St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church -- Watertown, WI
Pastor Mark Gartner
Sermon for Pentecost 5 -- July 6^th and 9^th, 2006

The other day I was walking through church and saw the blueprints of the new school and Church addition. This was no small blueprint. It was a roll of blueprints that was a good 6 – 7 inches in diameter. On these blueprint you will find any thing you want to know about the new facilities. It tells you the size of pipes and the types of wires running through the building. It tells you where the vents run and where each little outlet or piece of cable needs to be. I’m no expert at any of these things. I could look at these blueprints for hours, days and weeks and not begin to understand all the things that are included in these new buildings. It would be foolish for me to try and argue with someone who designed the blueprints, because I don’t have the understanding in this area of work.

Today we listen to these words from the book of Job. The one thing we will notice is that God holds the blueprint of this world and all that happens in this world. He knows everything about everything. But does this stop us from trying to question God’s expertise? Or do we think that we know more than God does and that our plans are better than God’s plans? As God reminds Job and as he also reminds us:

As we look at the life of Job, it would do us well to recap some the key points in the life of Job. Job 1:1-3 recaps this very well, "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. ²He had seven sons and three daughters, ³and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East." Satan came to God and said that Job was only a follower of God, because he had everything. God knew that this wasn’t true and let Satan bring earthly hardships upon Job. God was using these earthly hardships to test the faith of Job. Satan could take away his wealth and his family as well as bring physical ailments upon him, but he couldn’t take his life. Satan thought that Job would give up his faith, when things weren’t going well. God knew that Job would draw closer to him during these times of trouble. Over a period of time Job lost all his wealth and his children. He also was stricken with boils over his whole body.

As we live our lives on this earth we might wonder why do such terrible things happen in the world, and even worse why do such terrible things happen to us? Why did I lose my job? Why did someone in my family get a terrible disease and die? Why can’t I make enough money to make ends meet? Why are things so tough? As we look at the life of Job, we realize that God doesn’t bring these terrible things upon us. He is not the author of evil and terrible things. These terrible things that happen to us, happen because the devil and sin is in this world. Because of sin, we are going to get sick and people are going to die and life is not going to run smoothly. People will lose their jobs and families are going to struggle financially. God uses these tough times in our lives to test our faith. He is looking to see if our faith stand firm under the pressures of sin and the devil.

But we always need to remember that we have God’s promise that he will be our side through all of these things. He and his saving Word will never leave us. Just because the things of this world seem to be falling apart, our God has not left us to fend for ourselves. He will always give us a way out from our troubles.

Our text begins a new section in which God now responds to all the controversy concerning the problem of Job’s suffering. The three friends of Job (Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar) all attempted to explain the suffering of Job as a matter of cause and effect. Job’s great suffering must be the result of his great sins.

Job’s fourth visitor, Elihu, took much the same approach to the matter. God, he says quite correctly, knows what he is doing; he has a purpose in chastising a man. But Elihu, too, subjects divine providence to the law of cause and effect. Job’s suffering is so severe because the wrongdoing of which he is to be purged is a terrible evil. The correction fits the crime. If Job confesses and repents of his sin, God will take all these troubles away.

The various speeches of Job and his friends only served to prove that God is beyond the reach of human thinking. Man can never know God’s thoughts unless the Lord chooses to reveal them. At the same time, God’s revelation of himself and his thoughts do not necessarily make him more accessible to man’s reason. There is still much about God and his ways which is far beyond man’s ability to understand and grasp.

Job had repeatedly pleaded for God to give an answer to his suffering. "Let me speak, and you reply" and "Let the Almighty answer me!" are two of Job’s persistent demands for communication from God. Now God confronted Job. But it was a confrontation unlike Job had expected. God says nothing about Job’s suffering. No discussion takes place about the bad things happening. Not even an answer is given to Job’s charges about the injustices of God. Instead of answering questions, God asks them. That alone was evidence of God’s power. God wasn’t dwelling on the things happening in Job’s life, he ignored it and went instead to the subject of his power and wisdom and his control of all that happens.

When I was a young boy, one of my jobs was to take the electric trimmer and trim around the edges of the sidewalks and bushes. This is one of those old electric trimmers. You held it in your hand and it kind of looked like a big scissors as the blades moved back and forth. I thought I could be smarter than the electric trimmer. I wanted to know just how fast are those blades moving and just how sharp are they. In my ignorance I found out that the blades moved very fast and that the blades are very sharp as I tried to put just the tip of my finger in the blade and pull it out before it got cut. The scar on my one finger tells me that I wasn’t as smart as I should of been.

