Al Mohler in He is Not Silent writes:

“Every single text of Scripture points to Christ…From Moses to the prophets, He is the focus of every single word of the Bible. Every verse of Scripture finds its fulfillment in Him, and every story of the Bible ends with Him.”

The same is true for the book of Job. Here are eight ways that Christ walks in the book of Job:

1.      A Blameless Man

In the book of Job, the most upright man on earth (Job 1:8) suffers the most of anyone on earth. 1 Peter 2 says of Jesus “He committed no sin” but “he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:22, 24).

2.      Passionate Lament

Job bemoaned, “Why do You hide Your face, and regard me as Your enemy?” (13:24). The lament of Jesus on the cross was: “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mt 27:46) Both engaged in passionate laments in in the hour of their suffering.

3.      Forsaken by Friends

In the hour when Job needed his friends most, they failed him: “Miserable comforters are you all” (Job 16:1).  At Jesus’ arrest, all his disciples abandoned him: “Then everyone deserted him and fled.” (Mark 14:50).

4.      Disfigured by Suffering

Job was so disfigured by his sufferings that his friends didn’t recognize him (Job 2:12: “When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him”). Isaiah says that the Messiah’s “appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance” (Isaiah 52:14).

5.  Source of Trial

The source of Job’s suffering was that he was attacked by people, by Satan, and by God. When you look at the cross, you realize that Jesus was crucified by people (the Roman soldiers, the Jewish leaders), by Satan (who entered Judas Iscariot), and by God (who gave His Son for us all).

6.      Innocent Sufferer

God to Satan about Job: “You incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause” (Job 2:30). Job did nothing wrong to deserve his suffering. Nor did Christ. Jesus was a sacrificial lamb “without blemish or defect” (1 Peter 1:19)

7.      Intercession & Suffering

Job was asked to intercede for his friends. Job 42:8:  “My servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly.” Jesus is our great high priest who “always lives to make intercession” (Heb 7:25).

8.      Granted A Vision of Seeing God

Job says: “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5). Jesus says only the Son “has seen the Father” (John 6:46).

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the doyen of nineteenth-century British preachers, once indicated his own hermeneutical method:

“I have never yet found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if I ever do find one that has not a road to Christ in it, I will make one; I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get at my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a savor of Christ in it.”

Christ treads beautifully in the pages of the book of Job.

Trinity Wellsprings Church,

The last months of shepherding and leading a church during the coronavirus has been uniquely challenging, frequently exhausting, and often exhilarating all at the same time. These last 13 months has required our church and staff to be endlessly adaptable, flexible, and open to the constant changing circumstances in our world and in our church family.

Here are some reflections from the last 13 months in no particular order.

(1)   I’ve been encouraged by the missional footprint of Trinity Wellsprings Church. I’m proud of the way our church has mobilized to meet real needs both in our community and around the world during the last several months, including:

• Responded missionally by surprising Neighbor Up Brevard with a food drive for struggling families

• Blessed 125 Assisted-Living Health-Care Workers at Zon Assisted Living Facility working on the local front line of the coronavirus

• Fed 100 families living in extreme poverty in a town dump in Guatemala (live chickens, 50 lb bag of rice, etc.) during the height of the worldwide lock-down

• Helped Iranian seminarian-refugees living in Turkey struggling to survive in the midst of the lock-down

• Helped purchase a truck for the missionary family Paul and Thania Heier in Guatemala working with folks in extreme poverty

• Participated in “The Perspectives of the World Christian Movement”

• Supported young church plants within the ECO family struggling to birth an expression of Christ’s church during the coronavirus

• Rallied around Becca Bowers as our “Fall Priority Mission Partner” to send her to Guatemala as a short-term missionary from our own congregation

• Provided Thanksgiving dinners for nearby school families and purchased numerous Christmas gifts for local families (in concert with Gifts from the Heart, a consortium of 9 local non-profit agencies).

• Partnered with Parker Memorial Missionary Baptist Church (Cocoa) to renovate a house adjacent to the church to become a center for drug addicts to get counseling and move from a life-of-drugs to a life-in-Christ.

• Provided meals and the love of Jesus to homeless families for a week through an adapted program via Family Promise of Brevard and served our local homeless and low-income residents by serving monthly at The Daily Bread

• Continued our faithful prayer and financial support of our global mission partnerships with Rev. Frank Godberg/Bethel Church in India (church planting), IBCP Seminary in Equatorial Guinea (pastoral leadership training), Unnamed Family in (for security purposes) Unnamed Location (church planting), Candy Reiger in Dominican Republic (church ministry/discipleship), and Fishers of Men Ministries in Haiti (discipleship, poverty).

