Wisdom’s Master Class Kenwood Baptist Church Sermon Series: The Way of Wisdom Pastor David Palmer November 3, 2019

TEXT: 1:1-22

Good morning, beloved. We continue this morning in our fall series, The Way of Wisdom. We have been on this journey together as a church family looking at the four books of the Bible that are called wisdom books: Proverbs, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. We looked at the practical wisdom of a father to a son in Proverbs. We looked at the mystery of falling in love in the Song of Songs. We looked at the wise warning against worldly ambition in Ecclesiastes, and this morning, we enter wisdom’s master class. The deals with the question of the suffering of the righteous. The book of Job deals with those times in our lives that are difficult, hard, painful, great loss, beyond our understanding, and it is important to note right at the beginning that this topic is addressed in Scripture. It's a topic that we all encounter in varying degrees, and yet we need God's wisdom for this topic as well. We’ll look at the book of Job together over the next three weeks, and I want to encourage you right at the beginning to read the book of Job in its entirety. There are three big movements in Job. This week, we will look at his situation, what happens to him in the opening chapters. Next week, we will look at the large central section of Job which is filled with the bad advice of his friends. When you go through hard times, people come willingly, and sometimes unwillingly, solicited, and unsolicited, to interpret that situation for you. That is the central section of Job, the cycles of counsel of his friends. We will look at that next week. In the final week, the rising tension of Job, his experience, his interaction with his friends and family, finally resolves when God Himself comes. It's the third week of Job in our study that's the most important of all. It’s when God comes and explains what's happening; it's when God gives to Job more of Himself than he knew

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before. I want to encourage you as we go through these next few weeks as a church family. This might be the only time in your Christian life that you'll hear a set of sermons on Job. It's not often preached; we often avoid it, and yet this is the most frequently raised question about the Christian faith. We need the whole book. Job is best read, heard, listened to in its entirety, and I want to encourage you to let this book wash over you and answer this question in your own heart so that you're ready to answer it for others.

We begin this morning in Job 1:1. We are introduced to the figure of Job: “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil .” We don't know exactly where Uz is. You may have noticed it in Lamentations 4:21: “Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of , you who dwell in the land of Uz;” This is the only other reference of this place. Edom is in the South. It's really outside the borders of , and that is significant to notice. Uz is the home of Job. The name Job is attested in other ancient near Eastern texts, and we are first told about Job that he is a man of godly character. This is listed and described for us very clearly. Job is described as a man who is blameless. This is the language that is used of the sacrifices: without blemish. It is a term when applied to people that is often translated as integrity. Job was a man of integrity; he was upright; he was a man who feared God. That's lesson number one of the wisdom literature, that “the beginning of wisdom is to fear God.” That was the climax of Ecclesiastes: “The end of the matter was to fear God and obey His commands.” Job fears God, and not only does he fear God, but he turns away from evil. It's not enough to say: “I revere God,” but Job turns away from evil. He is introduced as a man godly character, as a blessed man with a large family. In Job 1:2, we read: “There were born to him seven sons and three daughters.” Ten children! A large family, great blessing! In Job 1:3, he has not only a large family, but he is a man of great wealth: “He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.” Seven thousand sheep, that's a lot of shares in a mutual fund; 3,000 camels, that's a few apartment complexes; 500 yoke of oxen, that's a small construction company; 500 female donkeys, that a transport business; and very many servants. We're told that Job was the greatest of all the people in the east, meaning he was a man of status and stature; he was blessed; he was a godly man; he had a large family; and he had flourishing businesses. Sometimes when people are wealthy, with large family, sometimes those homes have a lot of

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drama. That's why we’re so interested in the Royals, what's going on in the imperial Caesar's household, because usually those families have big problems. Job's family, his big family, wealthy family, actually had great relationships. Look at Job 1:4: “His sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them.” “His day” is the Hebrew idiom for their birthday, so whenever the sons had a birthday, they would send and invite their three sisters and eat and drink with them, and they would have parties together as a family. So this is not only a big family, a wealthy family. They actually really like each. They get along well. They are celebrating together.

