Rev. David Holwick Book of Job series
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
August 16, 1998
Job 32:1-12
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I. What were you like when you were 18?
A. Qualities of youth.
1) Drive fast.
(Drag racing David Moran with our green station wagon.)
2) Impatient to be an adult.
a) Impatient WITH adults.
3) Know everything.
B. Frustrations of youth.
1) Often ignored, especially in church.
2) They have little experience to fall back on, so are not
taken seriously.
II. Appearance of Elihu.
A. An angry young man.
B. He arrives out of the blue.
1) Not mentioned previously, not mentioned in conclusion.
2) Some see him as a latter addition, even a first commentator.
C. Better to see him as a special speaker. [Stedman]
1) His speeches take up five chapters.
2) He always speaks with courtesy and sensitivity to Job,
despite his strong feelings.
a) Directly quotes Job.
b) Gets a little wordy.
3) He seems to recognize the depth of Job's suffering and
always speaks with understanding.
D. The most important thing about Elihu.
1) He claims to speak not out of experience as the other
men did, but from revelation. 32:8
a) "The breath of the Almighty gives [man] understanding."
b) Elihu, therefore, comes into the book as the answer to
Job's cry for an explanation.
2) He doesn't condemn Job or call him a sinner.
a) If Job has sinned, it is how he has responded to God.
1> It is not necessarily the cause of his suffering.
b) Elihu is only friend not condemned by God in the end.
III. God is gracious.
A. He is not our enemy, as Job felt. 33:8-13
1) Job hints that God acts out of feelings, just like our
rages.
a) God is greater than us, and not accountable to us.
1> (Danger in saying our lives don't count for anything?)
Sheila Walsh, former anchor on "700 Club."
b) If he seems indifferent to us, realize he has a larger
perspective.
B. God loves us enough to communicate with us. 33:14-28
1) Dreams or visions.
Ron Gullion had a recurring dream about a two-hundred-fifty
foot fir tree near his house.
He dreamt the tree fell on his house, crumpling the roof and
splintering through the living room and front bedroom
with a sickening, thunderous roar.
Each nightmare would wake him up in a drenching sweat.
All his dreams were vivid and frightening.
He warned his children to stay away from the old tree.
Ron Gullion asked himself, "What do all these dreams mean?"
One day he noticed a twenty-foot dead limb dangling from the
tree.
A neighbor helped him cut the dead branch off.
As Christmas approached the dreams subsided.
Ron and Nita, his wife, returned home from Christmas shopping
to find their nine-year-old daughter, Alison, had
rearranged her bedroom.
She had been talking about it for days but her mother asked
her to wait until after the holidays.
"I just wanted to get it done now," she explained.
On Christmas Eve it started to snow as the family made their
way to church.
Ron recalled, "I hunched in the pew with my arms folded
tightly, "thinking about whether I even believed that God
was part of my life."
It was near blizzard conditions by the time they reached home.
Ron wasn't asleep for very long when he heard a roar.
The old fir tree had fallen on their house.
Alison across the hall was crying for help.
"Daddy, I'm stuck," she called out.
All Ron could see was branches, insulation, and hunks of
ceiling strewn about the trunk.
Somewhere in that mess Alison was crying, "Daddy, Daddy."
Soon the quiet night was filled with the sounds of rescuers
with chain saws frantically sawing parts of the big tree
in an effort to free Alison.
Hours passed and still they were unable to free the girl.
There was the threat of Alison going into hypothermia.
Ron began praying to the God whose very existence just
hours earlier he had doubted.
"Please, God," he prayed, "spare her life."
With more equipment the rescuers finally freed his daughter.
At the hospital the doctors said she would be all right.
The next day, Christmas Day, Ron and his son kicked through
the rubble of their house.
In Alison's room he noticed that the bulk of the tree landed
right where her bed had been before she had impulsively
moved it.
He noticed a scar on the tree and realized that it was from
the dead branch he had felt such an urgency to remove.
That branch might have killed her.
Amid the rubble Ron wondered, "Had God been trying to warn
me all along about the tree?" [see postscript below]
Does God speak through dreams?
#2392
2) God even speaks through pain.
a) C. S. Lewis called pain the "megaphone of God."
He said: "God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pain."
b) The English writer John Donne meditated on the meaning
of pain.
The first hint of an answer came to him through the open
window of his bedroom, where he lay sick.
He heard church bells tolling out a doleful declaration
of death.
For an instant Donne wondered if his friends knew
something he didn't, and ordered the bells to be
rung for his own death.
But he quickly realized that the bells were marking a
neighbor's death from the plague.
Donne wrote Meditation XVII on the meaning of the church
bells, one of the most celebrated passages in English
literature:
"No man is an island....
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee."
Donne realized that although the bells had been sounded
in honor of another's death, they served as a stark
reminder of what every human being spends a
lifetime trying to forget: We will all die.
He began with prayers that his pain would be removed
but ended with prayers that the pain be redeemed.
God wants our pain to be transformed into something
redemptive and meaningful.
#1399
3) Special messengers. 33:23
a) Message of redemption.
b) Renewed like a child.
c) But a correct response to suffering does not always
bring healing and restoration. [LAB, 33:23-30]
IV. God is just.
A. Job felt God wasn't fair. 34:5
1) There is no profit in honoring God. 34:9
2) In effect he says, "I might as well have sinned!"
B. God is the ultimate in fair.
1) Elihu appeals to God's character. 34:12
2) He cannot be against justice, for he would deny himself.
3) He gives us what we deserve, with no favoritism. 34:11,19
4) He is too great to be manipulated by our tiny deeds. 35:6-8
a) He doesn't need our permission to act.
b) Our own sense of justice comes from observing God.
V. God is great.
A. Elihu stresses the majesty of God.
1) Prepares way for God's message on his majesty.
2) Faith in God is far more important than Job's desire
for an explanation for his suffering. [LAB, 37:20]
B. God is sovereign. 37:21-24
1) He remains in control at all times.
C. We cannot understand all God does.
1) Elihu was an astute observer of the rain cycle. 36:27-28
D. But we must still trust God.
1) True in and of itself, but incomplete.
2) Human wisdom is always incomplete.
3) Elihu gives best human answer to Job's dilemma, but it is
still just a human answer.
4) Only God can satisfy our thirst for answers and justice.
=======================================================================
Sources for illustrations used in this sermon:
#1399, "Making Sense Of Suffering And Pain," Internet sermon by
unidentified pastor, who is quoting from "Disappointment
With God," by Philip Yancey.
#2392, "God Still Speaks Through Dreams," from sermon "Way Down In Egypt's
Land," Dynamic Preaching, Winter 1992.
=======================================================================
Postscript: on October 8, 2003, I received this email:
Rev. David,
As my family gave the rights to our story about the 'Tree Fall' and my
father's dreams to Guideposts, I have enjoyed searching on Google to find out
what's being published about it. In my research today, I came across your
"Wisdom of Youth" message [ie, sermon] and your eloquent recap of our story.
I wanted to introduce myself to you. I am Alison Gullion, the 9-year-old girl
that the tree fell on that Christmas night in 1983. I am honored to know that
a story that has the hand of God written all over it is still being talked about
today.
Thought you might be enchanted to know what's come of the girl whose life was
spared....I just celebrated my 29th birthday this year and will graduate this
coming spring with a Masters Degree in Counseling from Reformed Theological
Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He was with me that night and continues to be with
me today.
I am grateful my family's story touched your heart enough to include it in your
message years ago.
Godspeed to you,
Alison Gullion
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