Biblical Wisdom for Everyday Life: Suffering Reimagined

Pastor Fletcher preaches from Job, discussing God’s response to Job’s suffering. Discussion points: Our faith can survive even when suffering feels senseless, the retribution principle holds that God gives good people good things and gives bad people bad things in life, our perspective is too limited to understand all suffering in the world, we can hope and trust in Christ despite our suffering knowing that he is always with us.

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  Scripture reader: [Job 38:1-11] Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man, I will question you and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? Where were its bases sunk or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors and said, thus far shall you come and no farther? And here shall your proud waves be stayed.

  This is the word of the Lord.

  Preacher: All right, we're going through a series on the Wisdom Literature and today we're covering the entire book of Job. So we're doing a survey of the wisdom literature, wisdom literature is best studied when you study them all together. And so what we're doing is trying to give you a holistic picture of what's happening in these books. So they don't feel so creepy or intimidating or difficult, but there's something that you can actually appreciate and enjoy and see is life giving to you as you read them.

  With Job, we have this, this wonderful book that explores suffering and we're, we're going to explore it deeply this morning. I'm really looking forward to this. Sociologists tell us that no culture in the history of the world has been less prepared for suffering. The modern western society as modern western people, we are unprepared to deal with pain and suffering. There's basically two different ways that most people deal with pain and suffering in their lives. The first way is a religious way and the second way is an irreligious way, a religious way or an irreligious way, the irreligious way.

  Let me explain that one first. It believes that this world is all that there is that the material world, the things that you see in front of yourself that you live with and, and that, you know, and that you can see and touch and savor is all that this world is. And if that's true, then there's no need for God. There's no need for religion and suffering is a mere inconvenience. It is a mere bump on the road toward you accumulating more and more things or more and more people or however you want to say it, suffering plays no meaningful part in life. It is just an interruption to your story. And if this is true about the world, then the way that we see suffering has to be, I will avoid that at all costs, all forms of suffering, I want no part of. And so I'm going to try to find whatever I can find to numb my soul, to numb my mind, to run away from suffering.

  Now, on the other side of things, that's kind of the irreligious side. The religious side of things sees all suffering as punishment from God in one way or another. This is a, a way that they believe. They try to explain the religious approach on, on suffering, explains pain and suffering through what we might call the retribution principle. The retribution principle says I do bad things. God gives me bad things. I do good things. God gives me good things. If I'm suffering, it's because I did something bad and God is punishing me. The funny thing is that you don't have to be particularly religious to have a religious standpoint on suffering. I can't tell you how many secular neighbors, people that don't believe in. God will say something to me. Like what have I done for the universe? Quote unquote, they've just replaced God with the universe. The universe is trying to get me, I've done something, the universe is trying to pay me back whatever that means.

  And I think that this is for a reason, I think that the human heart is hungry for meaning. And so when people who don't believe in God experience suffering, they go looking for meaning and they have to find meaning somewhere. And so they go to this religious approach to suffering. Now, the Bible and, and particularly the Book of Job, but the Bible as a whole teaches us a robust, a robust theology of suffering and what the Bible says. And you guessed it is that neither of these are correct, that both of them are very, very wrong. They're both overly simplistic. That's the problem is that they're both overly simplistic.

  So today we're diving into this Book of Job and let me tell you something, Job is just this wonderful, wonderful piece of literature for us. And as we look at the book of Job, what I want you to realize is that God's people have been going to this book to this piece of literature for over 2000 years to find meaning and their meaningless suffering. They've been coming here to consider God's purposes in suffering for thousands of years. It's an intentionally long book. It's not short, there's a lot of chapters. It's meant you're meant to sit with it. You're not meant to have quick answers from this book. It is a lozenge, not a pill. It is something you're meant to wrestle with just by the nature of how it is written.

  And so this is a book that has brought great meaning and purpose for so many millions of people and it can for you as well. Before we start, I want to limit the scope of, of what we're gonna be able to do. As I said, I'm covering the entire book of Job and one sermon. Ok. And it, I'm gonna try for it to not be the longest sermon you've ever heard. The, the book. If I read the book right now, if I started right now, I wouldn't be done before lunch, I'll just put it that way. OK. We're, it would take a little while just to read the whole thing. But I'm going to try to summarize it for you. And I just want to give you a few of a few limitations for what I can do.