• Continued our faithful prayer and financial support of our local mission partners with Community of Hope (homeless transitional housing), Family Promise of Brevard (homeless families), Love Inc. (poverty), Neighbor Up Brevard (integral mission: low-income housing/after school program/food desert), Nana’s House (locally abused, abandoned, and orphaned children)

And those are just the missional endeavors that come to my mind at the moment!

 (2)   Our church family will need to embrace an “unmatched level of graciousness” to weather this storm and these changing times.

Our church currently exists in a world soaked in fear, enamored with division, and hostile to peaceful dialogue. In May 2020, I wrote a congregational letter that included these words:

  …one value stands head-and-shoulders above all others. In the ensuing weeks ahead, our church family will continue to display an unmatched level of graciousness as we navigate these changes together.

An unmatched level of graciousness.

That was my motto, esp. from March to June of 2020. I sought to communicate various versions of this same leadership axiom nearly every week for months. 

In changing times, you will not agree with every decision by the leadership of our church.  (Masks? Tent! Live-Stream! Easter!) That’s understandable and, quite frankly, impossible.

Yet we all can – by the Spirit’s power – continue to display an unmatched level of graciousness towards staff, elders, lay leaders, and our wider community as we follow Jesus together.

 (3)    I’d love to lead our church better in the practice of prayer.

Session adopted a three-year strategic plan which included 9 Dreams and 13 Initiatives that we rolled out during our SHINE Capital Campaign.

Dream #5 was entitled “Prayerful People: Develop More Fully our Identity as “A Praying Church” alongside this description: “We embrace our calling to be a people of prayer, recognizing that the renewal and revitalization of God’s people comes about through the Holy Spirit as God’s children humble themselves in prayer before the throne of grace.”

During Holy Week a few weeks ago, my favorite time was our “Good Friday Prayer Service”.  We prayed through the stations of the cross: we prayed for forgiveness, we prayed for peace in our world, we prayed for thankful hearts to be centered on the cross of Christ, and we prayed that our church would overflow with witness, mission, and hope to a hurting world. It was so good to hear my brothers and sisters in Christ pray together!

In the recent past, our church has engaged in a “50 Days of Prayer” experiment, did a church wide study on Paul Miller’s A Praying Life, held 24-hour concerts of prayer, and participated in creative expressions of prayer (remember “the prayer labyrinth”?).

Can you make a daily commitment to pray for your church family?

(4)   I long for our church’s culture of discipleship to experience a “heating up” over an open fire.

I recently saw a striking truth on social media:

 “The church has majored in holding worship gatherings and minored in discipleship. Let’s restore the balance.” 

How do we restore the balance? It’s not by minimizing the corporate aspect of worship in our lives of discipleship. We need to hear the Word. We need to declare God’s worth with the saints in the household of God. We need the “ordinary means of grace” as experienced in the Lord’s Supper and Baptism.  And we need the fellowship of God’s people. 

And yet…our culture constantly bombards our lives with unending opportunities for busyness. An intentional life of discipleship – lived alongside other believers – is increasingly being considered “optional” or “unnecessary”.

Studying the Word in a slow, methodical fashion is slowly “going out of style”. At TWC, we will work hard to combat this mission drift! 

Are we hungry for life-on-life discipleship?  I’d love for students to be asking Randy and the Small Group Leaders at Riptide: “Can you disciple me?”  I’d love to hear of folks asking Pastor Steve or Mike Elmer (when he comes on staff) or any number of other capable lay leaders in our church family: “Can you meet with me every month for spiritual direction?”

Left to our own devices, we plateau in the spiritual life.

In the upcoming months, we will do our best to put a “discipleship lens” over everything we do at Trinity Wellsprings Church.  In the Fall, we will aggressively re-launch Life Groups because our church still believes wholeheartedly that the Christian life is best lived alongside other believers in fellowship, in prayer, and in the Word of God.

We also believe that Life Groups provide our church family the best avenue for reaching our neighbors who are also desperate for authentic connections and relationships after a long season of relational disconnectedness and dryness! 

(5)   Pretending there is no “Dark Side” to Digital Forms of “Church” is not an option.

In April 2020, I penned a blog post for the Reformation21 website entitled “The Dark Side for the Church during Its Online Hiatus”. The dangers of digital worship that takes place without other believers will remain a problem for the church long after covid recedes into the background.

On one hand, I am so thankful for the technology that has allowed our saints and immunocompromised believers to maintain a meaningful connection to our church body through this season of the coronavirus. Our church loves these saints even as we miss their physical presence with us! This has undoubtedly been part of our church practicing “an unmatched level of graciousness” towards one another as people have responded to this global pandemic in divergent ways. I am also incredibly thankful for our Live Stream Team that has persevered through many challenges, toils, and snares!

