Rev. David Holwick Book of Job series
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
July 5, 1998
Job 3:20-26
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I. Is it a Wonderful Life?
A. Classic Capra movie with Jimmy Stewart.
1) Good man feels like a failure, despairs of life.
2) Angel intervenes, shows what life is like without him.
B. Imagine if someone special to you had never been born.
1) Best friend - what would your life be like?
2) Your mom?
3) What if YOU had never been born?
a) Impact on your family, friends, world.
C. Job faces this abyss.
1) He feels his life is not worth living.
2) Worse, he wishes he had never been born.
II. Losing it all.
A. First trial - loss of herds (wealth) and children (family).
1) Response: Naked I came, naked I go; God be praised. 1:21
B. Second trial.
1) Open sores. 2:7-8
a) Other symptoms:
1> Feelings of terror. 6:4
2> Sleeplessness and nightmares. 7:4,14
3> Ulcers. 7:5
4> Rotting bones. 30:17
5> Blackening and falling off of skin. 30:30
6> Failing vision. 16:16
7> Rotting teeth. 19:20
8> Bad breath. 19:17
b) Elephantiasis?
1> Disease featured in the movie, "The Elephant Man."
A> He was a piteous creature.
B> Employed in freak shows.
2> Would account for reaction of his friends.
3> All we can know is that it was dreadful.
2) Wife's rebuke: "Curse God and die." 2:9
a) Satan's instrument.
b) Foolish, but not evil.
1> Did she believe he deserved it?
2> Or being fatalistic - God is out to get you.
3) Job's second response.
a) Accept good, not trouble?
C. Friends arrive. 2:11
1) Ash heap.
a) Place of social outcasts. Lepers, etc.
2) Silence.
a) (Seven days of mourning).
b) Polite not to talk first.
III. Job's cry from the heart.
A. Dramatic change in spiritual tone.
1) Patience and faith sink into despondency and depression.
a) Not uncommon for believers.
b) Pilgrim's Progress: "Slough of Despond."
2) His speeches contain some of the most profound expressions
of pain, despair, and outrage in all of literature.
a) The first words in his first speech set the tone for
what follows: "May the day of my birth perish..."
b) He wanders just to the edge of blasphemy.
3) Here he comes the closest to cursing God. (cf. 2:5)
a) At Fall, God did not curse Adam, but the ground.
b) Here, Job does not curse God, but his own birth,
which is part of God's creative plan.
B. Removing a birthday.
1) Similar to Jeremiah 20:14-18.
a) Curse on the day offsets God's first day of creation.
b) He is questioning God's sovereign wisdom.
c) Poetic progression - disappear day -> kill me at birth.
2) Both faced trouble and opposition.
3) Neither chose suicide.
a) They questioned God's wisdom.
b) But they did not take away the precious gift of life
God had bestowed on them.
c) Death is a gift of God as much as life is. 3:21
C. Death seen as an escape.
1) Thomas Paine: "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
a) (A famous skeptic.)
2) Job wanted vindication or death.
a) He never asks for healing, or having his family back.
b) A relationship with God is his highest goal.
3) Death is only an escape for believers. Rev. 14:13 <<<<<
a) No rest for wicked! Luke 16:19-31 (Rich man & Laz.)
IV. Hedged in by God. 3:23
A. Satan had insinuated this in a positive sense.
1) Satan saw God's hedge as a protection.
2) Job finds it a restriction, a trap.
B. God as our enemy.
1) Philip Yancey's great insight into book: Job's true crisis
was a crisis of faith, not of suffering.
a) Will Job believe even when life isn't fair?
b) Each of us faces the same crisis of faith.
2) All of us at times find ourselves in Job-like circumstances.
a) A tragic accident, a terminal illness, or a loss of a job
may have us shaking our heads and asking ourselves,
"Why me?"
"What does God have against me?"
"Why does he seem so distant?"
b) At such times we focus too easily on our circumstances -
our illnesses, our looks, our poverty, our bad luck -
as the enemy.
1> We pray for God to change our circumstances.
A> If only I were beautiful or handsome, we think,
then everything would work out.
B> If only I had more money.
C> If only my sexual desires would somehow change,
or at least diminish.
2> Then I could easily believe God.
c) But Job teaches that at the moment when faith is hardest
and LEAST likely, then faith is most needed.
C. Don't be trapped in a limited point of view.
1) There is always a temptation to blame God and to see him
as the enemy.
a) But the view behind the curtain in chapters 1 and 2
reveals that Job was being exalted, not spurned.
b) God was letting his own reputation ride on the response
of a single human being.
2) At the very moment when Job felt most abandoned, at that
moment God was giving him personal, almost microscopic
attention.
a) God seemed absent to him; in one sense, God had never
been more present.
V. Finding peace and quietness. 3:26
John Killinger was in Brooklyn Heights visiting the church where
one of the greatest Congregationalist ministers had once preached,
the great Henry Ward Beecher.
In the evening, he walked with one of his hosts along the promenade
that overlooks Manhattan.
She talked about her life when she had arrived there several years
before.
Her husband had left her, and she was having difficulties with her
only child, a daughter.
The woman had come to this place at night thinking she could not
go on.
She didn't want to take her life, but she didn't know how she could
go on in the pain and the agony she was feeling.
She told him she sat on one of the benches and looked across the
bay at the city.
She stared out at Liberty Island in the distance, and she watched
the tugboats as they moved in and out of the bay.
She sat, and she sat.
The longer she sat, she said, the more her life seemed to be invested
with a kind of quietness that came over her like a spirit.
Down deep she began to feel peaceful again.
She said she felt somehow that God was very near to her, as if
she could almost reach out and touch God.
Better yet, she didn't need to reach out.
God was touching her.
She felt whole and complete and healed as she sat there that evening.
It became a turning point in her life.
"Since then," she said, "whenever I feel under pressure at my job
or from any personal problems, I come down here and sit on this
very bench.
I'm quiet; I feel it all over again, and everything is all right."
The psalm writer said, "Be still and know that I am God."
"When we know that, everything is all right."
#3959
[add conclusion on why death is not preferable to suffering]
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