The Book of Job: Spiritual Applications (Part 2)
You are invited to read Part 1 first. Here are five more sermonic tidbits lifted from the series When Life Hurts: The Story of Job.
1. Job teaches us about the Sanity of Tears.
Job cries for God’s justice in the face of extreme and grave injustice.
Job cries for God’s presence when he experiences the hiddenness of God.
Job cries for God’s voice when he experiences the silence of God.
Has Job gone mad?
Has he? Or do our lack of tears implicate our own callousness to the injustices of our world and all the ways we normalize our own spiritual apathy to the things of God?
Oh, that we would cry for God’s presence.
Oh that we would cry to hear God’s voice….the way Job did.
When was the last time that I wept and cried because of my sin before a perfect and holy and loving God? Is spiritual growth to be measured only by the temperature of my joy....is it not also to be measured by the depth of my sorrow over my sin?
2. What Job faintly hoped for, we experience the reality
“If only there were someone to mediate between us, someone to bring us together.” (Job 9:33; “I know my redeemer lives…Job 19:25-27)
What Job longed for, what Job hoped for, what Job cried out for, we experience in reality.
Job saw the shadows, we see the light.
A mediator is one who Receives our Sentence, Removes our Sin, and Represents the Sinner -- bringing us To God.
Christ as the Mediator is the one who (1) Receives our Sentence, (2) Removes our Sin, and (3) Represents us before God, thereby reconciling us to God.
What Job saw in the shadows, we experience in reality.
In Job 16:19, Job cries out: “Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven. And he who testifies for me is on high.”
Job knows there is no earthly witness who could come to his defense. Job wants a defender that will testify to his blamelessness and righteousness before God.
Job’s hope builds from Job 9 – to Job 16 and to a crescendo at Job 19 where Job says: “I know that my Redeemer lives”.
Christ walks in the book of Job. And Christ as the Mediator doesn’t walk faintly and in the shadows of your life but walks boldly and powerfully as your Mediator between your great sin and God’s great holiness.
Here is the good news: What Job experienced faintly and in the shadows, we experience in reality. Christ is our mediator! Christ is our witness in heaven! Christ is our Redeemer! Hallelujah!
3. Theology: Know When To Employ It
Complete these phrases:
Cause…..and Effect
To every action there is always…an opposite and equal reaction.
What goes up…must come down.
In a nutshell, this is the theology of Job’s friends.
Job’s friends live by the motto that every spiritual effect has a spiritual cause. Every spiritual action has an opposite and equal spiritual reaction.
Or, if you want to get more theological, this is called the doctrine of retribution.
The Doctrine of Retribution: A legalistic and simplified reading of Torah in which linkages between deed and consequence become frozen into absolute principle.[1]
The doctrine of retribution feels like it could be good advice -- in the abstract -- but the fault is that these abstractions make no sense in the particular case of Job. Job’s friends should have been using a ball-point hammer, instead they take a sledge hammer to the case. And destruction ensues.
You not only have to know the right theology, but also when to employ it.
4. The Logic of retribution confuses the Law of Linearity with the Principle of Influence.
Many Christian parents have stumbled over these words: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6).
“Ahh....the law of linearity…all I have to do is A, and I’m going to get B! It’s the Law of Linearity and it’s in God’s word!”
This is the cause and effect mentality of retribution (but with a positive spin). Yet, have you ever noticed that really bad parents sometimes have really good kids? And that good parents sometimes have kids who do terrible things?
That’s because there is a difference between the wisdom principle of influence and the cause and effect logic of retribution.
The Spiritual principle of influence says: 100 parents who love God and train their child well, will raise a greater number of responsible children than a 100 selfish-uninvolved parents. That’s influence.
But a “Cause and Effect Christianity” is no Christianity at all! A cause and effect Christianity where I am in control is completely devoid of grace, completely devoid of mystery, incapable of real prayer (because you’re still in control!) and completely at odds with surrendering your will to another because you still hold onto the illusion of control.
The Law of Linearity actually takes God out of the equation! Because you don’t need to relate to God – you just have to apply some of his principles. And the main focus is upon making life work rather than enjoying and glorifying God for who God is.
The logic of retribution puts God at arm’s length, but Job is not satisfied with the advice.[2]
5. An Open Posture to God in the Midst of Suffering
What I’m saying is that in the midst of my suffering, that I should have an open posture to God’s deepening and sanctifying process in and through the trial.
However, that’s different than saying that it’s your job to figure out precisely what God is doing, each little lesson he is trying to teach you at each little juncture of your life.
Some of these things that go on in my life have their cause in the heavenly court, just like they did for Job (they happen above my head). I’m just feeling the effect of a cause I can’t see. It’s not my job to always know and figure out the Cause. If you can, good. If you can’t—fine.
But there is a Job-type of abandonment to God, a posture of openness to God’s deepening and sanctifying process….even when I don’t know the cause.
Did you know that God loves and delights to work in the dark night of the soul – whatever name that may be for you?
Why? Because God loves and delights to work in the cross.
So don’t miss your cross. Golgotha ain’t pretty, but it sure does redeem.
6. BONUS: Suffering and Resurrection
Did you ever notice that when you read the apostle Paul: Paul is a resurrection guy! He loves the resurrection. He glories in the resurrection. He lives in the power of the resurrection. So what does he do with suffering? He pleads with God to resurrect the suffering in his life – to take away his thorn in his flesh!
Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this that it should leave me. (2 Cor. 12:8)
Yet Jesus doesn’t answer the prayer. Why? It’s a big question. Yet in this case, Paul knows why: “So to keep me from becoming conceited…a thorn was given to me in the flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7) So Paul understands a truth with profound implications: God is going to use evil outside of him (the thorn) in his life to deliver Paul from the evil inside of him (the conceit and pride in his heart).
Do you understand how wise and good and loving God is? God is going to use the suffering and evil that comes upon Paul’s life (the thorn in the flesh) to deal with the sin in Paul’s life (his conceit and pride).
Suffering/evil comes upon Paul’s life, God uses it in Paul’s life.
***
[1] Susannah Ticciati, Job and the Disruption of Identity: Reading Beyond Barth.
[2] For more development on this theme, read Larry Crabb’s great book The Pressure’s Off.