Where is God?
Job 23:1 – 9, 16 – 17
When we left Job last week, he was sitting alone atop a burning pile of community trash where he will sit for days upon days, weeks upon weeks, months upon months, scraping the oozing sores that Satan had afflicted upon him, with a piece of broken pottery as his only tool of relief. We saw last week Job’s Faith Challenged by God but as we see in our scriptures today, he was not left behind by his friends.
It must have taken weeks, if not months, for the news of Job’s afflictions to reach them, for them to communicate with one another, and then to travel to find Job. Job himself later refers to this as “months of emptiness”. Job’s friends come “together” rather than separately, perhaps because they sense that the task of comforting Job will be more than any individual can bear. They come “to show him sympathy”, that is, to enter into and share in his grief “and comfort him”, to find a way to ease his pain. But they are not ready for what they see when they arrive.
As they approach the city after their long journey, they catch their first glimpse of their old friend and they are appalled. The smoking rubbish heap is piled higher than the city itself, and as they come closer they spy a lonely figure crouched on the landfill in the distance. That couldn’t be their friend Job could it? No way, they thought, that couldn’t be the once powerful, successful and righteous man they knew.
But the closer they get the clearer the image becomes, it is him, the one that God himself says there is none other like him on Earth. But he looks so much smaller and wasted away, so pale and broken. As they get closer, the horror of his situation grows more real and more devastating. Job looks totally lost and broken sitting on that rubbish pile.
They came, his friends, and sat down next to Job amongst the burning debris, in an act which is reminiscent of the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva, the seven-day mourning period for friends and family. The three were simply there to be present with him and for him and they sat with him for seven days without uttering a word out of respect for the pain and suffering that Job was enduring. But the quiet is about to end.
Beginning with chapter 3 of Job and all the way through chapter 26 in the Book of Job there are three rounds of conversations between the four friends, with the three visitors telling Job that what has happened to him must clearly be a punishment from God for his sins. They try to persuade Job to repent for his sins. When Job argues that he has not sinned, at least not recently enough to deserve such suffering, his friends respond with ever harsher accusations. By the time we get to our message lesson today in Chapter 23, Job has lost his patience with what his friends are accusing him of.
Job believes that he’s innocent, he has always tried to be righteous and faithful. He believes that God has mistreated him. Job wants to have a day in court. He’s utterly convinced that if he can plead his case to God, and for God to hear him, that he will be vindicated. But he has a problem; he can’t seem to find God anywhere. Job tells his friends in anguish and frustration, “if I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. “Where“, he cries, “is God?“
My first thought is how wonderful it must have been that Job was so close to God that he expects to see him around, he expects to go here and there and see him, in the east, or in the west. To find him in the north and in the south. For Job, God was omnipresent, always nearby. What a wonderful blessing that must have been! But now, Job cries out “Where is God?”
And, honestly, isn’t it really hard not to side with Job on this one? We would also do well to learn from Job’s persistence, his unrelenting conviction that he will have his “day in court.” Job wants his hearing because, for all the curses he hurls at the divine silence, he simply cannot let go of the conviction that God is ultimately just, and that God ultimately hears him. It is difficult enough to endure the losses that Job has suffered; now added to that hardship is his growing sense that God has abandoned him, He is nowhere to be found. Job searches in vain for the place where he can deliver his complaint to God. Until that day, until he is heard Job’s questions will linger.
How many times have each of us have felt in the midst of our trials, in the midst of the Pandemic, wondered Where is God in all of this? Like Job, many times, our questions linger as well, and so we have a tendency to let ourselves engage in a destructive pattern of doubt and questioning that likely delays and undermines the power of the response that eventually does come in God’s time, a response of love and grace that will ultimately come to us from God.
In his book Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis is lost in a sea of grief and pain in the wake of his wife’s death. Like Job, Lewis probes deeply into dark questions of faith, asking “Meanwhile, Where is God” and “How can I be abandoned this way?” In times of happiness, Lewis claims that he found God present everywhere he turned. But in the midst of his present anguish, searching for God is like knocking on the door of a house and hearing the door being bolted in your face. What are you left with, he says, is silence and the disturbing fear that maybe this is what God is like after all?
Job has become acquainted with what he perceives to be silence and abandonment but his faith somehow endures. His mouth is full of arguments said to his three friends, but the arguments are not with his friends, the arguments with God!
When we don’t believe that God has treated us justly or fairly or we simply don’t understand the way God has ordered our lives, it can be too easy to simply give in, resigning ourselves to our misfortunes by saying “It must be the Lord’s will; we aren’t meant to understand, I guess we will just have to accept it.” Some of weaker faith might abandon faith in God altogether if, they think, if that is the way God treats his faithful followers.
While Job is frustrated with the way he believes he has been treated despite how faithful and righteous he has been, he is unwilling to accept suffering passively, he also refuses to abandon his faith.
You see Job is like Jesus who was no stranger to feeling deserted. While hanging from the cross, a mixture of blood and tears streamed from Jesus’ limp body. The apparent abandonment of Christ is evident in one last cry, Eli, Eli lema sabachthani, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?
At the heart of Job’s as well as our present reality, is not that he is suffering, or even that God would allow our suffering, but that we allow God to feel distant to us, absent from us, almost so far removed as to be unknowable. As Job asks Where is God he has a longing for a sense of God’s presence, for God’s attention, this is what drives Job’s complaint today and is primary thrust of his plea.
For all Christians, Job’s complaint resonates with us from time to time. Job echoes not just Jesus’ cries of abandonment, but our very own as well. Job gives voice to the bitter complaints and terrors that any believer may feel and that no doubt includes some who join us each week for worship, even some here today!
Hear the Good News my Friends……
Job says this in response to the abandonment that he feels:
Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling!
Charles Spurgeon said this about Job’s complaint: In Job’s uttermost despair he cried after the Lord. The longing desire of an afflicted child of God is once more to see his Father’s face. Job’s prayer is not “that I might be healed of the disease which now festers in every part of my body!” nor even “that I might see my children restored from the depths of the grave, or that my property once more brought back from the hand of the spoiler!” but the first and uppermost cry is, “O that I knew where I might find Him, where is my God that I might come even to his dwelling!!”
Do you remember as children, playing in the neighborhood, or our in the fields around the home, and an ominous storm would rise up, what would we do? We would run home, to find a parent, because that is where we would find comfort, and safety and protection from the ones that we trusted most! Oh that God’s children too would run home when the storm comes on. It is the heaven-born instinct of a gracious soul to seek shelter from all ills beneath the wings of Jehovah.
But a hypocrite, whether a believer or not, when afflicted by God, resents the infliction, and, like a slave, would run from the Master who has scourged him. But to the believer, the co-heir of heaven along with Jesus, the believer kisses the hand which smote him, and seeks shelter from the fury of the rod in the bosom of the God who frowned upon him.
Job’s desire to commune with God was intensified by the failure of all other sources of consolation. Job even turned away from his friends and looked up to the celestial throne. He bids farewell to earth-born hopes, and cries, “O that I know where I might find my God!”
Job spent hours complaining into the divine silent abyss believing that God had forsaken him, was not listening to him, had turned his back on him, that God had abandoned him. But we will see next week that God has been silently, patiently, faithfully, and lovingly listening to and caring for Job the entire time with a purpose in mind. Friends, as Spurgeon says, “Can’t we all bear our cross for a while with a willing heart to understand and embrace God’s purposes for our lives?” We would all do well to learn that lesson along with Job! Amen.