Job found treasure

Job

42 Then Job replied to the Lord:

² “I know that you can do all things;
    no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
³ You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
    Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
    things too wonderful for me to know.

⁴ “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
    I will question you,
    and you shall answer me.’
⁵ My ears had heard of you
    but now my eyes have seen you.
⁶ Therefore I despise myself

    and repent in dust and ashes.”....
¹⁰ After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before. ¹¹ All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the Lord had brought on him, and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring.

¹² The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. ¹³ And he also had seven sons and three daughters.

I am acquainted with a youngish man who is a well-known face on my local news.  Recently his job was made redundant and he now has to find another job.  This could be very stressful, especially when he has a young family and a mortgage. When I talked to him briefly about this – asking him how he was getting on finding a new position, he was very positive and upbeat.  “I’m sure God has a plan” he said.

The very next day, I was speaking to another acquaintance, a freshly minted teacher, in her first school.  When I asked how she was going, during the course of the conversation, she said something like “Oh well, if I stuff up teaching these kids, I’m sure God still has a plan for them”. I think she was trying to say that even though she might be making mistakes in her first year out, God would be able to override that.

And then just through the week, another Christian and I chatted about retirement,  Super funds, the stock market, and his circumstances, and he also said “I’m sure God has a plan”.

These quirky coincidences set me to thinking about what Christians believe about the plans of God. Does God have a plan for our lives?  And does God still have a plan when we “stuff up”, as my young friend so inelegantly put it?  How does the plan work when someone else does something to us which causes profound and long-lasting impact?  Where is God’s plan when everything goes wrong? 

Let’s have a look at these few verses in Job.

Then Job replied to the Lord:

“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

Job says these words to God, not at the beginning of the story when everything is right with the world, but at the end of his terrible journey of suffering. A daring interpretation of the context would suggest that God’s hand, if not causing the suffering, allowed it to happen. 

The book of Job is played out against the fact that the devil makes a wager with God.  At the beginning of the book, the devil says to God “I bet if I take away all his good fortune, he’ll abandon you”.  And God says “You’re on”.  God consenting to such a wager is, in itself, hard to fathom. The book goes on to speak of Job’s terrible plight, his discourse with God and with his friends.  But in this final chapter, after all his tantrums, he says to God “I spoke of things I didn’t know or understand;  my ears have heard you now and my eyes have seen you. Speak and I will listen”.  We might interpret that as Job saying “I’ve been an ignorant man on these matters and tried to tell you, Almighty God, what to do and how to rule the world.  I’m sorry for my arrogant presumption”  Job has been on a very difficult spiritual journey;  a journey to spiritual honesty.

That’s the overview, but I wanted to explore the idea of “no plan of God’s can be thwarted”.

God does indeed have a purpose for our lives, but it’s not usually the one we imagine. Our ideas of perfect plans are tied to earthly outcomes, to bottom lines; to comfortable lifestyles.  

God’s ultimate plan is the one where He sends His own son to die for us, so that when we stand on that other shore, we can cross into God’s country;  into the presence of God, unblemished and blameless by what we’ve managed to mess up on earth.

This amazing purpose of God did not involve everything falling into place in a favourable and comfortable set of circumstances.

It involved humiliation, violence, hardship, malevolence and ultimately not just physical death but spiritual death – a trip to Hades itself - for our sakes.

God always has a plan but they are always geared to the spiritual values, rather than our earthly ones.

Does He then involve himself in our daily lives and decisions?  - who we marry, what job we do, what house we buy; how safe we stay?

I honestly don’t know.  If you’ve had a long and happy marriage, you might say “Oh yes, God planned it all”.  It was God’s doing.

But if, like me, you were damaged by an abusive, unfaithful spouse, then you may wonder what God was doing when he allowed that person to walk into your life. 

