Ten Crucial Convictions
A Study in the book of Job
This talk is also available on video - three videos of about 25 minutes each, and a bonus video of about 10 minutes.
In This Article:
Introduction
It is quite common these days to hear people say, “It doesn’t matter particularly what you believe, as long as you are sincere.” Actually nothing could be more absurd or further from the truth. We would never think of applying that maxim to the physical laws in the real world. You never hear of anyone standing on top of a cliff and saying, “I sincerely believe I can fly,” and then jumping off. We simply believe too strongly in the law of gravity. It is a strange feature of the modern world that, with all our scientific knowledge, we switch off our brains when it comes to the non-physical world. In matters of eternal importance, the world has abandoned reason.
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What I believe is tremendously important. It shapes everything I am and everything I do. If my beliefs are faulty, sooner or later I am going to get into trouble – especially when life gets difficult.
But if my belief systems are sound, then I will be like the Rock of Gibraltar and nothing will be able to shake me.
Each of us has a picture inside of our heads of what the world is like. I like to call it our “map.” We cannot make our way through the world without these maps.
This young girl is starting to make her way and forming her maps. If you look closely you will see that the map in her head is back to front. None of our maps is fully accurate – the world is far too complex for that. And so we need to keep revising them. Quite a good definition of maturity is someone who is willing constantly to revise their belief systems. Every now and again we sense that our map does not match reality, and it gives us a very uncomfortable feeling. The technical term for this is “cognitive dissonance.” Every time I feel that, it’s an opportunity to grow. There are people who, rather than do the hard work of changing their maps to fit reality, try to force reality to fit their maps. These people can be quite dangerous, especially if they are in power, and they can become extremely angry if you question their maps.
There is a big difference between what I say I believe, and what I really believe.
What I really believe is called my convictions. Convictions are not just head-knowledge, they are heart-knowledge. They are what really shape my life and my behaviour. In my conscious mind, I might really think I believe something, but in my unconscious mind I actually don’t.
Our mind is like an iceberg – at least nine-tenths of it is below the surface - the unconscious mind. It’s a little scary to think that a vast area of my own mind is unknown to me, but it is – by definition - unconscious. To make matters worse, there is a kind of brick wall between the conscious and the unconscious mind, as if the conscious does not want us to know what’s going on “down there”. This wall is called Denial. Denial is very real and we all engage in it. “De Nile is more than a river in Egypt!” Perhaps the reason is that we are a little afraid of what is “down there” because we think it may be ugly and unacceptable. But we actually need to know what’s down there, otherwise it will run our lives without our knowing why.
A famous incident took place in America some years ago. A group of parents were watching their children playing soccer. An angry altercation broke out between two of the fathers until one of them picked up a brick and hit the other over the head, and killed him. Later, in custody, he said: “I don’t know what came over me, I’m not a violent man.” He is a man in deep denial – he is a very violent man, he just doesn’t know it, and has never admitted it. As long as he goes on denying it, he had better be kept in prison, because he is liable to do something violent again.
How do I find out what is in my unconscious mind – what I really believe?
1. Dreams.
Dreams are the highway to the unconscious. Sometimes dreams are simply the brain’s way of freewheeling and cleaning up stuff from the day. They are bizarre, but they don’t mean very much. But every now and again we wake up from a dream and we somehow know that was important, and we need to find out what the message of the dream is. It is possible to train yourself to remember your dreams, and then you can go for help to someone who knows how to interpret them.
2. Pressure.
If I hold a wet sponge lightly in my hand, nothing comes out. But when I squeeze it, water comes out. Why does water come out? Or more to the point, why does water come out? The answer is: because water is what was inside.
When we come under pressure, what is really inside us comes out.
3. Art.
All good art contains an “objective correlative.” That means it creates something objective that I can look at or listen to which correlates with something deep inside me. For example, whenever, in the old days, the family were watching “Little House on the Prairie,” I used to tease them because they all sat there and wept. But every now and again I made the mistake of watching the programme myself, and, sure enough, about 40 minutes into the programme, I found myself in difficulty. It usually happened when some child was in trouble, and finally a strong adult understood and came to the rescue. (Remember Hoss?!) Whenever I weep in a movie, it tells me that something in my unconscious is being touched, and I have an opportunity to learn something important.
