[AI translation] That's where we left off a couple of weeks ago, looking at the story of Job, where what happens is that Job, under the weight of the suffering that is coming upon him, can't take it any longer, he bursts out, he opens his mouth in a terrible lament, almost a curse, he curses the day that he had to come into the world. The three good friends, who had been sitting silently at Job's bedside, now speak out and try to comfort their friend in agony. They take up all the arguments that religious people of the time were using to explain the meaning of suffering. The argument between Job and his friends goes on at length for 23 chapters, often repeating the same things that have already been said. Their discourse alternates between many true and many false views, sometimes they are right, sometimes Job is right again. Each of the three friends takes up the thread of the discourse three times, and Job answers each of them separately. So: there is in these 23 episodes that follow the eternal human struggle with the eternal problem of suffering.I will not now take the individual speeches of the three friends of Job separately, because that would make the explanation of the whole book very long, but rather I will try to summarise in today's sermon the basic ideas which recur again and again in the reasoning of the friends; the basic ideas which all three of them explain again and again with different arguments.
1) The first basic premise is this: God is just. He does not distribute human happiness and unhappiness arbitrarily, but by blessing the merciful and punishing the wicked. Behold, says Eliphaz: "Remember, I pray thee, who is he that perished innocently, and where the righteous were destroyed? As I have seen, those who sow iniquity and sow wickedness reap the same." So, Eliphaz is referring to the common human experience that he who does something evil always ends up doing himself harm. He who has been unmerciful, cruel, selfish, envious towards others: he himself will soon suffer from the same impulses of others. There is a certain divine law of nature, which the New Testament has formulated precisely, as here the friend Job's friend says: "What a man soweth, that shall he also reap! What this means is that the sin that man has committed cannot simply be forgotten, because it will come back to bite him mercilessly!
A man was complaining the other day about how he was suffering terribly because of his wife, how it was a terrible pain for him to realise that she had been unfaithful to him, that she loved someone else, that a third person had intervened and upset their whole family life, which was so harmonious and happy! "What have I done that God should punish me so?!" cried the man in agony. Then, in the course of the conversation, it turned out that decades ago he had done the same thing: he was the third party to interfere in the happy married life of two people, he was the reason why a family life had been upset, he was the reason why two people had to divorce and he was the reason why he had married the woman who was now unfaithful to him. When this came out, he quietly bowed his head and said: 'I have got back what I did to another man 20 years ago. You could say that, but you could also say that his old sins had caught up with him and had come back to haunt him mercilessly. Yes: sin cannot simply be forgotten, veiled, shaken like a dog out of water and moved on: sin does not remain with me somewhere in the past where I committed it, but will sprout up one day - perhaps when I least expect it - like a seed sown and its bitter fruit must be eaten by the one who sowed it long ago (see Joseph's brothers!).
Eliphaz is right: they that sow iniquity, and sow wickedness, shall reap the same!"- So the strange ambition of the three friends to seek in misfortune and suffering the just punishment of God: may be right in two respects. One is this: when a man is in trouble, he is always well advised to examine whether there is not something untidy in his life, whether there is not some forgotten sin lurking somewhere in his past or present, which God now wants to bring to light, to make him pay for, to cleanse him from. "Is not thy wickedness great, and thy iniquity without end? For thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother unworthily, and hast made the poor naked." (Job 22:5-6) And though they are not right, yet it is good, even in such a distorted mirror, to consider whether there is not some little truth in it: whether it is not that I have not understood something, while God has spoken gently and quietly, and now, therefore, with the fire of suffering, He must make some truth burning, urgent, pressing to me.
