What's In It For Me?

Introduction

            I wonder how many of you out there are just as sick as I am at hearing people, especially politicians, try and convince me that their way of thinking or acting is correct because they have deemed it to be “fair.” It seems immediately obvious that this view of “fair” is entirely subjective in that what seems logically fair to one person is perceived as painfully unfair to another. Do you find it interesting that humanity seems to believe that there is some kind of universal “Law of Fairness” yet many reject the existence of God? I don’t want to get too far off on a tangent here but the belief that there is such a thing as “fair/right” and “unfair/wrong” happens to be one of the strongest proofs for the existence of God! Next time you engage an unbeliever about the existence of God, you might ask them how they believe the concept of “fair/right” and “unfairness/wrong” came to exist. Unfortunately, for unbelievers and believers alike, we believe that the Law of Fairness is the highest and greatest order to which God is also obligated to accommodate if we are to believe in him. Unbelievers reject God because he does not act in accordance with this Law of Fairness. If God exists, why is there sickness, suffering and death? How could God allow a crazy person to gun down little children and their teachers while they sit in class? How could God allow lunatics to crash fully loaded airplanes into populated office buildings? How could God let my best friend die of a heart attack before he was 40? How could God let my neighbor’s son contract cancer? Unbelievers use these as examples for why God doesn’t exist and believers use it to question God’s goodness and wisdom. We somehow perceive “fairness” and God as separate. We insist that God’s actions must conform to some form of absolute fairness and when it doesn’t we make an appeal to the Law of Fairness. When things go wrong in our lives as believers who earnestly seek to be faithful and obedient to God, we often cry out in our pain: ‘I’ve done everything you asked me to do! If things aren’t going to go will for me then What’s In It For Me?’ Instead, we must begin so see that God and the Law of Fairness are one and the same. The problem is that we try to see God’s fairness with the world’s eyes as opposed to the eyes of faith. We judge God’s fairness by what we see and never consider what is unseen. It is by faith that we will begin to understand that anything and everything God does or allows is fair regardless of how unfair it appears. In this week’s lesson, we see that Job learns this the hard way as his questioning of God’s fairness is confronted directly by God.

Subject Text

Job 42:2-6

² “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted.

³ You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.

⁴ “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’ ⁵ My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.

⁶ Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Context

            The Book of Job is presented to us as a story within a story. On the surface, we read the story of Job and the events that befall him but we tend forget that Job’s story takes place within the story that pits the ultimate Good that is God against the ultimate Evil that is Satan. God uses Job to illustrate to Satan what faithfulness and obedience looks like. However, Satan insists that the only reason Job is faithful and obedient is because God has blessed him richly with family, friends, good health and abundant possessions. In an attempt to prove his point, Satan asks God’s permission to test Job by taking all these things from him. Satan believed that Job would reject God if he lost everything. God agreed to Satan’s request and Satan began to unleash one tragic event stacked on another in the life of Job until Job lost everything; family, friends, health and possessions. Job was left to sit and suffer in ashes and dirt wondering why God would punish him when he hadn’t done anything wrong. Job’s friends visited and attempted to convince Job that there must have been some unknown sin he had committed that has led to Job’s dire condition. They believed, like most ancient Jews (and many of us today for that matter) believed, that blessings were the result of faithful obedience to God and calamity was the result of some known or unknown sin. However, “Justice cannot be equated with the doctrine of double retribution, which holds categorically that the righteous are blessed and the wicked suffer loss. The attitude of the comforters [Job’s friends] indicates how tenaciously they held to the corollary of this doctrine, that whoever suffers has sinned. Their belief in the inviolability of this idea led them to the conclusion that Job was a hardened sinner. Job responded to their rigid teaching by arguing that the dogma of retribution works imperfectly in life…the reason Job sought so vigorously to prove the dogma that the wicked are not always punished was to establish the possibility of the converse; namely, there are righteous who experience hardship with their integrity intact…Consequently, a person’s relationship with God cannot be judged either on the extent of their prosperity or the hardness of the difficulties they bear.”[1] Nevertheless, Job insists that he has done nothing wrong and insists that God explain himself. He’s done everything according to the way God wanted and his life has completely fallen apart. He wants answers! He wants to know; What’s In It For Me? God had finally heard enough and stepped in to answer Job. However, in God’s wisdom, he doesn’t actually reveal the arrangement he made with Satan. Instead, God makes a deeper and more profound point with his response to Job that applies to us as well when we question God’s wisdom. God goes into great detail in questioning Job as his way answering, but I’ll give you a quick summary: God tells Job to consider all the things of creation and asks, in essence; ‘How do you think all these things came to exist? Can you do the things I have done? If so, show me!’ Job knew he had overstepped his place in questioning God and insisting that God answer him. Job responds in our subject text in humility and reverence.

