Job 42:1-6 • Refining Gold
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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
I think I like "All Glory be to Christ" better than "Auld Lang Syne" as a New Year's Song.
We are so thankful for Kevin's creativity in introducing us to many things here at God's house as we rejoice in God's work among us.
Earlier, Kevin also chose a song for you that gets us ready for our passage today, which is Job 42, Job 42, as we'll look at the first six verses.
That's page 446 in the Grace bibles at your seats.
And what we're actually doing is picking up Job's response to the questions that you sang earlier today, questions, actually, the Lord has posed to Job.
Job, you see, as you know, has lost many things and at some point begins to question God.
God responds by saying, "Now, who are you to question Me?
After all, I'm the one who formed the foundations of the earth.
I'm the one who holds the seas in my hand and the stars in the sky.
Are you sure you want to question Me about what's right?"
And we'll see Job's response now.
I'll ask that you stand as we look at Job 42 and read verses 1-6 as Job himself responds to the questions God is now asking.
"Then Job answered the Lord and said: 'I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
'Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?'
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
'Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you make it known to me.'
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.'"
Let's pray together.
>>> Heavenly Father, Job speaks of things too wonderful for him to understand, but understanding came along a dark path as there was great loss in his life.
And, yet, through it, he came to understand the God who is working for eternity and the God that did not abandon him even in the darkest moments.
Would You teach us, Father, this day not about the absence of darkness and unreality in a world that is before us but a God who is present even there, to help us, to strengthen us, and to guide us for we must--, what we must face?
Teach us of the God who's there even in the dark.
We pray in Jesus' name.
Amen.
>>> Please be seated.
On the day after Christmas, our family was in the car on the highway that goes along beside the church.
You may remember the day after Christmas: dark clouds, mist, terrible weather.
And as we were on the highway after dark, we saw something we had not seen before.
We looked toward the church, toward the cross tower, and we saw the cross tower illuminated by the lights from the ground, as it normally is.
But because the clouds had closed in so much with the misty rain, we didn't only see the cross illuminated by the lights: We saw the cross reflected in the clouds.
It could not have happened if the darkness and the clouds had not closed in.
Somehow, the darkness itself enabled us to see something wonderful that we would not have seen had the dark clouds not been there.
Because I was thinking about this message from Job as we saw that event, I could not help but think of the parallels.
Where I've had you pick up the account of Job's life is after he has experienced much darkness: the loss of family, the loss of wealth, the loss of health, the loss of his reputation.
And despite our cliches out the patience of Job, at some point he actually does question God.
"Do You know what You're doing?
God, have You neglected me?
Are You not powerful?
Do You not understand what's going on in my life?"
But after those questions come, God shows Himself to Job so much in the dark, that Job ultimately says, "I spoke about what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me."
Is that really possible?
That somehow the dark clouds would get so close that they actually reveal things about God so wonderful that you would not have seen them without the dark.
We have to know, because as we begin a new year together, obviously we don't know the events, the circumstances that will lie before us, and we can already think of the people in our lives for whom darkness has closed in.
We think of the people who are facing loss of peace of mind because of tornadoes or ice storms.
We think of those robbed of joy by miscarriage or family loss.
We think of those anxious about job loss or career future or college choice.
We think of those who are sleepless, angry, afraid because of the loss of health, because of challenges in their families, because of loss of reputation.
All of those things are the dark clouds that come in.
Is it really possible to see God more clearly in wonderful ways because the dark has closed in?
Listen, nobody should want dark clouds nor waste them when they come, if they truly have the ability to reveal God in wonderful ways to us.
The question we have, of course, is is that really possible?
And if so, how is it possible that the dark, when it closes in, would actually reveal God in ways I had not previously known that are actually more wonderful than I could have anticipated?
God, I don't want to face the dark clouds, but if I have to face them, help me not to waste them.
If that is your prayer, the book of Job is God's flashlight in the darkness.
If we're to see the wonderful things, the first thing that we have to recognize is that the darkness does not condemn us.
It is undeniable that there is great loss in the life of Job.
