SOVEREIGNTY AND SUFFERING
Job 1 and 2
We are beginning today a nine-week series entitled, "Where is God
when it hurts?" We will be considering what the Bible has to say
about suffering and the life of faith. Before I begin, I want to mention
two things. First, I am confident that as we talk over these coming weeks
I will be provoking a number of questions. Therefore, each week there
will be a 3x5 card in the program that you can use to write out any questions
you may have and on August 8th I will spend the sermon time
answering, as best I can, your questions. You can simply turn them in
to me each week after the service. Also, you will find on the back of
the notes for this morning’s sermon a list of resources we have in the
library that I would encourage you to read and listen to.
WHY ARE WE GOING TO TALK ABOUT SUFFERING?
- Suffering is a fact of our existence.
During this past week another suicide bomber blew up himself and 16 Israeli
civilians. During the rescue of Mark and Gracia Burnham, the American
missionaries that have been held hostage for the last year by a band of
Philippian terrorists, Mark was killed in the cross fire and Gracia was
wounded. We transferred Jared, our 22 year old son who suffered a traumatic
brain injury while skiing in February, to a nursing home on Friday. We
left behind, at the facility Jared left in Milwaukee, another 22 year
old, the son of a pastor, who suffered a traumatic brain injury three
weeks after Jared in a fall. That evening we heard that the 22-year-old
son of the girl’s head basketball coach at Craig High School died in his
sleep from a diabetic coma on Thursday. In this small gathering of humanity
represented here, this morning, I am aware of amazing stories of suffering.
Stories of sexual abuse, unfaithful spouses, the ravages of disease, the
death of loved ones, financial distress, alienated relationships, mental
illness, wayward children and the list goes on. The kinds and severity
of suffering are unevenly distributed, but everyone here has suffered
and everyone here is going to suffer more, it is a fact of our existence
and to not talk about suffering would be to fail in my task as your pastor.
- The Bible talks a great deal about suffering, it is promised by
our Lord, and confirmed by his apostles.
Only those who have never read the Bible or who have read the Bible with
the blinders of presupposition are unaware that human suffering and evil
are talked about in vivid color. Human evil, suffering and death are the
conditions within which God’s story is told. In fact, the story of the
Bible is the story of the suffering of God’s people and of God’s plan
to rescue his people out of this "present evil age", as Paul
calls it in Galatians 1. If you have been attending River Hills for very
long you know that we have talked about suffering just as a result of
going through the Bible in a systematic way because the Bible is full
of such talk.
However, not only is suffering talked about at great length, but also
our Lord Jesus promised that we would suffer. "In this world you
will have trouble." "You will be hated by all men for my sake."
In fact, as we saw two weeks ago in Matthew 20, its not simply that suffering
happens to us, but to be a follower of Jesus means that we have chosen
a lifestyle of suffering servanthood for the good of others. The apostle
Paul as he traveled through the churches he founded in Asia Minor told
them, "We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of
God." I have often, since our church began 4 years ago, wanted to
do a series on suffering because it is such a major theme in the Bible
and because it is so clear that suffering was talked about by the apostles
as soon as people became Christians. One of the most hope giving things
I know is to be able to see how my or your particular suffering fits into
the bigger story of sin, suffering and salvation that is the story of
the universe. It is my prayer that all of us will be able to experience
the rock solid hope that our part in this larger story is meant to give
us.
- We live in a culture, both Christian and secular that seeks to
deny, avoid and cover up suffering at all costs.
It is right to want to alleviate suffering. Christians are not masochists,
we don’t suffer from some martyr complex. Suffering is never good in and
of itself. Misery is always an expression of our fallen world and therefore
we must do all we can to limit the evil of suffering. Medical technologies
that prevent and cure disease are good. Laws that require safe work conditions
and product safety are good. It is wonderful to live in a country and
an age when most of our children don’t die before the age of 5, when there
are pain medications to combat headaches, antibiotics to fight killer
bacteria and anesthesia to make pain free operations possible. However,
we do not merely live in a country and an age that has done much to alleviate
suffering. We live in a culture that believes we have a right to
not suffer. We live in an age that demands a pain free existence
and will pay any price to get it, even if it means sacrificing the most
helpless among us to get it. We live in a society that pushes suffering
out of view into hospitals, nursing homes, and drug induced forgetfulness.