And here we come to the book of Job. The book of Job is a work of art. It is dramatic poetry. It was originally not intended to be read, but to be performed. It may not be our style of art, we have come used to things being much more brief and neatly packaged. But Job is a work of art. It paints a number of characters, and we are meant to examine which ones correlate to something within us. There is tremendous power in pictures and stories. The pictures and story of Job invites us to examine our convictions, and leads us to ten crucial ones.
The book of Job
Job is a book about suffering. The world is full of suffering. We will be very fortunate if we go through our whole lives without some really hard times. If there was ever a place where God was going to answer the question of the problem of suffering, it would be the book of Job. It is a book that gives us permission to ask questions – “Why? … Why me? … Why now?” It is when I’m going through hard times that my convictions become tremendously important. If they are faulty, the hard times are liable to crush me; if they are good I will be able to endure and come through victorious.
Job is a book that gives us ten wonderful beliefs to help us through hard times – ten crucial convictions.
Conviction #1 - We are not in a reward-and-punishment
relationship with God.
The first verse of the book we says, “Job was blameless and upright.”
This is the starting point and foundation of the book. It is repeated in Job 1:8 and 2:3. Everything in the book must be seen against the background of the fact of Job’s blamelessness. Surprisingly, only four people in the whole Bible, other than Jesus, are ever called “good.” They are, Simeon, Joseph of Arimathea, and Barnabas. This is not to say that these people were perfect. Of course not. As we go along we will see the Job had faults. What it is saying is that his heart was thoroughly towards God, and he was living as well as you can expect of the human being. And God really appreciated that.
This is the key to the whole book: Job’s suffering had nothing to do with his sins or failures.
We are not in a reward-and-punishment relationship with God.
This means that when things go wrong, we are not necessarily being punished by God, and when things go right we are not necessarily being rewarded by God. I say “not necessarily,” because sometimes God does reward and punish. I believe that if someone constantly ignores God, they are risking discipline and punishment. Equally, I believe that when someone is consistently honouring God, he may well pour prosperity of various kinds into their lives. But this is not a rule. The book of Job strongly opposes the idea that all suffering is caused by our shortcomings and sins. Sometimes very good people are required to suffer very deep things.
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It’s amazing how deeply this idea of reward-and-punishment is ingrained in us. From an early age we are taught that bad behaviour is punished and good behaviour is rewarded. We are taught that you get nothing for nothing: that you have to work for everything - “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” And, up to a point, it is important to teach children these things. But they very easily become a conviction. My mother, who was a good Baptist woman, and in her conscious mind would have said we live by grace not by works. But one Sunday afternoon she did some knitting. Later that night she was rushed into hospital for what, I think, was a miscarriage. It was a brother or sister that I never met. When I was grown up, my mother told me that for many years she had believed that she had been punished for knitting on a Sunday. Unconsciously, she believed that she was in a reward-and-punishment relationship with God.
Santa Claus promotes the same faulty conviction. On the surface, he is this big generous man with a sack of toys on his back, handing out goodies to children. But remember the old Christmas song “Santa Claus is comin’ to town.” It is a sweet little song with a lilting melody. But look at the lyrics:
You better watch out, you better not cry,
You better not pout, I’m telling you why:
Santa Claus is comin’ to town.
He’s makin’ a list, he’s checkin’ it twice,
He’s gonna find out who is naughty or nice,
Santa Claus is comin’ to town.
Have you ever noticed how many pictures of Santa Claus show him holding a list? What is the message here? Big Brother is watching you. If you’re not good, you won’t get any toys. It is reinforcing the idea that we are constantly in reward-and-punishment relationships. And, "You better not pout ,You better not cry" is teaching children to equate crying and pouting, which are not the same thing at all. It is in fact encouraging children to repress sad emotion – a very dangerous thing.
I call it Santa with claws!
Conviction #2 - Satan and the spirit world are real.
Job 1:6 – “One day the Angels came to present themselves before the Lord.”
Angels love to be in the presence of God. When Gabriel presented himself to Zachariah he described himself by saying, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of the Lord.” It was almost as if Gabriel was saying, “That’s what I do for a living, and I love my job.”