  First. Let me, let me, let, let me put a limitation on me being able to answer all the questions about Job. I cannot answer all your questions about Job here. I wish I could, I wish I could go into the Satan. I wish I, and not literally but figuratively, I wish I could explain who the Satan is and what's going on in the Heavenly Council and everything that goes with that. I wish I could dive deeply into these characters at the end of the book that are known as Behemoth and Leviathan. And so if you have questions about some of these things. I am not an expert, but I'm willing to hear your questions and to try to help you to think about Job more holistically. So after the service right over here, it's gotta be kind of quick today because another church we can be Yeah. Anyway, there's another church coming in here later on today. That, that's gonna be worshiping. So we're going to do a quick Q and A over here and that will just help us to have more conversations after that is something we walk through with many of our questions, it can take time.

  But so first, I'm not gonna be able to answer all your questions about Job. Second Job does not answer all of your questions about suffering. Job does not answer all of your questions about suffering. I wish that Job gave us the answers to some of these really difficult questions that we have. Like, why do bad things happen to good people? I wish the Job told us how a good God could exist when there's so much evil in the world. But this is not why Job was written. Now, I think that the Bible does help us with those things. I think that there are good answers to be found in the Bible on those questions. And I'm so I'm willing to, to dive into them a little bit during the Q and A and we can talk about that and walk through those things, but that's not what this book is about. And so I wanna stick to what Job is about.

  What question does Job explain? What does it answer? This is what Job teaches us that your faith can survive when suffering feels senseless, your faith can survive when suffering feels senseless. What do you do as a Christian? When the retribution principle just isn't working when it just doesn't seem to be working the way that it's meant to the way that it feels just and right. What do you do as a Christian in those situations? That's what Job is answering. So let's dive in. OK. Verse one chapter one. If you wanna open your Bibles, you can, we're gonna throw some, some of the, the scriptures up to on the screen for you.

  Also, I just want to start with the very first sentence because I, I think it frames where we're at as we study Job and we need to go through the, some of these things. Verse one, there was a man in the land of UZ. Everybody say Uz. Bless you. That wasn't a sneeze. I don't know why I said that. It was just, it's just a funny uh whose name was Job and that man was blameless and upright one who feared God and turned away from evil. All right. So where is us? No one knows seriously. Like no one's actually 100% sure where Uz was what we know about Uz is that it was far away from Israel. In fact, Israel is not mentioned one time in this entire book, no mention of Israel. And what we do know about this, it says to the east of Israel. And so oftentimes if something felt foreign to Israel, what's to the west of Israel is the Mediterranean Sea? Ok. So it's got to be to the east, it's to the east. So all of this stuff is to the east if it feels foreign to them.

  And when was this book written? What, what do, what do we, who is the author? These are things, we just don't know, we don't know who wrote Job. We don't know when Job was written. Job quite possibly could be the oldest book in the entire Bible. It could, it could have been written before. Everything else. Scholars just aren't 100% sure when it was written. They aren't sure who it was written by, but it has been accepted as God's Word for millennia. Now. We have a lot of other questions that, that come to this, I mean, Job is certainly set in a time that is similar to the patriarchs. So maybe Job occurs around the same time as Abraham. We're not sure exactly when it's set, but it's way before it's before Noah, it's before Moses, it's before all of that. It's like if it was in, if the Bible is in chronological order, Job would appear somewhere around Genesis, four or five, something like that. It would be like really early. Oh, before Noah, what am I talking about? Abraham was between Noah and, and Moses in case any Bible scholars are out there.

  So it, it probably in between those two, is when Job occurred but it could have been in, in a variety of different places. We really don't know. We're not given a lot of the information on, on when and where this is. in fact, it almost sounds like it starts with in a land far away, a long, long time ago. That's almost how Job starts and maybe the ancient ears it did here this way. And so when you start a book and it says in a far away land long, long time ago, what does it make you think of a fairy tale? Right? But Job Job is no fairy tale.

