Prayer Orders the Story

June 28 2020

Job 9:32-35, 13:1-8, 16:19-22, 22:21-30

         Two years ago our children surprised Jennifer and myself by buying us iPads for Christmas. Now, we weren’t sure we would like them but we actually love them and use them every day. One of the things I use mine for is to get the daily news. I prefer to read the news stories instead of listening to the chattering heads. One of the news stories that was not about the Coronavirus or the racial unrest was the story about Pacific Gas and Electric. I don’t know if you remember the deadly wildfires in Northern California last year that totally wiped out the little town of Campfire. As it turns out that fire was the result of negligence on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric as one of the hangers that held up a high voltage wire broke, the wire fell, sparked and the rest as they say is history. What caught my eye from the headlines of the recent trial is that Pacific Gas and Electric were charged in the deaths of eighty four people who died as a result of those fires. The chief executive for Pacific Gas and Electric, Bill Johnson pleaded guilty to the charges of involuntary manslaughter eighty four times as the names were read. To me it seemed a little weird that a power company could be held responsible for so many deaths but it is right that they should be. To me it was fascinating because we rarely consider that the power we rely on to turn on the lights and cool down with our air conditioning and heat our water and run our stoves all these things that make life more enjoyable, this same electric can unleash devastation that can destroy life. That is something we just don’t think about very often.

         Well, this story is in a way illustrative of Job’s perspective on his own personal tragedy. As you may remember, Job was part of a test that Satan was attempting to see if hardship and devastation came upon Job would Job curse God to his face? Or to put it another way, was Job just a fair weather friend to God so that when the storms of life arose Job would turn his back on God? Well, in the first part of this testing, Job first experienced the loss of all his wealth as all of Job’s camels, sheep, cattle and donkeys were either destroyed or stolen. Then if this were not enough, all ten of Job’s children were killed when the house they were in collapsed. The loss of all this, especially his children sent Job into unrelenting grief yet through it all Job refused to curse God. So Satan asked God to try again and this time Job was covered with horrible painful oozing sores over his entire body which caused Job to cry out in anguish over the experience of such piercing pain. But still Job would not curse God. 

         Last week we read how Jobs friends came to be with him in his grief and pain and when they saw him they did not recognize him at first. They wept at the sight of him and for a week they simply sat in silence with Job. When Job breaks the silence, he reveals that in his inner self he is a man overwhelmed by turmoil, another word for chaos. This is the same primordial chaos that was before creation, this chaos is the disorder that is what Job is experiencing. To help Job find order once again for his life Job’s friend, Eliphaz, tells Job a story. It is an old familiar story, the story of God the Creator of all who created the universe with wisdom, understanding and knowledge. Just as God called creation out of the chaos in the beginning so too God can speak order back into a life overwhelmed by turmoil and chaos. 

         What begins to be clear about Job is that he does not have the same perspective about God as his friends do. Job does not seem to know God as his Creator but instead Job knows God as a great power. Just like electricity is a great power that can do great things for our good yet it also can, as the people in California so tragically found out, bring about devastation, this is the way Job felt about God. As Job said at the end of the second chapter, “Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil?” This is when we first begin to suspect that the God Job believes in might not be the God that we believe in, at least I hope not. The thought that comes out of such belief is that if I am obedient to do what this God asks of me then I should have success. Instead of a relationship with God based on faith, the relationship becomes one of a contractural agreement. If I give God the payment of obedience then God in return will give me the blessing of success. When we state it like this, this idea seems plainly not the right line of thought as the Bible yet there are still some who are tempted by it. I’ve been in church long enough to know the people who think that because they have taught Sunday School for thirty years or did some other type of work for the church for a long period of time that something was owed to them besides a thank you. It is hard to not let this kind of thinking color our thoughts when we live in a world filled with contracts. This is why we have bills come due every month because we have a contract with the electric company, the gas company or the phone company. We agreed to pay them so much money and they in return agree to supply us with electric, gas and phone service. This is the nature of contracts, this exchange of something of value for goods and services.

         We have to understand this contract mindset to help us wrap our minds around just what Job desires to do as his story progresses. In our scripture we read today, it becomes more and more evident that Job wants to put God on trial. Now just saying such a thing its easy to see how absurd such a thought it. It almost sounds like the premise of a movie that’s coming out on Netflix. Yet this is what Job has figured out what has to happen. We can only understand such a desire if we also understand that Job considers God to be nothing more than a great power and that Job feels he has some contract with this power that now with his current misfortune Job believes God has not kept up his side of the bargain. Only with this mindset can we also understand Job’s increasing demands he makes upon God. I mean as you read about Job you want to pull him aside and say, Job, buddy, look you are really getting in God’s face. I mean this is God, like Almighty God, do you really think getting in his face and demanding something from him is the best idea? Perhaps this is one of the points the writer of Job is trying to make from taking such a mindset to its worst extreme.If you have this idea that the relationship with God is some kind of contract where you behave yourself and in return God rewards you with showers of blessing what’s going to happen on your first cloudy day? What’s going to happen when the hurts, the pains and the suffering of this life show up on your doorstep just as they inevitably will? What are you going to do, sue God for breach of contract? You see contracts don’t work with God because, well, because God is God and we are not. We simply cannot demand anything of God. We can ask, we can seek and we can knock but we cannot demand God do anything for us. When you know this you begin to see what makes grace so amazing. We don’t have to demand God for anything because God desires to give to us all we need simply because of who he is.