Job 1:7 – “Satan also came with them. The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?”
Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.”
Whereas the angels love to be in the presence of the Lord and feel very settled there, Satan is very uncomfortable in the presence of the Lord. He would far rather spend his time wandering through the world causing trouble. And there is a certain restlessness in him – he roams to and fro. He never settles. And he is real.
There is much more in this world than we can just see. There are two worlds co-existing – the physical and spiritual. And the spiritual is as real as the physical. If we look at the ministry of Jesus, it is striking to note that about a third of his ministry was devoted to the casting out of demons. (The other two thirds were given to preaching and healing.) Are we going to say that Jesus was deluded, that if he had only lived in the 21st century he would have known better? If you think that, you do not serve the Jesus I serve. In fact, I believe that demons gathered in Palestine between 4BC and 30AD specifically to try to destroy the ministry of Jesus. Angels also gathered to protect Jesus.
All of this is not old-fashioned fairy-tales, it is true and real, and if we do not believe that, we will be very vulnerable. It is very hard to protect myself against something I don’t actually believe in.
The story of Hayden Mellsop.
Hayden Mellsop was a New Zealander who went as missionary to inland China in the 1940s and 50s. I heard him speak when he was an old man visiting South Africa. He told of his early days in China when he was learning the ropes. One day a Chinese pastor came to see him and said to him, “Do you believe in demons? Because you can’t minister here if you don’t.” Hayden answered, “Yes I do.” That’s what he thought he believed. But he was to discover that actually he didn’t. The Chinese pastor discerned this, and took him down to a Hindu temple. As they were standing in the temple he noticed a group of about twenty men sitting on low stools with crossed legs, swaying back and forth holding their holy books in their hands. Then the Chinese pastor said, “Watch.” As Hayden watched all of the men put the books down on the floor in front of them, folded their arms, closed their eyes, and went into a kind of glazed trance. Then all twenty of them lifted between 18 inches and 3 feet off the floor and drifted around the room in the air. Being a westerner, Hayden was looking to see if there were any wires or pulleys holding them up, thus proving that he did not really believe in demons. But what persuaded him of the reality of the spirit world was not sight of the men floating in the air, but the terrible depression that came on him in the six weeks that followed. He was not a naturally depressive person, but he wanted to take his own life. The white missionaries prayed for him, but had no success. It was the Chinese pastors who came and prayed for him and gained deliverance for him. He learned from that experience never to go to any pagan ceremony or temple simply as a spectator. He only went if he were covered with prayer and his purpose was to uphold the name of Jesus. Some years later he was way up in the Highlands of China where a white man had never been seen before and English had never been spoken. People came from all over to see this amazing tall pale man. And then a little girl came rushing up and started swearing and cursing at him in the foulest language he had ever heard – in English.
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The spirit world is very real.
I generally find that people have one of two reactions to this sort of story. There are some who would say, “Now, Andrew, you getting a little bit carried away. You are being too dramatic and almost superstitious.” These people don’t really believe in demons and give Satan too much leeway to do damage. Then there are people that “see demons behind every bush.” They see demonic activity in everything that goes wrong – even if I catch a cold, they say that a demon is behind it. I know of people who have tried to cast out demons out of a child because he had epilepsy.
Both of these reactions are very unhelpful.
The spirit world is real: God is real, Jesus is real, angels are real, and Satan and the Demon world are real. If we do not carry this conviction, we will not be able to live a full and safe Christian life. But demons are not all-powerful. A Christian who is living consciously in a faith-relationship with God is not very vulnerable. We don’t have to keep talking about demons, and, I believe, should not talk to them. As long as we keep our eyes on Jesus, we will be safe, and have no need to be afraid.
If you have reason to believe that demons are active around you or in your family, do not panic or be afraid. I recommend that you get hold of the book “The Bondage Breaker” by Neil Anderson. This will give very practical ways of breaking that bondage.
Conviction #3 -There are things going on in heavenly places .
And we're almost totally unaware of them.
Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
Satan replied. “Stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, he is in your hands; but you must spare his life.” - Job 2:3-5
This is a scene of tremendous conflict in heaven. There is a great warfare going on between God and Satan - a warfare of cosmic proportions. The book of Revelation is all about this cosmic struggle.
