The Fourth Sunday after Easter

Job 19:21-27

“In My Flesh I Shall See God”

Most of you are familiar with Job’s story. He was the properous and blameless man of old. Satan claimed that Job remained faithful to God in return for the big blessings. Remove the blessings and Job would curse God, not worship Him! So God gave Satan permission to test Job’s faith. Shortly thereafter, Job lost everything; his possessions by wind and fire, his children by marauders. Then, a disease struck Job, causing emaciation, boils, the peeling and itching of his skin. From health and wealth, Job fell to pain and poverty. He shaved his head, fell to the ground and muttered, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  That was his first response to the agony. He was calm and submissive. But as more time passed Job’s attitude changed. He lashed out at God, seeing Him as the cause of his suffering. Job questioned the Lord’s fairness, goodness and justice. Of course this would be natural for a man who believed in God’s sovereignty. Had he believed in a limited deity, he would have had no problem with God’s justice or goodness, since then he could not hold God responsible for every event.

After World War II some Jewish theologians abandoned the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, that God governs every detail in the universe. In their minds, if God was in control, why did He stand by and allow the Nazis to massacre six million Jews? That would be unthinkable if God was both omnipotent and good. Hence, for them, god must be unsovereign. Many things are beyond his control. His power is limited; his knowledge incomplete, and his ability to help hindered. Well, Job never accepted such a shriveled up deity. He knew that God was in control, which accounts for the wild and intemperate language Job used as he blamed the Lord for his afflictions. You can see this throughout the first twenty verses of Job 19.

As the days passed, his body wasted away. Sitting in dust and ashes, he scratched his skin with broken shards of clay pottery (2:8). That was his only relief from the itch of his disease. Our Old Testament lesson for this Fourth Sunday after Easter starts at Job 19:21. Let’s work into it at Job 19:19-20. [Read them.]

Job’s friends and family members ostracized him in his suffering. His wife taunted him with, “Curse God and die!” Three other friends came to comfort him: Eliphaz, Bildad, and and Zophar. But their comfort was uncomfortable, “Job, you must be an exceptionally wicked person, (they accused him) or God would not have punished you like this.”

Added to the emotional anguish was his physical pain: “My bone clings to my skin and my flesh” That is, he had lost weight and was emaciated to skin and bones. Job’s next words, “I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth” (v. 20). This phrase has become a cliché, meaning “I barely escaped, keeping nothing but my life,” or, “ I had a close call.” However, another possible meaning is that “the skin of my teeth” refers to Job’s gums. In that case, the thought would be that his body was so totally dissipated by disease that even his teeth had fallen out and only his gums were unaffected. [Job by Zuck. pp.87 ff.]

[For the insights in this sermon I’m borrowing from Roy Zuck’s, Job, and a book he edited called, Sitting With Job. Also I use an idea from the introduction to Job from the New Geneva Study Bible. See also Follow the River by James Alexaner Thom for the story about Mary Ingles. Peter Kreeft’s Making Sense Out of Suffering. pp. 96-7.]

This same thing happened to two ladies during the French Indian War. James Alexander Thom researched the story of Mary Ingles. She was twenty-three years old when Shawnee Indians attacked her frontier settlement. The Indians massacred several pioneers and kidnapped her. Her husband narrowly escaped death. The Shawnees took her a thousand miles down the Ohio River. There she was sold and made a slave. She and another Dutch lady who had been kidnapped on a different raid decided to run away. The two finally got their chance and left with nothing but a knife and two blankets. Mary remembered that the Indians had brought her down the Ohio, so their strategy was to follow the bank of the Ohio River back up. Unfortunately neither of them could swim, so every time they came to a tributary, they had to follow it upstream until the water was shallow enough to wade across. A one thousand mile trip turned into two thousand miles. Another minus was that they started in the fall, so the weather soon got cold, and it started snowing. This meant the food dwindled.

 “They pulled up and gnawed roots. They ate buds. They found a few acorns, cracked them with rocks and ate the dried-up, leathery, bitter meats. Pealing the bark off dead logs revealed squirming grubs; these they swallowed with a shudder. But even this meager diet disappeared as autumn morphed into winter. They began to starve. The symptoms included swollen joints, the whitening of their hair, distorted vision, unclear thinking, and rotting gums. Their teeth became loose and sensitive to cold, even to biting. Several teeth came out, and the older woman Gretel lost nearly all of hers. It was an agony to drink water, or chew a root. Job said, “I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.” And he probably meant that his gums were the only things left.

In a sorrowful whine of misery, Job repeated his plea that Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar pity him. Surprisingly, he addressed them, “O you my friends.” Perhaps he said this in sarcasm, for they had certainly not acted like true friends. He turned to them for compassion because he wasn’t getting any from God: “For the hand of God has struck me!” “Why do you persecute me as God does?” God had persecuted him, so why should they do the same? Why were they “not satisfied with his flesh?” The Dutch lady Gretel became so famished she tried several times to kill Mary Ingles for cannibalistic purposes. When Job asked, “Are you not satisfied with my flesh?” he was not referring to cannibalism. It was an idiom that meant, “why should you continue to malign me?” To eat another’s flesh was a way of saying they cursed him.

Job was a defeated man. He was at his lowest point. Friends and family had deserted him. Human help had vanished. He was alone in his misery. Not even one person came to console him, and say “I understand,” or “I can’t imagine what you are suffering. I’m sorry.” Job’s body was racked with pain, and he was the object of God’s unfair torments. But here, unexpectedly, Job’s faith also shined the brightest.

