Rewards for Believing!
Job 42:1 – 6, 10 – 17
When we left Job last time, he had finally received what he thought he wanted most in the world, the opportunity to meet with God, face to face, to explain his dissatisfaction with how God had ordered the world, especially as it pertained to allowing a righteous man, himself, to suffer a great many tribulations without cause.
But rather than the opportunity to go to God and give him a piece of his mind, God comes to Job as a thundering voice from a whirlwind. In fact, rather than apologizing to Job, God instead launches headlong into a divine rebuke that Job was not expecting. Over the next four chapters of the Book, God explains to Job all of the things that Job simply doesn’t understand about God and His creation of the universe and all of things in it.
Through this awe-inspiring response from God, Job was finally able to see himself as simply a part of the fullness of God’s plan. Job suddenly was able finally to look up from the pile of ashes on which he sat, to look through the pain and to see that he felt abandoned, God was right there with him all along.
In our lesson today, Job finally is able to have the conversation that he so desperately wanted but it is not the one that he expected to have. Humbly and reverently Job repents, not for previously unnamed sins as his friends had suggested, but rather he realizes he has been presumptuous: that he has spoken of things he does not understand and has overreached in his accusations toward God. Now in the presence of the living God, Job bows down in silent worship and repents amongst the dust and ashes that have been his home and his Hell for months.
Sometimes the most compassionate and merciful thing God can do is to humble us, to bring us low, so that we bow before him and lean on him and trust him. That is the first mark of the compassion of God: he loves enough to humble us, as he humbled Job, under his mighty hand. In his response to God, Job is humble and contrite. In that moment Job makes another honest and dramatic confession.
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you;
By saying this Job admits that while he had heard of, believed in and obeyed God before his suffering, but only now has he has actually “perceived” God for who he truly is. For Job, God’s coming in the whirlwind and his lengthy rebukes must be seen as a wondrous moment of new insight of the majesty and wisdom of God. Job’s story reminds us that while we can learn much about God from what we “hear” but when “perceiving” God happens, the reality of His greatness comes near to our souls and our lives are reoriented.
There are many moments in life where our perception is limited because it is skewed by our human experiences. We see the world and our God through our own self-centered lens. We see ourselves, and one another, through the sum of our experiences and perceived outcomes.
Job could see justice only in terms of what he deemed was right and wrong, for himself. He judged God and himself through the lens of “righteousness and faithfulness”. However, we and Job must come to see and understand that the God that allowed Job to be persecuted is the same God that restores him.
Our scripture tells us that after Job reconciles with God, God not only restores his fortune, but actually doubles it! God blesses Job’s later life even more than he had his earlier life. He ended up with fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one thousand teams of oxen, and one thousand donkeys. He also had another seven sons and three daughters. Job lived on another 140 years, living to see his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, four generations in all! He died an old man with a full life. Quite the fairytale ending wouldn’t you say?
While we are happy for Job getting back what God allowed Satan to take away and then some, in the real world, in our world, that somehow does not ring true to us. Clearly God has the ability and authority to make anything happen that he wants to make happen, and Job was a bit of a pawn in God’s lesson to Satan and probably deserves compensated but how and when do we get compensated in our lives for being faithful? Where are our Rewards for Believing?
I suspect we have all have pondered at times that wouldn’t it be nice if millions of dollars just dropped in our laps by God as compensation for being good and faithful as we are suffering when we believe that shouldn’t have had to! Isn’t that what the ending of the story of Job seems like? Shouldn’t we have our lives renewed and restored like Job? I know I would!
This scripture, then, can be a tricky and delicate lesson to understand so I need you to listen closely. There are many pastors that preach in big churches, in front of big crowds, making big dollars and living in big houses that would try and convince you that if you are faithful enough, obedient enough, humble enough, righteous enough, if you are enough like Job, that you too may receive double for anything that you feel has been taken away from you unjustly.
They would say that God will repay you double for your losses just like he did for Job. So it is important that we should first understand that the blessing that Job receives is not a reward for faithfulness. It is not as though God is saying to Job “thanks for taking one for Team God there. I know that it was tough, and your life was ruined but I am going to make it up to you, you deserve it!”