  It's intentionally placed here, but we do ask ourselves was Job a real person. OK, was Job if it starts like this was Job a real person. And let me put it this way. I, I don't want to get in trouble with my seminary professors. I'm still intimidated by them. And so I'm going to say, I think so, but I will say I'm less sure that Job was a real person than I am of a lot of different people. Don't get me wrong. I think that James quotes Job, he, he mentions Job as if he was a real person. And so I think the tendency is to believe that Job was a real person. But if he wasn't like, I don't think it would change the way that I receive what's in this book. I think the truths are, are timeless in that way and don't get me wrong. I believe in a literal Adam and Eve that they were real people. I believe in the literal Abraham, definitely a literal Jesus literally risen from the dead, literally sitting on the right hand of God in the throne room to this day. But a literal Job. I'm not sure, you know, that's like the one I'm like, maybe, maybe not. And I'm, and it's OK, I can just say it's OK for me to not to know.

  And that's mainly another reason why this is, is because of the genre, the genre of what Job is Job is this highly lyrical epic? It's like this long poem. It's like 42 chapters of poetry, really deep, profound poetry. It is not a simple story. There's so many vocabulary words that are found only here in Job, not in English, but in the, when you read the Hebrew, there's Hebrew words that appear in Job and then do not appear anywhere else in all the scriptures or all of Ancient Hebrew that we still have today. And so as scholars are trying to translate this thing. They're having a really difficult time because they're like, I'm not 100% sure what this word means because I've never seen it before. Nor does it exist anywhere else. The vocabulary is fancy. It's like drinking its coffee with this pinky out. We, we do not know all the words that are in Job. It is very poetic. It's exalted poetry even. It's not, it's not blue collar poetry. OK? This is like this is the the cream of the crop poetry that we have before us.

  This first verse says that Job was blameless. Now, I just want to mention before we continue after this first, I just want to cover this also that being blameless does not mean guiltless. OK? When we read this, we're oftentimes thinking, well, we know that no one is without sin and so Job he must have sin. And I think that's probably true, but that's not the point that the author is trying to make what the author is trying to communicate is that Job was blameless. Meaning he did the right thing. He was a good dude. That's basically what it's saying. When you read this, you should say now there was a man a long time ago in a land far away, his name was Job and he was a good dude. He loved God with all of his heart and he turned away from the evil things in life. Good dude.

  After this we learned that Job is quite rich that he's been blessed tremendously by God. He has many Children. He has lots of stuff. He's a very wealthy man. And then what happens after we're introduced to who Jove is, is the the scene cuts and we cut to the heavenly throne room of God, the the heavenly council. And so God is meeting with what is described as the Sons of God. Some translations call them angels. But this is like a heavenly council that we have in the throne room of God, maybe the command center of God might be a way to think about it. And I think that this is trying to communicate less about the theology here. OK? I don't get a lot of my theology about the heavenly command center from Job as it is trying to teach us what about the retribution principle and how that works. So don't get overly sunken into exactly what's happening here.

  But we're pro we're, we're introduced by this character called Satan or more liter more literally is the Satan in the Hebrew. It's, it starts with the, the definite pronoun is before every time Satan's mentioned, it said the Satan and Satan is just a transliteration for Satan, which is the Hebrew word that means opposer. So every time that Satan shows up in Job, it's basically saying the opposer came to talk to God, the opposer came. So when we talk about Satan we're talking about the opposer here and the Satan poses the question of God or the, the, the opposer poses the question of God. What if Job is just doing all the, what if he's a good guy because you've given him a lot of stuff and he has an easy life. What if he's not really following after you? But what if he just really likes the stuff you've given him, God? Do you think he'd still follow you?

  And so basically, it's a challenge to God and God invites Satan to attack Job. And at first he says, don't don't touch him personally, do not touch the person of Job. And so what Satan does is he goes in and he finds through natural means, ok? Through kind of a terrorist act, through a natural storm through lightning through a variety of different natural means. He said this, the opposer wipes out Job's entire family except for his wife, all of his children die. All of his stuff is either stolen or destroyed and the news comes to Job. And what does Job do? Verses 20-21 then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, naked, I came from my mother's womb and naked I shall return. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

  You really cannot suffer any better. Than this. This is like master class, how do you do this. Job responds wonderfully. He, he's real about his suffering. He's mourning, but also he gives praise to God and recognizes that the Lord gives the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. The opposer approaches God again and says, that's not good enough. I mean, we're going to do this more. And so what happens after that? As he says this to God, Job two verse four skin for skin. All that a man has. He will give for his life, but stretch out your hand and touch his bone and flesh and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to the Satan behold, he is in your hand only spare his life.