If you’ve spent a long and illustrious career in a job you loved doing, then I’m sure you will be first to say that God’s plan came to fruition for you.  But if your job has been back-breaking toil, with not much financial remuneration, and time spent in a caustic workplace, amongst ferocious workmates who bullied you, then where is God’s plan in all that?

We live in a free and prosperous country, but I wonder what Syrian Christians think about the plan of God for them?

But even here in our fortunate country, our lives are all flawed; things frequently don’t work out the way we think they should.  This was Job’s experience too;  He did not reap the harvest he should have had, for a life lived with integrity.  He got, instead, what he didn’t deserve.

I’ve puzzled over these things during the course of my own dark days, and I have concluded that God always has a plan for our spiritual well-being. And just as He used the terrible happenings in the life of Jesus, for his plan of Salvation, so He can use the terrible things in our lives too, to bring healing to our souls.  That is a paradox isn’t it?;  that terrible things, which should bring us undone, can just as surely bring us closer to God.  And when we are closer to god, we are actually healthier spiritually.

The betrayal of Jesus by Judas was a terrible thing, yet it was all woven into the plan of Christ’s death;  the Roman soldiers were the means of delivering the death of Christ.  Pilate also played His part.  These were all heinous things, but they were allowed by God because they were part of His plan for our redemption.

His glorious plan was achieved – the conquering of spiritual death was achieved through suffering and everything going wrong.

So it can be for us, if we have the good sense to keep following the Christ through all the brokenness and messy circumstances of our lives.  We too can be triumphant over even the things which impact us profoundly, even though they are terrible things.  I find that very comforting.

Some of you may remember the chorus “Something Wonderful”.  It goes “something wonderful;  something good.  All my confusion, you understood.  All I had to offer you was brokenness and strife, but you made something beautiful with my life. 

When I sing that at home though, I always change the middle line into “all you had to offer me was brokenness and strife”.  Because sometimes that’s what it seems like, when everything goes wrong.  God seems to offer us strife and then abandons us to it. This is exactly what Christ felt when he hung on the cross.  You’ll remember he said “My God, why have you forsaken me?” 

This was how Job felt too.

Chapter 19: "He has blocked my way so I cannot pass;
he has shrouded my paths in darkness.
⁹ He has stripped me of my honour
and removed the crown from my head.
¹⁰ He tears me down on every side till I am gone;
he uproots my hope like a tree.
¹¹ His anger burns against me;
he counts me among his enemies.

Chapter 13:24: Why do you hide your face
and consider me your enemy?

And consider these verses from the Psalms:

I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.

My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, 'Where is your God?' "

And this from Paul in  2 Corinthians 1: 8-9:  "We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters,^[a] about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself." Paul, the great Apostle despaired of life itself. 

The bible is full of verses about the Saints of God grappling with the awful stuff, and wondering how it fits in with the idea of a loving, providential Father God.

We don’t want the strife – we want it all to be rosy.  Anthony Warlow, Australian Tenor with a glorious voice, starred in a Musical a few years ago, called “Jekyll and Hyde”.  Not sure it was very long-lived, but it had a song in it called “This is my moment”, and it part, it goes :

"Every endeavour,
I have made - ever -
Is coming into play,
Is here and now - today!

This is the moment,
This is the time,
When the momentum and the moment
Are in rhyme!"

But sometimes, nothing is in rhyme;  the stars don’t line up, the Universe isn’t in harmony….. it all goes wrong… and we  want a plan B.

I’m afraid there is often no Plan B. Awful stuff happens.

Why does God allow the awful stuff?  If we read Job, I’m not sure we should ask that;  God is God;  it’s not up to us to tell Him what He can and can’t do.

I know one thing though – God is still in control in the terrible stuff, just like He was when He allowed Judas to betray Jesus and when he allowed the devil to make bets on Job’s life.  He works within the terrible stuff. He can always bring good out of bad.  Romans 8: 28 “All things work together for God for those who love Him and are called according to his purpose”.  He can always offer us spiritual sight.  He can always give us gladness for mourning, even in the face of tragedy. And ultimately He will always give us strength to endure.

