My Redeemer Lives
Job 19:25-27a
The Problem of Faith in the Face of Unjust Suffering
I recently heard a highly educated Christian woman who had experienced severe and ongoing trials say, “I have a problem with the book of Job. How can God allow such inexplicable suffering and still be both all-loving and all-knowing?” She was still holding to God, cherishing God, but with a fair amount of anger and puzzlement.
I once heard a minister of a Christian church say, “I’m not sure I believe in God anymore. When you consider the horrible things that happen in the world, how can there be a God who is at once good and powerful?”
In our pews and pulpits are many who may not have faced or expressed their doubts, but who exhibit a practical atheism, a failure in daily life to trust and to take seriously that they have a living God who is all-powerful and all-loving. Deep down, they are not sure that God is real. If you are not sure that God is both good and powerful, it is hard to get excited when you are invited to worship, pray, give, or share the good news.
Many people think that the hard questions in some way disprove the Bible. But the Bible does not present the saving truth as something that removes the hard questions. So why are people who call themselves Christian often undone by the hard questions? Because they have been brought to faith with a watered-down message of easy answers. We may hear famous preachers giving happy, uplifting messages about how to use God to get ahead with our own agendas in life, but in the Bible there are a far greater number of deep, dark questions and hard challenges than simple, happy answers. The good news is that the answers the Bible does offer will stand up to the test of hard reality.
Summary of Job
Today, we take a look at the book of Job. The story goes like this: Job is a righteous and prosperous man. God called him to Satan’s attention. Satan asserted, “Job is merely a mercenary. Who would not be righteous if it pays so handsomely?” God says, “Okay, remove his wages.” In a two-step process, Job loses almost everything including his health. He is left totally impoverished, sitting on the garbage heap, scratching his boils. His wife urges him to curse God and die. He refuses, answering, “Shall we receive good from God and not evil?”
Three friends come to visit Job. Job vents his anger, cursing the day of his birth. The three friends who begin to put forward the standard answers that suffering comes to us as a punishment for our sins, and that Job needs to confess his sins and repent. Job is sure that he is innocent of anything that would explain his suffering. Job vehemently argues his case. The three friends at last exhaust their counter-arguments. Job offers his summarizing defense, and a young man enters the fray to try once more to persuade Job to confess his sins.
At last, God appears to establish that Job—especially when he cursed the day of his birth—has failed to comprehend the grandeur, complexity, and goodness of creation, and that he is not in a position to question the Sovereign Creator’s wisdom. Job repents of the things he has said in ignorance and humbly waits in silence.
In spite of Job’s errors, God honors the honesty of his speech but tells the friends that they are in danger because they, with their simple formulas, have spoken wrongly of God. He has Job serve as their priest, offering sacrifices for their forgiveness. Then he restores Job to a well-being and prosperity substantially greater than he had before. End of story.
How does this story help us address the problem of unjust suffering?
1. There is such a thing as unjust suffering.
Unjust suffering does not have to be explained away. In fact, the three friends and the young bystander are wrong to try. When we see someone suffering, we do not have to explain to them why they are suffering. It is generally best for us to keep our mouths shut and just show our love and care. Job was not the last to suffer unjustly; so did the perfect Son of God. The New Testament tells us that therefore we may know that we an advocate in Jesus who has undergone every kind of temptation that we will ever face, yet without sin.
2. In spite of Job’s sometimes ignorant speech, God honors his tenacious integrity.
An example of that tenacity shows up in 13:15-16: “Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face. This will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him.” Job does not in his perplexity, distress, and anger, turn away from God. Instead he presses his case in the trust that it is better to risk one’s life coming into God’s presence than to live with less-than-honest platitudes apart from God. God is big enough to handle our anger. What God cannot handle is apathy.
3. In the end, justice prevails, often even within this life.
It is a matter of human experience and observation that sin contains within it its own downfall and that the sinner, although prospering for a time, will ultimately fall. Good is generally rewarded over the course of time. This truth is not to be reduced to simplistic formulas such as those the three friends espouse, but it is a general truth nonetheless. The error of the three friends is that they applied the truth in an untimely and undiscerning manner. It is good news that justice prevails. It is even better news that mercy prevails. Job had warned the three friends that their wrong speech was endangering them of coming under divine punishment. In the end, God clarifies that they deserve such punishment, but appoints Job to offer sacrifices for them so that their sin might be covered. We look to a better sacrifice than any Job offered for them, the self-giving love of the perfect Son of God. Anything that ends with justice and mercy is a truly good story.