We live among a people who drive suffering from view by trite and chipper
entertainments and the hollow comfort of homes and computers and vacations.
However, even more troubling than our culture’s reaction to pain, we
also live in Christian culture that has adopted our culture’s demand for
pain free existence and put a religious spin on it. Salvation in the
Christian world we live in is cast in terms of a trouble free life on
planet earth. The Jesus of modern Christianity came to deliver us
from troubled homes, marriages, and minds. He came to guarantee health
that never fails and investments that always succeed. He wants us to feel
good about ourselves and to experience a full and happy life here. In
the American church, avoidance of pain and risk are as much the values
of God’s kingdom as they are of Caribbean cruise ships. We use the
same means that culture at large uses to push suffering to the side. We
use the same drugs, the same therapies, and the same entertainment but
with this difference, we label them Christian. Popular Christianity does
not deal well with the reality of suffering or of God’s good purposes
in it. I hope, by considering these eight passages to help us not conform
to the pattern of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of
our minds. There is no better news than the gospel of Jesus Christ. However,
it is not good news because he came to guarantee a happy life here. It
is good news because it promises us eternal pleasures in the presence
of God forever and uses suffering to help us gain that greatest good.
- Suffering will destroy you spiritually if you do not think about
it and deal with it biblically.
In the coming weeks we are going to look at many of God’s good purposes
in suffering. Nevertheless, suffering does not automatically bring good
to our lives. Suffering often results in the destruction of faith and
hope in God. While God always has good purposes in the affliction he brings
to his people, there is also, always, a sinister will at work in the misery
as well. I’d like you to turn with me to 1 Thessalonians 3: 1-5 (page
____). Paul spent about a month in the Greek town of Thessalonica preaching
the gospel. The religious leaders of the town became jealous of the crowds
of people who turned out to hear Paul and so they drove them from the
town by threat of violence. Paul and his companions left behind a fledgling
church in the midst of these threats. Listen to how he felt and what he
did in view of these threats to these young Christians. (Read it.) Why
was Paul so insistent that Timothy return to Thessalonica? He knew that
the persecution that these young Christians were undergoing was designed
by Satan for the purpose of destroying their faith. Suffering is one of
Satan’s chief weapons to turn people away from God. It is my goal to be
Timothy for you, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith so that
Satan might not destroy you through affliction.
- The fact that God exists and that suffering, evil and death exist
creates a massive dilemma for us.
Scott Hafemann, in his book, "The God of Promise and the Life of
Faith" tells how his four year old son Eric was playing catch with
his older brother. A wildly thrown ball hit Eric on the head and Scott
quickly responded to his crying child with a word of comfort. He said,
"We can sure be thankful that God kept the ball from hitting you
in the eye. Think of how God was watching out for you! He really loves
you." To which Eric replied between sobs, "Then why didn’t God
stop the ball before it hit me?" He goes on to say this about
the "problem of evil", "Responding to suffering and evil,
and eventually death is the challenge of life. Eric was right. Faced with
the horrendous evil that permeates our world, no problem is as perplexing
and painful as the problem of reconciling God’s absolute, sovereign power
with his all-encompassing love. The existence of evil seems to force us
to limit one or the other. If God is all-powerful, then he cannot be all
loving. If he is all loving, then he must not be all-powerful. As John
Hick put it, ‘If God is perfectly loving, he must wish to abolish evil;
and if he is all-powerful, he must be able to abolish evil. But evil exists;
therefore, God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.’…. If God
is both sovereign and loving, then evil, all evil, must somehow fit into
God’s ultimate, good, and perfect plan. But can we really conclude that
the evil in the world around us, from genocide to child abuse, from cancer
to starvation, is somehow part of God’s sovereign, loving will for his
creation? And can we worship such a God?" It is my prayer
that as we spend these weeks looking at suffering in God’s world that
we will not only learn to worship this all loving and completely sovereign
God but that we will delight in him more as we contemplate his infinite
wisdom, power and love as it is expressed to us in and through affliction.
