[AI translation] The eternal consolation of every suffering person is heard in these words. I have often comforted sad people with this Word. I have drawn comfort from it for myself. For indeed: when all human consolation fails, when all human power, authority, science, wisdom, reaches its utmost limit, then there is really nothing left but the certainty: "I know that my Saviour lives!" It is sometimes a very long and bitter road. Job too started from a very long way off, and came up very staggering and stumbling! And now I would like to talk about this stumbling and stumbling of faith. Last time we talked about the speeches with which Job's friends tried to console their suffering friend, summarising in these long speeches the main ideas which recur again and again in their arguments, and now I would like to summarise the main ideas from Job's replies to the friends' arguments.1) Such words from the lips of a man are astonishing: "Remember that my life is but a breath, and my eye can see no more good. No eye that looks at me sees me; you look at me, but I am no more! The cloud disappears and passes away, so that he who goes down to the grave will come up no more. (Job 7:7-10) It is astonishing because the man who says this: he believes in God and does not believe in the reality of life after death. All his thoughts, his hopes, his possibilities, his plans are only until death, beyond which there is some dark, misty abyss for him... He cannot see through the darkness of death, beyond death. Well: we already know that there is an afterlife, that Jesus Christ not only died, but also rose from the dead and opened for us the way to eternal life through death - and yet we do not really believe it, yet we are so hopeless in the face of death, as if there were nothing beyond it. Yet how we cling to this earthly life as if it were all there is! Isn't our religiousness, our faith in God, practically meant to make our earthly affairs right, to help God?! What happens after death? We shall see then! What is certain is certain. That is to say, this life on earth, that's how it is, undoubtedly because we live in it, we move, we struggle, we struggle, well, here God comes with his power and help! Life after death is not certain, no one has ever come back from it! So what God can give, God gives here, because only here is of value. Whatever beauty and joy there is, must be enjoyed here, because we only live once: from sickness God must heal us, from peril God must deliver us, because if not, then death is the end of everything!
In practical terms, what is the difference between our faith and that of Job in the Old Testament, who lamented in his anguish: "Before I go, I will go to the land of darkness and the shadow of death, the land of the midnight sand, which is like the thick darkness of the shadow of death, where there is no order, and the light is like thick darkness." (Job 10:21-22) Is this not how we often see death, as bringing an irrevocable end to all that was beautiful, all that was lovely, all that was good. If we really believe that eternal life is such a great and happy state, as the Scriptures say, why do we consider it such a tragedy when someone dies? For us, too, death is practically nothing more than the terrible end of life, a night on which the morning dawns no more; the great silence, the great nothingness! The way we mourn our loved ones; the way we want to drag a sick person back to this earthly life from God anyway; the way our whole philosophy of life, our outlook on life, extends only to the grave: a practical refutation of our supposed belief in the resurrection of the body and eternal life! We cannot truly believe that God can give us more than this earthly life (Quo Vadis). Paul is right: unless we hope in Christ in this life, we are more miserable than all men! Without a hope for the hereafter, our faith is like a bridge with no pillars on the other side, leading nowhere, arching into nothingness! Oh, how often our faith stumbles like Job's, believing in God, in Jesus Christ, but not believing that He is Lord after death, and that we remain His children there! We believe in God without hope of an afterlife!
2) The other error, stumbling block in Job's faith is that he believes in the power of God without the love of God. He believes that God is Lord Almighty, but he cannot believe that this infinitely powerful Lord can love the little man! These are terrible words, which he says almost through gritted teeth in his anguish. Who can say to him, 'What are you doing? If God does not turn away His wrath, even the accomplices of Rahab will bow down before Him. How then shall I and He answer him, and find words against him? Who, though I were almost righteous, I could not answer him; I would plead for mercy to my judge. If I should call upon him, and he should answer me, I would not believe that he would take my words to his ears; who runneth upon me in a whirlwind, and causeth my wounds to fester without cause... If he slay me with his whip suddenly, He laughs at the affliction of the guiltless." (Job 9:12-17, 23)
It is a terrible temptation to feel that one stands as a helpless nothing before the mighty God. What could that little man want with the giant God? In such an unequal struggle, man is bound to be the loser. The power of the divine wrath is fundamentally disordering the earth and the firmament: how can a poor man, who is as fallen and miserable as Job, stand before Him! Can the worm complain, and who can he complain if he is trampled on the ground? What can mortal man do but bow to the greater will?! But in this bowing, it is not the trust and reverence of the believer that is expressed, but the despairing resignation that there is no help, no appeal, that God is far, far greater! God's power is infinite, untrammelled, bound by nothing, accountable to no one for what He does! A merciless God! A heartless God! In vain does the wretched man cry out to him: he cannot move him! Job, in his final despair, sees God almost as a sadistic compulsion, who plays with the man at His mercy, who delights in the torment of His trampled creature! "If he slay suddenly with his whip, He laughs at the affliction of the guiltless." (Job 9:23)
My brethren! If even Job came to this in the fires of suffering, do not condemn those whose hearts are also tempted to think that God is a cruel taskmaster. I am sorry and I understand if people who have gone through horrors, who have died in the gas chambers, who have been victims of the storms of history, or who suffer from incurable diseases, or who are standing next to a coffin, or who have been in some other way weighed down by the mighty hand of God, I understand if such a person's faith in God's love is shaken! And even if they do not express it as Job did, they have the same dreadful suspicion in their hearts that God is a cruel God. He takes the one I love, He does not give me what I ask for and I am helplessly at His mercy. When one comes to this point, he no longer sees the true God at all, but someone who rises threateningly before him out of his own bitter fate, born of his own suffering as an imaginary God-figure. It is often the case that such an angry monster, projected from within by the soul in doubt, comes between man's faith and the living God, hiding from him the face of the loving, real God. From here it is only one step to the complete denial of God! Beware then, he who feels God to be cruel, who believes in the power of God without His love, is on the very edge of a very dangerous precipice!