Job 19:23-27 is a combination of things. Job’s misery is at its nadir while his faith soars the highest. We see in these verses the peak of Job’s confidence in a future vindication of his cause. It is a magnificent burst of faith. Let’s read it. Job 19:23-27. [Read them.]

Job wanted his words to be inscribed in a book, no doubt a scroll. Then he requested another form of writing. “That they be engraved on a rock with an iron pen and lead, forever!” Job wants a hammer and chisel to etch a message in granite. To have his case chipped out on a rock would be a monument on which future generations could read and judge the justice of his case.

“I know that my Redeemer lives, And He shall stand at last on the earth.” These words have been interpreted in various ways. The first problem has to do with the identity of the Redeemer. “For I know that my Redeemer lives.” Who is this Redeemer? Some scholars say that he is a person other than God. Some relative would appear to rescue Job from his dilemma. A kinsman redeemer was a family member who was supposed to help out his close relative. Job was thus hoping for some relative to show up and defend him. However, most people identify the Redeemer as God Himself. This passage refers to the Messiah and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Seeing the Redeemer as Christ, is an interpretation that reads naturally, and has been accepted by most of the Church Fathers, and even many contemporaries. For in the very next verse Job says, “I shall see God.” This is meant to parallel, “For I know that my Redeemer lives.” Hebrew parallelism means that the two lines match and repeat one another.

The “Redeemer is a big subject in the Old Testament. The Hebrew word “gael” appears forty-four times. The word is translated “Avenger,” “Vindicator”, or “Kinsman Redeemer.” It means to “lay claim to a person or thing, to free or deliver.” A redeemer in the Old Testament was a person who provided protection for a close relative who could not do so for himself. We see the word in Ruth 4:10. Boaz acted as the Kinsman Redeemer to Ruth. After her own husband died he asked her to be his wife, thereafter protecting and providing for her. Moreover, a kinsman redeemer could redeem the relative’s property that had passed into other hands (Lev. 25:23-25; Ruth 4:4-15); he could avenge a slain relative (Numbers 35:19-27; 2 Sam. 14:11; 1 Kings 16:11), he could marry his brother’s childless widow as in Ruth (Ruth 4:10); he could buy a close relative out of slavery (Lev. 25:47-55) and he could defend his cause in a lawsuit (Psalm 119:154; Prov. 23:11; Jer. 50:34). Job believed he had a divine Kinsman Redeemer, and trusted that he would meet his Redeemer. Job himself in his flesh would see God face to face, and he would not be a stranger or enemy to God, as he was then. He would see Him, and his Redeemer would defend him, vindicate his cause, and redeem him.

When did Job expect to be vindicated by his Redeemer? After death and in a resurrected physical body. This is the traditional view and it is why the Church appoints this reading during Easter. Job longed to see God – and knew that he would because his loving Redeemer-Vindicator would stand on his behalf and plead his case. This Redeemer was the longed-for Messiah whom we know as Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Job’s assurance of vindication after death was a giant step in his walk of faith and another indication that he was sure the three friends were wrong in their accusations. Death, inevitable and imminent, would be a gate, not a wall, to solving his problem. 

It is ironic that Christians understand more of this passage than Job did. Job said he longed to see his Redeemer. We know who the Redeemer is. At some future time, the Son of Man will come again with His holy angels and raise the dead. We will see the Lord, first as our dreadful Judge, and then, if we are in Christ by faith and through grace, we will see Him as our Lord and King in the New heavens and New Earth. Once Messiah conquers sin and death, suffering will end. This is the best hope we have.

In the meantime we live in a fallen world, which means that pain, suffering, and death are normal. Is there anything redemptive in suffering? Peter Kreeft believes that one of the messages of Job is that from suffering comes wisdom. Over time, wisdom can be gained from affliction and crises. And wisdom is a blessing that can bring a deeper happiness. So there are three links in this golden chain. Suffering leads to wisdom, and wisdom to happiness.

“It is easy to see and admit this when we are not suffering. But it is much harder to see when our minds are blinded by pain. One of the worst things pain does is turn our eyes inward, to ourselves. Sick people often say that the worst thing about being sick is that it makes you so self-centered. But that certainly isn’t wisdom. [It is folly.]

Perhaps the resolution of our dilemma is that suffering leads to wisdom in the long run but not in the short run, and that short-range folly is a price worth paying for long-range wisdom. Job admits that his pain makes his words unwise. He said, “My suffering is more than I can bear. What wonder then that my words are wild?” Yet Job learned from his suffering and we can learn too. In the end, we can come to see that it was worth it.” [Kreeft, p. 97.]

Job 42:12 says, “Now the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; for he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one thousand yoke of oxen, and one thousand female donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters… In all the land were found no women so beautiful as the daughters of Job…” Between the lines one gets the impression that Job enjoyed great wisdom and satisfaction.

Another thing Job never abandoned was the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. In Job 42 God gives Job a description of the behemoth and Leviathan, two big dinosaurs. God created these amazing monsters. What do you think? God asked. Job answered, “I know that You can do everything…” When you are going through trials and affliction, know that God is in control. You are in His hands, and he is good. Someday you will see the big picture, and more often than not you will gain wisdom from your suffering.

Let us pray.