I am going to begin this morning by taking a brief, but I hope helpful
look at the first two chapters of the premiere book on suffering, the
biblical book of Job.
SOVEREIGNTY AND SUFFERING IN THE BOOK OF JOB.
There are basically three non-biblical ways that people try to resolve
the tension between God’s sovereignty and love and the existence of evil.
First, many simply take the existence of evil as the chief evidence that
God doesn’t exist. The famous atheist Bertrand Russell said, "…there
is to me something a little odd about (belief that) ….an omnipotent, omniscient
and benevolent Deity… considers Himself adequately rewarded by the final
emergence of Hitler, Stalin and the atomic bomb." Second, millions
of religious people of various persuasions have concluded that God is
merely just and powerful but not loving. The Hindu concept of "karma"
states that whatever is happening to you is what you deserve. Everyone
is getting exactly what he deserves based on how he lived in their previous
life. The Moslem assertion that all is from the will of Allah comes very
close to the raw justice of karma. The friends of Job subscribe to this
basic view as they are sure that the reason Job is suffering is because
he has sinned as the righteous always flourish and the wicked always suffer.
Even within Christianity, broadly defined you will find strains of this
wicked conception of God. A dear friend of ours grew up in a church that
taught this sort of fatalistic, determinative view of reality. Her grandmother,
citing God’s sovereignty over all of life did nothing to stop her grandfather,
the pastor of the church, from sexually molesting her and her sister.
Any conception of God’s sovereignty that promotes a passive, irresponsible
response to suffering and evil is not only in error and a great dishonor
to God but promotes the grossest kinds of evil.
Third, probably the most common way of resolving the supposed contradiction
between God’s love and God’s sovereignty is to limit God’s sovereignty
and to emphasize God’s love. There are many different forms of this false
teaching. In his book, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People",
Rabbi Harold Kushner asserts, "God wants the righteous to live peaceful,
happy lives, but sometimes even he cannot bring that about. It is too
difficult even for God to keep cruelty and chaos from claiming their innocent
victims… God can’t do everything but he can do some important things…
if God is a God of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our
side when bad things happen to us." In other words, while God wants
to help us and he knows it would be just for the innocent to not suffer,
he is not able to do anything to help us. We are to be comforted that
while he has no ability to prevent evil, he sympathizes with us.
Most Christians would not go as far as Kirshner in asserting that God
is not able to stop suffering. Most will simply say that God limits his
sovereignty out of respect for our and Satan’s "free will".
The reasons for God doing this are varied but the common assertion is
that God made us as free creatures and therefore he will not interfere
with our freedom. This means that all evil is outside of God’s will and
is entirely caused and controlled by human or demonic free will. Scott
Hafemann summarizes this position like this, "In relationship to
the world, God’s sovereignty is an unrealized sovereignty, not an actual
sovereignty. Evil exists not because God is limited in his power but because
God has limited himself in exercising his sovereignty." This was
clearly expressed by a woman who wrote me a letter upon hearing what I
said on March 10th about Jared’s accident. That morning I told
you as I have told everyone who has asked that it was God’s will that
Jared be injured. This is what she wrote, "God does not always get
his way on earth as long as the enemy has not yet been destroyed. We have
the free will to choose God or to deny Him. He knows every detail of the
future but He does not control it. If he did, we would only be puppets,
all forced to follow him without free will".
The way that the Bible deals with the apparent contradiction between
evil and suffering on one hand and God’s sovereignty and love on the other
is far more complex than any of these proposed solutions and far more
satisfying. I want to look briefly at the book of Job to see one of scores
of examples of how the Bible talks about God’s relationship to evil and
suffering.
