Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Why Do We Suffer? (Job 42:1-6)
Date: November 5, 2023
There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right now in Gaza. There’s an ongoing one in Ukraine. China is still keeping millions of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps in the Xinjiang Province even though that has dropped out of the news. That is in addition to that nation’s ongoing and vigorous persecution of Christians…who make up a larger percentage of the population than Chinese Communist Party members. Azerbaijan has launched a genocidal effort to exterminate or otherwise forcibly relocate all of the Armenian Christians in a disputed border region between the nations, leading to massive suffering on the part of tens of thousands. Muslims in Pakistan are becoming more and more aggressive in their persecution of Christians in the nation. So are Hindus in India. The two nations don’t like each other, but they both agree that they hate Christians more. A category five Hurricane hit the Pacific coast of Mexico last week from which the recovery efforts have only just begun. A shooter in Maine just last week murdered 18 and injured another 13, some critically. Several people in our own community have had their lives disrupted just recently by unexpected, unwelcome, and scary news that bodes for a very difficult road stretching out in their near future.
Sometimes we suffer in this life. And while, yes, we can nearly always point to somebody else’s situation as being worse than ours in an attempt to make our own troubles feel somewhat less troublesome, that kind of thing only distracts from the suffering we are experiencing, it doesn’t actually make it go away. And the thing is, if suffering came in only one form that we all experienced from time to time, it would still be really bad, but at least we would know basically what to expect. But suffering comes in more forms than we could even begin to count. And we never know what form it’s going to take. That means we can’t prepare for it. We just get hit with it, often from completely out of left field, and have to figure out how to pick up the pieces when it comes. And when we are in the midst of suffering, it can be really, really hard for us to see anything good. Anywhere.
It’s no wonder that astute thinkers about the human condition over the centuries of human history have asked some awfully hard questions about the character and even the existence of God in the face of the world’s brokenness. One of the most common presents itself as a logical syllogism. Either God is a loving God, or He is an all-powerful God, but He can’t be both. If He were a loving God, He wouldn’t allow suffering. But since suffering exists, He is either not loving and doesn’t actually care, or else He isn’t powerful enough to stop it. To put that a bit more straightforwardly, if God is good, then why do we suffer? Indeed: What are we supposed to do with the existence of suffering in the world?
This morning finds us in the third part of our teaching series, Confident in the Face of Hard Questions. All this month, we are tackling some of the biggest, hardest questions people ask about the Christian faith. These are the biggest, hardest questions people sometimes ask us about the Christian faith. They are some of the biggest and hardest questions that perhaps you have asked about the Christian faith. The goal of this series of conversations is to think through some of the answers to these questions—for, rest assured, there are good answers to all of them—in order that we know them ourselves, but also so that we are more equipped to handle them when someone else drops one of them in our laps.
In the first two weeks of this journey, we have tackled questions of truth and miracles. Does it really matter which “truth” we believe, and do miracles matter? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. As for why, we discovered that in two different passages from Jesus’ best friend, John’s, reflection on His life and ministry. People who play fast and loose with the truth are often doing so in an attempt to achieve a greater freedom for themselves. What Jesus helped us understand, though, is that the only way we are going to experience the kind of freedom we desire is when we commit ourselves to what is truly true—that He is Lord. As for miracles, Jesus Himself made it abundantly clear that miracles are how God proves who He really is. Without His miracles—and, most importantly, the resurrection—we don’t have any reason to believe anything He said about Himself.
These first two questions, though—and, honestly, the last three we’ll look at in the next few weeks—are mostly academic in their orientation. I mean, of course there are personal elements to them. Which truth you choose to believe for yourself, for instance, will have personal consequences. The same thing goes with the decision of whether or not to accept Jesus’ identity. But the question we are going to tackle together this morning is a whole different animal. This morning, we are going to spend some time reflecting together with the Scriptures on the presence of suffering in God’s good world.
While it has certainly been given plenty of academic treatment over the centuries of church history—and indeed, it is a whole lot easier a question to tackle in an academic setting than otherwise—it is the one question of the bunch that we feel the most personally. When we suffer, or when someone we know and love suffers, we don’t want academic hypotheses about it, we want answers. More than that, we want action. We want God to answer for it and do something about it. If He really is who all of those Jesus people have been telling me He is, then why is He letting this happen? If He really is all that I have committed myself to His being, then why is He letting this happen? When suffering comes for us, all the reason and rationality of an academic treatment in the world don’t help us actually accept the answers we are given. No, because this is such a personal problem, it requires an equally personal answer.