Rather the important message to take away from the return of Job’s previous blessings is that they come at the end of the story when Job’s understanding of and reverence for God has grown.
It is after Job has been humbled and has bowed down in despair before God and has asked for mercy. It is after Job has found himself to be unworthy of the great Creator of the Universe and desires to be reconciled to God. That sounds like a salvation plea, a come to Jesus moment, that we as Christians have all been through doesn’t it.
You see, my friends, Job lived thousands of years before the arrival of the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus and consequently there was no context of an eternal Heavenly reward for those that came to believe in God completely and unconditionally.
Having his losses restored by God and in fact doubled by God, gave the hearers of this story over the hundreds of years before Christ, the understanding that “coming into relationship with God” would provide unimaginable future blessings. It did in fact foreshadow the gift of an eternal Heavenly home for us as Christians some four thousand years later.
Our Christian life is filled with spiritual warfare, God’s grace and mercy is poured out on us in those times, in order that we can be by justified by God for having the faithfulness in Him during those times, these times. So, we do have a real expectation for blessings at the end of our story just like Job. We do get blessed in the present as God graciously pours out all manner of blessings here and now. But the blessings we get now are just a tiny foretaste of the blessings to be poured out on us at the end.
And the blessings God will pour out on the believer at the end will be every bit as real as the blessings of Job. Job knew real prosperity, real joy and celebration, real fruitfulness and real beauty.
In our end, in our eternity, we to look forward to unimaginable gifts that will make the most abundant life in this world seem barren. We look forward to riches that will make the world’s billionaires seem poor. And we look forward to a celebration that will make the best party in the world seem like a dirge. The blessings that Job received were temporal, the blessings that we will receive will be Eternal.
Friends, we need to accept that there is such a thing in the universe as suffering that is not a punishment for the sin of the sufferer. In fact, we are here today because we have come to believe completely in that truth, because we have faced it personally and because we have a Savior that has faced it. I told you in the beginning of our series that the Book of Job is about Job and that remains true, but the Book of Job is also profoundly about Jesus, whom Job foreshadows both in his blamelessness and in his perseverance through undeserved suffering.
The disorientation and abandonment of Job are relived in the journey to the cross for Jesus Christ. In the darkness and God-forsakenness of those terrible hours of lonely agony, the sufferings of Job are repeated.
And since the Book of Job is about Jesus, it is also becomes about every man and woman that follows Christ. Every follower called to take up the cross and walk in the footsteps of Christ, must expect in some measure to walk in the footsteps of Job. So, in the end we must conclude that the story of Job will be in some way be about all of us here today as well.
Hear the Good News my friends………..
James, the brother of Jesus tells the early Christians as well as us, the present day Christians this:
“As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy”. (James 5:11).
You have probably heard the phrase, The patience of Job, Theologian Theodore Epp tells us: “that through the patience, or maybe more accurately the persistence of Job, we see what God was able to do with Job and we see what the God of Job can do in ourselves. We learn from Job that through righteous vindication and mercy that the suffering of the godly always includes compensation, or Rewards for Believing. It may not come in this present life. It did in Job’s life, and we can be assured that it will eventually come for us. The Bible says so, and that settles it.”
Job’s reward had to come during his lifetime to complete the object lesson the Lord was presenting to God’s children through Job. However, life for the believer in Christ does not end with his life on earth; it continues into heaven. All believers have an inheritance reserved in heaven.
The Bible tells us in many places that we cannot avoid suffering here on earth. God does not delight in our being afflicted, yet through these afflictions His very gracious purposes are realized that we are part of the awesome plan that God created in eternity past. The suffering will not endure forever however, and we should look beyond it to the Rewards for Believing that God will give for that faithfulness in our eternal home.
This is what James called “the end of the Lord“; the outcome of the Lord’s plan for us includes vindication in our trials and through our patience and persistence we find faithfulness. Dear ones, our Rewards for Believing though being challenged in times such as these, are an Eternal life with fellow Spiritual survivors, walking streets of Gold and joining the Heavenly chorus singing praises to our Triune God. I think that more than doubles anything that we might lost in this world! Amen.