WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN
TO GOOD PEOPLE
Text: Job 23:1-17
June 26, 2005, Dave Philips
I once ended a sermon with the ancient story about the farmer, the preacher, and the mule. The preacher passed the farmer’s place one day while the farmer was trying to get his mule in the barn. After rebuking the farmer for the language he was using, the preacher said to the farmer, “If you want to get your mule into the barn, you’ll have to use kindness.”
“Well, preacher,” said the farmer, “if you can get him in the barn with kindness, you’re welcome to try.” So the preacher picked up a piece of two-by-four and hit the mule a terrific clout right between the eyes. The mule staggered, fell, got up, fell down and got up again. And the preacher grabbed him by the halter and led him into the barn.
“Preacher!” cried the farmer. “Is that any way to show kindness to a mule?”
“It’s the only way,” said the preacher. “Before you can be kind to a mule, you’ve got to get his attention.”
I told this story to illustrate the way God sometimes uses the crises in our lives. If we’re cruising along through life with no other thought in our minds than pleasing ourselves, God may call our attention to himself and to our responsibilities by shutting down our little party abruptly through a crisis of some sort. Many people have come to God through such a crisis: a business failure, an illness, a death in the family. C.S. Lewis says that pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
“We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities,” says Lewis. “But pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”1
Following that sermon of a few years ago, I got a rather sharp rebuke on a note written by one of the congregation saying that God did not cause his saints to suffer just to get their attention. I agree. The distinction is an important one. What about the suffering of the saints who are already paying attention to God?
For some of us who are experiencing physical or emotional suffering, it may seem to us that God has forgotten what he’s doing. After we’ve been hit over the head for the fifth time, or even the hundred and fifth time, the problem no longer seems to be that we aren’t paying attention. The problem seems to be getting God’s attention and telling him that we’re more than ready to listen to whatever it is he wants to tell us. When the volume of the pain has been turned up to its highest pitch, we’d like to get a message to God that he doesn’t need to use the megaphone of pain any more. We’re all ears!
When bad things happen to good people, we sometimes come unglued. We may become furious with God. We may deny God’s existence. We may blame ourselves. But God is with us even when we get angry or deny him. There is in suffering a tremendous opportunity to learn new lessons about life and to learn to trust God even more deeply. When bad things happen to good people, God’s people have the privilege of sharing the suffering of God that we see in Jesus Christ and of becoming tougher, more mature, more fulfilled people ourselves.
Let’s take a look at Job as we think about those times when bad things happen to good people. We see in Job’s experience a profile of suffering and a presence in suffering.
First, a profile of suffering. Job’s suffering is classic. If you haven’t yet read the book of Job, shame on you! Consider yourself an uneducated person, and go home and read it!
Job is a man who is obviously good. He’s also very rich. In fact he’s so good and so rich that he’s apparently the object of jealousy from Satan, the fallen angel. Satan jeers that anyone as wealthy and well fixed as Job can afford to be righteous. Remember the echo of that line in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion as Alfred P. Doolittle (Eliza’s father) proclaims that he’s too poor to have morals, that morals are only for those who can afford them.
According to Satan, God has built a fence around Job and protected him from evil. But if that fence of protection were removed, Job’s righteousness would be seen to be mercenary. If Job had a touch of suffering, then he would curse God to his face.
So God, for reasons that are never stated, permits Satan to afflict Job. All his property is taken away, all his children are killed, Job himself is stricken with a loathsome disease, and his wife turns on him and tells him to curse God and die.
The final blow is his friends who come around to “cheer him up a bit,” and their way of comforting him is to tell him that he must be a terrible sinner to have all this calamity come upon him. But they’re sure that everything will be all right if only he’ll confess his awful sins to God.
Got the picture? Here Job sits on the garbage dump, he’s lost everything, he’s sick, his wife has turned on him, and now his friends are telling him his suffering is all his fault! What a deal! You’ve lived a good life, you’ve kept your nose clean, and you’ve lost everything. Now you discover that your losses are all your fault!