We're here at the end of the book.
If you were at the beginning of the book, in the very first chapter, he faces the loss of livestock and fields and family.
And that's all external to him.
By the second chapter, things are happening directly to him.
He has sores that cover his body from head to foot.
His wife scorns him because of his troubles.
His friends gather around only to be silent.
And, by the way, that's the best thing they will do among the things they will do in the book of Job is just keep quiet, because when they start talking, it gets worse.
All of the loss he experiences and yet, at the same time, his righteousness is undeniable.
In verse 8 of chapter 1 where God is describing Job, even in the midst of all the calamity, God says of Job, "There is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil."
By the second chapter when the darkness comes in and he begins to experience the physical and family ailments, even his wife says to him, "Curse God and die."
But the Bible says of Job, "In all this, Job did not sin with his lips."
It's undeniable that even though the calamity is coming into his life there is trouble.
That is not the equivalent of being an evil man.
And that's something we need to know.
The troubles do not automatically condemn us.
It's sometimes the human reflex, because we know that God can punish evil with trial to say therefore if there's trial, there must be evil.
And it simply is not the conclusion of the Bible.
Now, Job's friends get it all wrong.
We have three of them in quick order in the early chapters of the book of Job.
Eliphaz in the fourth chapter simply says this: "Those who sow trouble reap the same.
So if you're reaping trouble, you must have sowed it.
You are to blame because there's trouble in your life."
The next of these wonderful friends is Bildad the Shuhite, otherwise known as the shortest man in the Bible, right?
He's just shoe height.
[Laughter]
That was for free.
[Laughter]
Bildad the Shuhite has no better counsel.
He says in the eighth chapter, "God will not reject a blameless man.
The innocent don't suffer.
So if you're suffering, you must be to blame."
Finally, there is Zophar in the eleventh chapter: "God is exacting of you, Job, less than you deserve."
Now, there's a friend.
[Laughter]
It's going awful in your life: You deserve worse.
Now, sometimes we greet each other with that little, you know, "How you doing?"
"Well, better than I deserve."
If you were meeting Zophar, he'd go, "Well, that's sure right.
You deserve worse."
[Laughter]
Which is precisely the counsel that he gave to Job.
But these are all the same thing.
It's each of these friends saying, "If you suffer, it's because you're sinful.
In some way, you have failed God, and that's the reason that you are suffering."
We all know in our heart that internal dialogue.
If I'm going through something hard, I must have failed or been at fault in some way.
I grew up playing a lot of baseball.
And I can remember one particular game where I was playing at my favorite position, which was shortstop, and muffing a few plays, so I got exiled to right field.
[Laughter]
Determined to redeem myself out there.
And I can remember, because I wasn't very accustomed to playing right field, seeing an easy pop fly come my way, take a beat on it, get the glove hand up, get the cover hand up, do just as I had been taught to do, get ready for it, and watch it sail over my head.
[Laughter]
And as I turned to run after the ball, I can still remember the words that I screamed at heaven: "Oh, God, what did I do?"
I'm suffering.
I've had a hard day.
God must be punishing me for something wrong.
It's not just the perspective of a child.
Remember, it's even the perspective of Jesus' own disciples in John 9.
They met a man born blind.
Do you remember the question of the disciples to Jesus?
"Lord, who sinned: This man or his parents?"
Do you remember Jesus' answer?
"Neither this man nor his parents but this was so that the glory of God might be revealed in him."
I intend something wonderful , beyond your knowledge, beyond your understanding.
A holy God who is powerful and wise is yet at work to reveal to His people the necessity of His own hand in their lives.
It's a hard lesson.
We have to learn it over and over again.
So Jesus taught it to His disciples over and over again.
By Luke the thirteenth chapter, there is that terrible tragedy where the Tower of Siloam falls and kills 18 people.
And Jesus asked His disciples the question, "Do you image that those who died were more evil than those who survived?"
No.
But it's easy to think otherwise.
When the large tree fell in our yard this past week and missed our house by this much, how easy it was for us to think: Well, we must be more righteous than those people on whom the hou--, the trees did actually.