  And so after this Job receives these terrible sores all over his body and he is just miserable and he's so so miserable that his own wife looks at him and says, what is wrong with you? Curse God and die, man, curse God and die. It couldn't be much worse. You've lost everything and now your health is gone, curse God and die instead of cursing God and dying. What Job does is kind of awesome. Chapter three. And we're not gonna read through it all. But what he does is he basically exalts into this like two chapter long or one chapter long lament on the day he was born, he's like, let me just lament the day I was born. If I would not have been born, he sees his life is not one that he is able to take away. The Lord gives life. The Lord takes away life. I lament that the Lord brought me into the world, but I will not curse God and kill myself. So, so, so deep, profound, dark, super, dark, a lot in this book is very dark.

  And then what happens after that is we get lots of chapters, chapters three through 31 of what scholars call the cycles. And so what happens is Job has three friends show up. His three friends names are Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar and they each take turns comforting, very loosely. The term comforting Job in his affliction. Now, actually, what they do at the beginning is quite good. They show up, they spend seven days and they say nothing and they mourn with him. Great. That that's good. OK? But after that, nothing else is good from, from the, the friends that he has here, each friend is kind of taking turns and the way that the cycles work is this happens three times.

  One of the friends says Job, you know what you're really to blame here. You must have done something because the assumption is God is just both Job and his friends assume and know that God is just and then they disagree on some of the other parts of the equation. So the equation goes like this, God is just the retribution principle is true that if you are bad, God gives you bad, if you are good, God gives you good. And then the last one is that Job is innocent. So one of these is wrong in their minds because these three have to be the same or, or cannot equal the one another. And so for the friends, they're like Job. You are not innocent, you've done something because the retribution principle is true and God is just.

  Job, on the other hand is saying, I am innocent, I've not done anything. He defends himself to the bitter end. He says the retribution principle must not be true. That must not be how the world operates, how God orders his world. God is just I am innocent. He must not see justice as something that's important for his people. That's the way that's Job's defense. And so they take turns basically, the, the friends come and they say you really did do this, you did something Job, you did something and then Job defends himself and then a different friend comes and then Job defends himself and then a different friend comes and Job defends himself. And so they go through this cycle three times each friend defending Job.

  This is, this is like an ancient rap battle, ok? They have, they're like starting to call each other names. They've got more dishes than a Kendrick track. This is like really getting amped up by the end of it and they just keep going back and forth, back and forth. It's just very prolonged and here's the, I, I just explained the crux of what's happening. This goes on for a long time. And there are definitely some highlights I think chapter I can't go through them all if you want to just jot these down or mark them or something. Chapter 19, one of my favorite passages in the Bible, it describes how God created everything. And then, and then it's, and then Job is like, and these are just the out workings. This is just the, the fringes of his glory. It's very powerful.

  Chapter 26. Also a wonderful book where he says for, I know that my redeemer lives. I know my redeemer list. I it's just those are two really big highlights things that I'm not gonna go too in depth on at the moment. Let's skip forward to chapter 32. OK. So we have the cycle set up here and like I said, Job is a lozenge. If you're in this place where you resonate with Job, this un unexplained suffering, it can just be helpful to walk through some of these, these passages throughout the cycles.

  But in chapter 32 it changes. And what happens is we're introduced to a fifth character. OK. So we've got Job, his three friends and now we've got this fifth dude and hi, his name is Elihu and Elihu is, has been waiting for his chance to enter the rap battle. He's like, I've got my contribution to make here and he's younger than all the other ones and this is an Eastern culture. And so he's waiting until the older guys have had their time to talk and then he's like, ok, I'm gonna spit some knowledge when, whenever it gets to be my turn, whenever they seem to have a, a closing defense because Joe wraps up his closing defense after his three friends have assaulted him for several chapters, he makes his final appeal.