But, as one might say, the same idea occurs in the New Testament as Job here, the idea of divine arbitrariness. For it is written, I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. The Lord does not say here that if I have compassion on anyone, who has anything to do with it, but that if I have compassion on anyone, I have compassion on him, and if I have mercy on anyone, he is forgiven. So great is God that He can forgive even insults and offences against His own person, that He can love even little rebellious, distrustful people like Job, like those who think Him cruel! For it is His love that is the most convincing testimony of His power!
3) Again, another stumbling-block of faith is the case of what might be called believing in God's power without His glory, which Job points out in the course of an argument with his friends, when he speaks of a man who "carries his God in his hands". (Job 12:6) It is a very apt expression, indicating that kind of faith in God which thinks that it can have God and His power, that it can use God as a means of carrying out its own thoughts and plans. In the fables we find a spirit which exercises its superhuman power in the service of its master; which, by some magic word, is held in power by a fortunate man, and does with it all that human power is not sufficient to do! Such is the way in which man would like to conceive of his relationship with God, so that all those problems for the solution of which human power is not sufficient, he may, by the magic word of prayer, have done with God. Here in the playground, I often hear a hurt child shout, "Wait, I'll tell my brother and he'll beat me!" That's what I want to use God for: to fulfill our own wishes and desires with His greater power. How many times do people who read the Bible want to see their own desire, their own heart's desire, justified by the Word of God. They read out of it the doings that their heart desires, not the Word of God, but the desire of their heart. I know of someone who has been coming to this church for years to this day, waiting for the Word of God to justify the sin that he has been warming in his life. He wants to hear something from God that will free his conscience, that will reassure him that, well, I am right after all.... Well, such a man is the one who "holds God in his hand". The disciples of Jesus were tempted in this way once, when, in a village in Samaria which refused to receive Jesus Christ for an overnight stay, they said: 'Do you want us to ask God to send fire from heaven and burn this village?' Now, this is the case of believing in the power of God without His glory, which Job speaks of, "carrying his God in his hand". Or he thinks he's imagining it, or at least pretending to... - but that's nonsense: God in one's hand! It cannot be, my brethren! Only the other way round, so that man is in the hands of God! And if man accepts this, if he himself, with full confidence, places his destiny, his body and soul, his suffering, his anguish, his pain, his sickness, his struggle, in the mighty hand of God, then this promise of Jesus Christ will one day become a happy experience: 'No one will snatch them out of my hand'.
4) Thus Job's faith staggered and staggered to and fro: like a hunted animal, which wants to break out of the circle, sometimes towards the hunters, sometimes towards the hunted, so Job struggled against his friends, sometimes against God, until at last he does what only utter despair or faith can do: he throws himself into the arms of the one who beats him. He throws himself into the arms of his Lord with this unexpected exclamation, this declaration of faith, "I know that my Saviour liveth, and shall stand at the last upon my dust!" Even if I know nothing, I know this one thing, and that is that He, God the Saviour, is alive! He will survive all things, I can trust Him with my cause even after death, He will have the last word, He will pronounce the final judgment. Such is often the struggle of faith: in its bitter pain it accuses God and yet cannot tear itself away from Him. He sees Him as an enemy, yet he clings to Him. He crumbles under his adversity, yet seeks refuge in Him. He fears Him, yet he flees to Him. He complains against God, yet he complains to Him. He sees not His love, yet he counts on it. He knows he deserves punishment, yet he looks for mercy. He trembles before his judge, yet he asks Him to plead his cause. He aches for God's will, yet he wants to rely on it. The eternal darkness of death looms before him, yet he walks through it on the path of eternal life.
This is true faith: this is the holy magic, this is the courage that, relying on the word of the Lord alone, counting on the news of Jesus' death and resurrection, dares to defy appearances, the emotions of his own heart, the reason of his own mind, what he sees, what he feels, what he desires, what he wants. Then, slowly, all the burning "whys" will subside, and this happy magic will be in full triumph.When Job, or even a modern Job, comes to this point, he will find his spiritual balance again.
It is the same faith that sings in the psalm, "Though my flesh and my heart fail, Thou art the rock of my heart, and my inheritance, O God, for evermore" (Psa 73:26).
Amen
Date: 12 October 1958.
Lesson
Jób 7,6-11
Jób 9.2
Jób 9,12-23
Jób 12,6-10