Then, too, the maxim of Job's friends may be correct in the sense that suffering is never undeserved. I always wonder when people complain in this way: 'Why is God punishing me, I wonder what I have done to get here, I must be very guilty to suffer so much...'" - I always say that you must be very, very guilty, dear brother, much more guilty than you think, so much so that you deserve not only such punishment, you deserve no better fate than sickness, or loss of a job, or deportation, or prison! - All of this is far less than you deserve, because your sins have a far greater punishment: the death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the execution! The misfortune and trouble that may befall us in life may only serve to make me feel in my own skin a little of the justice of God in punishing my sins on Jesus according to their merit! In suffering, God always sees and feels something of His justice, and surely it is to make sin sin, to expose it, to hurt, to burn - and to drive me to grace. And when I am kneeling before Him at the cross with my sins confessed, repented and confessed, then it is already true that "He wounds, but He also binds; He crushes, but He also heals." His justice wounds, but His mercy binds; His judgment crushes, but His mercy heals. In fact, I believe that often He wounds and crushes us in order to bind us and heal us, or without images: so that we may fall into His mercy, or fall deeper into His grace.
I once heard of a pastor who testified, "I was a pastor of the professing church, preaching and teaching many times on the knowledge of the Scriptures. But when I spoke of Jesus, who came to seek and save those who were lost, it always struck me in a way that I never experienced personally! Of course, I knew there were sins in my life and I was glad for the word of forgiveness. But was that why the Son of God had to die so bloody and miserable a death on the cross?! I was never so lost. And so at the time I was a faithful mediator of a correct biblical truth, but I was not a witness to a lost and found condition! Until one day God made me a lost man! A man who had all ground slipped from under his feet. And who now can only cling to the pierced, bloody hands of the saving Jesus for his salvation. I now know from experience what it means to be lost and to be found!
I believe that God will always finally drive me to the sense of His truth, so that I will be compelled to come to the suffering person, to grace, to forgiveness of sins, to the reality of salvation, to Jesus Christ! And there the soul always rejoices: the Lord indeed wounds, but also binds, crushes, but also heals! And it is true to Job's friend that the man whom God rebukes is truly a happy man. Therefore hate not the chastisement of the Almighty!
2) So there is some truth in this basic idea of Job's friends: that God is just, that he does not distribute happiness and unhappiness arbitrarily, but by blessing the merciful and punishing the wicked. But they are no longer right in the second fundamental idea of their argument: that Job's misfortune proves that, that Job has offended God with some specific, great sin, God has now hit Job with the cane for some secret sin, like the teacher in school with the cane. If God is just, the friends say plainly, and if Job has suffered so many heavy blows, it can only be understood that Job has sinned in some way, but he does not want to admit it, and that this misfortune is a punishment in direct proportion to his sin. Such a particularly great misfortune as that which befell Job indicates a particularly great guilt. He is told plainly, "Thou hast not given water to drink to the desolate, and thou hast denied bread to the hungry. He who was mighty, the kingdom belonged to him, and he who was great dwelt in it. Thou didst send away the widows empty, and the orphans' arms were broken. For this reason destruction has surrounded you, and sudden terror has terrified you." (Job 22:7-10)
The problem of suffering is not as simple as these friends think, that Job has sinned much, so he must suffer much! I myself, for example, am a living refutation of this thesis: if I had to suffer physical and spiritual torments in proportion to the degree to which I have sinned against the Lord and against my fellow men, I could not now address you here, for I would be wallowing in torment somewhere in desolation, misery, and shame. If God were to deal with me according to my merits, to measure my prosperity or my misfortune by the greatness of my sins, I should howl with suffering, if indeed I were still alive. So it is not the case that suffering or misfortune is a sign that one is an ungodly, wicked man! In practice, we very often see the opposite: that there is no concrete sin in someone's life for which he or she would receive suffering and trouble as a straightforward condemnation. Sometimes, the most blessed, the most godly, the most purified souls are the ones who suffer the most. We have all seen someone whose life is full of love, full of self-sacrifice, full of childlike faith, trust, goodness: languishes before our eyes for months in some terrible illness, growing more and more ruined day by day, in agony, in unquenchable pain; or is afflicted with some other misfortune, some other trouble, some spiritual pain, some material loss, so that we involuntarily sigh: why should such a truly blessed, good soul suffer so much, especially one who has always been so good and so good...?!
