"Chapter 14: Praying"

Walking with God through Pain & Suffering

by Tim Keller

 

Chapter 14: Praying

 

The Uniqueness of Job

• The book of Job faces the question of evil and suffering with emotion and realism as well as intellectual and theological skill.
• Its main theme is innocent suffering—why do so many good people have a disproportionate number of afflictions, while many dishonest, selfish, and greedy people have comfortable lives?
• Job treats this issue with balance and nuance. It does not give simple, pat answers.
• Job critiques all of the common answers to the problem of evil and finds them wanting.
• Religious answer: you must have done something wrong or bad
• Secular answer: there is no good reason, and a good God wouldn’t allow this—so there is no God.
• One of the main messages of the book of Job is that both the religious and the secular answers are wrong.

 

My Servant Job

• Job is described as a man who was blameless and upright. He was beyond reproach.
• Satan accuses Job before God and says that Job fears and follows God for the benefits that God gives him.
• If Job is just serving God for the benefits, then God has failed to make people into truly loving servants.
• Satan wants to frustrate God and his purpose to turn people into joy-filled, great and good worshipers of him.

 

Becoming “Free Lovers” of God

• God allowed Satan to test Job, because God knew that Job already loved him for himself. But Job’s love needed refinement. The suffering was allowed to bring Job to a level of greatness.
• The opening of Job reminds us that there is a difference between external religiosity and internal heart love and devotion to God.
• How do we develop a true, internal love for God that is not just a response to his good gifts or benefits?
• Our love for God might begin with a heavy dependence and reliance on his benefits, but as the relationship deepens we will grow to love God for himself alone and grow to depend less on his benefits to love him.
• The only way to grow to this point in a relationship is for it to be tested through difficulty and suffering.
• Suffering provides us with an opportunity to notice our mercenary nature of our love for God and move beyond it to a deeper, truer love.
• Job was not fully the servant he should be, and could be, and God was going to enable him to attain that kind of greatness the only way it can be attained—through adversity and pain.
• Job would become more fully someone who serves God for nothing and loves God for himself alone.

 

God and Evil

• The book of Job teaches a very asymmetrical relationship of God to evil.
• In other words, the world is not dualistic, with two equal and opposing forces of good and evil vying for supremacy.
• The Bible shows us that God is sovereign and is completely in charge.
• He has total control over Satan, and Satan can only go as far as God allows.
• At the same time, God is not viewed as being the one directly bringing the affliction on Job.
• All things are within his sovereignty, but God does not will the evil in the same way that he wills the good.

 

The Speeches of Job and His Friends

• The speeches of Job’s “friends” wound him deeply, because they are accusatory, and they give pat answers to difficult and mysterious afflictions.
• They assume in a moralistic way that Job’s sufferings are directly related to his sinful actions.
• The solution is to repent and confess his sins to God, and God will restore him.
• The counsel of Job’s friends has elements of truth, but they are too disjointed and too simplistic to be helpful.
• Job’s friends approach the world through a mechanical/formulaic lens.
• They have no room for mystery, and they in essence put God on a leash and can’t imagine him acting in a way that is outside their moralistic formula.
• Job’s sufferings are not punishment for his sin, nor are they a corrective to bring him back from a foolish path.
• Job’s sufferings are intended to give him an “enlarged life with God.”
• Job rejects the counsel of his friends. He knows that their domesticated view of God is wrong.
• He also knows that God is just and he cannot curse God or reject him.
• Job takes the harder path of mystery, and this leads him to the real lesson that God intended for him.
• If Job had accepted the rationale of his friends, he would have missed the real purpose and benefit of what he was going through.

 

The Lord Appears and Job Lives

• The book ends with several surprises.
• The first is that God shows up, and yet he does not destroy Job. Job lives.
• God does come in a “storm” with strong, challenging language. But this is actually a form of God’s grace to him.
• God “answers” him, which suggests a personal conversation between Job and God.
• God did not come to judge or denounce, but to invite Job into a deeper relationship.

 

The Lord Does Not Answer—and Yet He Does

• One of the surprises of the book of Job is that God does not answer Job’s demand for explanation.
• Job expected an explanation from God, and his friends expected God to condemn Job.
• Neither get what they were expecting.
• God does answer, but not in the way that any of them were expecting.
• God offers Job no explanation for the things that have happened to him.
• If he had, Job would have missed the purpose of the suffering, which was to bring Job into a deeper relationship with God where he would learn to trust and love God without the benefits and without all the answers.
• To withhold the full story from Job, even after the test was over, keeps him walking by faith, not by sight.
• He never sees how it all fits together. He sees God instead, which is far greater.

 

The Lord Is God and You Are Not

• God’s reply to Job reminds us of his absolute power, wisdom, and sovereignty. He is God, and we are not.
• God’s knowledge and power are infinitely beyond ours.
• A seven-year-old cannot question the mathematical calculations of a world-class physicist. Yet we think that we can question how God runs the world!
• The way of wisdom is to acknowledge that God alone is God and knows best.
  • In our complaints over our circumstances, there is the implication that we could propose to God better ways of running the universe than those God currently uses.

 

Job Is in the Right and You are Wrong

• Surprisingly, in the end, God rebukes Job’s friends, not Job.
• They assumed Job was in the wrong, because of all his suffering that he supposedly “deserved.” But God rebukes them and tells them to ask Job to pray for them.
• God’s vindication of Job as an innocent sufferer speaks of God’s grace and forgiveness.
• It also reminds us that God is always near his people, and we should continually seek him in the midst of our suffering.

 

“My Servant Job”—Again

• God graciously allows Job the last word!
• Job humbles himself before God and worships him.
• He retracts his earlier statements, and acknowledges that God is sovereign and wise.
• He speaks of now having “seen” God. The suffering has brought him into a deeper experience of the presence of God.

 

The Other Innocent Sufferer

• Job, the righteous, blameless man, is a type of one greater to come.
• Jesus was the ultimate righteous sufferer.
• The one who knew no sin was made sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
• Through suffering, Job became a companion of God.
• When we suffer without relief, when we feel absolutely alone, we can know that, because Christ bore our pain, he will be with us.
• In suffering, we are walking the same path Jesus walked. So, we are not alone. In fact, we are on a path that leads us closer to him.