First, in this profile of suffering, notice that God never gives his reason for allowing Satan to afflict Job. You’ll notice my sermon title is not, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The fact is, I don’t know. I don’t think anybody does. The Bible is pretty much silent about the why’s of suffering. But the Bible is eloquent on the presence of God in the midst of suffering and on the how’s of enduring suffering triumphantly.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, a good man, who lost a child to a horrible disease, wrote a very sensitive book with the same title as my sermon. I’ve got great respect for Rabbi Kushner’s sensitivity, but I don’t agree with his conclusion. His explanation is that God is too weak to do anything about the suffering we go through.2 What people sometimes blame God for is, according to Kushner, the result of bad luck or the decrees of fate. In other words, there’s another power in the universe -- call it luck or fate -- that is just a bit more powerful than God.
But that’s not the message I get when I read my Bible. I see a God who is powerful, compassionate, and just, who permits suffering, indeed who suffers himself and shares our suffering,3 but who doesn’t always tell us the reason for it. But sometimes, years after we have gone through a really terrible experience, we can look back and see the reason. And we have the confidence that some day we’ll see it all and praise God for it.
Pain is one of the facts of life that the Bible teaches. There’s no escaping it. Everyone suffers some pain. Some of us suffer a lot of it. The Bible offers no explanation for why some people suffer a whole lot more than others. And, folks, this is important: neither does any other religious, scientific, or philosophical system. The only explanation that any religious, scientific, or philosophical system offers for the problem of pain is one that has to be accepted by faith of some kind!
In our scripture lesson we get a look at the inner thoughts of a man who is going through intense psychic, physical, and emotional pain. Those of us who have gone through intense suffering over an extended period of time know the road map all too well.
First, there’s the bitterness. Job can’t understand why God keeps laying it on even in the midst of his groaning.
Second, there’s ambivalence. Job goes rocketing back and forth between opposite thoughts and emotions like a bobsled rider trying to set a world record. He’s angry at God. But then he thinks, “If only I could find God and present my case to him, I’m sure he’d listen to me.” But then he says, “I can’t find him. I look all around, and he’s nowhere to be seen.” But then he thinks, “God must know what I’m going through. There must be a reason for all this, and when it’s all over, I’ll come forth like gold.” But then he thinks, “Here I’ve been faithful to God. It terrifies me to think that this could happen to me when I’ve been so faithful in keeping his law and following his way.”
And underneath the bitterness and the ambivalence, there’s the constant pressure of the physical pain that keeps pounding away, ready to stir up the mental and emotional anguish as soon as they seem about to quiet down.
Add to these problems the maddening efforts of Job’s well-meaning friends to try to straighten him out and get him back on track with God, and you’ve got a recipe for total misery. Suffering is a lonely business, and you never feel more alone than just after the visit of a friend who is all mouth and no ears, and who leaves you in your sickroom more confused and upset than before his visit.
I knew a group of Christians in Pittsburgh who took on a cancer patient as one of their projects, visiting her faithfully through her terminal illness until she died, and telling her repeatedly that if only she would have more faith, God would heal her.
Others take the tack that Job’s friends did: there must be something between you and the Lord that’s causing him to afflict you in this way. Still others tell people who are suffering that they should praise the Lord for their suffering, because they read in a book that if you praise the Lord for calamities, the calamities will go away.
One thing Job’s comforters and their modern counterparts have in common: they have practically no idea what their suffering friends are going through. When Job’s comforters arrived, they were so aghast at his condition that they kept silent for seven days and nights.4 Up to that point, their comfort was healing. If they’d only kept their mouths shut, how much more effective their comfort would have been! But then, of course, we wouldn’t have the book of Job today. Give the comforters some credit, even if their methods and arguments were wrong, they cared enough to come and sit with Job.
For in the heat of the debate between Job and his friends, they all became increasingly aware of a tremendous presence in the midst of Job’s suffering. God is there! And God makes his presence known.
The amazing thing to us is that Job never quits believing in God. I had a friend who I thought was an atheist because of his bitter remarks about God. But when I called him an atheist, he turned on me and said with some heat, “I believe in God! I just wish he’d come down here so I could punch him in the nose!”
