Job, A Marked Man

And good afternoon, pleasure to again be able to declare God's word to end our day in worship with Job chapter 1 verses 1 through 5, and I'll start by reading and then we'll jump right into the proclamation of the first few verses of this great book, so if you please stand for the reading of Job chapter 1,

I'll read from verses 1 through 11. There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was

Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. There were born to him seven sons and three daughters.

He possessed 7 ,000 sheep, 3 ,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east.

His sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, and they would send and invite their three sisters and eat and drink with them.

And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all.

For Job said, it may be that my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. Thus Job did continually.

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.

The Lord said to Satan, from where have you come? Satan answered the Lord and said, from going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.

And the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears

God and turns away from evil? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, does Job fear

God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has on every side?

You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.

God bless the reading. Now the proclamation of his word. Please be seated. So thus opens the book of Job.

The author of this book has remained beyond the reach of all kinds of scholarly research. The most credible estimates of his lifetime would place him somewhere between Abraham and Moses, but closer to the former than the latter.

He lived closer to Abraham than Moses, but we can't be sure quite how close. We know he lived east of the

Jordan River, as he will describe in the dialogues to come, maybe in Edom or close to Edom, in the greater

Mesopotamian area where Abraham came from. We know that he would live to be 140 years old.

We know that he started with seven sons, three daughters, as I just read to you. And we know, because most of us know the story, that he would soon lose those sons and daughters, and all the cattle and all the wealth that he had that was so enumerated a moment ago.

You know, interestingly, the only family names we have about Job are Job himself and his three daughters, but not the three daughters who are extant at the beginning of the book, the three daughters who come at the end of the book with several more sons.

But the only names we have, and I'm not going to make anything of this other than to point it out to you because I just found it really interesting, is not the names of his sons, former or latter sons, nor the name of his wife, just his three daughters.

I don't quite know what to make of that. If we make this a series and we get to the end, Lord willing, some scholar will guide me in that direction.

Job's only mention in the New Testament is in James 5 .11. The patience of Job during trial is commended to us.

Look to Job, follow his example, sort of a moralistic thing there, but from the scriptures,

James 5 .11, and outside of the New Testament, in the Old Testament, he's only mentioned twice.

He's mentioned two times, both times in the Ezekiel's prophecy, and both times he's mentioned by God, and both times his name is in company with Noah and Daniel.

And God says even if these three, Job and Daniel, were before me, still I would condemn and destroy and bring into exile the rest of Judah.

My words there. So we know something of the man's character before man and God, which

I just read to you. What we know of his personality, his traits, we can glean from the discourses in the narrative and some, the discourses that follow, and then some of the narratives that we have.

One other thing we know about Job, this is the title of this message too, is that Job was a marked man.

He was a marked man. And we know that Jesus said that all of God's children are going to suffer persecution and tribulation in this world.

And for most of us, true as that is, it's true in sort of a general sense. As we mourn the world around us and the iniquity and the sin that the world so enjoys, and we know displeases

God, and therefore displeases us. And sometimes it comes at us a little bit more directly, but few of us will ever have the specific kind of suffering that Job is about to go through.

For Job, you see, it was very close, very personal, and very costly. Job was a marked man.

He was marked by the world as a man of integrity and wealth. He was marked by God as being blameless and God -fearing.

He was marked by his family as faithful. And he was marked by God as a trophy of his grace.

So, integrity and wealth by the world, blameless and God -fearing by God himself, faithful by his family, and then again back to God, he's a trophy of God's grace.

And so as I've been looking through the book of Job, and as I presented to you this afternoon, and if I ever come back to this in a series sort of a format,

I will say again that the book of Job is not primarily about suffering.

Suffering is not the primary emphasis of Job. It's the catalyst that brings about the discourses that take up most of the book of Job.

And suffering certainly is in there, and there's much we can learn about suffering, but that's not the primary emphasis.

The main idea is the power of God's transforming work. The power of God's transformation in an individual sinner.

