Grace or Karma

Towards the beginning of his book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, Tim Keller writes these words: "No matter what precautions we take, no matter how well we've put together a good life, no matter how hard we've worked to be healthy, wealthy, comfortable with friends and family and successful with our career, something will inevitably ruin it. No amount of money, power, and planning can prevent bereavement, dire illness, relationship betrayal, financial disaster, or a host of other troubles from entering your life. Human life is fatally fragile and subject to forces beyond our power to manage. Life is tragic."

These Sunday mornings, we are looking at the book of Job. Job is a man who loses everything. He loses his family, he loses his wealth, he loses his reputation, and he loses his health. He develops quite quickly this skin disease so that he's unrecognizable to his friends. I don't know whether you've ever had something like that happen to you where your appearance has changed.

I can recall a time when driving home from being on holidays, I had something in my eye and I couldn't quite work out what it was. By the next day or two, I realized that I had developed something called Bell’s palsy. There are known causes, but mostly the cause is unknown. It's a paralysis of the facial nerve, so half the side of my face just dropped. You're faced with the prospect that it may never get better. Often it does get better, but it doesn't have to. I did know a number of people who had it and had not gotten better. It does change the way you meet the world because you notice people are looking at you in a very strange way because it's just so obvious. I survived, which is good.

It's important because suffering—and there's a lot of suffering in Job—can be a belief killer. Having some sort of framework to deal with it is important. What do you do when life treats you to a very hard time?

It turns out that Job loses almost everything not because of fate or accident, but because there is a cosmic issue at stake. The issue is this: Is God worthy of our praise for himself, or is he just convenient? Is faith just a natural thing we do because we want to play a religious game? Does God just give you what you want, and because he gives you what you want, you give him your devotion? Sort of like it's Pavlovian—you ring the bell and the dogs react. Is that all faith is?

Last week, I suggested to you that Job is written like a play with long speeches, or we might call them soliloquies. It's more like an opera, perhaps. I mentioned last week if someone wanted to write an opera—I did find out during the week that there is a member of our church that actually has written an opera based on Job, so there you go. Ninety-five percent of Job is poetry. Lord Tennyson called Job the greatest poem of ancient and modern times.

As I was preparing this, part of me was thinking to myself, perhaps this should be performed rather than dissected line by line because there are very long sections. Perhaps it's better just to be read in long sections. You couldn't do better than to go home and read some sections of Job to yourself—or you could sing it if you want.

What I'm going to try and tackle today is chapters 4 through 31, and it's going to be very brief, of course. In chapters 4 to 31, you have three of Job's friends and you have three rounds of speeches. Each speech is pretty much interspersed by Job's speeches. The three friends are Eliphaz the Temanite (not the termite), Bildad the Shuhite (shortest man in the Bible, "shoe-height"—I'm sorry, that's the best I can do on the morning), and you have Zophar the Naamathite. These clever men bring their reason, their wisdom, and their counsel and try and say something helpful, but they are basically wrong.

What you have is lots and lots of sentences. Some of them are helpful and some are not. They don't really know anything about Job's suffering, but they want to say everything. You might say to yourself, "Well, why is it here? Because it takes up a big chunk of the Bible." Are these chapters just a waste of space? Well, no, because you have four men here trying to grapple with a grief and a sadness. The four men are the three friends and Job himself. They have no answers, and that is worth absorbing.

Firstly, Job and how he feels. I'm going to mention some of the Bible verses here but not all of them. Just get the gist of what I'm talking about. Job feels that God's hand is heavy on him. He feels like God has left him. He says in chapter 23: "If I go to the east and look for you, not there; if I go to the west and look for you, not there; if I go to the north, you're not there; if I go to the south, I can't find you anywhere." He says in chapter six he feels like God is attacking him. In chapter three: "I can't sleep, I have no peace, I have no quietness, I have no rest, I have only turmoil."

But then he can say something like, "Though God slay me, yet I will praise him." He says some very honorable things, so don't try to work Job out from just one sentence. He's a real person, a complex person, very much like you and I. Job says in chapter six: "If all my misery could be placed on the scales, it would surely outweigh the sands of the sea." In another case in chapter six, he says he feels like God is firing arrows at him, or in chapter 10, he's being stalked by God like a lion.

He has moments of great confidence and moments of great despair. Chapter 14: "As water wears away stones and torrents wash away the soil, so you, God, destroy man's hope." Chapter 29, he realizes though that God has been watching over him, but then a chapter later he says, "I'll cry out to you but you do not answer." Job is going to go on to say some very honorable things, but he's also going to say some silly things, things that he regrets. Why? It's because he's wrestling with God.

What these verses give us is the language of lament—the language of feelings. These are lines that you could well recite yourself and could well mean yourself. There may be times in life when you need to say to God, "God, I'm so angry about what is happening." But the mark of maturity is to take the feeling, whatever the feeling is, and try and find the promise of God that answers the feeling. To not just stay with the feeling, but to try and find the promises that answer it.

There's a big difference between how Job feels and how things are. Job's feelings are up and down all the time, they're all over the shop. But the reality is God is devoted to him all the time whether he feels it or not. God has taken hold of him, and he is God's man. When all is swept away, that's the most important thing: having fellowship with God. That's the reality that matters more than the suffering. Being connected to God—that's absolutely the bedrock. Is there someone who can connect us to God? Well, the answer in the gospel is yes, there is Jesus, and that will prove to be the most important thing that you could ever hear or ever respond to.