Now, when it comes to what the various guys who contributed to the Scriptures have to say about suffering, there’s actually a fair bit to work with. There are numerous stories about people going through suffering of one sort or another. Many of these include how God responds to that suffering. The apostle Peter wrote a whole letter about how to maintain our faith in the face of suffering and persecution. But there is one document in the Scriptures that gives its attention to the question of human suffering more than all the rest combined. In fact, it doesn’t give much of any attention to any other topic. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to the story of Job.
The name Job is synonymous with suffering. And not just regular, old, garden-variety suffering either. His story is synonymous even among those who don’t have much other knowledge about the Christian faith with some of the most intense, undeserved suffering anyone has ever experienced. Job allows and even forces us to reckon with some really hard questions about life in a broken world. And, it doesn’t give us the out of easy or trite answers. In fact, and as we will see in just a bit, the answer Job ultimately leaves us with is by itself enormously unsatisfying from an emotional standpoint. Let’s talk about what’s going on in Job’s story and what it does for us in our attempt to answer this question.
Job’s story opens by giving us a glimpse into the life of one of the most righteous men who ever lived. By standards both ancient and modern, Job had it all. Listen to this: “There was a man in the country of Uz named Job. He was a man of complete integrity, who feared God and turned away from evil. He had seven sons and three daughters. His estate included seven thousand sheep and goats, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred female donkeys, and a very large number of servants. Job was the greatest man among all the people of the east.” It’s the kind of opening for a story that leaves you wondering when the shoe is going to drop on the guy, because it’s probably going to be a really big shoe.
In this case, it was. The scene shifts to God’s throne room which is odd in and of itself, but then who should slink in but Satan himself, looking to cause as much trouble as he can. In a move that is totally predictable from a literary point of view, but from an emotional standpoint is absolutely jaw-dropping, God sets him loose on Job in what may be the most back-handed compliment of all time. God is so confident in Job’s faithfulness and righteousness that He is willing to let Satan do his worst because Job’s faith can handle it. Satan jumps at the opportunity to take a bite of that particular apple, and Job’s perfect life soon falls completely to pieces. By the end of chapter 2, Job has lost everything—including his health—and his wife tells him to just curse God and die because there can’t possibly be any left worth living for.
Now, the thing we have to keep in mind here is that Job didn’t know what was happening. We sometimes forget that because we do know. We have a behind the scenes look at the whole story and have something like 4,000 years’ worth of history to serve as our lens for reflecting on it. We watch Job’s horror unfold and are able to understand the whole time that God is merely testing him. We know from being able to see to the end of the story that Job gets everything back with interest. But Job didn’t know any of this. All he knew was that everything in his life suddenly went from great to bad to worse to unimaginably awful. He experienced wave after wave of suffering as a whole ocean of pain washed over him. He didn’t have anything like the narrator’s knowledge that we do. He experienced the whole thing just like we do our own pain and suffering. It’s just there, and there’s often not an explanation for it at all, let alone a good one. So, when you read the heart of Job’s story that takes the form of a series of conversations between Job and some friends who didn’t just flunk out of the school of how to comfort people who are hurting, they burned the entire institution to the ground and scattered the ashes to the wind, when Job seems angry and confused and openly wishing God would kill him rather than continuing to subject him to this unending misery, that’s because he is.
Speaking of these friends, four of Job’s friends—three of whom were contemporaries, and one who was much younger than the rest—showed up when they heard about his misery with the intention of offering him some support and encouragement. They start out doing really pretty well, but then they open their mouths and things go downhill from there. Over the course of several chapters, they each try to convince Job that all of his misery is really his own fault. If he would just confess whatever sin he was hiding from God, everything would get better. It’s the kind of religion-rooted explanation that has been common across human history in such situations, but which finds absolutely no traction in the Scriptures.
Finally, just before the young guy jumps in to blast them all, but especially Job, for being so blind as to see that the problem is Job’s grotesque sinfulness, Job’s own anguish reaches its fullest expression in chapter 30. He’s broken and hurting and confused and angry at the God to whom he had been so faithful all his life and who has apparently abandoned him to his fate.