And our faith will wax and wane, but ultimately, if we're truly in Christ, it will not fail.

As Jesus said, he who perseveres to the end will be saved. Or Paul who said, and I'm sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Christ Jesus.

And we can ask from the New Testament, and ask Paul, why are you so sure? Well not because of the

Philippians themselves, but confidence in he, God the Spirit, who began the good work in them.

In God who elected, in the Son who redeemed, in the Holy Spirit who applied, and continues to apply, so great is salvation.

So from the book of Job, we learn much about suffering. Most especially, we might learn how little we really understand suffering.

And while this book has much to offer on this subject, the emphasis is not so much on Job's suffering, but on the enduring quality of God's transforming power.

The same transforming power, wrought by the same Holy Spirit, who laid a hold of you, and me, and any and all who are in Christ Jesus.

There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job, and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared

God, and turned from evil. We see Job's relationship to God right at the outset. Blameless in his conduct, he walked straight in paths of righteousness.

His reverence for God was matched by his distaste for what was evil.

Now here's a picture of a man who knew the good to do, and did it. Here's a man who was prepared for adversity.

He was blameless, he was upright. It doesn't mean he was sinless, as Job himself will later affirm in the discourses that follow.

It means that he was ethically and morally right. His decisions, his words, his actions, all sifted through a common filter, so that whatever he did, whatever he said, they had one foundation that informed them all.

God. God's Word, pleasing God. By blameless, we mean that specific charges against him would fail for lack of proof.

We might think of Naboth, who was accused by Jezebel's conspirators of having blasphemed

God. We see no trial, they just took him out and stoned him, so the whole thing was a conspiracy. But there was no proof against Naboth.

We just had read to us how there was no real proof against Jesus Christ, and yet he was led to be crucified. Here this description of Job is similar.

No one's as blameless as Jesus Christ, but similar by analogy. That charges against him would not stick.

That's what it meant to be blameless. By upright, it meant that he lived his life on a straight, consistent path.

His worldview had been thought through, it had been weighed on a scale, it had been found to be balanced, it had been burnished by the fires of life, and the dross of it had been removed.

It informed his every step. So with Job, and you read this in his discourses as he defends himself against the three friends who will show up soon enough.

With Job, we would find that whether he's greeting a merchant at the fair or discoursing with a prince, he was the same

Job. A poor man who needed food would find from Job, Mesur Muriel's open hand.

The rich man who needed advice would find in Job an ahitopel. The widow or the orphan could find a defender, and all this flowed from one and the same fountainhead.

The same fountainhead from which our conduct in this life, in this world, must also flow.

God. God as we're led by the Spirit. God as we follow the word that the Spirit has given us.

God as we look to Jesus Christ and see his example, and look to him for all things in our conduct.

We have a worldview, brethren, that in many ways is similar to Job's. He's pre -resurrection, of course, so there are those differences, there's that greater revelation that we have, and yet we find in Job a man whose worldview was thought through so carefully and so bathed in God and his word that everything he did came out godly.

He's blameless. He's upright. He feared God. That Job was blameless and upright in his outward life was the inevitable consequence of his inward life.

He feared God and turned away from evil. His entire life was founded on the word of God, and by this

Job was prepared for the storms and the winds that our Lord spoke of in Matthew 7 at the end of the

Sermon on the Mount. There's a logical connection here,

I think, about a man who feared God and turned away from evil, because you see, to fear

God is to turn away from evil. To fear God is to turn away from evil. To fear

God is to love God and to have awe of God, and all those words that we load into fear, and they're all correct, and to fear

God with all that that word can mean has a logical consequence, because fearing

God includes loving God, and to love God is to love what he loves and to hate what he hates, so to fear

God is to shun or turn away from evil, and this is Job. Outwardly, blameless and upright.

In his civic sense, nothing could stick to him. He was moral, he was ethical in all he did. In the spiritual sense, because he feared

God, he turned from evil. His entire life was founded on the word of God. There's another reason that turning from evil can't happen without an a priori fear of God, and that's because God's goodness defines what is evil.

