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February 20, 2005
True Faith in God
True Faith in God
Job 38: 1-12 / Matthew 21: 18-22
Heidelberg Catechism, Question and Answer 21
February 20th, 2005
Today we formally and publicly welcome a number of people as members of this church family. It is good to remember what it is that attaches us to the family of God. The basic essential for membership in the family of God and the basic essential for membership in a congregation-family is faith in Jesus Christ. I will ask a couple of other questions, but the one at the heart of it all is, “Who is your Lord and Savior?” What distinguishes a Christian is the willing and happy confession of faith, “Jesus Christ is my Savior and He is Lord of my life.”
John Shively asked us this morning a question from the Heidelberg Catechism, “What is true faith?” Not merely what is faith? but “what is true faith?” That might seem an impertinent question no one has the right to ask. Faith, after all, is something that happens in my heart and yours and who has the right to challenge whether it is true or not?
But the question might have been asked differently, in a way that is not impertinent. We might have asked, “What is living faith?” And here we can tell a difference. Living faith is a faith that shows itself in what it does, not merely in what it says is going on in a hidden recess of the heart.
Living faith is the opposite of dead faith. Dead faith is real faith the way a dead body is a body but it isn’t the kind of faith that attaches us to God. Dead faith is the kind of sincere belief the devils had who looked at Jesus, trusting fully that He was God made flesh—their mortal enemy. Jesus was not their friend. They liked it best when He wasn’t around.
Living faith, by contrast, not only makes a person like to have Jesus around, it makes a person live as though in the presence of Jesus. This is how Jesus is our Lord, when we not only say but act as though we believe we are in His presence.
Live faith puts us in the company of the disciples who had left everything to follow Jesus and one day found themselves with Him on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. They looked up the slope and saw 5,000 hungry men with their wives and children. Jesus multiplied five small loaves and two small fish so that they were enough to feed those people. But as far as the hungry people were concerned the great moment was when the disciples arrived where they were sitting with food.
How glad hungry people were when Nathaniel, or Bartholomew, or Thaddeus, or one of the other nine bent down with a full basket and said, “Have some lunch.” Jesus could have spoken a word and filled every tummy with food, I suppose, the way He stilled a storm or healed a cripple. But He wanted His disciples to see that they were to do more than sit and watch Him.
We know the disciples believed in Jesus because they left everything to follow Him. But they needed to help feed the hungry crowd as much as the hungry crowd needed to be fed. It was in sharing Jesus’ task that their faith came alive, we might say.
And so it is with us. You and I need to be doing the deeds of faith as much as people need to receive the deeds our faith prompts us to do in obedience to Jesus. But there is more to it than this.
True faith has ripple effects. I want to speak of two of these ripple effects that are particularly of interest as we think of what happens when we “join” a church. Here let us allow the faith of Job instruct us.
The first ripple effect of true faith is to enable us to be a blessing to each other. A second ripple effect of true faith is that it helps us to endure when we are not a blessing to each other.
Many think of the Book of Job as opening the question, “Why do good people suffer?” But I think it also, and perhaps more pertinently illustrates the two questions, “How can we be a blessing and encouragement to each other?” and “How should we endure when people are not a blessing but a bane, a pain in the neck?”
Job was a good man. He was such a good fellow that he caught the attention of the members of a gathering that hovers above ordinary human life, and is occupied with watching what’s going on in ordinary life. The Bible tells us that there are angels who are God’s ministering spirits for our good. But as in every group of people, not all angels are equally positive.
One of the members of the heavenly court was a surly chap named Satan. Satan means adversary. Though we associate the name Satan with the devil and demons, the way the story of Job starts out it seems that Satan is just a very grumpy, ill-tempered pessimist among the company of angels. The Lord asked him at one of their assemblies, “Where have you come from today?” And he replied blithely, “From going everywhere on the earth.” Since the job of angels was to take care of particular people maybe this means he wasn’t doing his job.
The Lord replied, “Have you noticed Job, a blameless and upright man who honors me and turns away from evil?” Rather than accepting Job for what he was this ill-tempered angel said, “Yes, but it’s only because everything is going his way. If things start to go wrong for him, he will curse you to your face.”
It is at this point that people wonder about the goodness of God in letting Satan put Job to the test. Because the testing Job had to suffer was awful to demonstrate to Satan how genuine was his faith in God. Here was his test. First, Job lost all he owned. Second, he lost all his family except a wife who wasn’t all that much of an encouragement to him. He responded to this second loss saying, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Third, he lost his health. It must have been like having shingles. He scraped his scabby skin with broken bits of pottery, surely making it hurt worse. Still he didn’t blame God. His wife said, “Curse God and die.” But he wouldn’t.
But the most painful part of Job’s testing however came from his pious friends. They comprised a sort of church. Maybe a Bible study group. Judging from what the friends had to say to Job, they had clear ideas about the ways of God. And it is from them that we learn how to be good church members by how NOT to be a fellow member in the church.
Job had three devout friends who just knew that bad things don’t happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. Bad people who have bad things happen to them should acknowledge it, confess their sins, and hope God will take away the bad things that happen to them. It seemed very reasonable to Job’s three friends.
The third chapter of Job shows us how badly Job felt when he sat with his three friends who had come to comfort him. They began well. They saw him and realized it was their friend Job. They cried, and sat with him and didn’t say a word. They listened to Job tell how bad he felt. “Let the day perish wherein I was born. Why did I not die at birth? Why is life given to those who long for death? The thing I feared is just what came to me.” They visited him. That was good. They listened to him. That was very good.
Then Job’s friend Eliphaz starts out just as every friend should do. He reminded Job that his life had been a blessing to others. “You have instructed many and have strengthened weak hands.”