We might ask, “God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he end it?” That would be nice, but there are things beyond our understanding involved here. In the meanwhile, we must learn to live with the fact of what is going on.
There is a corollary to this conviction that there are things going on in heavenly places:
Your struggle may be a part of a spiritual warfare, and your keeping the faith may be winning battles in spiritual realms.
This is a tremendously encouraging truth. There are many people who are lying in bed, or confined to wheelchairs feeling helpless and useless. As a pastor I often used to say to people in these situations, “Be careful of saying that you are useless. Just by keeping your faith, you are serving a purpose in the kingdom of God.” It is so ingrained in us that we have to be doing something to be of any value, and this is just not true. John Milton put it well in his poem about his blindness: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
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Victor Frankel was a Jew who endured the horrors of the concentration camps during the Second World War. He was one of the few who survived. While he was in the camps, he made a study of why some people just died, and others didn’t. And he came to a conclusion: Those who had a sense of purpose and a sense of meaning survived.
My parents gave me this picture when I was a child and it hung over my bed for many years. It served the purpose of heightening my awareness that there were things going on around me which I could not see. More specifically, that Jesus was present and guiding my life.
Frankl subsequently wrote a book entitled, “Man’s search for Meaning,” in which he said that without meaning, our lives just fritter away. He said: “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances alone, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”
And so, just by keeping the faith, just by staying cheerful and positive, your suffering may be serving purposes way beyond your imagining.
Conviction #4 – Bad things happen
to good people.
Job 2:7 – “So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores. Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.”
This picture of Job sitting on the ground scraping puss out of his sores has become a primal picture of suffering in the world. Many artists have painted it. And it is a stark reminder that bad things happen to good people. We may not like it, we may argue with God about it, but it is a fact.
The best man at my wedding – Brian Harbinson – contracted brain cancer at the age of 34 and was dead by the age of 35, leaving behind a lovely wife and two children too small to remember him. And he was a good man – a very good man.
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We might ask “Why?” Many people ask that question.
There was a survey done recently in England about why people do not follow God or go to church. The answer that came back above all others was the problem of why innocent people suffer.
We will come to the question “Why?” under Conviction #9. But the fact is, bad things happen to good people.
Conviction #5 – Fears can be
self-fulfilling.
Job 1:5 - "Early in the morning, Job would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of his children.”
Now that’s wonderful. Job prayed for his children.
When I was a teenager I was part of the big youth group. We used to meet at the church to play volleyball every Monday and Thursday evening. I noticed on Mondays that my parents and another couple arrived and went into the church for an hour. I only discovered years later that every Monday both of those sets of parents fasted all day, and then met at 5.30 for an hour to pray for their children. Between the two families there were eight children. One has died; all of the other seven are still serving the Lord fifty years later. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. My parents fasted and prayed for me every week. It’s a great privilege to have parents who pray for you.
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But Job is nursing a fear. He says, “It may be that my children have sinned.” (Job1:6) Job is carrying a sneaking fear for his children.
We have to be careful of our fears.
A little later, when Job was in the midst of his suffering, and his children had all died, he said, “The thing I feared has come upon me.” (Job 3:25.)
For all his blamelessness and uprightness, Job had been nurturing fears down the years – fears that his prosperity and good fortune would come to an end.
We need to be careful of our fear-life, because fears can be self-fulfilling.
Now, fear is a normal, healthy thing. If I don’t fear certain things, there’s something wrong with me. The other day I was baby-sitting my three-year-old granddaughter. After she had gone to sleep, a big thunderstorm came up. Next thing I heard her crying and I went to see what was wrong. She told me, “It’s too scary for thunder.” So I picked her up and cuddled her and reassured her, and eventually she went back to sleep. Now that was perfectly normal fear, appropriate to her age.
But then there are fears that are not normal or acceptable. Job has been worrying all along about his children, his wealth and his health. Every time they had a dinner party, he was fearful that his children might have sinned, and so he performed a sacrifice just in case. Even when everything is going well, he is worrying. And Satan sees this weakness and hones in on it.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even need Satan’s intervention for our fears to come true. We can fixate so much on our fears that we do things that actually make happen. I know of one teenage girl who was so afraid that her parents might reject her, that she did everything in her power to make them reject her. This is self-defeating behaviour, and it is irrational, but people with perpetual fears are very prone to it.