As Paul says, I wouldn't have known sin unless the Lord had shown me sin. I wouldn't have known I was coveting until the law said, do not covet, is

God's revelation to us that actually defines what sin is. His goodness defines evil.

The Lord looks down from heaven to see if there's any who do good and finds what? None, no, not one.

The psalmist says transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart. There's no fear of God before his eyes, that's

Psalm 36 .1, and we know that wicked people everywhere do all sorts of good deeds, right?

Jesus speaks to those who are condemned, and they answer back, they defend themselves. Did we not prophesy in your name, cast out demons in your name?

Didn't we do all these good, mournful deeds in your name? And Jesus says, get away from me, you lawless ones. Why? Because they did it for their own glory, for their own purposes, for their own credit.

Those are the filthy rags that the prophet Isaiah speaks of. And the same deeds done by those who love

Jesus Christ, and divested themselves of self, and did them for the sake of Jesus Christ their

Savior, those same deeds then are sanctified by the Lord Jesus Christ, and accepted by him.

So wicked people doing all sorts of good things, donating to good causes, developing medicines, taking in foster children, all sorts of things that otherwise would be good, but absent the fear of God, without faith, they're filthy, they're corrupt, they're vile.

Here's what Jesus taught us when he talked to those two groups having done the same things. Lawless is saved.

Your own righteousness, filthy rags, done in the name of Christ Jesus by the righteousness imputed to us by God our

Savior, accepted. Turning from evil is the fruit of fearing

God. A man who fears God as first, and turns from evil, shuns evil, despises evil, is the fruit of fearing

God. The blameless and the upright life is visible to everyone, but your fear of God is an inner work of the

Spirit of God in the heart. This is what Paul means in Galatians 5, 16 through 22.

I'm not going to go through the whole passage there, but he says in verse 16, as he opens this up, he says, but I say, walk by the

Spirit, you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Or John chapter 2, verses 15 to 17.

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

For all that is in the world, the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eye and the pride and possessions, parenthetically, can we stop for just a moment?

No one in that time had more possessions than Job. Pride and possessions is not from the

Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Now, the same Spirit who worked in Job, as we will see if we go through this book anymore, is the same

Spirit who works in us today. The same Spirit whom we will find in the coming pages that Job valued above all else.

See, in the discourses to come, Job's friends are going to speak about God from principles, from rules, from equations that presume to define the

Lord and regulate his actions. Really, they constrain his sovereign freedom, as if that were possible, which of course it is not.

Job, when you read those discourses, Job is going to speak from the foundation of something he fears was lost, a relationship to God.

So we get formulas, and we get strictures, and we get equations, and we get strict philosophy from the friends.

And each of them has a different emphasis, which we won't go into this afternoon. But if you read Job's answers, what does he fear has happened?

That God has left him, that he's no longer God's friend, that God is not just punishing him, worse,

God has left him altogether. That's his fear. Well, there's a quick litmus test here for you and for me.

Something that Job had, which we can check our own spirits, and that's the fear of God, that awe, that reverence, that respect.

And how can we test that in the context of Job, even without going into all that's going to happen very soon to Job? We all know that story about everything that he lost.

We can ask ourselves, what would happen to me if we lost this, or that, or everything?

You see, I think our attachment to worldly things is in direct proportion to our fear of God, but of course, going the wrong way.

As our fear of God is lower and less intense, our attachment to things can grow, and vice versa.

Because as our fear of God grows, as we learn more what it means as we go through this life to reverence

God, to worship God, to fear God, our attachment to the stuff that God has given us becomes less and less and less.

It doesn't mean we can't enjoy it. Lord knows I enjoy my

Corvette, but I honestly, in my heart, do not think I'm that attached to it, that I would be crushed if something should happen and I lost it.

We need to understand that the fear of God leads to a detachment from the things that God gives us.

And the more we fear God, the less attached we are to these things, from which, as happened to Job, you may quickly one day become detached.

