When Wise Words Hurt

In this sermon from our Job: The Mystery of Suffering series, we explore what happens when well-meaning words miss the mark. As Job's friends try to explain his pain through a rigid lens of retribution and reward, we’re invited to reflect on our own assumptions about suffering, faith, and God’s justice. Join us as we wrestle with tough questions and discover the hope found in the innocent suffering of Christ.

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Read the transcript

This morning's reading is from Job chapter 22, verses 2 to 30, and can be found on page 811 of the red pew Bibles, if you have those.

Can a man be of benefit to God? Can even a wise person benefit him?
What pleasure would it give the Almighty if you were righteous? What would he gain if your ways were blameless?
Is it for your piety that he rebukes you and brings charges against you?
Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless?
You demanded security from your relatives for no reason; you stripped people of their clothing, leaving them naked.
You gave no water to the weary, and you withheld food from the hungry.
Though you were a powerful man, owning land, and an honored man living on it, you sent widows away empty-handed and broke the strength of the fatherless.
That is why snares are all around you, why sudden peril terrifies you, why it is so dark you cannot see, and why a flood of water covers you.
Is not God in the heights of heaven? And see how lofty are the highest stars?
Yet you say, “What does God know? Does he judge through such darkness?”
Thick clouds veil him so he does not see us, as he goes about in the vaulted heavens.
Will you keep to the old path that the wicked have trod?
They were carried off before their time, their foundations washed away by a flood.
They said to God, “Leave us alone! What can the Almighty do to us?”
Yet it was he who filled their houses with good things.
So I stand aloof from the plans of the wicked.
The righteous see their ruin and rejoice; the innocent mock them, saying,
“Surely our foes are destroyed, and fire devours their wealth.”
Submit to God and be at peace with him; in this way prosperity will come to you.
Accept instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.
If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored.
If you remove wickedness far from your tent and assign your nuggets to the dust, your gold of Ophir to the rocks in the ravines,
then the Almighty will be your gold, the choicest silver for you.
Surely then you will find delight in the Almighty and will lift up your face to God.
You will pray to him, and he will hear you, and you will fulfill your vows.
What you decide on will be done, and light will shine on your ways.
When people are brought low and you say, “Lift them up!” then he will save the downcast.
He will deliver even one who is not innocent, who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.

Thank you, Angie.

Well, I lost my voice during the week, so I might sound a little bit unusual today. My thanks to Chantelle, who's leading the singing, despite me choosing all the songs and making all the plans to be the person. So thank you very much.

And thank you to the staff who've managed while I've been working from home this week. We particularly want to acknowledge that for those who have come from Iran, this is a very difficult time.

On Friday, you might be aware that Israel began to send artillery to bomb Iran. That has been reciprocated, and we certainly fear a significant escalation.

So we want to say to all of our congregation members who are from Iran and who have friends and family there that we're with you and we're praying for you.

Of course, we know that many in Israel also have no control over what their leaders choose to do, and their leaders are making decisions based on all kinds of bad things that have been done on all sides.

And so it's a very complex and dark and difficult situation.

So, we love you and we're praying for you and for the people of Iran and Israel.

Job's Friends

We are continuing in our series on the Book of Job, and they tell me that having a raspy voice is kind of good for today because we're looking at some serious challenges in the way that people have spoken to each other and related, particularly around how friends have been together.

Now, I didn't invent this—someone else (awesome) on the internet did. This is an original painting featuring Job and his friends. And for those listening to the podcast, it has the word Friends, which we could say… you know, “So no one told you life was gonna be this way?” (That Friends.) Thank you very much.

So, the show Friends, of course, was one of the most successful sitcoms of all time. It started in 1994, and I was really busy doing Year 11 at that time, so I never got into Friends (I know that's horrifying to some of you). But of course, you can't help but know that the teaching and the story of Friends is not really about an overarching arc; it's about how these relationships unfold and how they navigate life together.

These friends, living in the US (on the sofa at Central Perk), had 236 episodes of just friends interacting with each other. The way in which human relationships—and indeed some of the changes that were happening in our society, particularly around intimacy and how we considered moral choices—were shown through friendships.

And you could see that being a friend didn't always mean you were a good one. Sometimes you said things that indicated you had a really different perspective. Sometimes you wounded each other through how you spoke, through how you cared (or didn't).