But, the most important window into Job's person, his character and soul, is in Job 1:5 where we see that Job was a devout man: “And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all?” Not only does he have a proven godly character, but he is a devout man. At the end of the festival times, Job would send and he would consecrate them, in the ESV, he would actually make them holy. He would rise early in the morning, and he would offer burnt offerings according the number of his family. This was an act of devotion and delight in God and confidence in God and a willingness to keep the slate clean between himself and God and his children and God. He was concerned to have nothing separating him and his family from God. He even wonders that it may be that they have sinned, and it might even be that they have sinned in their hearts. You may have heard this passage interpreted in various ways. I am going to share with you how I heard this passage preached the first time, and the only time, I've ever heard it preached. I hope you've never heard this before, and then I’m going to ask you not to believe it! Okay? I was taught as a new Christian that Job's offering for the sin of his family was a reflection of Job's fear or that he had sinned and that this was the key thing that he actually did wrong. You’re all looking at me with blank stares, so that means you've never been taught that. Praise God. Job’s devotion in this passage is not a lack of faith; it is an extreme confidence of faith. The picture of Job, in other words, that we are given from all these angles is that this man is righteous; he is blessed; he is devout; he has a regular practice of morning prayer, of offering atonement for sin as God commands to be done. That's the picture: a righteous man, a blessed man, a man to be admired.

The next scene in Job is one that Job does not see. It's critical to notice that this next scene is something that we see as readers of Job, but Job does not see. In Job 1:6, we read:

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“Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.” The sons of God is the Hebrew idiom for the angels. The Septuagint translates the bene-Elohim as angeloi, or the angels. Some English translations will render this idiomatically as angels. The NIV, for example, says “the angels came” to make it clear that’s who we’re talking about. It’s a heavenly court, and in the heavenly court, the angels come before God, and all of a sudden our view is shifted from looking at Job, this righteous, devout man, and suddenly, by access of the Word of God, we’re standing in the courts of the Lord God Almighty. We are in the courts and we see the angels presenting themselves, standing before the Lord, and all is good until the last phrase. Among the angels, Satan also came among them. Satan in Hebrew means the accuser. Again, we look to the Septuagint briefly because Satan is translated into Greek as Diabolos or devil, which means the same thing in Greek. So, Satan means accuser, like the prosecuting attorney in Hebrew, and devil means the same thing, only in Greek. So, all of a sudden, in the midst of the heavenly court, comes an accuser. The Bible doesn't tell us everything we would like to know, which is probably good, about Satan and his activities in his origin, but we understand from Scripture that he was an angel who envied the glory of God and fell. Jesus says: “I saw him fall.” Scholars and theologians have speculated about the nature of that, whether it was pride and arrogance. What motivated this fall? We are not told as much as we would like to know about this, and yet we are told, and can see in Scripture, that humanity is the particular focus of his accusations. Other theologians have put Scripture data together, and I think there is truth in this observation, that the hatred of the accuser against humanity lies in the fact that we are made in God's image. The Bible says we are made in His image, yet for a little while, lower than the angels, that humanity is actually the object of God's redeeming, saving love, and as the object of God's redeeming and saving love, we then end up glorified together with Christ. I think this is what fuels Satan's hatred and animosity toward humanity, because right now, if we would see the angels and see ourselves, the angels would seem much more glorious. Yet, at the end, Jesus says we will judge the angels. We will be glorified above them. In our passage, the accuser, the adversary comes and the Lord says in Job 1:7: “The LORD said to Satan, ‘From where have you come?’ Satan answered the LORD and said, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.’” The Bible says that Satan roams the earth like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Then in Job 1:8: “And the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?’” Notice the Lord's approval of Job. Job embodies the wisdom that we have sought in this series. Then the accuser seeks to drive a wedge between Job and his Heavenly Father. The charge, the

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accusation, comes in the form of a question, just like in the garden of Eden how Satan begins with questions that seek to separate us from our Heavenly Father. He says in Job 1:9: "Does Job fear God for no reason?” Does he revere God gratuitously? Is there no basis? And in Job 1:10, he accuses: “Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.” Satan's question is: “Job loves You because what You do for him.” His charge is to raise the question: “Does Job really love You because You are worthy of that love or just because of the benefits that that you provide in his life?” You see, dear friends, this question comes in to us: “Do we serve Christ, do we love Christ just because of what He does for us, or do we serve and love Jesus Christ because of who He is?” The adversary raises the question as a challenge to God. In Job 1:11, he says: “But stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse You to Your face." In other words, he says, “Job is a fair weather fan. Things go poorly and he's going to turn around and curse You.” This is the challenge of the narrative. The Lord surprisingly says in Job 1:12: “Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand.” We are given access to this heavenly dialogue, and it's important for us to notice that Satan has no independent authority at all over our lives. God gives him permission but sets firm limits which Satan cannot cross.

