GOD’S ANSWER TO OUR PAIN IS ALWAYS THE SAME

Series on the Book of Job (Week 6 of 6)

Pastor Jeremy Mattek – September 16, 2012

There is a man in the world today who has all the answers. He always does. He always has. In fact, he is so confident in his answers that he gives you the answer before you even think of the question. Alex Trebek has been the host of the game show Jeopardy since 1984. Jeopardy is the game show on which they give you the answer, and the contestants are supposed to figure out what the question was. “Garden Homes,” Alex might say. “What is … the best church in all of Milwaukee?” you might respond. Alex Trebek has always had all the answers, but I don’t know for how much longer he’ll be giving them to us.

Alex had his second heart attack this summer. Of course, people most likely to have a heart attack are those who have already had one (or two). And his second heart attack came just about a year after he snapped his Achilles while running after a woman who broke into his hotel room and started stealing things. He was out of commission for six weeks and, even now, has to take it easy. Alex has given us a couple reminders over the last couple years that the man with all the answers is mortal. He won’t always be here to answer our questions. But at least for now, he is. And that’s important. There are some people in the world who never get answers to their questions.

Last Friday morning, a man named Armin Wand III set his own house on fire. He had been having severe money problems. So he decided to set his own home on fire in the middle of the night – with his pregnant wife and four of his children sleeping inside it – so he could collect the property and life insurance money. The fire killed his three youngest sons, ages 7, 5, and 3. His wife woke up during the fire, grabbed their 2-year-old daughter and started running out of the house. When Armin saw them escape the flames, he grabbed his daughter and tried to throw her back in. His wife and daughter escaped, but his wife lost the 16-week-old baby in her womb. If you were that 2-year-old daughter, as you grow up, what one question would you want to ask your father? Do you think there is an answer he could give that would ever satisfy her?

Have you ever been less than satisfied with someone’s answer to your questions? Have you ever been less than satisfied with God’s answers to your questions? Or, to ask it another way: If you could ask God only one question and know that he’ll give the answer, what would it be? If you knew he was going to answer the question honestly and entirely, what would you ask him? This won’t be the case for everyone, but odds are that your question has something to do with someone’s pain.

This is now the 6th week we have talked about the pain of our friend Job. And, up until now, God has chosen to answer the questions of Job, of his wife, of Job’s friends, by doing just one thing – by shoving him back into the fire that everyone was trying to rescue him from. But today, near the end of this book, Job asks for an answer one last time. And, this time, he gets one. He gets the one answer that God always wants to keep in our hearts and minds whether times are great, or we feel like we’re getting thrown back into the fire that caused all of our questions in the first place.

(31:6) “Let God weigh me in honest scales and he will know that I am blameless – (7) if my steps have turned from the path, if my heart has been led by my eyes, or if my hands have been defiled, (8) then may others eat what I have sown, and may my crops be uprooted. (9) If my heart has been enticed by a woman, or if I have lurked at my neighbor’s door, (10) then may my wife grind another man’s grain, and may other men sleep with her. (11) For that would have been shameful, a sin to be judged … (35) Oh, that I had someone to hear me! I sign now my defense – let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing” … (40) The words of Job are ended.

Last month, a 59-year-old man in Madison named Andrew suspected his wife of having an affair. When he asked her if she had been cheating on him, she said that she hadn’t. But he didn’t like that answer, so he asked again. But no matter how many times he asked the question, he always got the same answer – the one he wasn’t looking for. So he put his wife in the car, took her out to their storage facility, tied her up, poured gasoline over her, and started her on fire. She survived with only minor burns, and Andrew’s in prison. But the reason he set his wife on fire was because he didn’t get the answers he was looking for. And he’s not the only one who doesn’t like that feeling.

“Let the Almighty answer me!” Job demanded. But before we take a look at how God did, switch it around. Instead of asking if Job got the answers he was looking for, ask yourself if you think God did. Did God get the response he was looking for from Job when he allowed Job to go through this tough situation?

You can answer that by asking yourself what God is looking for from you when you go through some of the same things. What is God expecting to see in you when life doesn’t go the way you plan sometimes? How does God expect you to react when money is tight, or when you lose your job, when just one week earlier you were convinced it would never happen? Does God get what he’s looking for when he allows a relationship, or your life or your health, or the lives and health of your children, to be torn apart by Satan? Or, thinking back to our Gospel reading (Matthew 14:22-33), did God get what he was looking for when Peter tried to walk on water?

Now maybe you don’t blame Peter for sinking. But asking if you blame Peter is the wrong question. Alex Trabek would not give you one penny for it. The right question is: Did Jesus? Did Jesus blame Peter for not walking on water? Was Peter wrong for sinking?

Before we answer that question, see if you can answer this one: There are two new items going on sale this week; can you tell me either one? One was announced at an event in San Francisco this past Wednesday. It has 4G LTE capability, with a quad-core processor. It’s thinner than its predecessor, has an improved camera, as well as a longer 4-inch screen. The other item was announced a few months ago. Some people thought a pair of these would sell for over $300, but they’re coming in at only $270. They have sensors inside them that track how high you jump and how far you run. Can you tell me what either item is? The first is the new iPhone. The second is the new Lebron X basketball shoe. Millions of people all across the world can tell you all about those things.