Our text marks the beginning of God’s first speech to Job. Job thought he was very smart and understood God, but Job is reminded that he isn’t so smart and God challenges Job to put his trust in God’s wisdom. Compared to the unsearchable wisdom and power of God, Job is shown to be ignorant and unpowerful. If he could not comprehend or control God’s government in nature, how could he hope to comprehend or control the LORD’s ways with man? "Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me." In the Bible, God’s appearances are often accompanied by storms, thus dramatizing the awesomeness of the occasion. The storm through which God speaks to Job is also a display of his divine glory in keeping with what he is about to say to Job. It is only as God speaks to us through the Word that we can find out anything about him and his ways.

God’s opening question, "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?" is a rebuke of Job’s way of questioning God’s plan or design for the universe. This question may ironically allude to the darkness of the storm through which God revealed himself to Job. As a friend of God, Job would have been expected to defend God’s ways to others. But instead, his charge that God’s dealings were unjust, that God was his enemy, made the good and gracious designs of God appear dark and severe. The words of Job were "without knowledge" in the sense that they were without a true awareness of the facts, without an understanding of God’s and Satan’s heavenly controversy, which had come before Job’s trial. Likewise, believers today should not presume to know fully God’s ways, his "counsel" (or plan) for them. To act on inferior knowledge of God’s purposes is to run the risk of misunderstanding what God is going to accomplish.

God then challenges him to "brace yourself like a man." The expression has the idea of rolling up one’s sleeves and getting ready for action. When undertaking a strenuous task such as running, working or fighting, a man in biblical times would gather up his flowing robe and tuck it into a sash-belt. Thus this expression suggests that Job is to be alert and prepared for a difficult task — that of explaining God’s ways in nature. Because Job had questioned God’s doings and accused him of wrongdoing, he was here challenged to support those claims. Job, the plaintiff, has suddenly become the defendant!

"Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched 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?" God had said, "I will question you, and you shall answer me". Those questions then began immediately — a series of dozens of inquiries filled with irony and firmness. They demonstrated that Job’s presumptuous criticisms had darkened rather than shed light on God’s plan.

God’s first questions had to do with the creation of the earth. This work of God was pictured as the construction of a building, with its foundation, dimensions, measuring line, footings (the earth was figuratively presented as having pillars sunk into sockets) and cornerstone. By asking Job "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?" and by challenging Job to tell who did it all, God immediately demonstrated Job’s ignorance and insignificance. Of course Job knew that God had created the earth, but that knowledge and understanding was not from personal observation. Man, created after the earth had been made, was not present and therefore Job could not have advised God or have understood what took place. Unable to have done those things, how could Job possibly hope to advise God now? His deficiency of the knowledge of the earth’s origin disqualified Job from governing the earth.

"Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness. when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place. when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?" This second set of questions has to do with the origin of the oceans and other great bodies of water. These are depicted by God in poetic language as being formed as an act of childbirth or that the earth’s shorelines are presented as gates that hold back the water as a dam. Job had nothing to do with this majestic work, which was performed only by God.

How many of you like to put together puzzles? I don’t mind doing puzzles, as long as they aren’t too difficult. I always start by doing the outside and working through different sections on the inside of the puzzle until it is complete. At times I can look at a puzzle and it seems to go together so easy and at other times it is almost impossible to put together just one piece. As we live on this earth, we look at the puzzle called our life. At times it seems like we can see what the puzzle looks like and at other times we can’t make heads or tails of what God has in store for us. What is difficult for us is that there are too may times we want to see more than God has allowed us to see. We can’t figure out what God wants to happen next in my life. It is at these times that we get impatient or angry and begin to lose trust that god actually know s what is going on.

That is why God reminds us today that he knows everything. And even when things don’t seem to be falling into place the way we would like it, God has a perfect plan already made up for us. His plan is meant to make sure that our souls are ready for the day that he calls us home to heaven. His plan is making sure that we know and trust that God is our only way to heaven. For this reason he uses different things to lead us in the right direction and to keep our faith firm. I can’t always see God’s plan, but I know and trust that it is perfect. I don’t need to worry one bit. Amen