February 1

February 1, 2009

Job Part 1: Why Do Bad Things Happen?
a sermon on Job 1.1-12
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

Have you ever felt like Job? … The book of Job is the most profound book about suffering ever written. Its star character, Job, is a poor soul with whom we can identify in our suffering. In our worst days, we can sit with him on the ash heap and ask: Why? … Why? Job never curses God, but he curses everything else. He argues with God. He questions God. He vacillates between hurt and anger as he moves deeper and deeper into despair.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. As the book of Job opens, we find a good, honest, righteous, God-fearing man—Job. He is also a happy and prosperous man. One day the satan (that’s Hebrew for “the accuser;” think of heaven’s district attorney who brings charges against people) comes in and God commends Job to him. God finds no fault in Job. Satan says, “Of course you don’t. You’ve bought him off. He loves you so much because you are so good to him.” So God grants Satan authority to take away all that Job has, and in next Sunday’s reading, that will be extended to include his health. The good times come to an end. Everything is gone in no time at all. Job’s whole world collapses, and it’s more than he can bear. This book is the story of his suffering but more about his spiritual struggle to understand his suffering.

Job’s suffering is two-ply. One layer is the physical loss. The other is the challenge to his faith. Job does not understand his suffering. It has no point that he can see. He senses it is unjust. This goes against everything he thought he knew about God. And where is God, anyway? God remains silent for 37 agonizing chapters.

I hope you never read this book knowing exactly how Job feels, but you ought to read it, especially if you are suffering. Better to suffer along with Job, in the hopes of finding the answer he found, than to suffer alone.

The book of Job does not solve the so-called problem of evil so much as it creates it. That’s sort of the main idea this morning, so let me repeat it: The book of Job does not solve the so-called problem of evil so much as it creates it. The problem of evil is: We believe God is all-good and all-powerful, yet evil happens. But, if God is all-good, he wouldn’t will evil or allow it. If he is all-powerful, he could prevent it. Yet experience tells us, evil happens—and not just bad things but unjust things. The innocent suffer. How is this right? Where is God? Why does it happen?

Job does not solve this problem. It creates it. The problem vanishes like fog in the morning sun with any of four easy answers: There is no god; God is good but weak; God is wicked, at least sometimes; or you deserve what you get. The book of Job creates the problem of evil by taking away these easy answers. Let’s consider them so we’re not just whistling in the dark, trying to solve a riddle that doesn’t exist. Christians and Jews seem to be the only people who struggle with the problem of evil on a philosophical level. Everyone struggles with it on the level of everyday life. No matter what you believe, suffering can hit you hard enough to make you wonder why. But for others, the spiritual dilemma isn’t there. Hindus believe the wheel of karma never swerves a hair’s breadth, so whatever you get, you deserve it. That’s one example. Anyone who does not believe in the God of the Bible has a much easier time explaining suffering. For the atheist, suffering just happens. We Christians and our Jewish cousins are the ones who have a problem, because we insist on God’s existence, his goodness, and his omnipotence despite the fact of evil. The book of Job pushes us in exactly this direction.

The first easy solution is atheism. If there is no God, evil happens, and there’s the end of it. In fact, without God, words like evil and injustice hardly have meaning. There are only things you like and things you don’t. Job stands with the rest of the Bible in rejecting this option without apology. The Bible spends all its time worrying about what sort of God exists, but it takes God’s existence for granted. Most people do. Atheism in our culture has a loud voice, but it remains quite small. I’m not going to spend time on this option, not because we Christians cannot give good reasons for our faith. I often preach on that, but it’s not our question today. The Bible says if you don’t believe in God, you’re kidding yourself. That’s the unspoken attitude of the book of Job.

The second easy answer denies God’s power. God is good and wants only the best for us. Unfortunately, even God is subject to forces of time, nature, and chance. He turns out to be an imperfect God with a big heart who tries but never quite gets things right. This is the solution Rabbi Harold Kushner offers in his famous book, When Bad Things to Good People. I don’t mean to be hard on Kushner because he lost a son, and his grief led him to question and rethink everything he thought he knew about God. He ended up in a place where he felt he had to choose between God’s love and God’s power. He chose to hold onto God’s love. So his God is loving and good, but not all-powerful. I think if we had to make that choice, that’s the right option to choose. But I think the choice is a false one. Here’s why: If God cannot do anything about my loved one’s cancer, how can he raise the dead or make all things new? In other words, what hope do we have? A loving but weak God is simply not the God of the Bible. It is not the God Job knew.

The third easy answer denies God’s goodness. This is the solution Job toys with. He knows God is too big for him. He has no standing to haul God into court, though this is exactly what he would like to do. Job wants an accounting from God. How could a good God allow his unjust suffering? Job never settles on this option. He never curses God. But in his heart he wonders. He asks the question.