Satan goes out from the presence of the Lord, and now Job’s trial and his suffering begin. I want to stress again that Job hasn't heard this conversation. In our experiences in this life of great loss and difficulty, we don't have access to this heavenly conversation, and Job does not. What he does experience is a whirlwind of loss. Satan had said that God put a hedge of protection on every side, and we read in rapid succession that that protective hedge is lifted as disaster and loss come from every side. In Job 1:13, we read: “Now there was a day when his sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother's house,” Job was not there. He was in his own home and suddenly, we read in Job 1:14-15: “. . .and there came a messenger to Job and said, ‘The oxen were plowing and the donkeys feeding beside them, and the Sabeans fell upon them and took them and struck down the servants with the edge of the sword, and I alone have escaped to tell you." Saba is in the south. The Queen of Sheba came to Solomon's court. Job just lost the construction company; one great loss. Then we read in Job 1:16:

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“While he was yet speaking, there came another and said, ‘The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants and consumed them, and I alone have escaped to tell you.’” Then to the north, we read in Job 1:17: “While he was yet speaking, there came another and said, ‘The Chaldeans formed three groups and made a raid on the camels and took them and struck down the servants with the edge of the sword, and I alone have escaped to tell you.’” While he was still speaking, from the West another came. Job is reeling from the loss of property, the loss of his businesses, in this fourth messenger’s opening phrase must have shaken him even more deeply, because we read in Job 1:18-19 that his sons and daughters were celebrating one of these birthday parties, and we read: “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother's house, and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you.” Dear friends, the scale and speed of this loss is hard for us to grasp. I remember as a young man my grandfather called. I was young, and I knew that my I knew that my grandmother was having open-heart surgery, but I didn't really know how involved that was or how risky that was. I had never heard my grandfather cry, but he was crying, and all I heard through the other end of the phone were the words that Donna didn't make it. The surgeon had opened her chest to do the surgery and as he touched her heart, it just came apart.

I remember talking with my friend Michael, and I noticed this young man had a sweetness about him, a love for Christ. We were remembering high school graduation, and I was reflecting on sometimes doing foolish things around graduation. God watched over our lives, and he said, “You know, that was really a hard day for me.” I said, “What happened?” He said, “We all graduated, and we were the closest of friends. After graduation, we went to this party together, and we ran out of chips and salsa for the party. So three of my best friends and I jumped in the car and ran to reload for the party. As we were on our way back, the back of the car was hit, and I lost my three best friends in an instant.” Loss, immense loss. I know some of your losses. Some of you have lost a business; some of you will have lost a home; some of you have lost a close relationship; some of you have lost a child. I remember Jeff and Ellesha Kirsch at Kenwood, dear, dear friends, and preparing to celebrate with them the birth of their next son, and sharing the joy. The day was near that Ellesha was going to be induced. The day before, everything looks good, and then, right before their son Samuel was to be born, they had the final ultrasound, and Samuel died the day before he was to be born. Ellesha had to give birth to a stillborn son. What do you say when you walk into that hospital room? I prayed. I can

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still remember the drive down I 71. I can still remember that so vividly, just thinking, “Lord, I talk a lot, but I don't know what to say.” I walked into the hospital room, and there was Jeff holding Samuel. I just walked in, and I didn't say anything. I made eye contact with him. I burst into tears, and he burst into tears, and we just stood there and cried for 10 minutes. Jeff and Ellesha celebrated their son's life with a memorial service, and one of Jeff's colleagues at GE came to trust Christ in that. I remember talking to Jeff and his saying: “I believe that Samuel's life counted even though all of his days were in the womb.”

The deepest water that our family has gone through in this area has been the loss of my sister's son Matt. He was a precocious, young man, gifted athlete, played three grades up in soccer, and all the sudden one day, Matt couldn't remember his basic math facts. We wondered what was going. He went to the local hospital, then the regional hospital, and a of couple days later he was transferred to the University of Michigan. He had developed a rare form of acute encephalitis, and he ended up in the hospital at the University of Michigan for 90 days. The doctors reached their limits. They didn't know what to do. They had neurologists all over the country looking at his brain scans. They didn't know. They couldn't figure it out. In the first 15 or 20 days we were there, there was one doctor who was, to be honest, particularly arrogant. Every time he came into the room he had a medical swagger, and he postured like: “This is what I do for a living, solve things like this.” There is another doctor who was more soft-spoken, and as our time there extended, and as it became clearer that there was no solution, the arrogant doctor made more and more infrequent visits. He started fade out. The other doctor who was soft-spoken drew closer to our family, and as he got closer to us, he finally revealed to us that he had lost a son, and that in the midst of his loss, though he was a professional, accomplished person, he could do nothing to save his son. He said, “You know, what happened was, a local church organized meals for my family while we were going through that, and I was astonished. It was my first touch from the body of Christ.” It eventually led to his conversion. When the time came to take Matt off of life support, in the hospital together, we all just gathered around. The arrogant doctor was nowhere to be found. He had other calls to make. The compassionate doctor was standing right with us. He removed the tubes, and we gathered together, and we sang. We just sang praise and worship. The day before, my family, being from Michigan, are huge U of M fans, and the Make-A-Wish foundation came and took Matt out of the hospital on a stretcher, his bed, and they wheeled Matt and our family through the tunnel into the football stadium of the University of Michigan. We came through the tunnel, and we heard “Hail to the Victors” playing, and I my first thought was: “What a nice touch that they would play that through the speakers!” We came out of the tunnel and the whole band was there with three of the starting players from the football team. One of the players, Gabe Watson, a 300 pound defensive lineman, wrapped his arm around my brother-in-law, a cross- country champion, nowhere close to 300 pounds. He wrapped his arm around him, and he