  And then we see Elihu show up and Elihu has a little bit of a different, a different thing. I'm confident that Elihu is like a middle child because he walks in. He's like, you know what? You're both right? You're both right. He waited until the end. He's like, I don't want to cause trouble. You're both right? Can't we just get along? That's, that's Elihu's place here and then also Elihu is not responded to at all after that. So definitely a middle child, they, everybody just ignores them Elihu says God is just and God does run the world by justice. But Job also could be innocent. Maybe God has another purpose for suffering other than punishment. Maybe he gives suffering to warn to avoid future sin and to build character. Maybe, maybe he has a different purpose guys, you don't know. And then he ends his, his, he's actually pretty long winded Elihu. It's like four or five chapters who just kind of going on about this. And then no one says anything to Elihu, including the Lord and, and, and God shows up after that. So Elihu, who is just this interesting character, he kind of appears out of nowhere in, in Job and he's not mentioned again. But I think it adds interesting perspective to us as we read through what has to say, but it's not the main crux of the book. So I'm gonna continue. OK. Sorry. Or middle children, you will continue to be forgotten.

  Chapter 38. Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and I love how Michael was reading this earlier. He, he got the right tone. I think the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? The the the Lord's dropping his diss track now and it's like he's on fire. OK. He, he's really got some strong words dressed for action like a man. I'll question you and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me Job. Where were you, where were you? If you have such understanding about how the universe works? Tell me. Where were you?

  And God spends the next four chapters just laying down this truth on Job. He questions Job. He says, where were you when I created the world? Where were you when I created the stars? Where were you when formed together? The sea and the creatures and the sea? In fact, Job, you don't even know what's going on in your backyard. Have you ever seen a deer give birth? Do you know how the goats give birth? Do you know how that stuff works? If he was talking to us today, he might be like, where were you dude? Do you even know how your car works? I made the universe. I made all of this.

  Basically the way I like to envision this is that God showed up to Job and he's like, hey little Job, come for a ride with me and he puts a VR headset on Job and he's like, you see the universe, there's galaxies that you got no idea about right now. I'm over there in these far away galaxies and there's planets surrounding stars, billions and billions of them. And each planet has a sunrise and a sunset. Where were you? You think? You know how the world works?

  It has a very similar effect that maybe like going to a planetarium show might have. I took my kids to a planetarium show. Like one of the old fashioned planetarium shows where it was like a, it wasn't like a show. It was like a dude with a laser pointer and, and he was like, showing us the stars and I afterward my, my son looks at me, both my kids really enjoyed it. The two older ones really enjoyed it. The younger one was off doing something else. But, my son looks at me and he goes, that was so cool. He had, he had never seen anything like that before, but it showed the immensity of the universe. And you know that feeling when you go to a planetarium show and then you just feel so small and insignificant. And this is like that on steroids because this is like God's view of it from like the creation.

  It's like almost like he showed Job a documentary of how we all CRE he created, created it all. And he, and basically the whole reason why God is doing this. And he, he basically says, you think, you know, better than me, you're suffering, you think, you know, better about whether you should be suffering or not. You know, God never answers the why question for Job. He never says this is why you're suffering Job. God basically says, look, I don't work on a retribution principle. You're both wrong. The retribution principle is not how I work. I guess that's kind of what Job is saying. But what God is saying is the world's too complicated for that, that if I worked on a retribution principle. It would not work. The world is too complicated, but I promise you Job, you couldn't do any better than me. You might think you could do better than me. But I know better than you.

  It's ironic. But this is the exact plot from the great 2003 film Bruce Almighty. Now, I haven't seen that movie in a long time. It's probably horribly blasphemous. I'm still gonna talk about it. because in that movie Jim Carrey and I feel like you don't get without, I, I guess you're finding my childhood. I don't know, I quote a Jim Carey quote or movie like almost every week. but Jim Carrey plays Bruce, who's a reporter, a news reporter and bad things just keep happening to him and he's ready to curse God and then he gets snapped into a warehouse. And who does he meet, Morgan Freeman himself.