This has been a popular answer through the ages. It was the answer of paganism. Paganism divided God into lots of gods, some of whom were good, some of whom were bad. Hinduism worships Shiva the destroyer; and Brahman, the ultimate divine reality encompasses both good and evil. Deism gave this solution the form it has in our culture: God is not necessarily bad; he just doesn’t care. The god of the enlightenment was way off somewhere, unconcerned about our little problems. I suspect this attitude remains popular, even if people don’t put it into words. “God doesn’t care.” The book of Job rejects this answer. God does love Job. We know that from the start. God’s ways may be mysterious, but they are fatherly. I reject this answer for a simple but compelling reason: the cross. Because Jesus died for you and me, I can never deny his love for us.

The fourth easy answer—“you deserve it”—is the one above all others the book of Job refutes. Over and over Job hears this from his friends, “You are suffering because you are a sinner. You did something bad. Admit it and hope God will be merciful.” But we readers know something Job feels in his heart: he doesn’t deserve it. We know it because God says at much at the beginning of the book. “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” At the end of the book, God is so mad at Job’s friends that he tells Job to pray for them. God tells them, “You have not spoken rightly of me as my servant Job has.”

This is surprising, because they have only been repeating what we find elsewhere in the Bible. God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous. God is just. God sets things right. Romans 3:4 says, “Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar.” That’s their position. Yet they are wrong about Job. His suffering is not punishment.

Jesus rejected this easy answer too. “Who sinned that this man was born blind?” his disciples asked. “No one,” Jesus answered. Once some people wanted his opinion about some Galileans Pontius Pilate had killed. Jesus turned the question on them: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” In other words, those disasters were not punishments sent from God. Interestingly, although Jesus rejects the notion that all suffering is punishment, he does not reject the conclusion most people draw from it: that we need to repent. Just because your suffering is not punishment does not mean you don’t need grace.

You can see how the book of Job sets up a real problem for Christians. It takes away all the easy answers and leaves us with a loving, all-powerful God and unjust suffering. We have two more sermons in this series, but I will go ahead and tell you now that the book of Job does not solve this problem on a rational level. In the end, Job will be satisfied, and his satisfaction has nothing to do with God restoring his fortunes. Before that ever happens, Job will find—not the answer he was looking for—but something ultimately more satisfying. At the end of the book, God speaks to Job. It is not what he says that opens Job’s eyes; it is simply his glory. Job gets the smallest glimpse of who God is, and all his suffering comes into perspective. He still doesn’t know why, but now he doesn’t need to.

The book of Job gives us this problem of evil because we live the Christian life not by solving it but by living with it—living with mystery. I say mystery because we don’t understand, but we trust. It is illogical to us that a loving, just, and all-powerful God allows unjust suffering. But we know that we do not see the whole picture. God does. Our tiny minds and limited perspective prevent us from grasping God’s purposes. But we know him, and so we trust him anyway.

You may still want answers, but consider this: Isn’t every attempt to explain our suffering really just an attempt to explain it away? Isn’t it like saying, “This is not really bad. It is good in disguise. You can’t see the good, and you are hurting, but it’s all for the best.” Now, I don’t deny for a minute that God can bring good out of evil. But I resent the effort to eliminate suffering—that is, to deny the spiritual problem of suffering—as if there is no injustice or evil. The book of Job denies us that option too. Job suffers, and he suffers unjustly. His friends can’t explain his suffering away no matter how much hot air they blow. We should at least give suffering people the dignity of acknowledging that they really are suffering, not just overlooking the silver lining.

When we suffer we confront a mystery. Before the Bible begins to hint at what might be on the other side of it, the mystery only gets deeper. God takes flesh and becomes one of us. Then he suffers. He not only suffers in the ordinary ways we all do: hunger, fatigue. He suffers torture, humiliation, and death—unjustly. Just when you think you at least comprehend the size of the mystery of suffering, you see the cross and realize it is far bigger and deeper than you are capable of imagining. Whatever is going on, whatever purpose suffering serves (if it serves one at all), whatever reason God has for allowing it as he does—God is not afraid of it. He is not above taking his own medicine. On the contrary, he willingly embraces the worst of it.

At the heart of the mystery of suffering is the person of Jesus, who identifies with us in our suffering. He is not like Job’s friends, who sit with Job and try to comfort him. For Jesus does something no other person can do. He shares our suffering. He suffers with us and for us.

In the Lord’s Supper, we symbolically share in his suffering. When we suffer for his sake, we share literally in his sufferings. Somehow, he identifies with us in our suffering and we identify with him in his. And somehow this makes things right. I don’t understand it. It is a mystery, but he is not. He is a real, living person present with us through his Holy Spirit. For reasons I cannot begin to explain, you may have to suffer; but you need not suffer alone.

I challenge you to read the book of Job during February. A couple of chapters per day will get you through it with plenty of time to spare. Suffer with Job. That’s the beauty of this book. It doesn’t rush to make things better. It lingers in the dark places. And though it offers no easy answer, it does not trivialize your suffering. Instead, you confront a mystery, and perhaps, by the grace of God, you find satisfaction, as Job does. Amen.

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