Text Analysis

            After giving Job seventy-seven reasons why he didn’t know what he was talking about, Job does the only thing he can in v. 2; Job confesses that God is sovereign. God knows precisely what he is doing because he knows the outcome of his actions before he acts. You see, we see life from a linear perspective of past, present and future. However, we only know the past and the present. The future is yet unknown to us. It is like standing in front of a very large mirror. We see ourselves immediately, as the present, and then we see what is behind us, as the past, with those things farthest away becoming more and more obscure with distance. However, the things beyond the mirror, as the future, are hidden from us. This is the result of our finite nature. We live constrained by time and space. However, for God, this is not the case. God’s perspective is as though he is looking down on the mirror from above. God sees the past, present and future as a single moment as opposed to a linear event. This is the result of his infinite nature. This is precisely why Job acknowledged that God’s plans could not be “thwarted.” “In the biblical account God’s intervention provides the solution, and though God’s righteousness may be questioned, it is sustained at the end of the story.”[2]

            True humility doesn’t stop at confessing the superiority of God. Sincere humility also correctly acknowledges our shortcomings as sinful human beings. We see this in Job’s statement in v. 3 when he responds to God’s somewhat rhetorical inquiry directed at Job wondering how an ignorant human being could legitimately question God’s wisdom and character. Job acknowledges that he spoke out of turn. He confesses that he was not qualified to question God in any way. However, considering his very real suffering and the dire circumstances of his life, his confession, that he spoke of things too “wonderful” to know, seems a bit out of place. This reference “Makes it plausible that Job refers to God’s wondrous ‘design’ (cf. 38:2) for creation. Before God addressed him directly, Job cursed God’s design for the world as being inimical and meaningless for innocent sufferers like him (Job 3). God has now countered with a vision of creation teeming with a variety of intricately balanced life forces, including wild creatures Job had presumed were beyond the realm of God’s care and concern. In response to this revelation, Job may be understood to recant his limited understanding of creation’s design and to acknowledge that he now sees a world that requires him to reassess his place within it.”[3]

            Job acknowledges in v.4 that God has commanded him to answer his questions. However, in v. 5 Job says something interesting; Job said that he had heard God but that he has now seen him. You can read and reread the text and you won’t find anywhere that God has physically revealed himself to Job—or did he? I’m going to take you to a text in the New Testament that will explain what Job is saying. It’s from one of Paul’s letters. Paul writes: “¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse (Rom 1:19; 20).” Job could see but he was blind. Blind in the sense that God was all around him in a world created by God, but he lost track of that in his pain and suffering. Now, as he listened to God speak, he could once again see that God was always there, always present, always watching over his created order. God is not part of creation but uses creation to speak to us about his beauty, his grand nature and his perfect sovereignty. I have had the privilege of seeing the sunset over the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean and I know exactly what Job was talking about. The outline of majestic mountains that give an appearance of a jaggedly torn purple canvas against the sky or an ocean reflecting the sky so perfectly that if you stand on the shore and look down it feels like you’re falling into the sky! God says: “I’m here! I know you! I’m in control of all things! You can trust me! I love you!” Now hearing and seeing, God has led Job into a new theological construct; a new way of understanding the world.

            This new understanding led Job to his final proclamation that he was unworthy and necessitated that he chart a new course in his thinking. The Hebrew word that the NIV translates as “repent” (Usual Hebrew usage for “repent”: swb) is not a very good translation in the overall context of Job. Instead, it should probably be translated as “recant” or “be sorry” (Hebrew usage translated as “repent” in 42:6: nhm). Job did not use the usual Hebrew word for “repent” in this case. It is a slight distinction yet important nonetheless. “If he had repented in that manner, he would have taken the direction vigorously advocated by his comforters and anticipated by the Satan. Rather job used the term nhm, which means to discard an intended course of action and pursue another course on the conviction that it is the right path. With these words Job withdrew his oath of innocence, which had placed a demand on God, and submitted his destiny into God’s control; he placed his trust completely in God. Job’s response offers the insight that a human being must not let the pursuit of a right position become a barrier that separates one from God.”[4]

Application

            One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that we must first acknowledge that we understand God first and foremost through the grid of each of our own life experiences—for good or bad. Once we’ve done that, we can redirect our understanding or misunderstanding of God where necessary so that we can begin to understand him correctly more often than not. For example, I have spent much of my life relating to God in the same way I related to my earthly father. At once I am obedient to God in the hope that he might love me and the next I am obedient to God to avoid his rage. Both attitudes are part of the grid created by the painful relationship with my earthly father and both are desperately wrong in relation to my heavenly father. Like Job, we must begin to let God codify a right view of himself in our hearts and minds.

