Determined to Hope
Text: Job 13:1-16
July 18, 2004, Dave Philips
Philip Yancey tells about a friend of his named Richard, a theology student at the Wheaton College Graduate School, who during his graduate studies wrote a book about Job. He sent it to a publisher, and it was accepted. Yancey was pleased when Richard called him up and asked him to write the foreword for the book.
But with a month to go until the publication date, Richard came to see Yancey to tell him that he no longer believed what he had written. AI hate God!@ he blurted out. ANo, I don=t mean that. I don=t even believe in God.@ Richard then poured out the sad story of his lost faith. He had become a Christian as a university student in a turbulent time in his life during the divorce of his parents. But from the beginning he had an uneasy feeling about his new faith. In particular, he was concerned because his prayers never seemed to be answered, at least not the way he felt they should be answered. He transferred to Wheaton College to learn more about Christianity, but the more he learned, the less comfortable he felt. He talked to God faithfully in his prayers, yet he felt that God never talked back to him.
Finally, in a fit of desperation one evening, he decided to put God to the test. Even though he barely believed in God any more, he decided to give God one last chance. Alone in his student apartment he began to pray. He prayed on his knees, he prayed stretched out flat on the floor, he prayed and prayed and prayed. AGod! Do you care?@ he cried out in anguish. AI don=t want to tell you how to run your world, but please give me some sign that you=re really there! That=s all I ask.@
Finally, at four in the morning he gave up. God had not answered, and he felt that his Christian faith was at an end. He took his Bible and all his theology books out into the backyard and set them on the brick barbecue. He sprayed them with lighter fluid, lit a match, and set them on fire. AIt was a moonless night,@ Richard recalled, Aand the flames danced high and bright. Bible verses and bits of theology curled, blackened, then broke off in tiny crumbs of ash and floated skyward. My faith was going up with them.@[1]
I wish I could report that Richard later turned the corner and became a believer again. To my knowledge, however, he still has not come back to Christian faith.
How many of us have had similar experiences? How many of us have lost hope? How many of us have questioned our faith in God to the point where we were prepared to give it up?
I have! Just in case you were wondering. My worst collapse of faith was in the midst of my ministry when, as a young man barely into my 30s, I seriously wondered whether what I believed about God and Jesus were nothing more than a pipe dream. Obviously, I turned the corner. Otherwise, I wouldn=t be here this morning. Instead, I would be among the group of my fellow citizens who spend Sunday mornings reading the paper or sleeping in.
Job in our scripture lesson for this morning is at about the same point as Richard, and for reasons that are far more devastating. He has been hit by several catastrophic disasters. On a single day he lost most of his property and, on that same day, all of his children were killed. Then, he lost his health. Then his wife, disgusted by these terrible calamities, told him to curse God and die. Finally, when he was at his most vulnerable, three friends came to comfort him. But when Job indulged in a little understandable moaning and groaning about his bad luck, these friends began to criticize him, gently at first, but then with increasing harshness. They told him that he wasn=t a very good man. In fact, he must be a very bad man to have these calamities happen to him. Because, they said, as everyone knows, good guys are rewarded with pleasant lives while bad guys are punished.
ABut,@ Job protests, AI=m not a bad guy at all. How come these bad things can happen to a good guy like me?@
I remember hearing about a man in the first stages of intestinal flu who was riding in the front of a very crowded elevator. As the elevator went from floor to floor, he got more and more queasy and sick. Finally, the elevator arrived at the penthouse level. The elevator door opened and there waiting to get on was a lovely lady dressed to the nines, and the poor man could no longer hold it in. He threw up all over this beautiful woman. Then the elevator door closed leaving the woman standing there in her ruined outfit and saying to herself, AWhy me?@
Why me? Don=t we all ask that question from time to time. Why did I allow my stockbroker to persuade me to buy Enron? What did I do to deserve my son-in-law losing his job so that he and my daughter and their three preschool kids had to move in with us? Why did I, who eat wisely, exercise, and don=t smoke, get cancer while my neighbor who smokes like a chimney, is overweight, and sits and watches television all the time is cancer free?