When Job is stripped of everything so carefully inventoried in these verses, the real question is, is he going to remain steadfast?

This is a question that overlays the coming drama. Is God's work of transformation powerful and enduring?

Is the transforming power of God more powerful than the world's enticements? Will he, will Job love the things he's been given more than he who gave them the things?

Paul asks it this way of us, what do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, of course the answer to that is nothing, what do you have that you didn't receive?

Nothing. And he goes on, if then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?

Why do you boast as if you gained it? Why are you crushed when you lost it? It wasn't yours in the first place.

God gave it to you as a gift. Every good and perfect gift is from above, from the

Father of lights, in whom there is no shadow of turning or any variation. You see, to mourn the loss of our stuff is to imply that it was mine or yours in the first place, by right, by deserving, which is clearly not the case.

So we do need to, at the very outset of this, the man who feared God and shunned evil, a man who we know is soon to lose everything he has, do we fear

God to that point that we are really detached from those things that God has given us? Or do we consider them our own?

Would we be depressed, angry, discouraged, worse? It's a good time to check ourselves, even right now.

You know, with the stock market's recent free fall, then recovery, then up and down and up and down, how have we responded?

Again, speaking of myself, my IRA is heavily in stocks, so it's been a bit of a roller coaster.

I don't say this boastfully, but I can tell you I've lost no sleep. I truly have not. Some of us might be more stirred up than that.

I suggest that the more stirred up we get over this, the more worried we become, the more we need to check the level of our fear of God.

You see, fear of God will turn you away from the evil of materialism. Fear of God will allow you to set those things in their proper context.

Something God gave that you can enjoy, something God gave for your good, something God gave so that as you enjoy it and give him thanks, he receives all the glory.

But again, fear of God, less attached. When events threaten to diminish, even take away what

I've earned, what I was counting on to be there, what I deserve, how are you going to react?

I mean, Job had a lot to lose. He was the richest man on the planet. Let's move on with Job.

There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. So just Job's family, seven is a number of wholeness, sort of a holy number where something is complete, and ten is that number of pure and perfect completion.

So seven sons, three daughters equals ten. It's like seven days of creation, but creation is still ongoing, but seven days, that perfect number when

God said it's done, it's good, and it's very good. Ten is a number of completion, as I said, ten representing what

Jacob said to Laban when his labors were complete. He says, I'm done with you, you've changed my wages ten times, so I'm done with this.

Or the tenth plague that brought an end to the plagues of Egypt. So Job's family is a picture of wholeness, a picture of completion.

Seven, three daughters, seven sons, three daughters, ten. There are more tens if we want to dig into it a little bit more,

I'll just go on it briefly with his possessions. He possessed 7 ,000 sheep, 3 ,000 camels, that's 10 ,000 valuable pieces of stock, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, but the female donkeys,

I read, were actually very valuable in the day because they gave milk. So there's 1 ,000, which is a series of tens, maybe, and very many servants so that the man was the greatest of all the people of the east, the

Elon Musk of his day, but with godly fear. So as important as Job's fear of God was, as important as fear of God is, is this verse, verse three, that really stands in pride of place for our attention.

See, verses one and five speak of Job's relationship to God, verses two and four are about his family, notably his wife is not in the descriptions, but one and five are

God, two and four are family, and there in the middle is verse three, this inventory of his goods, everything he had.

And I think it's there to set us up for what comes, which is so we know how much Job had to lose and what a good life

Job was living. He walked with God before God and men, his family was whole, his family was wholesome, his wealth was incredible, he had a lot to lose.

Verse four, his sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, it's probably the birthdays, and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them.

So it's Job's children here, their conduct, we see chords of familial harmony binding them together.

And we sometimes hear that Job was afraid that these parties were wild ones, but the text only allows us to know this, that the brothers, each on his birthday, held a feast, no indication of wild indulgence, no indication of drunkenness or any such thing, could have been, but it's not explicitly given to us, and the added detail that the three sisters were invited shows brotherly care, a cohesive family, one that was worthy of the greatest man of the east.