         How different would have Jobs story been had he only known God as his Creator. You see when you know God as your Creator then you first realize that all of creation was created with a purpose in mind. This means that each person, you and me and everyone else are not some accident but part of God’s purpose of his creation. When you understand this then you also understand that this life we have is a gift. We are alive because of the choice of God. Thus our life is a gift and a name for a gift is grace. When we realize that God has given us this gift of life then it just makes sense that we should respond to this gift with a sense of gratitude. This gratitude is not about bartering with God or seeing what needs God can fulfill for us; its just the right response to the kindness of God who gave us life. This gratitude is what establishes the relationship we have with God.It is not a far leap from gratitude to a feeling of love for the God who loved us enough to give us life.

         So do you see why God desires to be known as the Creator and not just a great, the greatest, power? The reason why God needs to be known as our Creator is so that we might have a right relationship with him, a relationship based on grace which inspires a response of gratitude and love. The nature of this relationship is disclosed to Moses who God revealed his name of Creator to. God told Moses in the fourth chapter of Exodus that Israel was God’s first born son. God’s desire is to have a parent child relationship with all of the people he created, Israel being the firstborn who like a lot of first born children know their duty is to show the ropes to the children born after them.

         So, we have to know all this to understand that the relationship we are to have with God is not one bound with a contract but one defined by a covenant. Where, in a contract, what is exchanged is goods and services, in a covenant what is exchanged is people. The essence is that I will be there for you and you in exchange will be there for me. This is why we say that marriage is a covenant not a contract. You don’t get married for what goods and services your marriage partner brings to the table; I for one am glad for that! To get a deeper understanding about covenants, it is interesting to note that in ancient Hebrew there is no word for “family”. The bonds found in a family, the bonds of marriage, parenthood, the bonds between siblings and cousins and extended family members all of these in ancient Hebrew were covered by the name covenant.

         Another interesting understanding about covenant from the ancient Hebrew is that the verb which means to swear a covenant is built on the word “seven”. The thought is that when God was creating the world in seven days he was swearing his covenant with his creation.On the seventh day, God rested and he not only rested but he invites into his rest. As we discover in the fourth chapter of Hebrews, it is those who believe, place their faith in God, thee are the ones who enter into God’s rest. This is faith in the God who gives life to the dead and who calls into existence the things that do not exist. So, when our relationship with God is a covenant relationship we have an attitude of trust and faith even if circumstances of life drive us to despair and anguish we still have the bond we have with the God because we place our faith in him above everything else.

         It is prayer then not a hope of a trial with God that Job should be turning to. Prayer is the communication of the family of God. It is as Eliphaz says, to agree with God and to be at peace. This just echos the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples found in Matthew 6. Jesus teaches that after we acknowledge that God is our Heavenly Father, the one whom we have a covenant relationship with, then the very next thing we must do is to agree that God is holy which means that God is righteous and his ways lead to life. Then we agree that it is God’s kingdom that coming upon the earth so that just as God’s ways are known in heaven they will also be known here. And we agree that it is God’s will not ours that is to be done by us in order for heaven to come upon the earth.  Even Eliphaz knew that the good way of heaven comes on earth is when we receive instructions from the word of God’s mouth and we take up the words of God and treasure them in our heart. This is the unexpected meaning behind what Jesus teaches us to ask for in the asking for the supernatural bread of heaven keeping in mind that we do not live by bread alone but we live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. These words of God are our very source of life if we only understood it to be so. Eliphaz continues that if we return to God then God will be to us more precious than gold or silver. We can return to God because as Jesus teaches us in his prayer, we can ask for forgiveness to repair the covenant bond we have with our Heavenly Father if we are willing to forgive in order to repair the bond we have with each other. We know how precious is God’s mercy to us because we have been redeemed from our futile ways not with silver of gold but with the precious blood of Christ. This is how precious we are to God and this is why God is precious to us.

         Finally, Eliphaz tells us that our God is a God who delivers us, even when we are not innocent if we would but confess our sin come clean and walk in the light. This too is what Jesus taught that we are to pray that God deliver us from evil. So, all of what Eliphaz tells Job, this agreeing with God, the listening to God, the returning to God and being delivered by God, all of this is what is spoken of in the family of God. Prayer then is all about strengthening our faith in the God of grace. We learn to do the will of God not in order to receive anything from God but in order that through doing the will of God we will experience the goodness and righteousness of God through our obedience. The blessing is found in knowing God as a good and gracious God that deserves our trust and allegiance.Sure, disasters and tragedies may come but what is found in the midst of them is the God who is our anchor the one we can hold fast to until the storm has passed. This is how prayer orders our story from being a story of chaos and turmoil to one where we have faith that God is still present with us calling our life back into order.What Job failed to understand about our relationship with God is that this relationship is not about what is in it for me but rather that there is a God who is in it for me. This reminds me of a story I once heard about a pastor who felt called to begin a church in the very poorest part of town. He didn’t have a whole lot of resources but he he had a great faith in God. So in order to share the gospel he would walk through this poverty stricken neighborhood every day looking for someone to strike up a conversation with. One day he noticed a man sitting out on his porch, his house completely dark. The pastor asked the man what his story was and he told the pastor that his power had been shut off. He then proceeded to ask the pastor if he could pay to get his power turned back on to which the pastor said, “No, I don’t have enough to get your power turned back on but what I can do is sit with you in the dark.” God may not always use his power to turn our power back on, to send his light but let there be no doubt, God is always sitting with us in the dark. This is the assurance prayer gives to us that our Father is always by our side. