When You Don't Understand Why

The Heavenly Conversation Between God and Satan 1:54

He missed the prologue to his own story, and so he was confused. Now, what was that prologue? Well, again, we studied it in part last week, and we'll study it a little more this week, but it involved a heavenly conversation between God and the devil. God and the devil.

Specifically, God had mentioned to the devil Job's righteousness. He said, oh devil, have you considered My servant Job, who is righteous, he's a good and upright and upstanding guy. Have you considered him? And the devil nodded and said, yes.

And then the devil threw back at God the equivalent of this, that, well, he's faithful, but that faith is fickle. If something bad was to happen to Job, in fact, if a lot of things bad happened to Job, he wouldn't be this way. In fact, God, he would curse You to Your face.

God's Sovereign Limits on the Devil's Power 2:47

Well, again, for reasons that are God's alone, God permitted the devil's request, but with limitations. He had a hedge of protection around Job, and He lifted it with regards to Job's possessions and relationships. And again, almost immediately, to show the power of the devil if he was given unfettered access to your own life, consider this: that within a single day, Job is sitting there, and messenger after messenger — before the other messenger had even been done speaking — messenger after messenger came in and told him of all the people who had died and all things he'd lost.

The devil, if he was granted unfettered access to your life, could mess you up far faster than you possibly know. Thank God He doesn't. Thank God He protects us in this way. Whatever the case, Job lost everything in chapter one, and Job's sitting there wondering why.

He didn't know that God and the devil had talked. He didn't read chapter one and most of chapter two. He was unfamiliar with any of this. He didn't know that they talked.

He didn't know what they talked about. He did not know that he himself was about to be tried and tested through the eyes of a watching world, not only in his own age, but across 4,000 years later — we're still talking about his story. He didn't know that. He didn't know what was going on.

He didn't have the foggiest clue. All he knew at the close of chapter 1 was that he was hurting. And though he was hurting, chapter 1 ended with these words. It said that all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.

Despite losing almost everything he had, Job's faith remained intact. The question as we come to chapter 2 is this: would that faith remain if Satan were permitted to attack his body, attack his flesh? And that's the question this chapter deals with.

Satan Among the Sons of God: The Fallen Accuser 4:25

“Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil? And still he holds fast to his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause.”

— Job 2:3 (NKJV)

All right, if you would, let's look again at the first three verses. We'll look at verse — 3 verses of chapter 2 — and then just work our way as far forward as time will allow. Verse 1, now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord.

So the Lord said to Satan, from where do you come from? And Satan answered and said, I come from going to and fro on the earth, from walking back and forth upon it. Then the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job, that there's none like him on all the earth, blameless and upright, one who fears God, one who shuns evil?

And still, still he holds fast to his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without cause. All right, so back in chapter one, we discover that there had been a day when the angels had presented themselves before the Lord. You have this angelic parade, and for reasons we don't fully understand, the devil came among them.

It's probably because the devil had once been an angel that he was permitted to do so. Whatever the case, he comes with this group. Now, in today's text, we read of a second similar encounter. This happened in chapter one.

It also happens here in chapter two. The angels present themselves before the Lord. Satan is among them. And God asked Satan the same question He did the first time.

He says, where do you come from? Where have you come from? I see I've got My angels here. I've got Michael and Gabriel and these guys.

How about you? Where have you come from? And I think the point was this: you're not a heavenly resident anymore. You've been evicted.

You do not belong. You have a different home. You have a different abode. The devil responded to the question the same way he did the first time.

He says, you know where I come from — walking to and fro on the earth. I was cast down like lightning. You remember that, oh God, I was cast down. That's where I am.

I walk back and forth across the earth. I think this is a bitter acknowledgement that his estate, his abode, his home was no longer where it once was, that he had truly been cast down. And now he's reduced to nothing more than a roaring lion who is in an enclosure and seeks within the limited confines of that enclosure those that he can devour.

1 Peter 5 makes that exact statement about him. In any case, God then, after establishing that the devil is now a wandering nomad, in verse 3, God reiterates the question that He'd asked back in chapter 1: have you considered My servant Job? Now, at this point, of course, Satan had considered Job. In fact, he had done his best to destroy him just one chapter earlier.

However, it hadn't worked. And I think that's God's point. It hadn't worked. Satan, you remember, you came to Me like one chapter ago.

You came to Me and said that if we did this, he'd curse Me to the face, right? You said that, right? Well, he's still faithful. You incited Me against him without cause, and yet he is still faithful.

That's what God reminds the devil of in verse 3, where He says Job still holds fast to his integrity.

Skin for Skin: Satan's Plan B Against Job's Body 7:23

“Skin for skin! Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out Your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse You to Your face.”

— Job 2:4-5 (NKJV)

Well, let's see Satan's response as we look now, verses 4 through 6. And so Satan answered and said, skin for skin, skin for skin! Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. But You stretch out Your hand now, touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse You to Your face.

If he didn't curse You before, you do this and he'll curse You all day long. He'll curse You to Your face. He won't curse You behind Your back. He will curse You to Your face.

And so the Lord said to Satan, all right, behold, he is in your hands, but spare his life. God permits us to be tested and tried, and yet He always defines the parameters of that test and those trials. Now, what we're seeing in verses 4-6 is that Satan always has plan B. The devil always has plan B. If you try to block the devil at the front door, he'll go around to the back.

If you're able to steer away from one temptation in your life, there's a lot of other ways you can be tempted. If you survive one form of attack, there are other tools and implements that he can use. And that's what we see in verse 4. God reminds Satan, hey Satan, it didn't work out so well for you last time you tried this.

And the devil says, okay, plan B: skin for skin. Touch his health — that'll do it. If this other approach didn't work, that's all right — this approach will.

Why Physical Affliction Gives No Reprieve 8:49

You touch his skin and that will break him. Now, broadly speaking, you think that the devil may have had a point here, at least in a broad sense. You see, losing your health, especially in the extreme way that Job did — it can be harder on your heart and your mind and your spirit than most other forms of loss that you can endure.

And the reason why is because physical sickness gives you no reprieve. You see, if tomorrow your car goes flying off the Biloxi Bridge and into the Back Bay, you say, well, that's terrible, and you call Geico, and then you move on with life. Now, there's other things that might happen. Same deal — even death of loved ones, same deal.

There's things that are terrible and horrible, and you don't like and you don't want, and they hurt and they stink terribly for a moment, and that hurt can even echo out further. But here's the thing: for moments of time, you can forget. For moments of time, that pain, as painful as it still is — you can put it aside, and you can go out to dinner, you can go to a movie, you can have coffee.

And for a moment, you don't think about your car at the bottom of the Back Bay. You don't think of the losses that you've endured. You're just able to separate yourself from that hurt. But not so with sickness.

Not so with a physical ailment that causes absolute pain and discomfort in your bones. It's hard to forget about a discomfort that literally, as you're sitting in a chair or rolling around the bed, you can't be free of. And the devil knew that. He knows our ability to disassociate with certain sorts of pain, but you mess with a man's body.

You cause him pain that he can't get away from, even if he's in his own bed at night. That's a different story. It can break that individual, or at least it can put them in a place where mentally they can't handle things in ways that they might be able to handle other difficulties.

And that's the devil's argument in verse 5. Skin for skin. Let's get real here, Satan says. Let's get real.

Skin for skin. Touch his flesh.

The Trial of Job's Flesh and His Wife's Temptation 10:47

“Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?”

— Job 2:10 (NKJV)

Touch Job's flesh, and he will curse You. He'll curse You to Your face. Now, I don't think that God agreed with Satan. See, God has a benefit.

I don't know why Satan does the things he does, but God knows how things are going to turn out. And I don't think God agreed, but He says, all right, we'll give that a try. Behold, he's in your hand, but spare his life. Okay, let's see what happens next in verses seven through 10.

So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and he struck Job. He struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took for himself, this is Job, he took for himself a potsherd. It's like a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat there in the ashes.

And then his wife said to him, do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die. She wants him to do the same thing the devil wants him to do. Curse God and die.

Why are you still doing this? Verse 10, but he said to her, your speaking is one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and shall we not accept adversity?

The Severity of Job's Disease and Satan's Full Fury 11:55

And all this Job did not sin with his lips. You know, I have doctor next to my name, but I am not a physician. I cannot diagnose physical ailments or symptoms. However, I do know how to use the internet.

There's a doctor. I don't know if you've heard of him. He's running around. His name is WebMD.

And if you have questions about health issues, you can go to Dr. WebMD and find all sorts of interesting details. In fact, there's also Dr. Wikipedia. There's other tools you can find to try to shed light on symptoms like we see Job has. So that's what I've attempted to do.

Now, in order to understand those symptoms, you have to go through all the book of Job and start categorizing them. Here we see boils from head to toe. I don't know what that is. It sounds terrible.

But I know that as you go throughout the next 40 chapters, more symptoms are introduced. Throughout the book of Job, we see that he had restless nights of sleep. He had skin that was cracked and caked with worms. He had pain that made him bite at his own flesh.

He had rotten, wrinkled skin. He had bad breath. He had bones that cleaved to his skin, bones that radiated with pain, Scripture said, and he had blackened sores all over him. Now, many medical scholars and others have concluded that Job may have been suffering from a terrible disease that's referred to as black leprosy.

Whether that was it or not, I don't know. I have no idea, but I know this much: it was terrible. Whatever he was suffering from was dreadful. You see, if Satan was given carte blanche to mess with his body only to the point of death, he couldn't kill him, but he could do everything else.

Do you think Satan said, you know, I think I'm going to use about 80% of all the stuff I could hit him with, and I'll show him a little bit of mercy because that's pretty rough? Do you think that's Satan's approach? Well, no. Satan leveled both barrels. Whatever Satan was allowed to do in the confines of God's parameters, he did to the hilt — as sickly and as hurting and as pained as you can physically make a man before he dies from it.

I think that's what we see here. From the sound of it, that's what happened. It gave Job a sickness that he says he could feel right from his skin to his bones. Again, I'm no doctor, but there's not much between the skin and the bone, and everything in between — that's everything, and across the whole body.

Remember the boils from the head to the toe. Whatever he had was dreadful to the extreme — so dreadful that his wife takes a look at him and says, you're done. Game over. Curse God and die.

Be done with this. She sounds like a real keeper.

The Three Friends and the Ministry of Silent Presence 14:32

Let's look at verses 11 through 13. Verse 11. Now when Job's friends heard all of this adversity that had come upon him, each one came from his own place. He had Eliphaz the Temanite, he had Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.

And they made an appointment together to come and mourn with him and to comfort him. And when they raised their eyes from afar — so when they looked at him from distance, verse 12 says, they did not recognize him — they lifted their voices, they wept, each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head towards heaven.

And then they sat down with him, verse 13, on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great. All right, up to this point, the book of Job, it's been pretty simple in terms of characters. There's been just three.

You had God, you had the devil, and you had Job. I guess you had his wife as well. But beginning here, verse 11, we see that three new characters are introduced. You have Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.

And these guys, at least theoretically, these guys are Job's friends, right? The cavalry has come. Wow, hurrah. However, we're going to see that their input is going to be somewhat less than helpful over the next few weeks.

Whatever the case, the cavalry shows up, verse 12. But as they show up, they're as aghast at his condition as his own wife is. They don't even recognize him. They don't even recognize him.

Now again, that speaks to the magnitude of his illness. His symptoms are so bad, so manifest, so terrible, that he was unrecognizable. You know, when Scripture says he was covered with boils in verse 7, I think it meant covered with boils. With that said — Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar — they roll up.

They just take a look at him, and they start crying. That's the depth of horror that Job had undergone to cause this reaction. Now, what did they do at this point? Well, at this point, they demonstrated solidarity with Job.

They see he's just in a terrible pain, and so they sit down, and they remain seated and quiet for seven days, which seems like a lot of time. Now, so far, so good. Job's friends, think of it this way. Job's friends have taken time out of their life.

They had other places to be. I don't know what Bildad did or Zophar. I don't know what his habits and hobbies were, but I know this much: to take a week out of your life to sit with someone who's undergoing this — they put their entire lives on hold. So far, so good, right?

It's good that his friends would do that. That's a good start. And beyond that, they also did something else good: they were quiet. Sometimes if you visit someone in the hospital, or there's counseling, or what have you — sometimes the best thing you can do is just kind of listen or just stay quiet, because even Job wasn't talking at this point.

So they stayed quiet. They realized this isn't the time to try to give Job a bunch of advice, and so they seem to be waiting for him to speak first. And it would take a while — in fact, it'd take about seven days. At that point he spoke.

Now I'm going to read just one big block.

Job Curses the Day of His Birth: The Lament of Chapter 3 17:31

I'm going to read chapter three, and then we'll move towards some concluding thoughts on it. But let me read chapter three so we can hear the pain, we can hear the heartache of Job. Verse one, after this Job opened his mouth and he cursed the day of his birth. And Job spoke and he said, May the day perish on which I was born, the night in which it was said a child is conceived.

May that day be darkness, may God not seek it, nor the light shine upon it. May darkness, the shadow of death, claim it. May a cloud settle on it. May the blackness of the day terrify it.

And as for that night, may darkness seize it. May it not rejoice among the days of that year. May it not come into the number of those months. He's cursing his own birth date here.

Oh, may that night be barren. May no joyful shout come upon it. May those who curse it curse the day, those who are ready to arouse the Leviathan. May the stars of this morning be dark.

May it look for light but have none, and not see the dawning of the day, because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb, nor hide sorrow from my eyes. Why did I not die at birth? Why not perish when I came from the womb? Why did the knees receive me?

Why the breast I should nurse? For now I would have lain and still I'd been quiet. I would have been asleep. Then I would have rested with kings and counselors of the earth who built for themselves ruins, with princes who had gold or filled their houses with silver.

Why was I not hidden like a stillborn, like infants who never saw the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they do not hear the voice of the oppressor. The small, the great are there, the servants free from the master.

Why is light given to him who's in misery, and life to the bitter of the soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and search for more than hidden treasures, who rejoice exceedingly, are glad when they can find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?

My sighing comes before I eat; my groanings pour out like water. The thing I've greatly feared has come upon me; what I have always dreaded has happened to me. I'm not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble it comes.

The Recurring 'Why' and the Error of Works Theology 19:36

Now, if you were to go back and look at this block of text, there's a repeated question. The question is one word, and that word is the word why. In other words, Job wants to know why he's suffering the way he was suffering. Wouldn't it have been easier if he'd just never been born?

Why is he suffering the way he suffered? Why did he lose his family? You know, if someone dies that you love, the question is why? It doesn't even matter what the circumstances — car wreck, cancer, what have you.

The question is, God, I loved that person and You've taken him away. Why? Now that's just one example. It happens all the time.

We ask God, why this hardship? Why that hardship? But from one end of our life, if you live long enough, to the other, you'll ask, why, why, why? Now, Job, Job had lived, I mean, as righteous a life as man can live.

He was not sinless. He had sinned, and yet he was a stand-up guy. And up till now, you know, Job's looking around at his life, and he says, you know, up till now, God's blessed that. I'm not perfect, you can just see Job saying, but I've done my best.

And up till now, it seems like we had an agreement, God and I, where things would seem to go pretty well. But what happened? I didn't change, but all of a sudden, God's angry with me. He must be angry with me.

If He wasn't angry with me, why is this happening? See, there seemed to be a correlation in Job's mind between his righteous lifestyle and God's blessings. And so what are the implications if the blessings are gone? The implication is that maybe he wasn't that righteous after all.

And in fact, that's exactly what his friends are going to say. See, his friends, when they roll into the picture — and we'll study that next week — they're going to come in and say, well, hey, Job, this sort of stuff isn't an accident. Can we all agree on that? You don't lose everything in a single day, and you don't end up in this condition by accident.

Dear heavens, Job, what did you do? What did you do? You must have done something in order to be in this estate. But Job knew that wasn't the case.

He knew functionally he hadn't been any different the past week, the past year, than really the previous week or the previous year. He'd been giving God his best as he always had, and so he couldn't fathom this. Their whole society was based on the wrong-headed thinking — works theology — that you do enough, good enough, then God will bless what you've done.

That's really not the story of Scripture, but that's a mindset that we can fall into. And because Job even fell into that, he didn't get it. He didn't understand it. The correlation between his righteousness and God's blessings was gone.

The Myth That Godliness Insulates Us from Suffering 22:09

Left him struggling, made him wonder — why was I even born at all? We tend to believe that good people shouldn't suffer. We tend to believe that good people shouldn't suffer. If anyone's going to suffer, we think, it should be Hitler.

It should be some villain. The bad guys should end up like this. The bad guys should have this sort of problem. And on the other hand, the godly people, they should be insulated from that, right?

We think that if God's good and He's just and He's in charge, and He's all powerful, then the villains should be having these sort of terrible days, and the godly heroes of the faith, they should be insulated from harm. That's what we think. At least that's the default setting that we can be inclined to think.

We think godly men and women should be insulated by God from hardship, and by extension, the most godly people should suffer the least. Now, is that the way it works? Not at all, and that's what confounds us. That's what confounds us.

Can you think of any godly people in Scripture who suffered? Give me one, besides Job. Two? I know we're Presbyterians, but we can try harder.

Paul? We've got Paul. There's Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. Paul was in prison.

Paul was beaten. Paul was shipwrecked. Joseph, right? Joseph, this wonderful brother, and the other scurvy brothers all sell him off into slavery in Egypt and the like.

Think of Daniel. Wonderful Daniel. He's thrown into the lion's den. You think of Elijah, like one of the only godly men of age, and he ends up crying under a sycamore tree while Jezebel sends out assassins.

We hear these things, or we hear about Job's suffering, and we go, what's the deal? And the irony, or at least what stands out to us, is that it happened, it seems, almost all the time to some of the most godly people in Scripture.

Suffering Saints Point to Christ, the Suffering Servant 23:53

Stephen, godly deacon, stoned to death. And Joseph, Daniel, Paul, Elijah, Jeremiah, Job. You know, Jeremiah 20, Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet. Jeremiah chapter 20, this is a prophet.

He was as godly a man as there was in his age, and yet he was so reviled and so ill-treated by his people that he also would say in Jeremiah chapter 20, Cursed is the day that I was born. Some of the most godly people in all Scripture were brought to the same point, where it seems like they were just broken.

The most godly person in the Old Testament, you could argue, is Job. Who's the most godly person in the New Testament? If you said Jesus, we're on the same page. Well, guess what?

They both suffered. The pages of Scripture are drenched with the blood and the tears of godly people. So once and for all, get out of our mind that being good and godly and righteous insulates you from harm. This is not the prosperity gospel we're teaching here.

Rather, we're teaching a gospel where men and women throughout the centuries, throughout the ages, sometimes do suffer and die and undergo hardships in a way that points like a neon arrow to the Son of God, the suffering servant, the Lamb who was slain. Now Job, again, he didn't get all that. And honestly, neither did Elijah when he was crying under the tree.

Neither did most of the same people we're talking about. They really didn't seem to get it. And so they asked why. The book of Habakkuk starts with this question: how long?

They all wondered these things, and it's understandable. If we were back then, we'd wonder too.

Refined by Fire: God's Purpose in Trying Our Faith 25:34

In your own life, you may be asking these sort of questions. So it's normal to be in this estate, but it's also normal for God to look upon His most beloved people and to refine them over a fire that they don't necessarily want, but which will do them a great blessing, which will help them tremendously and help their ministry in ways that they might not see it when they're undergoing the hardship.

Some of us are in church this morning because of some heartache in your life. Some of us are in church this morning, come to God in prayer, come to His words, because He has nudged you and moved your life with enough thunderstorms as to prompt and cause you to come to a place that you might otherwise not come.

He knows how we tick. He knows how we work, and He'll use all manner of things — most of them, most of them — that can be difficult in order to prompt us and nudge us in direction that we need to go and allow us to be refined and have our faith tried.

And yes, He will try our faith. If it happened to Job, it can happen to you. The question is, how will we respond? We do hate that there seems to be disparity between how the wicked seem to prosper and even the most godly, righteous people seem to suffer.

We hate the disparity. Even Jesus understood that this disparity is something, is something that we're not supposed to like. But His reminder is that a better day is coming. His reminder is that if we have problems with what seems to be unfair in the world around us, when the wicked seem to prosper and the righteous seem to be persecuted, His consistent reminder is this: Justice is coming.

Justice Is Coming: Vindication and Every Tear Wiped Away 27:07

The question is not whether you will be vindicated and your faith will be borne out as true. That's not the question. You will be vindicated, and so will your faith. Question of when.

The wicked will be judged. The question of whether it will happen is not the issue. It's just a matter of when. And in God's timing — which is the short answer — in God's timing, every ounce of evil will be dealt with.

There will not be a single drop, a single scintilla of wickedness in all of the created realm that will not be dealt with in God's time. And at the same time, it's not just that He judges evil, but it's also, as we see in Revelation 20, 21, that He comes alongside you and I and He says, I know, I know it's been hard and I know it's been hurting, but you have kept the faith — enter into your rest.

And then He bends down, and He does the most loving thing that a father can do for a child, and He wipes a tear from the eyes of people just like you and I, people including you and I. If you go to your grave with unresolved hurt and heartache, you will awaken in a place where your tears will be wiped clean.

And when you can look back at the hardships of the here and now, and still go, I see now something I didn't see then. Job has perspective now he didn't have. In chapter 3 — Job is not still repeating in heaven right now the same words he repeated in chapter 3. He gets it now.

So will we in God's time. My encouragement to you this morning: wait, trust, be faithful. God may be this week or next week — God may put things in your life that will test you and will try you. Now, God willing, it will not be as severe as what Job underwent.

But whatever the case, however severe it is or isn't, God will put things on our life that will refine our faith and test us and try us. And in those moments where we feel alone and hurting and we ask why, He gives us an invitation. The invitation is this: turn to Him and ask.

Lift up your hand and say, how long? And trust to know this, that even if you don't get the answer right away, God grasps your hand and holds it tight and leads you through the valley of the shadow of death. Even now, God's everlasting arms are open to you. My encouragement is that you trust and you fall into them this day.

Let's pray. If you'd like to check out additional recordings or videos by Dr. Toby Holt, please visit our website at fpcgulfport.org. And if you're on the Gulf Coast, come join us at 11 a.m. Sundays at First Presbyterian Church of Gulfport, Mississippi.