Parenthetically, I want to ask you: have you heard these questions discussed by anybody in the past six months over the media? Have you heard Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer ask someone who has gone through a terrible calamity: why did this happen to you? Or, have you heard them ask some prominent clergyman, like Billy Graham, why did God allow these things to happen? Or, have you heard well-meaning Christians come up with pat answers for these difficult questions of life? And I ask finally: isn=t it just amazing that this book of Job which was composed two or three thousand years ago is as fresh and relevant to our human condition as today=s front page?
All of us have asked these questions at one time or another during our lives. Job teaches us a ton about how to ask these questions and how to make sense out of God=s answers. Job is clearly one of the most stubborn men God ever made. He is determined to hope. He is not content with easy answers. And his stubbornness and persistence pay off in the end as God restores to Job both his faith and his fortune. I wonder what the outcome of Richard=s story would have been if he had been a little more stubborn, a little more like Job, if he hadn=t said: AO.K., God: you=ve got four hours to prove your existence to me, and if you don=t come through in your allotted time in a way that satisfies me, that=s the end of my faith in you.@
Note three things that Job teaches us in chapter 13: first, honesty: Job is honest enough to admit that his religion is not working. Second, faith: Job knows that his religion is not working, but he just can=t believe that the problem is God. It must his religion. Finally, determination: Job is not going to give up on God. He=s going to keep persisting until he finds out what has gone wrong.
The first thing we learn from Job, then, is honesty. Denial, as my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous are fond of saying, is not that big long river in Africa. It is Job=s friends who are in denial about their religion, not Job. It is Job=s friends who insist that their religion is working when it obviously is not.
Job=s friends believe what many people continue to believe in today=s world. If you do your best, if you keep your nose clean, if you pay your taxes on time, if you vote faithfully for the candidate of your choice, then you=re going to have a good life.
ANonsense!@ Job counters. AYou=re describing me. I=ve done all these things. But still the bottom of my world has dropped out from under me. Something is wrong with the way we=ve been looking at things, and you guys are not seeing it.@
It=s at this point in chapters twelve and thirteen that Job gives up on his friends and their take on religion. AYou guys are worthless physicians, all of you!@ Job says. AIf you had just kept your mouths shut, I might think you were smart. But you=ve babbled on with all your nonsense, and I know you don=t know what you=re talking about.@[2]
Folks, there are times when we need to just shut up and listen. When people are going through disasters, frequently the best thing is just to let them vent, to let them talk, to draw them out and listen to them rather than coming on with the God talk. There are lots of things that a wise spiritual counselor could have said to Job in his agony, but the truly wise Christian is going to spend more time listening than talking when he or she dealing with a person in the midst of intense shock and grief.
Job=s honesty destroys that smug piety of his friends. Good! Smug piety needs to be destroyed. Let it die! It=s not worth propping up.
Second, Job teaches us about faith. He knows that his religion is not working, but he just can=t believe that the problem is God. Very interesting! In all the agony that Job goes through, he never stops believing in God. We might be tempted to think, AWell, that=s ancient man. In those days, people weren=t smart enough to disbelieve in God.@ But that=s not true! There were plenty of people in the ancient world who didn=t believe in God. Lucretius, the Roman philosopher, 1st century B.C., for example. Or, remember the word of the psalmist who wrote these words several hundred years before Lucretius: AFor the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, those greedy for gain curse and renounce the LORD. In the pride of their countenance the wicked say, >God will not seek it out=; all their thoughts are, >There is no God.=@[3]
But Job doesn=t say this. He knows better. Remember, hope is an attitude of expectation based on our positive experience with God. Job has had a good life, a great life, and he confidently believes that the God who has blessed him thus far will come through again for him.
