If There Were Only Someone To Take My Side

If There Were Only Someone to Take My Side

Fourth after Easter

Collect: O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest, and desire that which thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Old Testament Lesson: Job 19:21-27a

21 “Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me! 22 Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh? 23 Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book, 24 that they were graven with an iron pen and lead, in the rock for ever! 25 For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; 26 and though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, 27 whom I shall see for myself.

Have you ever felt like you didn’t have a friend in the world? No one who really understood you. No one to would stand by you and stick up for you. Maybe you felt even your closest relatives and friends turned against you.

Have you felt that way? You might be paranoid. Or, you might be Job.

1. Job’s Complaint

Let’s consider Job’s complaint:

• Job was a prominent and wealthy man. He lived a very long time ago, perhaps in the time of Abraham, 2000 years before Christ. He was not Jewish and lived southeast of what would become the Jewish homeland. Somehow he knew the one true and living God, the God whom Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob worshiped. He lived out his faith leading a righteous life. He wasn’t sinless, but the Lord called him “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”

• Satan accused Job before God of being a man who led a God-pleasing life only because God was so good to him. So God allowed Satan to test Job. In a single day Job lost his much of his material wealth and all his children. But he remained loyal to God, saying, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Then Satan told God if Job’s body were attacked, Job would renounce his faith. So God allowed Satan to take away Job’s health. Job developed loathsome sores from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet. He was so miserable he sat in ashes and used a piece of broken pottery to scrape his sores. It was obvious to Job and those who saw him that, if this disease continued to progress, it would destroy his body.

• As you would hope and expect, if you were in Job’s circumstances, people tried to help him.

• The first was his wife. She said to Job, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die.” She probably spoke out of both sympathy and helplessness. As she saw it, nothing but death would end Job’s suffering. If Job cursed God, perhaps God would kill him and that would end his bodily suffering.

• Then three friends of Job did what friends do. They came to see him. When they arrived, Job’s bodily condition had deteriorated to the point that they did not recognize him. They wept. And for seven days and nights they sat with Job and said not a word. Presence is sometimes the only thing we can give and the only thing that can minister to the sufferer. But then they began try to say something. Their talk increased Job’s misery. They had a very simplistic theology: God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. So they began to urge Job to confess his sins. Neither Job nor they knew that Job’s loyalty to the Lord was being tested.

• All the help offered by his wife and friends, left Job feeling isolated, entirely on his own. He says,

God has put my brothers far from me,

   and those who knew me are wholly estranged from

        me.

My relatives have failed me,

   my close friends have forgotten me...

All my intimate friends abhor me,

   and those whom I loved have turned against me.

• Worst of all, though Job kept his faith, he felt that God had become his enemy. In today’s Old Testament lesson Job says to his friends,

Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends, for the hand of God hath touched me! Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh?

Earlier in Job 19, Job says,

He has kindled his wrath against me

                    and counts me as his adversary.

He did not know why, but he felt the Lord had turned against him. The worst of misery in suffering, is to feel, not only that the Lord is not for you, but that the Lord is with you, not as a friend, but as an enemy. Job had to wrestle with the question, “Why has God turned against me?”

• So Job is left wishing that there might be some permanent record of his case.

Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book, that they were graven with an iron pen and lead, in the rock for ever!

He wishes that his words could be put into a book. Better yet that they might be carved into stone, and, as they did in ancient world, the lettering might be filled in with lead to make it more legible. Perhaps someone in the future would read of Job’s case and vindicate him of the charge he was suffering for his sins.

2. Job’s Confidence

As is common with sufferers, Job moods changed - in this case from depression and pessimism to hope and confidence. He goes on to make the greatest statement of faith in the book:

For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;  and though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself…

• Job believes that he has a Redeemer who eventually will stand on the earth, defend Job’s integrity, restore Job’s good name, and redeem Job’s reputation. Job may be dead, but his Redeemer will vindicate him by proving that Job’s suffering is not God’s punishment for Job’s sin.

• It will help us to understand what Job means if we understand what a human Redeemer was in the Old Testament. A human redeemer in the Old Testament was known as a “kinsman-redeemer.” He was a close relative who had certain responsibilities. You see this in the book of Ruth. A woman named Ruth was a widow. She lived with her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi. Without husbands to support them, they were very poor. Naomi did own a piece of land to sell, but the land and Ruth went together. Who bought the land must also take Ruth as his wife. They had a relative named Boaz, who redeemed the land and who married Ruth. Both Naomi and Ruth were saved from destitution by their kinsman-redeemer, Boaz.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Kimmel, and the Army Commander on Oahu, General Short, were blamed, relieved of duty, and demoted in rank. They were unsuccessful in restoring their reputations. After their deaths, their families and friends continued efforts to vindicate both. Finally in 2001, Congress exonerated them, and they were restored to the ranks they held before Pearl Harbor. Job believes, that he has a Redeemer in heaven who will eventually stand on the earth and stand up for Job and redeem his name and reputation.  

• But Job has an even greater hope - that somehow, even if his disease is fatal, and he dies, and his body decomposes, he will yet in his flesh see God. God is the only One who can ultimately vindicate Job, clear his name, and redeem his reputation. Job has confidence that in some way he will see this happen.  What did Job have in mind? By faith he dimly saw dimly what we now can see clearly - the future resurrection of the dead. St. Paul brings it into clear focus:

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.  For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality (1 Corinthians 15:50-53).

When we bury Christians we commit their bodies to the ground, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to immortal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. When we are raised and appear before God and see him, Jesus Christ, our Kinsman-Redeemer, will say of us, “These are my brothers and sisters, and I am not ashamed of them.”

• But there’s a problem. Perhaps you are thinking what I am: “I am not like Job, blameless and upright. I have suffered, and sometimes for things I didn’t do, but I have never been in Job’s position - a righteous sufferer whose integrity will be vindicated by God.” But here, too, we see clearly, what Job saw only dimly. When we are raised and appear before God for judgment, we will be vindicated before the world and found righteous in God’s sight, not because we have lived sinlessly, but only because our sins are covered by the blood Jesus and God looks on us through the righteousness of Jesus. Jesus is the only One who is the perfectly Righteous Sufferer. But on the cross, he took to himself the sins we have committed and redeemed the good names we have sullied and the reputations we have destroyed. In him all our sins are buried in the depths of the sea and our names and reputations are the name and reputation of Jesus.

One of the reasons we come to this Table on Sundays is because we need to be assured and God wants to to assured “that by the merits and death of (God’s) Son Jesus Christ and through faith in his blood, we...may obtain remission of our sins, and all other benefits of his passion.”