It’s been more than 10 years now since I lost my very best friend. He wasn’t even 40 when he died suddenly and unexpectedly while on a business trip. It’s still very painful and I still don’t understand God’s purpose in allowing that to happen. However, I am learning to accept, albeit slowly, that my friend’s death was neither sudden nor unexpected to God—I am letting go of the “why?”. I hope that someday I can say with complete honesty that God was “fair” to take my friend—I’m not there yet. In our desperation to know God and be in an ever-growing relationship with God, we must continuously question our motives; why do we do what we do in relation to God. Can we be faithful and obedient and believe that God has a purpose for each of us that is only good regardless of how it feels or looks? Do we relate to God out of pure devotion and love or do we relate to God and then ask What’s In It For Me? One of my favorite movies of all time is Field of Dreams. The main character in the movie, Ray, is a farmer who plows down a large section of his corn crop and constructs a baseball field because he hears a voice one night tell him: “If you build it he will come.” After the field is constructed, long-dead, historical baseball players appear from out of the remaining cornfield to play on the newly constructed baseball field. Toward the end of the film, another character, Thomas Mann, is invited by the baseball players to return with them into the cornfield to disappear and return to wherever they come from. Ray is incensed that he isn’t invited to join them after all he did to make it possible for them to return to life and play baseball. Ray endured no small amount of ridicule by the townsfolk and family members for building a baseball field in the middle of his cornfield which has bankrupted his farm. Ray was obedient and faithful to do what he thought he should but now he wants to know, What’s In It For Me?




 Ray reluctantly accepts that he isn’t invited into his own cornfield and somewhat sulks away in the next scene only to be reminded by the primary baseball character of the film, Shoeless Joe Jackson, of the words that original inspired Ray to construct the baseball field: “If you build it he will come.” The whole time, Ray thought the “he” in the statement was Shoeless Joe Jackson. Ray soon learns the truth that the “he” was his long deceased father from whom he was estranged.




 All the subplots of the entire film converged in the movie’s final scene of reconciliation between a father and son in a game of catch. 


 The film provides an illustration that when we are convinced that God has only our best interest at heart, we can relate to him purely out of love and devotion regardless of our life circumstances and we won’t have to ask What’s In It For Me? Instead, we must begin to surrender and trust that God has a perfect plan for each of us and will use any and all things only for our good.

Dr. Larry Crabb provides a perspective of relating to God that is both inspiring and frightful in an imagined conversation with God that has God explaining his purpose behind the Book of Job: “To know Me well, you must first be confused by Me. Only in the mystery of suffering will you stop trying to fit Me into your understanding of life…When you stand before Me in mystery, you will eventually rest within Me in trust. When you can’t figure Me out, you will give up the illusion of predictability and control and discover the joy and freedom of hope…Suffering without explanation creates opportunity for faith in Me, the kind of faith that sees My heart. Suffering with explanation allows you to maintain the false hope of control…Hear Me say clearly: I make no promise to provide you with the good things you legitimately want in this world. Do not trust Me for a pleasant, prosperous life…I wrote Job to reveal who I AM, not who you imagine Me to be…That false image of Me gives rise to the cry I hear from many: ‘I don’t deserve this. I lived well. You owe me a better life.’ That cry drowns out the music of heaven; it prevents the one who cries from learning to dance…My message to you: I remain all-powerful and all-good in your darkest night. Trust Me. You don’t know enough not to.”[5] I will leave you with an old Puritan prayer I have used. If you are struggling and asking, What’s In It For Me? in your relationship with God, perhaps this prayer will be as helpful to you as it was to me.

“When thou wouldst guide me I control myself,

When thou wouldst be sovereign I rule myself.

When thou wouldst take care of me I suffice myself.

When I should depend on thy providing I supply myself,

When I should submit to thy providence I follow my will,

When I should study, love, honour, trust thee, I serve myself;

I fault and correct thy laws to suit myself,

Instead of thee I look to man’s approbation, and am by nature an idolater.

Lord, it is my chief design to bring my heart back to thee.

Convince me that I cannot be my own god, or make myself happy, nor my own Christ to restore my joy, nor my own Spirit to teach, guide, rule me.

Help me to see that grace does this by providential affliction, for when my credit is god thou dost cast me lower, when riches are my idol thou dost wing them away, when pleasure is my all thou dost turn it into bitterness.

Take away my roving eye, curious ear, greedy appetite, lustful heart;

Show me that none of these things can heal a wounded conscience, or support a tottering frame or uphold a departing spirit.

Then take me to the cross and leave me there.”[6]

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[1] Willem A. VanGemeren, Dictionary of Old Testament Theology & Exegesis, Vol. 4, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1997), p. 785)

[2] William Sanford Lasor, David Allan Hubbard & Frederic William Bush, Old Testament Survey: The Message, Form and Background of the Old Testament, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1996), p. 455.

[3] Samuel E. Balentine, Job: Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary, (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2006), p. 695.

[4] VanGemeren, DOTT&E, Vol. 4, p. 788.

[5] Dr. Larry Crabb, 66 Love Letters: A conversation with God that invites you into his story, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2009), pp. 86-88.

[6] Arthur Bennett, ed., “Man A Nothing,” The Valley of Vision: A collection of Puritan Prayers & Devotions, (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1971), p. 91.