Job senses the presence of God even in the midst of his worst moments of despair. We hear people talk about the “patience of Job.”5 But Job’s patience wasn’t passive. It was a persistent, assertive patience. He knew God was there, even though he couldn’t understand God’s silence. And he persisted stubbornly in calling on God until God revealed himself to Job and gave him an amazing insight on his suffering.
We know God’s presence in suffering in three ways. Sometimes God’s presence is known through his active help. Sometimes he is nothing more than a presence, but it’s nice to know he’s there. Sometimes there is only the silence, and he doesn’t seem to be there at all.
I compare God’s ways in our times of suffering to the ways of a wise parent. There are times when the parent intervenes and helps the kid in times of trouble. The parent runs in to break up a fight or chase off a dangerous dog. Other times the parent is only there with you in your misery. Do you remember what a comfort it was to have your mom hold your head when you were sick and throwing up as a child? There wasn’t much she could do about your sickness, but just having her there was a comfort.
But there are other times when a wise parent has to lay back and let the kid find out things for himself or herself. At a certain point in life, you can’t bail your kid out of trouble. Your kid has to take responsibility for solving his or her own problems. I can remember my anger at my mother in my student years when I wrote her about some pressing problems I was having. It was a typical poor-me letter. She wrote back a bland, noncommittal letter in which she said she had no advice to give me, but she was sure I could solve my own problem. Not what I wanted to hear, but what I needed to hear.
Sometimes God is an active helper, jumping right in instantaneously with the help we need. I think that’s more typically true early on in our Christian experience. But later on sometimes God is silent so we’ll learn to take responsibility and do for ourselves the things we’re capable of doing without God’s intervention.
And sometimes, let’s face it, God is silent for no reason that we can figure out. It may be that he simply can’t communicate that reason to us. It may be that we’re simply not smart enough to grasp it. But, for whatever reason, the occasional silence of God is something we must take into account.
Nee To Sheng, that great Chinese saint and martyr to the Communist purges in his country, tells in one of his books about his experience of the silence of God. “The Lord graciously laid me aside once in my life for a number of months and put me, spiritually, into utter darkness,” says Nee. “It was almost as though he had forsaken me, almost as though nothing was going on and I had really come to the end of everything. And then by degrees he brought things back again . . . . We would like to have death and resurrection put together within one hour of each other. We cannot face the thought that God will keep us aside for so long a time; we cannot bear to wait. And of course I cannot tell you how long he will take, but in principle I think it is quite safe to say this, that there will be a definite period when he will keep you there. It will seem as though nothing is happening; as though everything you valued is slipping from your grasp. There confronts you a blank wall with no door in it. Seemingly everyone else is being blessed and used, while you yourself have been passed by and are losing out. Lie quiet. All is in darkness, but it is only for a night. It must indeed be a full night, but that is all. Afterwards, you will find that everything is given back to you in glorious resurrection; and nothing can measure the difference between what was before and what now is.”6
Friends, in my experience, Nee To Sheng is telling the truth. The dark nights of the soul that I have endured came to an end. And when the sun came up, there was God again, better than ever!
We need to beware of thinking that God’s silence means God’s indifference. Loving parents hurt when their children are hurting no matter whether they’re able to do something actively to help them through their suffering, or whether they have to stand back and let them go through the pain with nothing more than their presence.
But one thing we can be sure of: God cares about his people. God does not desert his people. Whether we feel it or not, God’s presence is there. The cross of Jesus Christ is a window into the heart of God. When you look at the Cross, you see not only how much God loves us, but how much God hurts for us.
When bad things happen to good people, God is with us. Not only is he with us, he shares our suffering. And when the suffering is over -- and it will be over one day for all of us -- we will know the why’s and wherefore’s of the pain that we endured. “I consider,” says Paul, “that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”7 All of us will know in the life to come -- and many of us will know in this life -- why we have suffered. For God will in the coming kingdom wipe away every tear from every eye, and there will be no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain, for the former things have passed away.8