And that's exactly what we find in the Book of Job. The bulk of the Book of Job actually revolves around a dialogue between friends.

They go back and forth and back and forth, and it's not so much about getting somewhere; it's about how they speak about life from their perspectives and how they teach one another about what it means to live through the mess.

Now, Job's friends here are dressed very finely, and they match how Job would have looked before all the suffering and disaster came upon him and his family.

So Job was a great man and a good man.

Job was wealthy. Job was prosperous. Job was wise.

He had very substantial holdings, with lots of flocks and herds, and a large family with lots of kids.

He was well respected, and I suspect this was his crew. This is Job and the boys. (I can say that because we've got the youth in today, and Phoebe's not here, so she can't just die.)

And these fellows represent the whole of the ancient Near East. They're not from Israel or Jerusalem; this is a really multicultural crew.

I imagine them meeting at the Qantas Club or the RACV Club, or maybe the Melbourne Club—these are the boys.

And we've got Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar:

• Eliphaz – a Temanite (Teman was an Edomite region known for its wisdom). When Eliphaz speaks, he is the most respected, and he comes in quite pastorally. He probably has the highest EQ (emotional intelligence) as he begins. He is kind of a mystical person—he talks about having a vision, and a spirit came past him and he learned some things—but he's really representing the broad wisdom tradition in the ancient Near East.

• Bildad – a Shuhite (Shuah was a descendant of Abraham). He is the one who refers to the ancestors: "Don't you know the history of the worldview that we have?" He says no one has ever broken these traditional teachings. Think about what your ancestors taught you. As he says in Job 8, "Ask the former generation… Will they not instruct you?"

• Zophar – (we're not exactly sure where Naamah is). He is probably the most impulsive or abrasive of the friends. Everyone's got someone like that in the crew: when they're good, they're very, very good, and when they're grumpy… When Zophar speaks to Job, he has the least pastoral sensitivity. He even says to Job, "I think God’s even forgotten some of your sin. I think you're getting a discount on the way you are suffering."

So these men come to visit Job, and in chapter 2 we see that they bring with them a full Middle Eastern obligation to mourn with their suffering friend. They set out from their homes and come to him, and they sit in the dust with him.

They weep aloud and tear their robes—expressions of shared mourning and grief—and they sprinkle dust on their heads.

They sit with Job on the ground for seven days and seven nights. This is exactly what you want from your friends.

They had lived a life together that was wealthy, prosperous, wise, and high-powered, well respected.

But now one of their number has fallen—fallen he has. Job was wealthy, prosperous, wise, well respected, and now everything is gone.

His children are dead. His flocks and herds have been killed. His servants have been killed.

His homes have been destroyed. And now his health is also gone.

When one of their friends has fallen, they come to be with him. No one said a word to him because they saw how great his suffering was.

But after a week, the dialogues begin. They approach Job's suffering with a desire to fix it, and their solution comes from their worldview and their wisdom.

And so they bring these "wise" words, and we see cycles where Eliphaz speaks and Job replies; Bildad speaks and Job replies; Zophar speaks and Job replies. This happens three times.

Towards the end of the third cycle, there's a discourse on wisdom (it might be Job replying, or it might just be an indication that the cycle is about to change).

Then there is a young fellow who's not part of the boys. His name's Elihu (or Elihu), and he also has a long block of teaching.

We're not exactly sure how he fits into the picture; we think probably he's someone from the community who's been listening to this.

There is a lot of poetry in the text, so whether they were actually composing these speeches as they sat in the dust — probably not.

But Elihu comes in and says, "You guys, you old guys, you haven't managed to convince him. Let me have a go." (We all know someone like that.) He pretty much says the same sort of stuff, but he claims, "I know this from experience, not just from wisdom."

He, like a few of them, does talk not just about suffering as retribution and reward, but also about discipline. But for the most part, he doesn't add anything. So we're not going to look at his words today.

Retribution and Reward

So, as I just said, what happens in these cycles is the friends applying a worldview to Job's suffering to try and fix it, and the worldview that they apply I've called retribution and reward.

So if you do bad, you get bad. If you do good, you get good.

This formula applies both to how you act among human beings and to how you interact with God in His world as Judge. If you do wicked things, God will punish you. If you are righteous, then God will reward you.

And the boys and Job were pretty sure that this was how life had worked for them for decades, because they had done good by each other and in their community. They had been wise, they had been righteous, and they had prospered.