Yet, I still have many of the same reservations about our en masse pivot to digital worship that I did twelve months ago. After covid (hopefully) recedes to the background, believers will need to do a “theological reckoning” about the “dark side” of these digital forms of church. Several “open questions” that I raised twelve months ago might be worth contemplating: 

 …The problem is that “participation” of online worship lowers the bar to such an extent as to beg the question of whether this “church” is attracting consumers (to digital content) or raising up worshipers (of the Triune God).

We already live in a cultural moment where a person kayaks on the river or takes a run on the beach on a Sunday morning and posts a picture to Instagram with #church. Evangelicalism’s long confused love affair with its muddled ecclesiology seems to be at a potential tipping point during the coronavirus crisis. Tim Challies asks, “If we all stream our services, will anyone ever come back?” The fact that this is now a question reveals evangelicalism’s shaky foundation: the church’s orientation has been inverted with man at the center…

A church that worships the Triune God recognizes that humanity was made for relational connection (God is Father, Son, & Holy Spirit).  Disciples who follow the Incarnate One are meant to incarnate truth and grace in a community of real relationships. An individualized, fuzzy spirituality devoid of the body of Christ is not a recipe for church but for navel-gazing “experience-ism”, an increasingly common and cheap substitute for church in our particular moment in time.

What does it mean to “participate” in the life of the church after covid recedes? 

Does the Christian life necessarily include aspects of “service” and “fellowship”? 

Can an online worship experience ever duplicate what the New Testament writers portrayed as “the church” wherein the “ekkelsia” was believed to be the harbinger and outpost of the Kingdom of Heaven?

 (6)   Thank the Staff of Trinity Wellsprings Church…and then double-down on your own commitment to serve in whatever way you can. 

I have heard many votes of confidence and appreciation for the staff’s hard-work and endless efforts during the last 13 months. It has been a herculean effort! 

Please know that I already feel appreciated. But could you do me a favor? Might you send an encouraging email or note to other members of our staff?

And then…step up to serve?

Like many churches, Trinity Wellsprings Church will be faced over the next several months of (almost) completely re-building our network of lay leaders and faithful volunteers. 

It takes the whole body of Christ working together for our church family to effectively disciple children, pour the gospel into the lives of students, welcome new folks onto our campus, and overflow on mission into our community and world!

You can safely and confidently assume that the church desperately needs your participation, your time, and your gifts as we engage in the hard work of re-planting and re-launching Trinity Wellsprings Church for the glory of God!

 So…please “SAY YES to SERVING” at Trinity Wellsprings Church! Jump into a new role, a new ministry, or a new way to share your joy and your gifts with others!

Thankful for the privilege of shepherding this beautiful expression of Christ’s body,

Pastor Jason Carter

*********

An INVITATION (and a Final Thought)

Every church in America is now a church re-plant.

During this season, TWC will need to act like a church re-plant in radically “turning outward” towards our community in hospitality, love, and intentional mission in re-launching our fellowship. We need everyone to rally together!

Thus, you are invited to a lunch after church (11:45-1:15, in the Beach House) on Sunday May 2 entitled “The Replanting of Trinity Wellsprings Church: Our Next Steps”. Can you rsvp as soon as possible so we know how much food to order?

Hope to see you there!

How can the Psalms teach us to pray? 

The Psalms are censor-free.  Completely immediate.  No censors.  No passing them through a purification filter.  If there is sludge in the pipes, the sludge is coming through.  The directness and immediacy of the Psalms is startling to modern sensibilities. 

The Psalms are concrete. Polite, passionless, generalized prayers are not what is recorded in the Psalter.  Like the incarnation of God becoming human, the Psalms teach us that you have to incarnate your experience concretely in prayer. You have to live inside your prayers.  Remember these Psalms were songs, and in the singing, there is an owning of the experience. Say your prayers out-loud if you want to pray like the Psalter.

The Psalms are conflictual.  Hatred and anger are articulated. Somehow, this is okay in the presence of God. In the Psalms, life is a battle: there are enemies, there is exile, there is mourning.  The People of God (Israel) conduct a brutal war of language in the Psalms against the enemies of life, and sometimes that enemy is identified as the silence or hiddenness of God himself. Unlike some modern notions of prayer, the Psalmist is not awash in sentimental prayers to simply give the pray-er “a romantic emotional boost” with God. Conflict is part of life. Thus, conflict is part of prayer.