[Laughter]
Jesus says, "No."
We exist in a fallen world, and our God rescues us from the fall ultimately, but we experience, all of us, the brokenness of living through a world that is itself broken now.
And for that reason, He is forcing us to think about our helper always by the circumstances of our lives and not somehow believe that because we are sinful we are experiencing awful things.
Trouble does not automatically condemn God's people.
And, yet, often that's not just the self speak that we do inside.
These horrible things are happening: What did I do wrong?
It's what we do to others as well.
They're experiencing difficulty or hurt or harm in their lives: They must have done something wrong.
Now, be honest.
We all thought we were perfect parents and everybody else was a mess until we had our second child, right?
[Laughter]
Suddenly we, you know, our condemnations go away.
Early on we kind of look at other people with their children who cry and act up and so forth and we, "Well, now if they just did things right, their children would not be that way."
And then we discover that children are that way.
[Laughter]
Or we look at colleagues or friends who suffer career loss or difficulty in their marriages, and our reflex is, "Now, if they had done everything right, if they had just fixed things, if they had just been smart enough, wise enough, righteous enough, they would not have experienced that."
That is so easy to believe until you face the difficulty.
And then you discover that evil is real and the world is fallen and the rain falls on the good and the evil, even according to the scriptures.
And as a consequence, it gives us hope even in our own darkness to say, "The darkness does not automatically condemn us."
We will not see the hand or the hope that God intends if what we jump to is the conclusion that darkness condemns God's people.
We will actually damage ourselves in the darkness if that is the case.
Through my college years, I worked for a road construction company as a dispatcher.
And during that time, I met a man, fine Christian, who worked for a construction company.
Sometimes that was hard.
Life was rough.
Talk was rough.
I know that; you know that.
But here was a man, a believer, that I knew who really lived his faith.
His name was James Fontaine, red hair, red beard, mountain of a man, booming voice, fun to be around.
On his son's eighteenth birthday, James Fontaine gave his son, to honor the eighteenth birthday, an 18-ton dump truck.
[Laughter]
To provide for his career, to give him a hand up, to establish his future.
Some months later, the 18-ton dump truck had a problem with a wheel.
The young man climbed up under it to fix it.
The load shifted.
The boy was killed.
The next summer when I went back to the construction company, was working in dispatch then, James came into the weigh house to talk to me one day and did his business quickly but didn't leave, kept talking to me.
I had a job to do; he had a job to do.
But he didn't leave.
He just kept talking to me.
And at some point, I recognized that in my youth and in my features, he saw his son.
And he was staying there just to talk to his son.
But the more he talked and the more emotion began to fill him, he finally said to me, "Bryan, I should never have let him do it.
I should never have let him."
And the story came out that on a Sunday in order to help a friend, James had let his son take the dump truck to help the friend and not go to church.
And in James' mind, that was the offense that cost the life of his son.
How much we must say to one another: God laid our guilt on His Son.
It was Jesus who died for us.
Our difficulties do not condemn us.
Our sin condemned Jesus to the cross and the penalty for our sin, past, present, future, all of it was put on Jesus Christ.
What God intends now is only to refine gold.
He knows the way that I take.
And when He has tried me, He will bring me forth as gold.
His intention is to refine, to improve, to help and to help us ultimately see the glory and the goodness of Himself.
His ways are not wrathful in the sense that He is trying to get us hurt in some way because we have crossed the ogre in the sky.
He put the penalty for our sins on Jesus.
Jesus died.
We still live in a broken and fallen world, but we will not be able to survive that world with souls that are healthy if we somehow conclude when the darkness closes in that automatically means that I am condemned.
The darkness does not condemn God's people or we will not see what He intends in the darkness.
If the darkness does not condemn us, it also does not define God.
That's something we have to know.
Job experiences all these horrible things.
Yes, he does.
And you and I recognize the mental dilemma that he must be in.
If God controls everything and everything has gone wrong, then God must be hurting me.