One of my friends has been through hell in the past couple of years. He has a physical condition that keeps him in constant pain. He manages to function, he manages to get out socially, he volunteers in a couple of church communities, but unless you know him and know what he=s going through, you might not guess that he is suffering. He has been to doctors and they have told him there is nothing they can do.
I asked him how that had affected his faith, and I was stunned by his answer. AIt has not affected my faith intellectually,@ he told me. ABelieving there is a God still makes much more sense to me than believing there is no God. I cope with my pain by believing that some day doubt will no longer make sense and that I will receive peace. But I have been deeply shaken in my heart and soul. I feel sometimes in the midst of my pain that I=m hanging on to a blank wall with my finger nails. In the first stages of my intense pain, I wanted to hide, I wanted to stay in bed all day. I=m over that now, and the hell of my anguish is not there any more. Instead, I=m experiencing from time to time a deep melancholy, but I=m confident that=s going to go away. I=ve found a tonic for my pain in doing something for God and his people.@ My friend volunteers part time in a church and has discovered that when he=s helping other people, it helps him to forget how badly he=s hurting.
This modern day Job is an inspiration to me. He=s Job still in process, Job without God=s final answer to his pain, but Job persisting even when he hasn=t gotten everything he was looking for from the Lord. I=m proud to call him my brother in Christ. His faith encourages us all to keep going when the way is hard.
Finally, Job teaches us determination. Stubbornness is sometimes a virtue when you=re stubborn for the right reason. AEven though God kills me,@ Job says, Ayet will I hope in him.@[4] And it is Job=s stubborn determination to hope that carries him through until he finally has the answer he is seeking from God.
A young man sixteen years old named Billy Weatherford wrote this prayer: ADear Father, why do I have to be the way I am? Why can=t I walk like the other guys I know? Why can=t I get out and have fun like other people do? Why does everything seem to be just out of reach?@ Billy was paraplegic and confined to a wheelchair.
Dr. Allen DuMont, president of DuMont Laboratories, read Billy=s prayer and wrote this letter to him:
ADear Billy: I asked myself the same question forty years ago when I was a little younger than you -- eleven. Perhaps you like sports. I did. One day I came home from school aching all over. It was polio. The doctors feared I never would walk again. It didn=t seem fair that this should happen to me, but what I am most thankful for is that I didn=t quit. One day my parents brought me some radio equipment, a few crystals, and a microphone . . . . The stuff fascinated me, and at the end of my year in bed I had built my own radio set.
ANow, here is the important thing. I might never have become interested in radio if I had not been stricken with polio. During this period my mother prayed for me night and day. I came out with a limp that has been with me all my life, but my energies were then centered on radio, which was the best thing that could have happened to me.@
Billy Weatherford learned to live with his paralysis. He accepted his condition, made the best of it, and developed a lively Christian faith that was truly inspiring to his friends. One day he said to his mother, AI=d rather be a good Christian than walk.@[5]
There are lots of reasons people come to church. I had a woman tell me the first year of my ministry in my church in Phoenix, AI would come to your church if you would just fix that annoying reflection in your windows that comes from your clerestory.@ Well, we fixed that problem by putting up curtains in the clerestory. The annoying reflection was gone, and I let her know what we=d done, but she still didn=t come.
Other people come to church for the lively programs. AYou people have got the best darn softball team in town, and that=s why I=m here.@ Take away the softball team, though, and what happens to the softball enthusiast?
But folks, there=s only one good reason to come to church. It=s to worship the God who produces people like Billy Weatherford who would rather be a good Christian than walk. Or Allen DuMont who didn=t quit when the going got tough. Or my friend who, even though he is in constant pain, still worships God and serves him by helping his people.
Or Job, that honest, faithful, stubborn guy who said, AI=m going to hang in there with God even if he kills me.@
Or, don=t forget, Jesus, who told us, AYou=re going to have suffering in the world, but cheer up! I=ve overcome the world!@[6]