We see at the beginning of the book that Job is not just a great man; he's a good man. So when someone looked at him with everything that he had, they would say, "Yes, this absolutely matches up. The equation makes sense." Again, you do good, you get good; you do bad, you get bad.

Now, the Scriptures are permeated with this type of teaching, particularly if you look at the book of Deuteronomy, where God laid out how He intends humankind to live—and more specifically how He intended Israel to live as His people. He gave them the Law through Moses, worked out in great detail. Then at the end of Deuteronomy, you see God's promises: a list of consequences and rewards (or blessings) for disobedience or obedience to the Law.

So, Israel, if you keep My law, if you follow Me, if you worship Me, if you are humble before Me—if you live in the way that I have outlined for you—then you will flourish. You will thrive; you'll be in a land of milk and honey. But if you don't, then consequences will come: like exile, losing your land, drought and plague, and all the things that you might have hoped would happen to your enemies. This could happen to you.

Then as you come into the prophets and the Psalms, you see the prophets saying to Israel, "The way that you've behaved has brought you into this place. Go back and look at Deuteronomy 29 and 30—that's what's happening to you right now." Yet throughout the Psalms, there are laments like, "Why is this happening? Is it always that we did bad and got bad? We did good and we get good?" The questions are starting to come up.

You might know that one of the Psalms says, "I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging for bread." So still, underneath it: if you do good, you'll get good. Your kids will be prosperous and happy and healthy and all the things we want.

When you come to the Wisdom literature (which Job is part of), you see that wisdom itself is considered a way of living where good gets you good and bad gets you bad. And so it's really smart: God says to live His way because you will actually end up successful.

However, there's always exceptions, and the entire Old Testament is nuanced. There is teaching that says, "Hang on a second. Someone who is righteous is suffering—why?" Or, "Israel is trying to return to the Lord, and yet something bad is happening—what is going on?" But the friends have flattened the nuance and the larger picture into just the wisdom of the vending machine.

So when they come to speak to Job in his suffering—after they've done the right thing—they basically try to fix the situation with a vending-machine wisdom transaction. You do good: you put your money in, you press your button, and you get your Mars bar or your can of Coke. And if you don't, well, it's not because the vending machine is broken or needs a kick; it's because you put the wrong thing in.

Or if you get a cup of muddy water out of the vending machine—or if you wanted a Mars bar and got a box of sultanas (especially one that's been in the bottom of a school bag for three years)—then it's because that's what you deserved. You must have pressed that button.

And so the friends come to Job and they begin by saying, "Oh, look, can I venture a word with you?…" (This is Eliphaz in chapter 4.) "Can I say—look, if you're suffering now but you're really righteous, it's only going to be temporary. Just hold on. Don't make too much of a mess of this. It's only going to be temporary, because we know if you've put good things in, good stuff's going to come out of it."

I think Eliphaz is probably looking at Job's face while saying this, and Job's like, "Ah…" So Eliphaz starts to get a little bit stronger. Then the other friends come in and they're like, "Look, your kids are dead—it's really awful—and so they were definitely worse than you. But you've got a little bit of hope, because clearly you weren't as bad as them." And then it really starts to escalate to where we had our reading today, where they say, "Well, if you're getting muddy water and three-year-old sultanas, it's because you're actually a terrible secret sinner."

And so in chapter 22 that Angie read for us, Eliphaz—who started off saying, "Don't worry, it's only going to be temporary"—now says, "Oh, actually, I think you've been ripping off your workers. I think that you actually are not as wise and wonderful as you thought. You gave no water to the weary. You withheld food from the hungry." He's deciding that he has to find some fault here, because if Job is continuing to suffer, then he must be far more wicked than anyone knew.

They have flattened the teaching of Proverbs (which says, "If you keep the commands of God, they will prolong your life many years and bring you peace and prosperity") and they've turned it into a vending machine. You put in righteousness, you get blessing; you put in foolishness and you get shame.

Now, it might be easy for us to point fingers at the friends, but we have a tendency to flatten the teachings of Scripture and who God is when we're faced with very challenging circumstances—particularly in other people's lives.

Because, like the friends, if you've lived with a formula and it doesn't seem to be working for someone else, you've got two options: you can either force their situation into the formula, or you can have your entire life start to unravel.