Yes, that makes a certain logical sense, but there is a step of faith that every believer will be called to experience in a broken world where the darkness closes in at times, even on the good, the righteous, the godly people.
There must be a decision made.
Am I going to perceive God as hurter or helper?
Job's wife clearly understands God as one who hurts.
By the time you get to the second chapter, she has perceived all that has gone row--, wrong in Job's life, and unlike Job's friends who blame Job, Job's wife blames God.
"Just curse God and die.
He doesn't care.
He's brought this calamity upon you.
He's obviously the one who is capricious and wrathful.
Just curse Him and die."
And though it may not seem like the right thing to say from a Christian pulpit, you and I know how easy it is to do precisely that thing.
Because we can't quite make sense of it in our minds.
The Bible tells us that God's in control.
My circumstances are out of control.
Therefore, it must be God's fault.
But what our heads have trouble dealing with, the Bible is willing to state to us that difficulty so that our hearts will embrace what they must embrace.
Job, as he's going through all the calamity is trying to find his way through it, at some point just kind of pauses amid the earthly calamities and moves to an eternal perspective in Job 19.
I can't explain all this.
I can't make sense of all this, but "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last day he shall stand upon the earth.
And though my skin has been destroyed, I shall see him in my own flesh, I and not another.
Oh how my soul faints within me."
It's an amazing statement of hope and hurt at precisely the same moment.
I know that God has an eternal end.
I know that He will rise above all this.
I know that He will ultimately rescue me from all this.
But right now this is so hard.
And the reality of scripture willing to state both things so clearly is part of the beauty and the wonder of the book of Job, that we are allowed in our humanity to say, "I know God intends good; I know that God will ultimately rescue me from this earth for eternal purposes, but right now my soul faints within me."
And right where there's this great resurrection passage, there is immediately with it Job saying, "But I'm really struggling here.
My soul faints within me."
It's the reminder that the step of faith that God is calling us to go through when the clouds come through and close in on us is: Are you going to believe that God is a hurter or a helper?
My friends for a number of decades lost their first child to cancer early in his marriage.
He said to me, "I actually became a Christian through that loss."
And by the time he told me that, I knew him well enough that I felt I could ask questions.
And I, so I said, "Why did you become a Christian through the loss of your son?
Why didn't you blame God?"
He said to me, "I sure had questions.
We were nominal Christians.
We attended church every now and then, but I don't really know what we believed."
But he said, "When my son was gone, I knew our family and our marriage was in deep trouble.
And somehow I knew that God was the only one who could rescue us and keep us together and make us whole again."
That's the heart talking beyond what the brain can entirely reconcile.
"I somehow knew": That's the work of the Holy Spirit.
"I somehow knew that God was the one that we needed.
The dark had come in so much that all my strength and all my answers and all our solutions weren't going to work.
We knew that God alone was the rescuer from this kind of situation."
And that's where we will be at times, all of us, in life that is in a fallen world where earthly circumstances create clouds that close in.
We can at times with good reason say, "God must be a hurter, one who hurts people."
But it is the heart that says, "But in all of this hurt, in all of this darkness, I need a God who is a helper and I will turn to Him."
That's the faith choice.
The reason to make the choice that God is helper is spread across the pages of the book of Job.
The first reason that Job should believe that God is a helper Job himself says when he reminds us, "At the last day, I know that my Redeemer will live and stand upon the earth and that I shall see him in my own flesh, I and not another."
I am going to believe God through the earthly calamity because He has an eternal purpose.
And I will believe when I cannot make sense of what is happening here that my Redeemer yet shall live and shall rescue me for eternal purposes.
Because I believe that God is acting for eternity, I will trust Him even when the darkness comes close.
Not only does Job say that God is acting for eternity: He is acting from eternity.
There are supernatural things that He is doing.
Eliphaz, that not so kind a friend, actually does get close to saying the right things in chapter 38.
In chapter 38, he speaks of God, saying, "He created the earth.
He made the sea.
He gives you the breath of life in every moment.
You could not draw the next breath in the next second if God were not working in your life right now.