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pressed his fist into my brother-in-law's fist. He had something in his hand to give him. My brother-in-law opened up his hand, and Gabe had given him his bowl ring. He looked at my brother-in-law and he said: “God has blessed me, and I'm just so thankful for all His blessings, and I’m going to have other opportunities. I just want you to have this.” It was amazing! We shed tears over Matt’s death, his loss. We ended up taking him home, and he lived for many days at home. We thought in that moment when we took him from life support that it would be minutes, and it ended up being days, and those were precious days.

Some of you know great loss; some of you know greater loss than I do. What I want us to see this morning from Job is Job's reaction, because the way you react to great loss is one of the most determinative things in your Christian life. You will suffer great things. Job’s response to this tremendous loss in Job 1:20, is that he grieved: “Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped.” The Bible does not deny us grieving. Job rose, tore his robe in a gesture of grief, he shaved his head as a signal of mourning, and he fell to the ground. The most important thing he did was that he worshiped God. His loss did not create the separation of an inch between him and the Lord. It gave him room to grieve, and as we look at the middle section of the book next week, we will see his grief, his distress, and that is a legitimate part of the Christian life. But he worshiped God, and he responded to God in Job 1:21 by saying: “Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” He said he came into this world with nothing and he will leave this world with nothing. His line here is a line that if I had the power this morning, I would write it on each of your hearts: “The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Whatever we receive from the Lord is from the Lord. Satan has no independent authority over us. We are in the Lord's hands. There are spiritual dynamics and heavenly conversations around us that we don't really know, and frankly, don't need to know. What we do need to know is that we do not love Jesus Christ just for what He does for us. We need to know that we love Jesus Christ because of who He is, and we thank Him for the gifts that He gives; we thank Him when those gifts are taken away or the season for them ends. Job blesses God, and we are told at the end of the chapter, in Job 1:22: “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.” He does not say anything offensive to God. He does not complain or grumble. He does not charge God with wrongdoing, as the adversary would incite us to do. So, as we begin this portion of God's holy Word, I want to encourage you, through the hardest

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parts of your life, whether those hardest parts are in the rearview mirror, whether they are right now in the present, or whether they are coming up, that you never allow anything to drive a wedge between you and your Heavenly Father. We are in His hands, and His purpose will be realized in our lives. When we wonder: “Do hard things happen to good people?” we need look no further than the cross of Christ. Whenever you wonder: “Do hard things happen to good people?” that's where Christianity brings us to the cross. The Bible says that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ,” and that “Jesus, on the night in which He was betrayed, took bread, broke it in the presence of His disciples and said: ‘This is My body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.’” Later, He took the cup of Thanksgiving in their presence, and He said: “This cup is the New Covenant in My blood which is poured out for you.” Isaiah 53 says that Jesus was a Man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering. God knows what it's like to lose a Child. The loss that we experience is not outside of our experience in Christ. As we enter this portion of Scripture, my prayer for us in the midst of our suffering is that we would hold fast to Him. I want to invite you to express your trust in God in the midst of your hardship by partaking with us together of the symbols of the Covenant Meal. We are going to sing a hymn that celebrates that He will hold me fast. The lyrics of this hymn were written almost 100 years ago. They were written to give assurance that God will never lose His grip on us and on what we face. Would you prepare your hearts with mine as we partake together.

Lord Jesus, we thank You that You will hold as fast. We thank You, Lord, that suffering is not outside Your will. We thank You, Lord, for all that You've given, and we thank You, Lord, for what You have taken away. We bless Your Name. Lord Jesus, we fix our eyes upon You, and we love You, not just for what you for us, but because of who You are. We praise You; we honor You.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

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