WHEN GOOD THINGS HAPPEN

(Preached on Sunday, October 26, 2003)

And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends; and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.                     -Job 42:10

 

Let me say right up front, boy, does this feel anti-climatic!

First off, the Marlins won the World Series!!!

How can anything else be of much interest right now?

Second, after three weeks of exploring Job, especially with the dramatic speech of God’s from out of the whirlwind last Sunday, this fourth week might seem just a bit much.

And it should.

For last week was the climax of the story.

First we saw what happened to Job.

Then we dealt with the serious nature and severity of his questions and the lousy advice he received.

Then last week we heard God finally answer him.

This week we are in the last chapter.

It is definitely the denouement, the wrap-up of the story after the climax in God’s speech.

But, if we can all move past the euphoria of the World Series for a few minutes, perhaps we can still tease out a few learnings even from this final chapter.

 

For one thing, like much of the rest of the book of Job, it is not an easy chapter.

In fact, it feels as if there are two endings here.

In the first seven verses we have what feels like the first ending with Job’s response to God.

We see Job respond with great humility and with transformation.

We hear him in essence respond: “I retract what I have said, and repent in dust and ashes.  I will trust God and have faith.  Before this evil happened to me I had been taught; only now have my eyes been opened, and I can accept what I learned.”

Job is talking about the importance of first hand experience.

He admits that for all the goodness of his former life his faith was based on what he had been taught by others.

It was second-hand faith, hand-me-down faith, hearsay faith, that was the core of his being.

 

It’s not that this is a terribly wrong approach to faith.

In fact, it is the way most of us first come to faith.

This is the faith the country songs sing about as coming to us at our momma’s knees.

Most of us first learn our faith from our parents.

This is a good first faith, but it will often not be enough to carry us through life; to confront the tragedies and difficulties of life.

Nor will this faith often bring us great joy and stir us to deep passion.

This is the faith of our heads, more than faith of our hearts.

 

The more long-lasting faith, the more passionate faith, the energizer bunny faith, is the personal experience of God faith.

This is what Job admits that he now has.

Before, his faith was passed on faith.

Now he has that deeper faith that comes only through a personal experience of God.

Job had been demanding his audience with God for 37 chapters and he finally received his audience.

The great and mighty, all-powerful, amazing God spoke directly to Job out of a whirlwind.

It wasn’t even important, ultimately, what God said, but that God bothered to take the time to respond.

 

There was a young mother with a toddler in the department store.  The little boy was whining, pointing to various objects and insisting, “I want this; I want that.”  The mother ignored him for what seemed to some of those in the story an annoyingly long time and then, without a word, she simply bent down and picked him up.  Immediately, he was quiet.  The truth was, he didn’t really want “this” or “that;” what he wanted was her.

When we finally have that experience of God picking us up into her arms and holding us close, we will be transformed and that experience will carry us for a long time.

 

That is a powerful lesson to carry away from Job.

But then we have this rather “hokey” Hollywood like ending where Job’s fortunes are restored double.

His family returns, offering gifts for sympathy and money.

Job fathers 10 children and lives to see his great-grandchildren.

While we all love a happy ending, this ending just doesn’t quite feel right and fit with the rest of the book.

It is not what we expect.

Throughout this book Job has insisted on his innocence.

He has raved, complained, demanded a hearing from God.

When God finally appears and speaks, God does not vindicate Job, does not agree with Job’s arguments.

On the other hand, God in no way condemns Job.

But God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind.

No simple answers are given.

 

What we finally walk away with is the same truth we started Job with: life is not always fair.

There is no dependable equation of good deeds always resulting in good effects.

Tragedies strike good and bad people alike.

Living a good life, trying to do what is right, is no guarantee that good things will always happen to you.

Bad things happen to good people all the time.

 

Difficult as it is, I believe we have learned that lesson well.

Job, here at the end, in typically jobian fashion, difficult and extremely honest, teaches us that sometimes the moral arithmetic does work out.

Sometimes good things happen to good people.

Sometimes bad things happen to bad people.

Will Willimon once remarked in a sermon that we ought to get the notion out of our heads that good things always happen to good people, that God works by a system of tit-for-tat rewards.

Later that week, a man in his church said, “Preacher, let me tell you a story.  There was this guy in my town.  We grew up together.  He was smart, good in school, never had to open a book.  He was good at sports.  All the girls loved him.  He was a born charmer.  Naturally he figured that the rules were made for everybody but him.  We lost touch after high school.  I heard that he got married to the best looking girl in the class.  They divorced a couple of years later, due to his repeated infidelity.  He roamed about a good deal.  Married again, but the marriage lasted only for awhile.  He was in and out of one shady business deal after another.  Took advantage of his few friends.  His own kids turned against him, because he had disappointed them so often.  Just last year I heard he was dying.  Liver disease.  It was the alcohol and the drugs, best I could tell.  I wrote him.  We resumed our friendship.  He was a rather sad sight by this time.  Last week I went to his funeral.  I was one of the two people there.  Even his own children refused to come.  It was a sad ending to a life.  My point, Preacher, is that we are not always punished by God for our disobedience.  There is not always a sure retribution for our sin, but sometimes, sometimes there is.”

 

By the grace of God, bad things do not always happen to bad people.

Good things do not always happen to good people.

But sometimes, as in the case of this man’s friend, judgment crashes upon the heads of the unrighteous.

And sometimes, as in the case of Job, there is a happy ending.

Blessing is given to the innocent sufferers.

Not always, but sometimes, good things eventually do happen to good people.

Not always, but sometimes bad things happen to bad people.

Not always, but just enough to keep us nervous.

Life is not always fair, but sometimes it is.

 

Don’t take that as an easy answer.

Notice that even in this feel-good ending there are some shadows.

First, the story does not say that God restored Job’s fortunes and relationships in response to Job’s words of repentance and humility.

Instead, God’s reasons for giving things to Job are as unexplained as the reasons they were taken away.

God does not explain suffering, but God does not explain blessing either.

They are twin mysteries.

The sources of each are hidden from our view, beyond our understanding.

If, at the beginning of the story, Job had demanded to know why he had so much, God could have responded with the same dissertation on the crocodile.

It is difficult to imagine Job pressing such questions in the midst of prosperity and happiness — after all, we tend to accept the good that happens to us as a matter of course.

It is only in the end of the story — after we have demanded to know, with Job,, the reasons for suffering — that it occurs to us to question blessing or to grant that it too is cloaked in divine mystery.

 

Finally, while the first part of this chapter, Job’s final speech before God, tells us of his hard-won change of attitude and his new humility before God, it is in this last section that we learn how that new attitude is lived out.

It is here that we learn how Job is truly transformed.

The proof is in the way he is reconciled with his wife, with his friends, and in the way he treats his children, especially his daughters.

In the first chapter we only hear of Job’s children, their number and their behavior, but no names.

Now we hear of their number and of the names of his three daughters — Dove, Cinnamon, and Horn of Antinomy (a glittering metal used for eye make-up).