  And Morgan Freeman basically says Bruce, you think, you know, better than me? And he's like, here's, here's my power. You go and do it, you see what you can do and at first things go really well. For Bruce, his girlfriend likes him more. His Job's going better. Things are going really well. But then he turns around and the effects of what he has done is destroying society. Like at one point he pulls the moon a little bit closer without any idea of like he, how tides work. So the world is just like, really torn apart. He, he gets on, on his little computer in 2003. And it's like you've got prayer and he answers every prayer. Yes. And then, like, everyone in town won the lottery and then they're all mad because they won like 14 cents and when they split it all, and so the town erupts into chaos.

  And, and it's just teaching us this thing that, like, hey, the world's too complicated to work on a simple retribution principle. But God is in charge of it all. And if he created it all and he knows it all, we have to trust him. Basically, when we look at Job, we learn that limited humans lack the perspective and wisdom to run the universe. And though we, when we suffer, we feel like we should be running the universe and we would be doing it differently. We are limited and lack of wisdom. So the book ends in epilogue after God teaches all of this to Job and God ends up condemning his three friends as miserable counselors.

  He never condemns Job though. He applauds Job's honesty and then he restores Job's wealth, but he doubles it. He gives him Children again. And this is all, not a reward, but just a gift. It's a gift from God. We don't really know why he does it exactly. But it, it's not like Joe passed a test because it wasn't really like he was taking a test. It's like God just saw it fit to, to give him things again. And that's it. That's the book. It never really reveals the secrets behind suffering. It's been used for thousands of years to help people going through suffering. But it teaches us that there are just some things that are beyond our understanding.

  And the main point is this, that as humans, we must have humility to admit that we are limited and lack perspective. And we must trust in a God who is unlimited and has all perspective. That's the message of Job that as humans, we must approach our lives with humility and we must trust God that He understands it all. And he's got it all and that's all we can do. That's all we have in modern society. We're all looking for quick fixes to pain. We're all looking for the pill that we can take to heal our hearts. Job offers no magical solution. He offers no magical solution to pain and suffering.

  But what he does offer is more like physical therapy for pain and suffering. You know, you, you go see a doctor and some doctors and these are usually scam doctors are like, yeah, I can fix you, just come here, I'll done fixed. No one heals with a touch unless it's like a holy spirit healing moment. And instead, we oftentimes the pains that we have in life, we have to walk through them. We have to learn how to live with them. We have to go through the physical therapy of the soul. We're meant to process this material to ruminate upon it.

  And here's just a few things that Job does teach us. Ok. I'll leave you with a few practical things. First, God invites you to be honest in your suffering. God invites you to be honest in your suffering Job. Cries out to God. He expresses frustration and disappointment to God. And God never condemns these things. When you read the psalms, you see the same thing happening. The psalmist express their frustration towards God. Their disappointment with God. God invites you to be honest with where you are at that moment. He just wants you to talk with them. He loves you. He wants to hear your heart. And so you were invited and I think that God meets us in a more profound way when we open the China cabinets of our soul and we let him in. You know, a lot of us want to keep a right face before God say the right things to God. But God really invites us to come and to bear our souls to Him.

  The second thing that we learned from Job is that we should not offer overly simplistic explanations to suffering, do not offer overly simplistic explanations to suffering. I know far too many well intentioned good people who have offered overly simplistic solutions or explanations to suffering. This weekend, I was meeting with a couple, their daughter has cancer and at one point, her daughter's cancer was, was being, was being healed. She was, she was in remission and then her cancer came back and the people in her, in their church, it was like a prosperity church. They said, well, what have you done? What have you done wrong? Because obviously you've done something wrong.

  It's like the, the counselors. It's like his friends Christopher Ashe, a famous commentator about Job. He says that the that Job's friends, they believe the law of God, but they do not believe the gospel, the the friends, they believe the law. They believe that when you do bad things, you should get bad things and when you do good things, you should get good things, but that's not the gospel. They, they don't believe that you get bad things without deserving it. They also don't believe you do get good things without deserving it.

  And the gospel is we get good things that we did not deserve it. So his friends, they just believe the law and not the gospel. And for us, many times, we can offer an overly simplistic explanation to suffering. But instead I pray that you might have the same sort of trust in the Lord, in your suffering that Job had at the beginning. And it's, it's difficult, but he just says the Lord gives and the Lord takes away blessed be the name of the Lord. I will trust because I'm limited in my perspective, I will trust Him who has all.