It seems to me we have a picture here of domestic tranquility, with the brothers taking proper care of their sisters.

And then we move on and we find that Job took no chances with this, his concern, he was concerned that one or all of them may have inadvertently sinned against God.

Verse 5, and when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and consecrate them and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all.

For Job said, it may be that my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.

Thus Job did continually. So the family patriarch here takes his place as a priest and intercedes with God on behalf of his children.

And what's interesting here is that no sin has been established. The sacrifice, if you will, is preemptive.

It doesn't say that he knew they did this or did that, any wrong thing, or that they had actually blasphemed

God in their heart or with their mouth. He's not saying he actually knows that they did any of that. He said, just in case.

It may be that they had inadvertently sinned. So Job's concern is their spiritual need, that they would be right with God.

And above that need, which all fathers should have, stands Job's concern for God's name as it's carried by their children.

The word here for cursed, it may be that when my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts, that word is the

Hebrew word Baruch. And some of you will recognize that as the word that's normally translated as to bless.

But here in this particular context and in this form, the lexicons tell you that it means to curse.

It's a, quote, a blessing so overdone as to be a curse. Sort of, methinks the lady doth protest too much.

A blessing so overdone that it comes off as contrite or comes off as phony.

Just too many words, too many glossy terms, too much bowing down in dramatic fashion.

And so it sounds like a blessing from the lips or from the heart. It's really a curse because it's not real, it's not legit.

It's not, it has no integrity. Now again, Job's not saying they did that. He's saying perhaps they did.

But for Job, see, the concern is more than whether one of them actually spoke out such a thing against God. But whether God was taken in vain in the heart.

Whether it proceeds out of the lips or stays veiled in the heart, it is a grievous thing to take the

Lord lightly. The problem is that we can hide our heart with our lips, can't we? Now if we overdo it the way that word means, that word

Baruch, the way it was used there means to overdo it, most of us will figure it out and maybe call you on it.

But for a lot of us, it is possible to hide our heart with the words that we speak. The problem is that that won't last.

Numbers 32, 23 warns us, almost promises us, be sure your sin will find you out.

Eventually, the play acting will come back to bite you. You'll forget who you told what.

You'll forget which person knows which theological, beautiful truth that you can expound and which one you gave which act to.

Something like that will happen. But be sure that somehow, in the providence of God, through the circumstances he puts you in, your sin will find you out.

It's a matter of the heart. Jesus made it very clear in the book of Matthew that from the heart, the mouth speaks.

That the words that come out our mouth, the evils and the blasphemies, come from the heart.

This was his concern for his children, it's our concern for our children, your children, and for each other as brothers and sisters in the

Lord, that our hearts are right with God, that we all have a mutual fear of God, and together shun the evil.

Because we love God, we want to love what he loves, and if we love God and love what he loves, we're going to hate what he hates.

As I said earlier, we can learn a lot about suffering from this book. But the larger question is really about God.

It's really about God himself. Is his transforming power true transformation? Or is it just a band -aid placed over a mortal wound?

Or worse yet, is God just an idea? Is he just some placebo that we take that makes us feel better for the moment, but has no lasting effect?

I don't know if any of you have heard of him, but a scholar from the 60s that I think was a Harvard scholar named Joseph Campbell wrote a book called

The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And his idea is that it's sort of in our DNA, that every culture everywhere, every human being needs to worship something, and so we invent all kinds of gods.

And he would include our God Yahweh, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus in that invention, inventory.

His idea is that we just have to make heroes, we just have to make gods who are bigger than us. It's just part of our DNA, it's just part of who we are.

But one measure of the reality of God, setting aside

Joseph Campbell's falsehood, because God is the one true and only God.

One measure of the reality of God in our lives is right here in what we see with Job, which is prayer for our families.

Prayer for our immediate biological families, prayer for the church family, prayer for your extended families.

We do know from this morning and from 1 Peter chapter 2, that we're a kingdom of priests.