Now, can you tell me how fast how fast the earth travels every second?[1] Can you tell me how many tens of thousands of miles of blood vessels you have in your body?[2] Can you tell me how many millions of light receptors your eye has?[3] Can you tell me how many football fields your intestines would cover if you stretched them out and laid all its pieces flat next to each other?[4] How many people on this earth can tell you those things without looking them up? More or less than can recite for you all the new iPhone specs, tell you everything about the Lebron X, recite every ingredient of every recipe they’ve ever made, and tell you useless sports stats from 1978?

Do you know what the difference is between all those different things? The phone, shoes, recipes, and stats are all things that we human beings make. But the earth, blood vessels, eyes, and intestines are all things that God makes.

And the reason we typically know so much more about (and care so much more about) the things that we make is the same reason Peter starting sinking. Peter only started to sink only when he took his eyes off of … Jesus, and became more concerned about what? He wasn’t most concerned about the wind and the waves, but rather on how the wind and the waves affected him. The center of Peter’s universe wasn’t the guy standing on water. It was the guy who was sinking. Just like Job.

Do you know how many times Job used some form of the word “Me” or “I” just in the verses we read earlier? 17. The center of Job’s universe was the same as Peter’s. He looked at life from the perspective of how everything affected him. He was always the victim, which is why he felt he had the right to complain when things didn’t go the way he wanted - just like anyone who makes excuses for their sins – someone who goes through pain and says, “God, you shouldn’t blame me for reacting the way I am. If you only knew what I have to go through, if you only understood how little money I had, if you knew how other people made me feel, then you wouldn’t blame me for what I’m doing. If you would only pay attention to how much stress I’m under and how hard you’ve allowed my life to become, then you would understand why I’m so discouraged, or in church, or why I don’t give an offering, or why I jump to conclusions or lose my tempter sometimes.”

But who’s the focus on in all of those statements? It’s the person who’s sinking. It’s “me.” It’s “I.” And if there is one attitude God has promised to never reward, it’s when we break his first commandment, when we try to have the universe spin around us instead of the one who walked on water and never started sinking. That’s why, when Job demanded, “Let the Almighty answer me,” the Almighty finally did. He adjusted Job’s perspective by asking him a very simple question:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Who stretched out a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone – while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb … when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther,’ where were you? Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place … Have you entered the storehouses of the snow … and hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? What is the way to the place where lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? Can you bind the beautiful [stars]? Can you loose Orion’s cords? The constellations, can you bring them forth?” And the answer, of course, is “no.” Job can’t do any of those things. But you never think about God’s perspective when you’re so focused on your own bellybutton.

And God didn’t stop there. He went on like that for four chapters until chapter 41 when God asked Job if he could take a giant fish (the type that would have swallowed Jonah) and make a pet out of him, or put him on a leash for his little girls to play with – making the point that, if you can’t make a fish answer to you (or the sun, or the mountains, or the stars, the wind and waves), like our God so obviously can, then why should God answer your arrogant demands, you little man?

What does God get from us when something bad happens? When life is hard? When you’re overwhelmed? When you have no answers to your questions? We know what God was looking for when Peter tried walking on water. We know what that was supposed to look like. Peter wanted to believe. He wanted to have faith. He wanted to not be afraid. He stepped out of the boat, focused on Jesus, ready to do something he knew Jesus said that he could, just before his fears caused him to take his focus in another direction. And we all know exactly what happened when he did.

Jesus caught him. That’s when his Lord reached out his hand and saved him. His heart went out to him, because Jesus knows how it feels to get no answer to life’s biggest questions.

The next time you’re tempted to walk away from God because he’s not giving you the answers for which you’re looking; the next time you’re tempted to cry out, “Where was God when I needed him,” stop for one second and ask yourself where God was when God needed him – when he was nailed to a tree, crying, bleeding, suffering, and dying? “My God, my God, why have you left me forsaken?” And the only answer he got was … nothing; as he just hung there, not arching his back, not dulling the pain, not even crying “it is finished,” until it really was. Until the whole world, full of people who call themselves innocent victims of their own arrogant sins, was finally saved and forgiven.

“The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms,” it says in Deuteronomy. Where were you when his everlasting arms caught you? Peter was underwater. Job was in chapter 42.

Many people know that, at the end of the book of Job, the Lord made him prosperous again. He gave him twice as much as he had before his afflictions. Do you know what Job said just before God did those things? (42:6) Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. He spoke the only answer God never finds any fault in. He repented. He stopped making excuses for sins. And he found his salvation.

If you ever find yourself forgetting from whence our salvation came, then let God remind you of who made the earth’s foundations. For the best reminder, you need to get out of the city, where we are surrounded, distracted, and blinded by our tallest man-made buildings and take a trip to the mighty mountains of New York or the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. Drive through the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado and the curvaceous slopes of California. Let your eyes soak in Stone Mountain of Georgia, Lookout Mountain of Tennessee and every hill and molehill of Mississippi. Those are the places not only where freedom rings, but where our God so obviously reigns; where he reminds us that the answer to our every pain is always the same thing. It’s him - the God who used a skull-shaped mountain to remind us that his entire universe revolves around just one thing – you, the crown of his creation.

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[1] The earth travels 18 miles every second.

[2] There are an estimated 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.

[3] There are roughly 130 million light receptors in each human eye.

[4] You could cover 3 football fields with your intestines.