Yes: there are such mysteries, such incomprehensible things! And then the most terrible thing is what Job's friends do: they are so desperate to explain the divine meaning of this suffering. Here we should be silent and do what Eliphaz advises Job: "Therefore I would appeal to the Almighty, to God, who works great and inexhaustible works and wonders beyond number." (Job 5:8-9) Yes: this is the only help, the only consolation, the only solution: to appeal to the Lord Almighty, to pour out to Him all the sorrows of the heart, to complain to Him of the full depth of affliction - free! A believer is also allowed to complain, but always only before the Lord, to the Lord! If you don't pour out your complaint everywhere, but pour it out before the Lord, then it is good! You can. That's good! For the Lord opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. He will not break a broken reed, nor put out a smoking candle. So take courage: call upon the Almighty, and commit my cause to him who is great and infinite.
I once said that God does not expect us to understand Him and His works, but to trust Him! What do you want to understand about what God does?! Who can tell me why God thinks the righteous man suffers?! Who would dare to arrogate to himself to understand the mind and purposes of God?! It would be as absurd, as arrogantly conceited, as if a ladybird, who has climbed half of the tower of the Parliament House in his wormy life, now wanted to form an idea of the genius of Miklós Ybl or the technical problems of modern architecture on the basis of his experiences here. Where is the meaning of the ladybird from the meaning of man - and they are both creatures! Well, the meaning of man from the meaning of God: the creature from the Creator! Is it not better, instead of all attempts at explanation, to be mute and bow down before the Almighty, "Who doeth great and infinite works and wonders beyond number." (Job 5:9) - Yes: trust him with your case, for this unapproachable and incomprehensible God has become our brother and saviour in the human person of Jesus Christ, and now, knowing Jesus Christ, we can be even more certain that he will wound us, but also bind us, crush us, but also heal us! - Sometimes, even here on earth, perhaps long decades later, we will find out why suffering was not a punishment for someone's life at that time (Zsigmond Bükki). But it is also the case that it is only when we are there - when we see things from the surface - that we will understand why we had to suffer! (Missionary.) We who, even under the deepest and most incomprehensible human suffering, see the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, and who, even above the most comfortless death, see the resurrection of Christ, can confess with great humility: "Behold, happy is the man whom God rebukes; therefore do not hate the punishment of the Almighty! For He woundeth, and bindeth up, and bruiseth, and healeth with His hands." (Job 5:17-18)
Zsigmond Bükki, a pastor, told of the death of his mother when he was a young child. For months, even years, he could not come to terms with the great pain in his little child's heart. Many times in the cemetery, he would lie on the grave, hug the headstone and, with convulsive sobs, almost ask God why he had taken his mother from him. Later, as an adult, he began to understand something of the big "why": He had lived in difficult circumstances, trained by the fate of orphanhood to bear the burdens of later life. He became a tougher, firmer, more understanding, more tender man than many of his peers who had been protected from life's blows by a mother's care. Behold, a soul broken in childhood was healed by the Lord in adulthood.
I have read of a missionary who, in his long and faithful ministry, never once had the great joy of seeing a convert come forward to receive baptism. He was very bitter about it. His successor, as soon as he took up the vacant missionary post, was suddenly amazed to see people coming forward en masse for conversion and baptism. He asked how this could be possible, since his predecessor had done such faithful work and yet had had no results. And he had no sooner appeared than he had so much fruit: We wanted to see how he died first. Will his death prove all that he preached in life? And because we have seen that he did die as he taught, we now believe him and want to follow the Jesus he preached among us! Behold, the wounded soul on earth has been bound by the Lord in heaven.
In this assurance we sing:
Jesus, in you I trust,
I perish, O let me not perish!
You who through sin, through hell, through the grave
Thou art the only victor:
Encourage me in weak faith,
Prepare me that my soul
That my soul may see above, O Lord,
For ever and ever happy.
(Canto 295, verse 2)
Date: 5 October 1958.
Lesson
Jób 4,1-8
Jób 22,4-11