- The first thing that this amazing story wants us to know is that Job
is a righteous man.
The story begins by describing his devotion to God and his exemplary
righteousness and it ends affirming it. Verse 1 says, "In the land
of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and
upright; he feared God and shunned evil." Then the Lord himself says
to Satan in v. 8, "There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless
and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." God says the same
thing after all of his livestock and servants and children are killed
(2:3). Then at the end of the book, in chapter 42, the Lord says that
he would accept Job’s prayer on behalf of his friends because Job had
spoken what was right about the Lord in contrast to what the friends had
said. One of the central points of the book of Job is that the suffering
that came upon Job did not come because of Job’s sin. He was innocent.
This is the most troubling kind of evil and suffering. We know that some
of the suffering we experience is due to our own sinfulness. When someone
gets cancer after smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day for 50 years, we
are not surprised or troubled by it in the same way as when a child gets
leukemia. When a person goes to jail for robbery we don’t question God’s
love and justice the way we do when a Chinese pastor is thrown into a
labor camp simply for preaching the gospel. God himself says that Job
did not suffer for any reason in Job. You cannot explain the evil that
happens to Job as a function of God’s justice against Job because of evil
he has done. There is suffering that comes to us, not because of anything
we have done wrong. It is this suffering that the book of Job is about
and it is this suffering that we are going to be talking about during
these weeks.
- The second thing to notice here is that all the evil and suffering
that Job endured was God’s will for Job.
I am not saying that God directly did the evil. As Dr. Wayne Grudem
says in his Systematic Theology, that while there are scores of Scripture
passages that teach that God brings about evil the "…evil is actually
done not by God but by people or demons who choose to do it." What
the book of Job tells us is that it was God’s will and purpose that Job
suffer exactly as he did. God wanted Satan to do what he did to Job. God
wanted the Sabeans to kill Job’s servants and steal his oxen and donkeys.
God wanted "the fire of God" to fall from the sky and burn up
Job’s sheep and servants. God wanted the Chaldeans to kill his servants
and steal his camels. God wanted the strong wind to sweep in off the desert
and to cause Job’s son’s house to collapse and thus to kill all ten of
Job’s children. God wanted Job’s body to break out in boils. How do I
know that God wanted all this evil to happen? Look at several places that
this is clearly stated. Read 1: 20-22, 2:3, 2:9-10, 6:4, 7:17-21, 42:11.
You cannot read Job and say that evil and suffering is not what God wants.
Evil doesn’t happen because God limits his sovereignty. Evil happens expressly
because God is so powerful he is able even to cause the evil done by his
enemies to serve his good purposes while he never does an act of evil.
- This leads me to the third observation.
Satan and humans are the direct cause of the evil done to Job. In vv.
12-19 all the disasters that happen to Job and his children are clearly
Satan’s doing. God places Job’s family and possession in Satan’s hands
and immediately all of these evil things happen to Job. Not only does
Satan do evil, but the Sabeans and the Chaldeans also do evil. In 2:6-7
God again places Job in Satan’s hands and then Satan goes out and afflicts
Job with boils from his head to his feet. Is God forcing Satan to harm
Job? Is he somehow working "behind the scenes" so that Satan
is doing something he does not want to do? How about the human players,
the Sabeans and Chaldeans, are they acting contrary to their own desires?
Of course not. Satan and the humans are doing exactly what they want to
do and therefore they are accountable for what they are doing. Yet, they
are doing exactly what the Lord wants them to do. This is so clear when
you compare 1: 11 with 1:12 and 2:5 with 2:6. In both cases Satan tells
God that if he will stretch out his hand and strike everything he has
(1:11) or "strike his flesh and bones" (2:5), that Job will
curse him. Immediately after both of these statements God tells Satan
that Job is in his hands to do what he told God to do. God stretches out
his hand and puts Job in the hands of Satan and of evil men to do what
they willingly want to do.