The Psalms are hopeful.  The Psalms usher you into a world wherein God makes all things new.  Rage, hurt, anger — as they are vocalized and sung — slowly begin to spill forth hope.  There is hope in the praying.  God must keep his promises!  God is a Covenantal God, after all! God’s past action (the goodness of creation & deliverance from Exodus) reminds us of a future hope.  Though there is weeping for a night, hope comes in the morning. 

Pray Slowly through a Psalm

The Psalms instruct us in the way of prayer.  The Psalms teach me that prayer can be as emotional and as conflictual as life itself. Praying through the Psalms provides me with a language more hopeful (than my language) and images more beautiful about God (than my ordinary address to God). The Psalms expand my prayers like nothing else!

Pray slowly through a Psalm if you want to learn the way of prayer.

Lent is the 40-day period preceding Resurrection Sunday (Easter) that begins on Ash Wednesday.  This year, Ash Wednesday is February 17, 2021.  Let me give you three Lenten Recommendations as you begin your spiritual journey to the cross and resurrection on Holy Week. 

Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional by Paul David Tripp.  Tripp has a new devotional guide that has recently been released for this 2021 Lenten Season. For 40-days, Tripp begins with a “big idea” spiritual truth that guides you into a journey of meditating on grace, forgiveness, cross, prayer, reconciliation, resurrection, and other meaty topics in a highly accessible way. 

Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers by Dane Ortlund. If you still have not read this amazing book, the Lenten Season would make a perfect time. Several groups at Trinity studied the book in the Fall and found it a wonderful spiritual journey.

A Conversation with Tim Keller: On Cancer, Book Recommendations, Celebrity, and the Reformed Resurgence. The first twenty minutes of this interview with Tim Keller, especially concerning his journey with pancreatic cancer is faith-filled, hopeful, and deeply encouraging. The interview can be heard on the podcast “Life & Books & Everything” hosted by Kevin DeYoung, Collin Hansen, and Justin Taylor or downloaded from wherever you listen to your podcasts.

BONUS:  If you haven’t yet begun a Bible-reading plan for 2021, it’s not too late! The Lenten Season is a perfect time to begin new rhythms and habits.  Check out Trinity’s “Year of the Old Testament” Bible Reading Plan for 2021 as well as several other great Bible Reading Plans from this blog post from earlier in the year: “2021 Bible Reading Plans: ‘The Year of the Old Testament’”.

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar: Did they ever really comfort Job?

11 Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him. 12 And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. 13 And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. (Job 2:11-13)

A plethora of church-centric interpretations of Job’s three friends assert that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were model comforters until they opened their mouths. 

Preachers and bible study leaders will typically say: “Oh look how they sat with him, they wept with him, and they practiced a ministry of presence with their friend Job in his suffering” (see Job 2:11-13).

This interpretation makes for a great teaching moment.  The bible study leader can say, “You know, the best comfort we can often give a suffering person is to say nothing – but simply weep with those who weep and give the grieving person a ministry of your presence.  Just be with the person.” All of that is very true! A ministry of presence and weeping with those who weep during times of loss, grief, and suffering is a wonderful posture for coming alongside a hurting soul.

Yet, the question is: does this application actually come from the text in Job 2?  

Consider that putting dust or ashes upon one’s head in the Ancient Near East was a well-attested mourning ritual for the dead:

• When 36 Israelites were killed in battle, Joshua and the elders of Israel put dust on their heads (Joshua 7:6)

• When 300,00 soldiers were killed and the ark of the covenant was captured, a Benjamite came to tell Eli the priest this news – alongside the news that his sons Hophni and Phineas were dead – with dust on his head (1 Sam 4:12).

• See also 2 Samuel 3:19; 15:32; Ezek 27:30; Lam. 2:10; Daniel 9:3.

Consider also that in the Ancient Near East, the typical prescribed period of time for mourning was 7 days.

So the question becomes: when the three friends put dust on their heads (Job 2:12) and sit in silence for 7 days and 7 nights (Job 2:13), is that a comforting act of therapeutic solidarity with Job or is a premature death ritual being enacted even though Job is still alive? 

Old Testament scholar Robert Gordis says it plainly: “Putting dust on one’s head is the act of the mourner, and not of his comforters”.

David J.A. Clines writes: “Everything in their actions treats him as one already dead…It is hard to avoid the impression that such a way of showing grief would be experienced as alienating. For he is not yet dead; and although, when he opens his mouth, he will say that to be dead is his dearest desire, there must be for him a particular poignancy in seeing that fate externalized in the ritual behavior of his acquaintances.”