We need to be very careful of our fear-life: Satan sees it and hones in on it, and we are prone to make it come true.
are of part of life,
Conviction #6 - Grief and perplexity
and need to be expressed.
It’s a twisted view of the Christian life which has no room for lament. There were no short cuts in Gethsemane.
Job 3:1 –After this, Job opened his mouth and said, “Cursed be the day that I was born…”
Job has hit the bottom – he wishes he were dead. It’s a terrible thing to get there, and it can happen to any of us. When Job gets there, he opens his mouth and makes his feelings known, for chapter after chapter.
Job has the good reason to be depressed. He has lost his health, his wealth and his children. All he has left is his life and his wife. And now his wife doesn’t support him either. She says, “Curse God and die.” I can’t help thinking the loss of his wife’s support must have been the hardest thing of all. Job has every reason to be depressed.
Depression is a normal part of life. I should feel depressed every time I lose something. If the length and depth of the depression is proportionate to what I have lost, I am a healthy person.
If a child’s balloon pops, empathise with him for a minute, and then it’s time for him to move on. If my wife dings my new car, perhaps it is acceptable to grieve for an hour – my wife is fine, I have an insurance policy, I’m fortunate to have a car at all. If I grieve for more than an hour, my car means too much to me. If someone loses a child, don’t expect them to be cheerful for a year.
And during that minute, that hour, that year, it is appropriate to express our grief. And God gives us permission do that. The book of Psalms (the longest book of the Bible) is our prayer book. It is the book that teaches us to pray, and it gives us a tremendous amount of material for expressing negative emotion. I love Psalm 57:6 - “Break their teeth in their mouths, O God.” And my favourite: “Let them be like a slug which melts away as it goes along.” Now, God may not actually answer that prayer, but it does me good to say it. “Lord, squash them like a snail on the sidewalk!” Note that I say these things to God, and not to the other person. After I have spent time venting my emotions to God, I will be better equipped to speak to the other person in a more fruitful way.
I recently did a study in the book of Psalms to see how many verses in the psalms express “negative” emotions. (I put “negative” in quotation marks because it is not actually negative to express these emotions.) I discovered that 36% of the verses in the Psalms express anger, grief, depression, or confusion. In the first 90 Psalms, that rises to a staggering 44%. God allows us that. He even allows us to be angry with him. He can take it. When you are angry with someone, at least you’re acknowledging them. And bottling up negative emotion really is negative. It is interesting, though, that in the last sixty Psalms the percentage drops sharply to 21%. Perhaps the message here is that we are allowed to be depressed and down for a time, but the intention is for us to come through it, and to rejoice in the Lord again.
How do I help someone in distress or grief?
Job 23:13 – “So his friends sat down on the ground with Job for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.”
Job’s friends started very well –they just sat with him.
Sometimes that’s the best. Don’t try to say anything clever, just be with the person.
Some years a member of my church died – an Indian man. It was my day off, but I went down to the house in the late afternoon. When I got there, I was surprised to see that someone had already hired chairs, tables and a marquee and had set them up in the garden. Inside the marquee were a lot of Indian people. Some were Hindu, some Muslim, some Buddist, and some Christian. And they were just sitting.
And so I sat. It was quite uncomfortable, because I come from a culture where we feel a need to talk all the time. But the Indians gave comfort simply by their presence. Perhaps the Quakers have it right when they say, “Only speak if you can improve on the silence.” What a pity Job's "friends" didn't keep to that advice. “Better be quiet and thought a fool than open your mouth and prove it.”
We should be very careful not to think we understand what a person is feeling. If you’ve never experienced a clinical depression, don’t presume to understand. “Snap out of it” is not only cruel, but reveals a great lack of understanding. The depths of the human mind are beyond our understanding.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit priest, put it well in his poem:
Oh the mind,
Mind has mountains;
Cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer.
No-man-fathomed.
Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
Conviction #7– People with faith
can withstand tremendous trials.
In the midst of all his suffering, Job expresses a wonderful faith.
