his heart to Dr. Lloyd-Jones
about this bereavement, this sadness in his life.
And Dr. Lloyd-Jones said to him,
Gaius, whatever you do, don't ask why.
Gaius said it was the most helpful thing
that anybody had said to him throughout that experience.
Don't ask why.
Dr. Lloyd-Jones knew Dr. Gaius Davis.
He knew the torture, the anguish he was going through.
And he gave him exactly the right advice that he needed.
Don't ask why.
He wasn't ready to ask why.
He wasn't ready for people to come in
and to try and explain to him
the mysteries of divine providence.
And even if they had, he wouldn't have understood them.
So we need to be aware of partial understanding
of great truths and we need to just suspend our judgment
before we start to make ultimate statements.
And then there's a third negative lesson and it's this.
We need to be aware of speaking for God wickedly.
That's how it's put in chapter 13 and verse seven.
Will you speak wickedly for God?
This is Job now in response.
Will you speak wickedly for God
and talk deceitfully for him?
Claiming to speak for God, but they were speaking wickedly.
You see, they were saying that the transcendent God
didn't care, but the transcendent God did care.
They were saying that the just God, the holy God,
was punishing Job for his sin,
but the just and holy God
was not punishing Job for his sin.
They were saying that the inscrutable wise and knowing God
was really bringing upon Job
the consequences of his own sin.
And that Job couldn't hide from him,
but Job wasn't trying to hide from him.
In other words, these men, these three of them,
were speaking for God wickedly.
They were taking truths that are true about God,
but they were speaking them wickedly in a wrong way.
So they were using the transcendence of God
to browbeat Job, the justice of God to intimidate Job,
the wisdom of God to make Job appear
that he was running away from God,
which he wasn't doing anyway.
We need, I think, to draw near to God,
and we need to draw near to people
who need our help and our support,
and this is what they should have been doing,
but they weren't.
They spoke for God wickedly,
and it wasn't just foolishly, it was wickedly.
And then there's another negative truth, it's this,
that, well, I've really already suggested it in a way,
we should beware of using truth with which to beat people.
This is really what they were doing.
They were taking a truth about punishment and sin,
and they were using it to beat this man.
You have instructed many, said Eliphaz,
your words have upheld those who are stumbling,
but now it comes upon you, and you are weary.
It touches you, and you are troubled.
You've given advice and counsel to other people,
and now it's happened to you, look at you.
Can't you take your own medicine?
They're using the truth to beat this man.
Chapter 11, verse six, is perhaps the cruelest thing
that any of them said to Job.
I think it probably was the cruelest thing.
Verse six, 6b, know therefore, says Zophar,
that God exacts from you less than your iniquity deserves.
All that you've experienced, all the punishment,
in terms of what these men were saying,
that you've experienced, Job,
is actually less than you deserve.
Everything that's happened to you is less than you deserve.
You deserve more than that.
You're so sinful that, well,
God ought to have punished you even more severely.
How cruel that, how cruel that was.
He, Zophar and Bildad and Eliphaz,
they're tempting Job all the time to think of God
as a pitiless, cruel torturer,
because Job knows he is innocent,
and yet he is suffering, but if they are right,
well, he might as well curse God and die,
because there's no morality,
there's nothing of any meaning left in the universe.
They're using truth to beat this man down with,
and we should never, never do that.
Well then, just a couple of positive lessons.
Obviously, the first is to think before we speak.
Sometimes we're too quick, we say too much.
Empty vessels, you remember the old proverb,
empty vessels make the most noise.
We should think before speaking,
and then the second is that we should be genuinely
in our concern for one another,
because we are not experts and we don't know,
and none of us is immune anyway from suffering
and from sickness and the kind of things
that happened to Job.
So our responsibility ought not to be, as it were,
concerned about our own status and what we think
and how we come into the situation
with our words of counsel and help
in a patronizing kind of way,
but our concern ought to be for the people,
the persons to whom we are ministering
and with whom we are seeking to share and to sympathize,
and that means imagination.
That means trying to put ourselves
into the shoes of other people
so we can imagine what it must be like for them.
I don't know whether these three men did that.