It may take a while;  it may take some soul searching and honest conversation with God.  But He’s never been averse to that.  If we go back to the book of Job, we see that Job really gives God an earful – he really has a go at God, but in the end God doesn’t reproach him for that.  After all, God realizes it’s an honest tirade and part of the journey of Job’s grief. God rebukes the self-righteous friends who are untouched by tragedy but have so much know-it-all advice to give the suffering Job.

Ultimately, God says to Job “I am God and it’s not up to you to make the plans.  I created you;  you can’t dictate my purposes”.

Job’s heart and soul are big and he repents of his railing and ranting at God.  He admits he is not God and that he spoke of things he didn’t understand.  The relationship between himself and God is restored, because Job remains in touch with God; and is humble before God; and is honest with God. Job finds peace.

The hope in this message is tangible.  This can be our experience too, in whatever tragedy or failure has occurred in our lives.

And there is a peace, finally, after all our conversations with God and our anger and our cries of “it’s not fair”.  .. when we have hurled our accusations and puzzlement and raw grief at God;  in the end, we find He is not angry with us for that. 

But He IS God and who are we in the end to question what He does or allows?  This is how Job coped;  this is how he processed his grief and his affliction.  There is no plan B where God intervenes.  God’s plan is always to be present with us and to bring triumph out of tragedy;  to bring eternal spiritual values to the disquiet of our suffering;  to bring us finally to acceptance of what’s happened and to bring peace to our sorrowing heads.

His plan is always to be present with us no matter what happens and to make us more like himself. 

So we come to the final chapter of the book of Job and find that God restores his fortune. 

That’s actually not the good bit and I’ll tell you why.  The good bit is the journey Job has taken to spiritual wholeness and a deeper understanding of God. Job emerged stronger and wiser and humbler than he was before.

And if you are tempted to think that isn’t the good bit, let me tell you of a little story I heard on Radio National the other day.  The topic was poker machines.  Poker machine revenue accounts for 10% of state income in NSW.  Australians lose 12 billion a year on the pokies.  In a club in Fairfield, of the 39 million revenue this club makes, 37 million of it comes from poker machines. The machines are geared for the player to lose.  They are designed to let you win little amounts, so you keep playing and they can be played with credit cards. The venues have no clocks, so you lose track of time. 

So a lady was interviewed as part of this programme.  She began playing them after her son took his own life.  She explained that the appeal was the hypnotic soothing state playing the machines induced in her.  She was grief-stricken and floundering and this became her escape and her coping mechanism. I’m sure none of us would judge her for that.

But she became addicted.  This was a well- educated, well-incomed woman, who had something terrible happen in her life, and all she had were the pokies.  She eventually kicked the habit, but was then overtaken by alcohol abuse.  She finally found the strength, with some professional intervention, to kick both things.

But not everyone has the resources to see a health professional every week… and they lose everything.  They become irrevocably broken.

How much better it would have been if she had cried and raged at God, in her grief, as Job did.  Indeed, as some of us have.

Job’s way of coping was much to be preferred and that’s why I say that the end, where Job found peace and healing, after his very honest interaction with God, is the good bit.

God’s plan is always to keep us from falling.  I cannot tell you why God chose to take bets on Job’s life;  I cannot tell you why he doesn’t have a Plan B.  I cannot tell you why he allows terrible things or why He sometimes seems to abandon us or is silent in the face of our suffering. 

But I can tell you that God’s plan IS always to keep us from falling.

And it’s not over, ‘til it’s over. The mystery of our redemptive suffering will one day be explained on that heavenly shore, by the Risen Lord who has kept an account of all our tossings, who holds our tears in his bottle and who has written our names in His book of Life.

I’d like to conclude with those lovely verses from the book of Jude, vs 24-25:

²⁴ Now unto him who is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,

²⁵ To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.