Look at the great statements faith he makes:
“I know that my redeemer lives, and that he will stand at the last day upon the earth” (Job 19:25);
“The Lord gives, the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:21); and,
“Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” (13:15)
Despite everything that is happening, he still trusts in God’s supremacy, he still believes that God is his redeemer, he still believes in life after death, and he shows remarkable acceptance. It's a remarkable phenomenon.
In my thirty years in the ministry, I ministered to a lot of dying people. It may sound strange, but I found those times very rich and uplifting, because I have seen so many people keep the faith through terrible times. I have seen many come to an acceptance of God’s will, not in a fatalistic way, but in the way Jesus did when he said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” I have seen many die in peace.
Let me tell you more about my friend Brian. Once the doctors detected his brain cancer, they operated on him. They opened him up, saw that it was hopeless, and sewed him up again. They told him he might get a couple of months. In fact he got six weeks. In those six weeks, he said something to each of his friends that we all value. To me he said, “Andrew, I have realised that in the real world, you can die.” I have kept that sentence with me all down the years, and it has informed my ministry. To another friend, Ronald, Brian said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”
People of faith can withstand tremendous trials.
Even children can do it. Or perhaps I should say especially children can do it. Sometimes children keep their parents' faith intact.
There was a little girl dying of leukaemia. One night, when she was nearing the end, the nursing sister - a wonderful Christian woman - saw that the girl was afraid, and said to her, “If you look up in the corner of the room, and look very carefully, you will see angels are here to help you. And if things get really bad, just put up your hand, and Jesus himself will come and help you.” The sister then went about her duties and forgot about the little girl for a while. Then she returned to the room and found that the girl had died. But before dying, she had tucked pillows around her elbow, and her little hand was sticking up in the air.
And assuredly, Jesus came to help her.
Conviction #8 – The mind of God
is beyond our understanding.
In Chapters 4-31, three of Job’s “friends” have been arguing with him. (They are not true friends - they all make his life a lot more difficult.) All of them are basically saying that Job’s suffering is as a result of his sin.
Then in Chapter 32 we come to a character called Elihu.
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God’s voice thunders in marvellous ways;
He does great things beyond our understanding.
Out of the North it comes in golden splendour;
God comes in awesome majesty.
How great is our God – beyond our understanding.
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Yet God is tremendously angry with Elihu. Why?
He is a young man, and has a lot to say. Believe it or not he has more to say in the book than God has! We always need to be very careful if we are talking more than God is.
At surface level Elihu’s speeches sound wonderful. There are beautiful passages that I could easily use in worship services; passages like:
First, God is angry because Elihu does not actually believe that God is beyond his understanding. Elihu has an inner map which says, “I can understand God.” It makes God angry when people presume to understand him.
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The second reason God is angry with Elihu is revealed in Job 33:1-6
Note the words “I… my… me.” They occur 15 times in six verses. Elihu, for all his God-talk, is extremely self-centred. He has never dealt with the issue of self.
Elihu has a third problem, revealed in Job 32:1-2 – “Elihu became very angry with Job for justifying himself rather than God. He was also angry with the three friends, because they had found no way to refute Job, and yet had condemned him.”
He is a very angry young man. This is strange. He hasn’t lost his health, money or children. His life is going fine. So why is he so angry? The reason he is angry is: he hates having his maps questioned. He has a simple map in his mind: God is holy, God punishes sinfulness, therefore Job must have sinned. And when he cannot make his world fit into that map, he gets very angry. And he does great damage to Job and others around him.
And so Elihu talks for six long chapters, and God does not say a word. In fact, God has not spoken for thirty-seven chapters, and no one has thought to ask why God is silent. When God finally does speaks. he addresses Job and his three “friends,” but he is so angry with Elihu that he doesn’t say a single word to him. It's a terrible thing when God no longer deigns to speak to you.
Then, in Chapter 38, God finally starts to speak.
In verse one, “God answered Job out of the storm.”
Why out of the storm?