Secondly, the friends—the three comforters. Right at the beginning in chapter 2:13, when they meet him, they sit with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights and don't say anything. Oh, that's pretty impressive, really. That may be the single best thing they do in the whole of this narrative. It's true, isn't it, that sometimes words are just not enough? Sometimes they're inappropriate; sometimes people just need a friend. You can be too quick to answer, can't you?

However, these friends do soon turn to accusation. Eliphaz says in chapter 5:17, "God is disciplining you; blessed is the man whom God corrects," which is a true principle, it's just not true in Job's case. It's bad logic to apply this universally to every person in every case. It doesn't apply to Job.

Zophar, who's a bit like a cracked record and seems to have the ministry of being rude, says in chapter 11:6, "Job, you know it could be worse. I think God's missed some of your sins; there's so many of them he's probably missed them." Chapter 11:14: "Put away the sin." Bildad in chapter 8:4 says the reason your children died is they must have done something wrong. It's a heartless thing to say. "You better stop whatever it is that you are doing, otherwise it's just going to keep going."

If you want a summary, there is a summary in chapter 4:8: "Those who sow trouble reap trouble." If you sow trouble, you reap trouble. Bad things happen to bad people; bad things have happened to you; you must be a bad person. But the trouble is, trouble doesn't come just because of what you've sown. Sometimes a person like Job is in trouble not because he's reaped or sown anything.

In that passage in Luke chapter 13, Jesus deals with two really obvious disasters. The people say to him, "Were these people worse sinners than anybody else?" And Jesus says, "No they weren't." Jesus breaks the nexus between what you reap and what you've sown. Jesus breaks the link between cause and effect. It's true, isn't it, that God does not treat us as our sins deserve?

A lot of these speeches are just plain wrong. They are three men groping around in the dark to try and find an answer, and their answers get pretty nasty at times. Their words are not meaningless, but they say, "Job, you've done something terrible and now you're being punished. This is karma coming back to bite you." They don't use the term, but that's the concept. One of the reasons it's so good to be Christian is because grace beats karma.

A few years ago, there was an interview with Bono, the lead singer of U2. He was interviewed by a music journalist, Michael Asserand. In the interview, Bono said this: "I really believe we've moved out of the realm of karma into one of grace." The interviewer said, "Well, that doesn't make it any clearer to me." Bono replied, "You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Or in physics, in physical laws, every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It's clear to me that karma is at the very heart of the universe; I'm absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called grace to upend all this 'as you reap, so you'll sow' stuff. Grace defies reason and logic."

Bono goes on to say, "I'd be in big trouble if karma was going to finally be my judge. I'd be in deep... well, I'll leave that word out. Doesn't excuse my mistakes, but I'm holding out for grace. I'm holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the cross because I know who I am and I hope I don't have to depend on my own religiosity." He says, "The Son of God who takes away the sins of the world—I wish I could believe in that." Bono says there are consequences to actions, but the point of the death of Christ is that Christ took on the sins of the world so that what we put out did not come back to us.

These friends here have a tiny little formula: be bad, get suffering; be good, get blessing. It's like a simple maths equation: suffering equals bad. But real life is more complex. What Job really needs is he needs some friends who will stand with him and say, "Here is the truth we know." But they don't do that. Rather than say "trust God even though this seems terrible," they try and push him across a bridge called repentance.

So what should they have said? These three comforters professed to know what they could not have known, and they didn't say what they should have known. What could they have done? Three things.

Firstly, they could have prayed for him. They never pray for him ever, through the whole of these chapters—not once. We get a lot of problems that we just can't solve, but God knows how to solve the problems, so we should go to him in prayer. On Wednesday at central prayer, we had a terrific roll up. At one point, people were sharing things, and we all became conscious that there just really is no earthly answer. So what better time to pray than when there is no earthly answer?

Secondly, they could have shown him a bit more love. Some of the things they say are just terrible. It's like they love their theory and they love their answers, but they don't really love Job. They just want to get in and say their things and get out. Sometimes we talk with people and the things they say are just silly. Other times we come across people who are strangely anxious, and because they're so anxious, they can seem quite odd. We need to be patient, and we need to show calm, and we need to show love.

Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, "If I don't have love, I'm just a clanging gong." You can have all the right answers, or even all the wrong answers, but they could have shown a bit more love. That doesn't mean just nodding and smiling and not saying anything, but you do need to show love, which they didn't do.

And lastly, perhaps they could have shown a bit of epistemic humility. They could just say, "We just don't know. We just don't know why this is happening to you." Deuteronomy 29:29 says, "The secret things belong to the Lord." Sometimes it's appropriate to say, "I just don't know why this has happened. I'm an agnostic as to why this is happening to you, but I can tell you what I do know. I do know about Jesus."

Interestingly, the Christian believes in a God with wounds because the Son of God went to the cross. So there is an answer there for suffering. It may not make complete sense, but there it is. We believe in a God with wounds. These friends don't know anything; they try and use their reason and they try and reason up to heaven, but in the end, we need God to speak down to us from heaven.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I pray that these words of lament would be a gift to us and that they might be a gift to us in times of trouble. And unlike the friends, Heavenly Father, I pray that you would grant us more prayerfulness, more love, and more humility to speak about what we know and not speak about what we don't know. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

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