Look at this with me in Job 30:16: “Now my life is poured out before me, and days of suffering have seized me. Night pierces my bones, but my gnawing pain never rests. My clothing is distorted with great force; he chokes me by the neck of my garment. He throws me into the mud, and I have become like dust and ashes. I cry out to you for help, but you do not answer me; when I stand up, you merely look at me. You have turned against me with cruelty; you harass me with your strong hand. You lift me up on the wind and make me ride it; you scatter me in the storm. Yes, I know that you will lead me to death—the place appointed for all who live. Yet no one would stretch out his hand against a ruined person when he cries out to him for help because of his distress. Have I not wept for those who have fallen on hard times? Has my soul not grieved for the needy? But when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, darkness came. I am churning within and cannot rest; days of suffering confront me. I walk about blackened, but not by the sun. I stood in the assembly and cried out for help. I have become a brother to jackals and a companion of ostriches. My skin blackens and flakes off, and my bones burn with fever. My lyre is used for mourning and my flute for the sound of weeping.”
That’s pretty dark stuff. Can you imagine at all the kind of pain and turmoil and anguish he is talking about here? Maybe you can’t, but maybe you can. That’s the thing about suffering: we really can’t compare it. What might not even phase one person strikes another one as unimaginable anguish. Maybe you haven’t experienced anything like what Job did, but you have lost a spouse or a child and known that particularly acute kind of pain. Maybe you have watched a loved one go through the torment that is cancer or Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s. Maybe you’ve had to stand by helplessly as someone you love battled substance abuse or mental illness of some kind. You’ve seen all of this and metaphorically—or literally—raised an angry fist at God for not stepping in to do something about all of this…well, you probably didn’t use a sermon-appropriate word in that moment. Maybe you’ve gotten in your car and just yelled at God, nearly breaking the steering wheel as you beat on it in frustration and desperation for Him to do…something to make it better. And then things got worse.
Pain is personal. And that’s what makes this question so hard to face. We’ve all seen God not do something we wanted Him to do in order to fix a situation we didn’t want to face. Why wouldn’t He do that? Isn’t He good? Isn’t He loving? Isn’t He powerful? We can see where that logical syllogism we talked about before came from. We can see why it has led so many to conclude that the God of the Bible simply doesn’t exist. He can’t. Not if we’re going through this.
This, though, brings us to the real beauty…and the frustration…of Job’s story. Where God often feels silent in our suffering, He didn’t stay that way in Job’s. After listening for far longer than Job or any of his friends wanted, God finally spoke up to address the situation. But whereas this could have been the moment when He finally gave us clear, simple, and direct answers to our question, what we get seems like anything but that. Turn to Job 38 with me: “Then the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind. He said: ‘Who is this who obscures my counsel with ignorant words? Get ready to answer me like a man; when I question you, you will inform me. Where were you when I established the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who fixed its dimensions? Certainly you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? What supports its foundations? Or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?’”
On and on God goes for another three chapters after this one. And during this whole monologue—the longest such monologue we have from God in the entirety of the Scriptures—God doesn’t answer a single one of Job’s entirely reasonable questions about the personal horrors he had been through. Not even one. Instead, He paints Job a picture of exactly who He is as God. He’s the Creator and Sustainer of the whole earth. He was intimately involved in the details of its design. He takes care of all the world’s creatures, providing for them just exactly as they need. He is the one who created the fearsome leviathan, the great dragon that loomed so large in the imaginations of the ancient world. This great beast that they couldn’t even imagine facing—the very beast who we know was the cause of Job’s misery—is like a little toy before Him. God is great beyond all measure and understanding, and Job was demanding answers from Him?
It’s no wonder that when God finally stops to let him respond in chapter 42 that all Job can do is to stammer, “I know that you can do anything and no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this who conceals my counsel with ignorance?’ Surely I spoke about things I did not understand, things too wondrous for me to know. You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak. When I question you, you will inform me.’ I had heard reports about you, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore, I reject my words and am sorry for them; I am dust and ashes.” Then God scolds Job’s friends for having such a horrendous understanding of His character, and the story ends with Job having everything restored to him as a reward for his unwavering willingness to trust in God even in the midst of such intense suffering. And we’re left having to figure out what to do with all of this.
All we get from Job in answer to the question of suffering in the world is God’s presenting Himself as bigger than our suffering and Job’s saying, “Okay, I’m satisfied now.” How is that supposed to help us? This is the Bible. Of course Job’s story ends like that. But when we’re facing some kind of a personal Hell, how does God’s being bigger than our suffering help to explain or make sense of it? You may not like the answer. God’s being bigger than our suffering means that He can do something about it. But that just leaves us with a harder question: Why won’t He do something about it? Ah, but you see, that’s not the question we’re really asking. What we really want to know is why God won’t just make it go away on our timetable rather than making us wait on His which is clearly inferior to ours since ours involves the suffering’s ending right away rather than having to actually go through it, and His apparently involves our having to go through it? The answer to that—which you probably aren’t going to like either—is that God is operating on a much bigger timetable than we are. And if we’ll join Him on His timetable, things begin to get a little bit easier. Let me explain.