Because God is frightening and God is angry. There needs to be a part of our faith which finds God intimidating. After the space shuttle Colombia blew up, someone asked the pilot of the next shuttle if he was afraid. He answered, “If you’re not afraid, you don’t understand the forces involved.” Of course we must be afraid of God. When the children were approaching the lion in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” one of the children asked, “Is he safe?” And was given the answer, “Of course he’s not safe, but he’s good.” We need to understand that God can speak out of the storm. There needs to be a part of us that is afraid of God.
God is angry because these human beings have presumed to be able to understand him.
And when God finally does begin to speak, he gives no answers. Instead he asks a series of unanswerable questions – seventy of them - seventy being the perfect number. Here are some of my favourites:
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?
Does the rain have a father?
Who gives the rooster understanding?
Who let the wild donkey go free?
Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
What is the way to the abode of light?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
The purpose of these questions is to teach us, in the words of the old song, “How small we are, how little we know.”
The mind of God is beyond our understanding.
Calvin said: “The only way we know God is because he chooses to reveal himself to us. He accommodates himself to us; talks baby-talk; using anthropomorphism and metaphor.”
God has to use metaphor, because he is always beyond our understanding. Our knowledge of him is always only approximate, and is completely dependent on what he chooses to reveal to us.
Conviction #9 – God is sovereign.
Perhaps the central verse of the whole book is Job 40:2 – “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!” God will not be questioned or dictated to.
A wonderful Welsh pastor by the name of Derek Thomas said, “God has no intention of submitting himself to the bar of his creatures, and elevating them to be the judges of his conduct. He does not recognise their right to be censors of him and his ways.”
John Calvin put it this way – “God has such sovereignty over his creatures that he may dispose of them at his pleasure.” That sentence won’t go down too well in the office on Monday morning. Of course the world despises such teaching, because it takes away the sovereignty we so covet over our own lives. Eve’s original sin was that she wanted to be like God. We so wish we were God. God’s sovereignty makes us answerable, and we don’t like it. But whatever human beings may say, God remains sovereign. He created us, he can do with us as he pleases.
There is a corollary to the fact of God's sovereignty:
He can if he wants to, but he doesn’t have too.
We come back to that survey done in England which revealed that the biggest road block to people believing in God was the problem of why innocent people suffer.
Now, all politicians have a publicity manager – a spin-doctor – someone to advise them about how to look good. For example, John Kennedy’s publicity managers realised that his Catholic faith was a problem in the eyes of the electorate, so they advised him to address it head-on. He did so, and many believe it was the speech that got him into the presidency.
Now, without wanting to be irreverent, imagine you were God’s publicity manager, and you saw the survey that showed that the greatest barrier to people’s following God was the problem of suffering. You would advise God to give a good, reasoned answer. If ever there was a book that gave God an opportunity to explain the problem of suffering, Job is that book. And yet God doesn’t do it.
God never gives an answer to the problem of human suffering, and even if he did, it would be incomprehensible to the human mind.
He never gives an answer, he simply asks a host of unanswerable questions.
This situation might be intolerable for us if it weren’t for Conviction #10, which makes all the difference.
God is never obliged to tell us what he is doing.
Conviction #10 – God is always good.
There are times when God, in his sovereignty, might require his children to go to places where it feels as if he has abandoned them. But whatever it feels like, the truth is that God has not abandoned us, God is always good, and always working for the good of those who love him.
How do we know God is good? Because God has created a perfect world.
In Job 38:4 God asks “Where we you when I laid the foundations of the earth, and the morning stars sang together?” The answer, of course, is that we were not there. And if the scientists are right about the Big Bang, it’s just as well we weren’t. The forces at work are beyond imagining. But God was there, and he never burnt his fingers. When the Scripture says “The morning stars sang together,” the original writer had no way of knowing that the stars in fact do sing. We have discovered that with modern radio telescopes. Scientists believe the singing is the echo of the Big Bang.
Out of that enormous explosion God was able to create this amazing planet, which David Attenborough has helped us to appreciate in all its intricacies. The balances required for it all to work are infinitesimal, and yet they are all in place. It is an unbelievable planet.
If you watch the video in this series called “Bonus Ending” you will hear a song “How majestic are you Lord” by Vine Song. which for many years was my favourite.
Conclusion
What we believe matters very much. If we can get these 10 convictions from our head to our heart, we will be like the Rock of Gibraltar where nothing can defeat us.