We're the priests too, they intercede, they go to God on behalf of others. This Job did continually, just in case.

And we can pray that way, just in case. You don't know every beat of the heart of your children, no matter how close you are to them.

You don't know my every heartbeat, even though we're brothers and sisters together, and we love one another, and we know each other, some of us have known each other for decades.

We need to pray for one another. As Job did continually, be concerned for the heart, the heart that issues forth the words that we hear.

We hear on Sundays, we speak the right words to one another. Let's pray for one another that those words are real and legitimate and come from a heart that truly fears

God and shuns evil, not a Joseph Campbell theory that we just sort of need

God. All people do. We need

God honoring constant prayer for our children, for our families, for our spouses, for each other, that the Lord would be honored by them, that he would forgive them if they should sin against them, against him.

And this is a special place of fathers, to take up the mantle of priestly intercession for the family.

And back to 1 Peter, this is really for all of us in Christ. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

So husbands and wives are the focus of each other's prayers. Your children, extended family, your fellow believers in the church, pastors and deacons,

God willing we will have them soon. You have enough tender to spark a bonfire of prayers and this continually.

We come back to Job, Job, this man marked in so many ways, marked by society, marked by God, marked by the world for his integrity, for his wealth.

By God as blameless and God -fearing, by his family as faithful in his prayers. I want to go outside of verse 4 and bring in one more mark that he has, and I mentioned it at the very beginning.

He was marked by God as a trophy of his grace. Let's start from verse 6 again.

Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them.

The Lord said to Satan, From where have you come? Satan answered the Lord and said, From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.

And the Lord said to Satan, Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears

God and turns away from evil? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, Does Job fear God for no reason?

Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.

But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face. So it's the

Lord God himself affirming that Job is blameless and upright. And he, as we read in verse 3, he's the greatest man because of his wealth.

But here he is not the greatest man in the earth, in the east.

Boy, did I take the thunder out of that one. He's not the greatest man in the east in this statement. God says of his servant

Job, he's the greatest man on the earth. When Moses wrote that all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain, all the earth meant the ancient

Near East, especially the larger Mesopotamian area. In Colossians 1 .5,

Paul exalts that the gospel has gone forth into the whole world. But for him, the whole world was the large

Mediterranean basin. He didn't know about North or South America or Australia. But when the perspective is from above, when it is the

Lord who sets the boundaries, earth means earth. It means the whole earth.

There's none like him in all the earth. To which the accuser makes the challenge, but you stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.

And that's that word, baruch, again, that use of it to mean curse. That overdone blessing that is really truly from the heart a curse.

The accuser is claiming here that God who blessed Job will be cursed by Job if his material blessings are taken from him.

So what will prevail? Job's faithfulness to God or his love for what

God has given him? Will he fall into the trap of Romans 1 .18 -23 by holding what he's been given higher than he who gave him all that he had?

Which is more important to you and me, the God who gives or what he's given? The Lord has staked his reputation on the outcome here.

As fine a man as Job was, what God puts at risk is not so much the man Job himself.

What does God put on the table here? He puts his name. He's basically saying,

I have transformed Job. He is my servant. He will not fail, not because of his goodness, not because of his righteousness, because of God's transforming power in him.

And that comes out later. But we need to think of it this way, that the challenge here immediately is, here's my reputation.

You go and try and ruin it. And you can go through this trophy of grace,

Job. A few weeks ago when I preached from Psalm 23, we got to verse 3. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

We made the same point as what we have here, that the Lord has staked his reputation, his very name, on his care for his people.

And here in Job, he stakes his reputation, his very name, on Job's perseverance in the trials that are to come.

So the contest about to begin here is going to be epic. The greatest man in the East, none like him in all the world, will be put to the test in a manner that speaks forward of Jesus' wilderness temptations.