But then he started to think theologically and everything went down hill from there. “Job, think about it. Who that was innocent ever had things go wrong? As I have seen, those who sow trouble reap the same.” Reading chapters four and five of Job you see eloquent reasoning, and a lot of it isn’t all that bad. And he says words we might well quote as good advice, “Happy is the man whom God reproves; therefore despise not the chastening of the Almighty.” Job’s friend Eliphaz ends his advice, “Hear, and know it for your good.” (II Rom. 8:28)
Job does not disagree with Eliphaz, but tells him there is something more useful than this good theological examination of a situation he really knows nothing about, “He who withholds kindness from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty.” Job quotes words from Psalm 8 in a way we don’t usually intend, “What is man, that thou dost make so much of him, and that thou dost . . . test him every moment?”
Job’s second friend, Bildad, then breaks the silence he should have kept. “You’re just getting what you deserve,” he said with a righteous smile. “If your children have sinned against God He has delivered them into the power of their transgression.” By contrast, Bildad explained, “God fills the mouth of the blameless man with laughter.”
And all the while you and I know there was nothing at all that Job or any of his children did that had anything to do with what was happening to them. And Job knew it. He did no wrong to feel bad and to say he felt bad.
Finally, Job’s third friend, Zohar, tightens the screw this circle of friends turned in their suffering friend. “Know that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.”
I must skip over the rest of Zohar’s words and Job’s reply. What I hope we see is how unhelpful were these three friends who thought that Job needed good theological counsel when he was suffering.
Who knows what particular things Job or his family may have done once upon a time, that they knew about, which they expanded into the kind of evil that deserved the misery Job now suffered? Maybe Zohar remembered the time he was sitting in the shot-gun seat as Job was speeding down Lindberg Road at 30 MPH and didn’t get caught. Zohar then said, “You’re going a bit fast aren’t you?” And Job said, “Oops! I guess I better slow down.” And Zohar, years later remembered Job’s un-discovered speeding—no speeding ticket and thought, “There must have been a lot else that Job did that didn’t get caught. And he expanded Job’s guilt from his heedlessness of the speed limit to moral blunders. “You are getting your comeuppance now.” No doubt Job, like everyone of us made his blunders, moral and otherwise. But his flaw had nothing to do with God and his suffering.
But sitting where we do, we know Job’s friends knew nothing about what was really going on—as we seldom do of others.
And I wonder if a good piece of the lesson of the Book of Job is that we should think carefully before we say things to each other that we think necessary for them to hear.
It is true that the Apostle Paul taught us to approach a Christian brother or sister who is doing something that is obviously wrong. If you know that I am having an affair, you do well to come and tell me this is wrong. And I’d better listen to you. Paul writes, “If a person is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted.” But this isn’t at issue in the story of Job. His friends could not point to anything wrong he had done. And even if they could, they had no business telling him his misfortune was because of what he did wrong.
The Apostle Paul wrote to our earliest Christian brothers and sisters, “Knowledge puffs up but love builds up the church.” Love here is agape, self-giving love.
Self-giving love is very imaginative, it thinks of what I could do to make things better and is the principle gift God puts into our hearts for building the church. It “suffers long and is kind,” Paul writes in the great love chapter, I Corinthians 13. This means, love is very patient. Love puts up with a lot!
Had Job’s friends sat with him in silence, bathed his hurting body with pain-easing balm, or brought to him cool water to drink and food that tasted good to one suffering as he did, of course we’d never have had the Book of Job to read. But Job would have found in their faithful friendship a redeeming factor in his misery. He might have looked back at that time as a uniquely good time in his life.
Job’s friends were very religious, but they were not faithful friends. God calls you and me to be faithful friends to each other in the Church. Faithfulness to each other is faithfulness to Jesus Christ, in fact. Do not tear one another down with advice when they hurt, even with pious motives. Build each other up. We don’t know very much about each other. Let your love bloom imaginatively toward one another especially when ones are hurting. We hurt in many ways. This is one lesson we derive from Job by contrast with what his friends did.
The second lesson I will state very briefly. How do we survive in the church when others tear us down? How do we endure unfair rebuke? How do we keep on when friends fail us? The answer is brief. Keep on keeping on.
Job did not curse God. He did not even curse his friends. We don’t read of the aftermath, whether he invited these three friends to his home when his health and property was restored and he had a new family. But I can visualize Job graciously hosting them for dinner, and they had occasion to learn from his endurance and from his refusal to get even, that they had done wrong in the way they spoke to him. And perhaps they learned from their error not to be “Job’s comforters” to any others who suffered.
Endurance, faithfully keeping on when you’ve come to the end of your rope, enables the church to keep on being the church. Because we do fail each other. We hurt each other in what we say, in what we don’t say, in the way we ignore one another in times of difficulty, in the way we don’t take part, by not doing our fair share of what needs to be done. But when someone quits after being hurt, then the Body of Christ suffers at that point. Because at that very point we demonstrate that we will not accept Jesus’ basic teaching that we forgive one another because we know God has forgiven us. Keeping on demands of us that we forgive.
Keep on. Keep on keeping on. Do not let the great adversary of our souls take delight in the normal, every day human trait of quitting when we are hurt. This I learn from Job. He did not blame God. He did not quit. He kept on. God blessed him. And God will bless us if first, we prove to be faithful friends to Him by being faithful friends to one another, and if we keep on when we have endured suffering at the hands of those who should be our friends in Christ.
Let us pray: O Lord, Grant to us a living faith. And grant to us to build this Body in which we are members with works of love and grace. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at February 20, 2005 09:30 AM