Now, we (the church and Christians) might do something similar when we say things like:

• If you give a large tithe to the church, you'll get a large breakthrough in your life.

• If you have enough faith, you will be healed.

• If you stay pure as a young person, God will give you a great spouse.

• If your church is growing in number, the preacher must be saying all the true things.

• Everything happens for a reason.

• God won't give you more than you can handle.

• Hashtag blessed.

And of course, when we have testimonies with a nice victorious finish to a part of someone's life, we don't really acknowledge that God is at work in the boring and the unsuccessful—and the "Oh wait, I thought I had a testimony three years ago and then everything went to heck." We can do this ourselves.

And then, of course, when we sit with someone whose grief and pain is not resolved quickly, we become quite tired, and we might move to things like:

• "Well, what sin has opened the door that this has happened to you?"

• "What are you not doing right in life that you still haven't got enough money?"

• "Why are you not as clean and shiny as the rest of us?"

• "Is God really with you and at work in your life?"

Now, of course, if you go to Job's responses, you can see that exactly what happens to him is what happens to us. When people say these things, you start to feel very isolated. You're isolated from the community of God's friends, from your own friends. And then you start to wonder, "Am I isolated from God, actually?"

You feel shame.

• I must be doing something wrong.

• I'm not trying hard enough to be healed.

• I haven't got enough faith.

• I gave, but nothing came back.

• Maybe I shouldn't have given.

• Maybe I didn't give enough.

• What's going on?

And so we get a distorted view of ourselves. We get a distorted view of God. And it's no wonder that someone who sits with pain or a very significant challenge in their life could find it really hard to be part of a community where we flatten things out to retribution and reward.

So today we have an opportunity for a halfway-through learning. We've got three more weeks of this series, and we're actually going to learn some deep, deep theology about the way God works and what the real solution—if we can call it that—to Job's situation is (and was). But today I just want us to unlearn some things from the friends.

I think we've heard the challenge and the rebuke of what we can do when we flatten things out and talk about God as a vending machine. But let's also see these three things.

And I've got my gratitude to an author from New Zealand, William H. C., who runs a Chinese church over there, for these particular points.

Three Things the Friends Didn't Take into Account

1. The first thing that the friends didn't take into account was that there is a spiritual realm and spiritual evil at work in human circumstances. For them, they had shrunk good and bad, wisdom and foolishness, reward and punishment to the human realm alone. And we know in chapters 1 and 2 of Job that whatever was going on between God in the heavenly realm and the accuser (Satan) was saying to God, "Oh, look at this guy. He does not love you for you; he loves you because of the stuff he's got." And that interplay is hard for us to understand. But what we need to know is that there is a spiritual realm that is hard for us to understand, and it is mysterious, and it is in operation over what human beings experience in life.

2. Secondly, the friends didn't consider that God's judgment of good and bad—of righteousness and wickedness, reward and retribution—was never promised to be fully experienced in one life. In fact, God's promise is that even when the wicked prosper (and they do on the earth), God's justice will happen at the end of human history. Outside of human history, there is a good Judge, and those who have sought to live His way, even if they suffer, will find that their tears are wiped away.

3. Thirdly, there is actually innocent suffering. Now, if you're a theologian you might ask, "Well, how could Job ever be sure that he was truly innocent?" I think that's a great question, and it's answered by the fact that the suffering he undergoes is outrageous. And so he is always justified in a retribution–reward world because the quantum doesn't match. If he had (and he would acknowledge if he had) done things that were wrong, he had not done them to the extent that warranted this ginormous disaster. But of course, we know that when humans relate to a holy God, there is never true innocence on our part. But it is God's grace that enables us to have all that we have—the rain falls on the wicked and the righteous, we have every breath, and of course, we have His deep love. But there was one who suffered entirely innocently. And when there is one who does that for us, then we can find true healing.

So let me read to you from 1 Peter as we close. This is 1 Peter, chapter 2:

Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps.
He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.
When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats.
Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.
He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.

The death of the innocent Savior means that mysterious spiritual evil—that battle we don't understand and sometimes have no ability to change—is dealt with. And the death of the innocent Savior means that judgment outside of human history won't only fall to retribution, but instead brings great grace and forgiveness and flourishing and thriving forever. When the innocent Savior suffered, then we got more than wisdom. Job is interacting with God and challenging our flat ideas of who God is. But Jesus shows us God's heart and heals us. Amen.