And saying that, I think Job is a great type of Christ, one who points forward to much of what

Jesus will go through. For him, the question was, will his love for the

Father overcome the temptations of easier worldly ways? For you and me, marked by God's Spirit, do we fear

God enough now that when our now changes, will we be able to say with Job, though he slay me, yet I will hope in him?

God the Lord, by having put his Holy Spirit in you, by having given you a heart to believe the gospel of his

Son, Jesus Christ, has staked his very name on the outcome of our perseverance. Job was a forerunner of Jesus Christ in so many ways.

Job was actually one of two men whom the Lord said to their enemies that his prayers for them were their only hope to avoid divine wrath.

Do you remember Abraham with Abimelech? Abimelech says, you know, in the innocence of my heart, I did this. He lied to me.

I didn't know. And the Lord says, I know you did this in the innocence of your heart, but what did he say next? Do you remember?

You're a dead man. And then he goes on to say, if we can get Abraham to pray for you, maybe we can avoid that dead man warrant.

The other man who is put in this kind of position, that comes at the very end of this book, you guys know that, is

Job. When God displays his anger or verbalizes his anger to the three friends, he says something like, maybe you can get

Job to pray for you, and then they'll take care of my anger towards you. Job is one of two men in the

Bible who are put in a position like that. Our Jesus, though,

Job is a type of him, our Jesus prays for us always, and his prayers are not maybe they'll be heard.

As Jesus himself said, God hears him. God answers him. And he intercedes for us even now.

God, Father, his Father, God, our Father, by faith, our faith, hears him.

Few men have had friends turn against them as Job's friends will. Their change of demeanor towards him is almost a betrayal.

Yet it pales in comparison to our Lord's betrayal when Judas handed him to his enemies and the disciples all fled.

One so quickly he left his clothes behind. Few men in history, if any, have lived a life ethically and morally as faithfully pure as did

Job. He did not deserve what was about to befall him. And this is the core of many of the discourses that are going to follow in this book, that you deserved it.

You deserve what happened. I do have a moment.

The idea of deserving is really interesting here because the friends are going to say something like this in a mathematical sort of way.

Your circumstance, your fall from your wealth and your family must equal a sin because God is just.

Therefore God has discreetly punished you in proportion to a discreet sin.

And Job never disagrees with God as a God of justice, perfect justice.

What he says to these friends who are making this equation out of it, sure, what did

I do to deserve this? If you're saying that my position now is because of a sin

I committed, if I agree with that, let's say that for sake of argument, you now have to tell me what do

I do? And this is where the friends all falter. And this is what brings out God's anger at the end. Well, Job was pure.

He was blameless. He was upright. His family was whole. He was wealthy. But Job, like you, like me,

Job was a sinner. Job needed to be redeemed. And even though he pointed forward to Jesus Christ, he could only do so imperfectly.

Because our Lord Jesus was more than ethically and morally and faithfully pure, he was sinless.

In all of history, only he could have said, though he never did say, but only he could have said,

I don't deserve this. Satan was unleashed against Job with a range of operation you and I will never know.

Not because we don't deserve it, but because Jesus endured it for us when Satan came against him in the wilderness.

As Job was captive to the devil's wiles for a time, so Jesus was captive to what once held us captive, which is our fear of death.

For three days he was in the tomb. But as Job was at the end of this book raised from his miserable state by the goodness and by the kindness of God, so also

Jesus by his resurrection from the dead. And so Job is a book of gospel hope.

I pray that if we go through this and we have more studies in it, we'll bring forth gospel truth in our lives.

Job, this marked man who feared God and shunned evil, who was blameless and upright before others, his wholesome family, his incredible wealth, all about to be taken from him.

And the great contest is, and if we hadn't read this book and if you didn't know the outcome so well because the stories are so popularly told, then it's as if all creation holds his breath and waits to see, will

Job really defend God's reputation? Was God's transforming power in Job adequate to withstand this great circumstance, the judgment that's going to befall him?

And for us, may we be those who fear God and shun evil and live a life as ethically and morally and consistently pure as Job so that we have the right view of our circumstances, our things, and all that occurs to us.