If God laid the foundations of the earth, if he pours the waters into the sea, if he gives you the breath of this very moment, then that's something supernatural."
And Eliphaz, to kind of lift our eyes beyond just our immediate experience, says, "And not only does God work on land and sea and in your body's breath, but he keeps the stars in their courses."
And then pointing to the other creations of the sky, he says, "And he also feeds the birds in their nests."
He lassos the stars and feeds hatchlings.
He's that great and He's that intimate.
He's that powerful and He's that caring.
If God is able to do all those things beyond your power, beyond your wisdom, beyond your control, then there is reason to trust Him, to turn things over to Him, because He's operating for eternity and with this kind of eternal power and wisdom that is infinite and intimate at the same time.
But even there, we might struggle.
Okay, so He's very smart and He's very strong.
Why still trust Him in the dark?
Says Job, "Because he knows the way that I take.
And when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold."
That it's not senseless; it's not meaningless' it's not purposeless.
So what God is doing is somehow refining gold.
And the hints of that gold are when God actually speaks for Himself.
It's Eliphaz who says, "Why should you, Job, be questioning God when he controls land, sea, and sky?"
But finally in chapter 41, God speaks for Himself.
And God, all fishermen will appreciate this, says to Job, "Job, you question me?
Can you catch a whale with a hook?"
[Laughter]
"Really?
Can you with a worm catch a whale?
If you can't do that, then why would you question the one who creates the whale?"
But it's even more than that.
In that amazing chapter 41, God begins to describe the Leviathan that cannot be caught with the hook of a man.
And the more He describes the Leviathan, He doesn't just seem to be describing a whale but an animal that has scales that act like shields from the harpoons of men, an animal that has smoke that comes from its nostrils, and fire that comes from its mouth, one who ultimately is described at the end of chapter 41 as "king over all the sons of pride."
The Leviathan that Job cannot control is Leviathan of Isaiah 27 or Revelation 12 and 13, Satan himself.
God has moved from just thinking about earthly things to spiritual things: "Job, if you can't control the earth and if you can't control Satan, then you need to trust in Me."
Not only do our dark clouds not define God: They need not hide God.
When Job finally has heard God described in all these ways, the one who controls the land and the seas and the sky and the one who actually controls the spiritual world as well, Job responds.
Do you remember, verse 3?
"''Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?''"
That was the question that God had asked Job earlier.
Job responds, "'I uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.'"
What was that?
Verse 5, "'I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.'"
Yeah, I had heard about you, but now I see you.
And now the phrase applies: Seeing is believing.
I'd heard about you.
I knew about God.
Maybe I'd had faith in God, but I had not understood that You are working for eternal purposes in such a powerful way that You control the things of earth as well as the things of the spiritual world.
And for that reason, I now begin to understand You were coordinating things in such a way that it was for a spiritual good for eternity.
How is it spiritually good?
Because I knew about You.
I heard a man say recently, "I don't know a more dangerous place to be than to know about God but to not have a heart for Him, to just say I know those things, I believe in a God, but I don't believe He's for me and to know that God intends for us to believe that there is an eternal purpose being worked for the good of God's people and that is what will ultimately rescue us from the darkness and so God will make that known."
I want you to know from the darkness how much you need Me.
And we have to confess something then.
When the dark clouds come into our lives, two things inevitably will happen.
Either they will distance you from God or they will deepen your relationship with God.
And because we're human, they kind of do both at times, right?
Job knew that.
Over and over again, as the dark things come into the life of Job, again, despite our cliches about the patience of Job, Job doesn't always respond with patience.
Sometimes he begins to characterize God as his enemy.
He actually uses warfare language again and again as he describes the actions of God in the book of Job.
Chapters 30 and verse 21, Job speaks to God.
"You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me."
Yes, you've thought those thoughts sometimes.
Anger will not help us see God in the dark.
But sometimes we feel it.
Neither will arrogance help us find God in the dark.
Job also says in chapter 31, "Oh, that I had someone to hear me.
I would give account of all my steps.