They ought to have when they sat in silence with Job,
but they seem not to have been able to do it.
Genuine concern means imagination
and putting ourselves into the position of other people,
and then a third positive lesson, I think,
is that we should be warm towards other people
without being possessive.
That is to say, helpful but respectful,
not judging, not standing over people.
Discriminate certainly,
but accept the person,
accept the man, accept the woman.
We may not know all the answers.
We may not understand all that's going on here.
We may have to just hold our tongues and not say too much,
but all to show concern and love and sympathy
toward the person.
That's not always easy to be warm without being possessive
because very often when people are warm
and outgoing and caring, they want to possess.
They want to put their arms around a person
so that somehow or another,
the person fulfills a need in them,
but that is not what real care is about.
Warmth is one thing, possession is another.
It's like it in a family, isn't it?
A warm mother must not be a possessive mother.
The parental love, the care that a mother bestows
upon her children, or the father for that matter,
ought not to be the kind of possessive love
that can stunt the person's development.
So we need to be warm without being possessive.
That's a positive lesson.
And I think the most important thing of all
is that we should stand with people,
just be with people, just to be there.
Not aloof, not standoffish, not embarrassed to visit,
embarrassed to speak to them
because we wouldn't know what to say,
but just to be with them.
Just perhaps the gripping of a hand, a warm handshake,
just an arm on the shoulder,
just a tear that flows from the eye
when people are going through it.
That says a great deal.
Just to be with people, stand alongside them at their side,
to feel for them, to be like Christ, Emmanuel, God with us.
God with us.
Isn't that the whole story of the incarnation?
Isn't that really what the New Testament is saying
to us so loudly and clearly?
Jesus is our Emmanuel.
Jesus is God with us.
He didn't stand aloof from us.
He didn't build up a throne in the sky
and shout down at us.
He came right into our life, into our world.
He trod this earth of ours.
He breathed in the dust that we breathe in.
He touched the earth that we touch.
He stood alongside sinners.
He did so in the River Jordan
when he was baptized by John the Baptist.
He was with them, not as one of them, but with them.
And with them, of course, supremely and wonderfully
is their sin bearer, with them as their savior,
with them as their redeemer.
Christ came to where we are.
And because he came to where we are,
we can now be taken to where he is.
That's the message of the gospel.
And it's, to me, the great positive lesson
that comes out of the way in which these three people
handled Job or mishandled him.
Instead of just coming to where he was
and standing with them, with him,
they were over and above him
and aloof and indifferent and uncaring.
Thank God that our savior isn't like that.
Thank God that Jesus didn't treat us in that way.
If he had given us what we deserve,
then we should have perished, all of us.
Not one of us would be a child of God.
Not one of us deserves the least grace,
let alone the marvelous grace of God.
But God is the God of all grace.
And so Jesus sought me when a stranger
wandering from the fold of God and he to rescue me
from danger interposed his precious blood.
The great message of the gospel is that God is with us,
with us, not over us like a tyrant,
not about to kill us and destroy us like a judge.
He's already dealt with his holiness.
He's already judged sin.
He's already dealt with its consequences
in the cross of Jesus.
So he's now with us as our savior, as our father,
as the one who loves us remorselessly,
invincibly, inexorably, eternally.
Oh love, that will not let me go.
That's the kind of love that Christ has shown to us
and that these three men should have shown to Job but didn't.
Well, may God fill our hearts with that kind of love.
Calvary, the love of the savior who sees the woman taken
in adultery and has compassion for her
as the others are ready to kill her.
Do you remember, says to her those wonderful words,
neither do I condemn you.
Go and sin no more.
That's the grace of God.
And oh, there's nothing like it in the universe.
It's the most wonderful and precious thing of all.
God has not given us our desserts.
He's lavished his grace upon us
and we likewise are meant to do the same.
May God help us to do so.
Well, we'll sing our closing hymn.
It's number 85 and it's again another hymn of Cooper's.
I love these hymns of Cooper because he was mentally ill
and knew what it was to go through terrible suffering
but he's written these most exquisite hymns out of them.
And 85 is our closing hymn.
God moves in a mysterious.
This recording is brought to you
by thechristianlibrary.org.au.