The ultimate answer to the existence of suffering in the world is sin. If there wasn’t sin, there wouldn’t be suffering. In this sense, all the suffering in the world is really our fault. God didn’t introduce sin into the world. We did. If we hadn’t done that, the world would be a much better place. All we are doing when we try to blame God for suffering, or lambaste Him for not getting rid of it fast enough is shifting the blame around to the wrong person. This doesn’t mean any particular experience with suffering we have is our fault directly (although sometimes it is depending on the choices we have made), but it does mean that all suffering ultimately came because of the actions of people.
What all of this means is that when we are asking about suffering in the world, what we really, really want to know is why God doesn’t deal with sin like we want Him to. The answer to that question—which, to build on our theme here a bit more, you probably aren’t going to like—is that God is a lot smarter than us. As He made clear to Job, He is God and we are not. He made the world and knows how to run it, and we did and do not. He is perfect in justice and perfect in love. That means He will absolutely deal with sin and all the suffering it causes, but He’ll deal with it at just the right time and in just the right way.
Think about this wish on our part for God to just get rid of all sin so that we don’t have to suffer anymore for just a second, though. Let’s say God were to get rid of the sin that was about to cause your suffering. That would be good, yes? Well, sort of. I mean, in the moment it will feel good. But eventually there will be some other sin to cause us suffering. Should He get rid of that too? And while we’re thinking about His getting rid of sin, sin is not a thing that exists in space and time like you and I do. If God is going to get rid of sin, what He’s really going to have to do is to get rid of sinners. If God starts getting rid of sinners whose sin is going to cause someone else to suffer, the world is going to be a pretty lonely place pretty quickly. And what if it is our sin that causes someone else to suffer? Now things are getting a bit more uncomfortable. You see, God can’t pick and choose which sin (and the sinners who commit it) He gets rid of simply on the basis of our momentary convenience. That wouldn’t be just at all. Instead, when the time is right, He needs to get rid of all of the sin in one fell swoop. When He does that, though, as John makes clear in Revelation, that is going to be the end of the world. So, unless you’re hankering for the world to be over, perhaps you should slow down in your wishing for immediate relief to suffering.
While we’re talking about God’s dealing with sin in some kind of decisive way that could successfully mitigate some of the suffering it causes, the truth is that He’s actually already done that. He did it in the person of Jesus Christ. When the timing was just right, as the apostle Paul told the Galatian believers, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons [and daughters].” Jesus came to earth, lived a perfect life, and then died in our place. As the apostle Peter put it, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree; so that, having died to sins, we might live for righteousness. ‘By his wounds you have been healed. For you were like sheep going astray,’ but you have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls.” Jesus put sin to death when He died on that cross. When He came walking back out of His tomb on the third day, He broke death’s power forever. He also proved indisputably that death is not the end. In Christ we understand that if that happens to be the end of our suffering, it will not be an end at all but rather a momentary pause ahead of a much longer stint of life during which time, as the apostle John foresaw, “God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.”
When that is the hope ahead of us, whatever suffering we might be called on to endure in this life loses its power. This is possible because just as God announced to Job, He is bigger than our suffering. But it is only possible in Christ. Or, to put that another way, God’s answer to suffering is Jesus. God’s answer to suffering is Jesus. Jesus, our resurrected Savior, gives us the hope that our suffering, no matter how bad it might be, is not going to be the end of our story. It doesn’t have to be the end of anyone’s story, in fact. It doesn’t have to be the end of your story. God’s answer to suffering is Jesus. When we place our hope and trust in Him, He will give us the ability to see beyond the hurt, beyond the pain, beyond the loss, beyond the grief, beyond all the things of this world to the kingdom that is waiting for us and in fact is already here in part, where all of those things will be gone forever. The new things will one day arrive in full…in Christ. God’s answer to suffering is Jesus. He won’t take all the pain away because the time for that is not yet, but He will join us in it if we’ll let Him, giving us hope through it. God’s answer to suffering is Jesus. May you receive Him and live.