Job is treated as dead by his friends – while still living! Is this comforting to Job or do their actions only serve to further drive Job down the path into hopelessness and protest?

Consider further that the cast of characters in the book of Job is a portrait of simplistic extremes, almost caricatures of an epic authorial style. Job is “blameless” and the “greatest of all the peoples of the east”.  Job is fantastically wealthy, and his wife gives over-the-top zealous counsel to “curse God and die”. Does the dramatic arc of the entire narrative now drive the reader (in Job 2:11-13) to pause this rather straightforward style and toggle rather cautiously between interpreting Job’s friends as comforting and sympathetic (heroes in Job 2:11-13) and then cruel and obnoxious (enemies beginning in Job 4)?  

Or, does the entire narrative framework paint the friends in an entirely negative light from beginning to end?  That is, does the sympathetic interpretation of Job’s friends in Job 2:11-13 import a modern psychological/therapeutic reading of the text (mainly for applicational benefit) while overlooking the rather obvious cultural background of the mourning ritual that might be construed as deeply alienating by Job?[1] Especially considering that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are experienced by Job as deeply alienating and cruel for the rest of the book, it is probably not a far-fetched interpretation to suggest that this same alienation and cruelty may have begun already in their initial encounter in Job 2:11-13 however noble their original intentions may have been when they initially began their travels.

Considering the excesses of our modern therapeutic (church) culture, we should at least be aware of psychologizing texts of scripture for reasons of application.

Exegesis is hard work. Sometimes tentative, open-ended interpretations serve to remind us of our epistemological humility before the Word of God.

And, after Job experiences God in the whirlwind, I bet that Job himself would at least agree with that.

*****

 [1] Since Job’s children are not mentioned in the immediate context of Job 2 – or hardly the rest of the book – it seems unlikely that the friends are mourning his children but are rather responding to Job’s destitute condition (…they did not recognize him).

“Does Job Fear God for Naught?” Sermon

One of the seminal questions in the book of Job occurs in the conversation between God and Satan in the prologue: Does Job fear God for naught? (Job 1:9).

This past Sunday, I suggested that the purpose of suffering is to awaken my thirst for “First Things” (Union & Communion with God) and detach me from “Second Things” in life. What sustains us in our pursuit of God is not the blessings of God nor the felt experiences of God but a thirst for God and God alone.

Abraham Heschel once described God with these words:

God is not nice. God is not your uncle. God is an earthquake.

What happens to your faith when you experience God as an earthquake? What happens when we rediscover the nature and character of God in the Bible (and especially in the pages of the Old Testament)? We begin to have a trembling faith.  We no longer seek to domesticate God.  We abdicate all our earthly rights. We give up the illusion of control. We no longer expect the Christian life to simply be about minimizing our troubles and maximizing our blessings.

How we answer the question of our deepest thirst is pivotal and crucial to how we live the Christian life.  Is my deepest thirst for God alone (aka: “First Things”) or am I trying to satisfy my Spirit-implanted thirst for God alone with the second things of this life? 

Maybe the entire point of the Christian life is for me to put first things first, and second things second. And not allow second things to crowd out first things.

You can read the sermon Does Job Fear God for Naught? here in its entirety.

THE BOOK OF JOB

Let me recommend two non-technical books to aid a deeper study of the book of Job. Both books are especially good in tackling the crucial themes and narrative arc of the story of Job:

Job: Will You Torment a Windblown Leaf? by Bill Cotton.

This book represents a very readable and non-technical commentary that provides excellent, insightful details on the book of Job while ending each section with great questions and a section for “Christian reflection”.  At 175 pages, you will have an excellent grasp on the book of Job which will provoke many deep thoughts along the way. I never recommend a commentary for easy-reading but this little book breaks the mold.

The Gospel According to Job by Mike Mason

This book is organized in two-page reflections which makes it an easy devotional read in the mornings. J.I Packer writes, “The profundity of the insights into spiritual life that Mike Mason draws from Job is stunning.” I wholeheartedly agree. This is the book that I wish I could have written about the book of Job! 

BOOKS ON SUFFERING

The Broken Way: A Daring Path into the Abundant Life by Ann Voskamp

Ann Voskamp is a New York Times bestselling author, and some have hailed her latest book as a modern classic on the theme of suffering and brokenness. Ann Voskamp is a master story-teller, weaving details of her own broken life throughout the book which portrays God’s abundant life that is available by following in the broken way of Jesus.

Walking with God through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller

Biblical truth is weaved alongside cultural analysis in a style typical of Keller. If Voskamp engages your heart, then Keller’s book engages your head. Depending on your season of life, you may need Voskamp during one season and Keller in another.