  Third, embrace living without answers. I wish I could just give you all the answers, but you have to kind of embrace living without all the answers. Again, you were limited. We want, we all want to know the greater purpose to which we might experience suffering and pain. Sometimes God shows those things to us. Sometimes we get a window and we're like, oh, I understand why I had to go through that. It's usually, you know what it is like seven years later, you look back and you're like, oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. I didn't sleep for like several weeks because I was miserable. But I understand now I see what God was doing but rare but often times he just doesn't, we don't see it. We, we lack the ability to even see what's going on in our own lives.

  And yet God organizes the whole universe. We really have to approach life with humility while we trust God who is sovereign, good and loving. As we read the book of Job, what we find is that Job really points us to Jesus though like Job before him, Satan would assault another blameless man, Jesus without cause Jesus also would question God the father and his questions would go unanswered Jesus as he hung on the cross said, why have you forsaken me? And he was responded with silence. Unlike Job, though Jesus placed his trust in the Father, no matter what though Job was relatively innocent. Jesus was truly innocent. Though Job felt abandoned by God. Jesus was truly abandoned by God. And in that moment, he bore the sins of the whole world. You and I our sins are placed on Christ and he bore the wrath and the punishment that we deserve. The full separation from God, the full wrath of God on the cross.

  As Tim Keller so eloquently put it, he says Jesus was patient under great suffering for us so we can be patient under suffering for him. And so now we wait though, we live in a broken world. Still. We wait, we wait for Jesus to return and we know that He will return one day. And when he returns, what will you do? We'll wipe every tear from every eye. He'll heal all the broken places. He'll put your life back together. There will be no more suffering, the curse of sin and death will be destroyed. He'll stomp the serpent's head, the opposer will be gone, all will be made new and right.

  And we wait for that day as people who have faith in Christ, we know we know that he is coming to make all things new and our hearts long for that day. And so we don't just look forward to tomorrow. We look forward to eternity knowing that He will make all things new. Also as Christians that we know that there is meaning in our suffering. We know that in our suffering, it produces perseverance and perseverance, character and character. Hope, hope in what hope in this hope in Christ. Trust in Him. Hope does not disappoint Jesus is with us in our suffering.

  One of my favorite passages, second Corinthians chapter one verse three. Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of mercies, and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with a comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For we, for as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings. So through Christ, we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation. If we are comforted, that it is for your comfort, which are which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer. So our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you also share in our comfort.

  Our God is the God of all mercies and God of comfort. And as we go to Him, he might not take away our sufferings, but he can shine his face upon us and he can give us trust, but he he can give you trust. Trust is this gift from Him that He knows what he's doing. And so for many of us this morning, I want to invite you, I want to invite you to lay out your heart to the Lord, maybe over the next song or next couple of songs. You just need to pour your heart before him and let your sufferings be known. And I do think that Jesus meets you in those places. If you'd like someone to pray with you to lay a hand on you, let you know that you're not alone. We'll have a, a prayer counselor back there. I'd also love to pray with you. But this is a moment for you to, to turn in humility and to trust the Lord.

  Over the next song, we're going to participate a sacred meal called communion. And this is really an invitation to be reminded of the sufferings of Christ and to receive the comforts of Christ. On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus took a loaf of bread and he broke it and he said this is my body broken for you, do this in remembrance of me and he took a cup and he said this is my blood shed for you, do this in remembrance of me. And so each week we participate in the sacred meal. If you are a Christian, we invite you to come and receive it. And you can know that Christ received the ultimate suffering on your behalf so that you would never be abandoned by God. Christ was abandoned so you wouldn't have to be. He suffered so that you wouldn't have to. And you're reminded of that, it's not something you earn. But if you are calling on Christ, as your savior, we invite you to the table. Would you stand as we prepare ourselves to come to the table and to sing to God.

  Father, we pray that as we come to your, your table, that you would comfort our hearts and help us, help us to receive the comfort of Christ. We pray for those who are far from you and those who are near. We pray that there will be honesty in our souls as we, as we walk through the next few moments and God as we come to your table, would you, would you bless us with your presence? We may, we see and enjoy the presence of Christ in a, in a supernatural spiritual kind of way knowing that you're with us in our suffering that we are not alone. We ask this in Christ's name, Amen.