Hundreds of years ago, the great Christian pastor and theologian, Augustine
said it this way, "Men and demons will with evil wills what God wills
with a good will so that God’s will is always done while men and demons
are held accountable for the evil that they do." Dr. Grudem in his
"Systematic Theology" uses the illustration of a play to show
the relationship between God’s will and human or demonic will. "In
the Shakespearean play "Macbeth", the character Macbeth murders
King Duncan. Now… the question may be asked, "Who killed King Duncan?"
On one level, the correct answer is "Macbeth." Within the context
of the play he carried out the murder and is rightly to blame for it.
But on another level, a correct answer to the question ….would be, :William
Shakespeare": he wrote the play, he created all the characters in
it, and he wrote the part where Macbeth killed King Duncan. It would not
be correct to say that because Macbeth killed King Duncan, William Shakespeare
did not kill him. Nor would it be correct to say that because William
Shakespeare killed King Duncan, Macbeth did not kill him. Both are true."
Obviously there is mystery here. We do not completely understand how this
works. What we do know is that this world is not out of control. All the
evil in the world is serving God good purposes. God does not need to limit
his sovereignty to make room for human or demon free will. Humans make
willing choices according to their own desires for which they are accountable
and God so governs those choices that they always serve his infinitely
wise, loving, and just purposes, while he himself is never guilty of doing
evil. We are not at the mercy of random or evil forces in this world.
C.H. Spurgeon said about this doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of
God, "There is no attribute of God more comforting to his children
than the doctrine of Divine Sovereignty. Under the most adverse circumstances,
in the most severe troubles, they believe that Sovereignty has ordained
their afflictions, that Sovereignty overrules them, and that Sovereignty
will make them all work for good."
- Why did Satan want to do this evil to Job?
He wanted to dishonor God by causing Job to curse God and he wanted to
destroy Job by causing him to sin and thus incur the wrath of God against
him. He wanted to prove that the Lord is not valuable in himself and not
worthy of love, trust and obedience. He wanted to display how pitiful
God is in that the only way any creature will love God is if God bribes
him. Satan’s entire motive was to mock God and to destroy people. This
is always his motive. He hates God and wants God to be hated. He hates
those made in God’s image and wants God to destroy us. He delights in
the true God being despised, distrusted, and hated.
- Why did God want this suffering to come upon Job?
Scott Hafemann says, "Satan asks the theological question of the
book in 1:9, ‘Does Job serve God for nothing?’ Job’s suffering, God counters,
will demonstrate that Job serves God for the worth found in serving God
alone, but ‘only through pain and loss can this question of God’s worth
be answered.’" God seeks to show that Job does serve God for no reason
other than the worth of God himself. His aim is to both display the reality
of Job’s faith and the worth of his own name. The suffering comes to Job,
as it comes to all God’s people, for the ultimate and highest good of
Job and for the glory of God.
- Finally, you need to know that Job never finds out what we know in
chapters 1 &2.
Job lives in relation to God and his suffering just like us. He only
knows that God exists, that he is sovereign in his world and that he,
Job, is suffering greatly. The rest of Job shows the anguish that these
realities create in the person of faith and exposes the falseness of asserting
that all suffering is caused by the sins of those who suffer. At the end
of the story, God does not tell Job why he sent all this suffering. God
simply asserts his right to do as he pleases, "Who then is able to
stand against me? Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything
under heaven belongs to me." (41:10-11) Then the book ends by God
vindicating Job and restoring all that Job lost twofold. "The Lord
blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first." The book
of Job thus ends not only by displaying God’s sovereignty over all the
universe, including evil, but also God’s commitment that flows from his
love to finally save and vindicate his people. All who belong to Christ
have a glorious future awaiting them that makes God’s blessing of Job
seem as nothing. This is the hope that sustains us in our suffering.
It is my goal during these weeks that we, along with Job, will bless
God for his sovereignty over evil and suffering.
© Copyright 2002 John Swanson.
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