4. To see the complete picture, we have to take an eternal perspective.
Taking an eternal perspective is what Job is doing in 19:25-27a. Job is persuaded that he may die before justice is done, but nonetheless he affirms: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the end, he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another.” Job lived in a culture that imagined the dead as going to a shadowy semi-existence, but Job has a strong conviction, a knowing, that he has a living Redeemer. A Redeemer is a kinsman who takes the necessary actions to restore one’s just cause and inheritance. Job suddenly knows that his Redeemer will stand on the dust—perhaps Job’s garbage heap, perhaps Job’s grave—to advocate his case. Then he has another knowing, that even though he may die, he will in new flesh see God.
Finally, Job seems to perceive that the Redeemer who will advocate his case before God is none other than God himself. It is hard to make sense of that except by the way we Christians know with God the Son as Redeemer standing before God the Holy Father as Judge. As Paul later writes: “Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.” Job somehow—I suggest by the Holy Spirit—knows that his Redeemer lives and will advocate on his behalf, and that Job himself will see it in renewed flesh. That gives him hope—not mere wishful thinking but well-founded conviction, a knowing—of eventual vindication in eternal life.
5. Our vindication is this life may come through personally experiencing the living reality of God.
Within the book of Job, Job does not have to wait for the eternal perspective, but receives his vindication from experiencing the direct presence of God. God restores Job to prosperity, family life, health, and longevity, but these are secondary matters. What really matters is that Job now has a living relationship with God.
Conclusion
I have laid out five ways that the Book of Job helps us deal with unjust suffering. The first two are (1) that there is such a thing as unjust suffering and (2) that God honors tenacious integrity.
The next three ways anticipate the Big Three Promises of the New Testament.
(3) In the end, there is justice and mercy. It is Jesus who brings together the holiness and love of God, the divine justice and mercy, and he does this in his sacrificial death on the cross. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, there is forgiveness of our sins. Forgiveness is one of the Big Three Promises of the New Testament: it takes care of our past.
(4) Our Redeemer lives. As Christians, we know the Redeemer’s name: Jesus. And we know that he has been raised from the dead and exalted to the place of authority at the right hand of God to serve as our Advocate. He is the first born of the new creation, the guarantee that all who are found in him will share in his resurrected life. And we shall behold him! Alleluia! Eternal life is one of the Big Three Promises of the New Testament: it takes care of our future.
(5) We can experience the presence of God. Jesus promises that he will send his Holy Spirit to live in all those who believe in him, who are baptized into him, and who ask, seek, and knock. The Holy Spirit will confirm our faith in the good news; he will convict us of sin and give us the power to repent and to live a new life; he will guide us into truth and wisdom; he will renew our lives in the image of Jesus; he will empower us to serve Jesus with spiritual gifts; and he will comfort, encourage, and strengthen us when, like Job and Jesus, we undergo the testing of unjust suffering. There is no comfort like the presence of the living God! The gift of the Holy Spirit is one of the Big Three Promises of the New Testament: it takes care of our present life.
Now what we need to ask ourselves is: Are we living our lives to get the whole good news? Do we have faith that Jesus can provide for our forgiveness, for our eternal life, and for the transforming power of the Holy Spirit in our lives?
I am not just asking, Have we professed faith in Jesus? I am not just asking, Have we gone through the baptistry? I am asking if we are getting the benefits of those actions: Forgiveness, Eternal Life, and the Holy Spirit. That’s what it is all about. Not just one of the promises, not just two, but all three! Don’t spend a life going through the motions of churchianity and miss the benefits.
I began this sermon talking about the problem of unjust suffering. The answers Job found were not philosophical answers, were not pat formulas, but they were better by far. In the end, the answer is not an explanation, but a living God! The Christian development of Job’s answers are better yet: Forgiveness, Eternal Life, and the Holy Spirit. Claim them! They will stand up to everything life throws at us! And they will get us moving for Jesus!
[For a closer look at the Big Three Promises, see The Big Three]
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