Like a prince I would approach that one."
Hey, if God would just listen to me, He's know I'm just fine.
I don't deserve this.
In which case arrogance would be the reason that he believed he should not have experienced the darkness.
But if anger nor arrogance are the response, because those distance us from God, what actually deepens our relationship with God in the dark clouds?
Verse 6, Job ultimately says, "'I spoke of what I did not understand; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.'"
Now, that's a hard place to stop.
I repent.
I recognize I spoke about things I didn't understand, so I repent.
Okay, God, I'm wrong.
And I put the ashes and the dust on me.
Alright, I'm a terrible person.
Then what?
Verse 7, God rebukes Eliphaz and his friends for equating suffering with sin and then does something else in verse 10.
In verse 10, we read, "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends.
And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before."
Simple gospel truth: Job repented; the Lord restored.
Now, if I'm sitting where you're sitting, I got a ton of questions.
[Laughter]
Now, wait a second.
Is the fact that he has got more money and more land and new kids really make up for all that he lost including those children?
I don't think we'll get clear answers to that in this life.
I've read all the commentaries.
[Laughter]
You know what I think God is intending to say to us?
His mercy is not dependent on our righteousness.
There is Job in the dust.
He's got ashes on him.
I questioned God in arrogance and anger.
I spoke against God.
And God says, "Oh, you're acknowledging that?
I'll be merciful to you."
Where there is repentance, there is mercy.
And that is the gospel message from the very first pages of scripture all the way through the last.
How remarkable to think that many commentators believe that Job is actually the very first book written in the Bible, not the first in order but the first actually written.
And as a consequence, it is saying right from the beginning Job is in the dust; he's repenting.
He knows he's been wrong, and yet God says, "I'll restore you, not because you become more righteous but because you recognize all My good is dependent upon My mercy and not your righteousness."
And that's when we begin to see the reality of God even in the darkness, a God who is saying, "I will never leave you nor forsake you.
My hand is not withdrawn because you're angry.
My hand is not withdrawn because you're arrogant.
My hand is not withdrawn because you are at fault.
My hand is ever extended toward you."
And when do you most appreciate a hand being extended toward you?
When it's dark.
That's when we see how much I appreciate the hand of God.
If I never experience the darkness, if it was always bright, if there was never a trial, if there was never trouble, would I ever appreciate the hand of God?
And yet because of the darkness that comes, I see God saying, "Listen, if you will depend on My mercy and not your righteousness, I'm for you.
And because I am for you, you have hope no matter how dark the clouds or how much they have closed in."
I saw some of you last night at the airport late.
You shouldn't have been there.
It was Saturday.
You should have been getting rest for Sunday morning.
[Laughter]
I saw you at the airport late, because I was returning from a trip to see my brother in prison in Mississippi.
It's hard for me to tell you how much of a dark tunnel closed in on my family during the years of my brother's trials and difficulties.
Nor how wonderful to be with my mentally handicapped brother in a cafeteria in a prison in Mississippi yesterday and when snacks were put on the table to see him without any prompting from his preacher brother bow his head and pray to God.
And to rejoice before the Lord that eternity is secure despite the awfulness of the dark clouds that came upon us.
To know that because God's hand was with us in the darkness, we trust Him for eternity.
We know that hand now.
It's the way some of you know that hand when your children go through difficulties and there's never been anything better for your prayer life.
As you begin to pray, "God help, God help us, God save us," and you begin to recognize how narrow is that line between absolute calamity and life being okay and so you pray for your kids and you pray for your family and you pray for your job and you become dependent on a God who says, "I will never leave you, forsake you."
And because we know He will never leave us or forsake us, we know that the dark is actually what makes that hand offered to us all the more precious.
I love You, Lord, not because the dark clouds never come but because I see how great is Your love for me even in the dark.
When that happens, you will know what Job meant when he said, "He knows the way that I take.
When He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold."
And the gold is knowing how precious I am to Him.
He even stretches His hand to me in the dark.
And because it's dark, I know how wonderful that hand is.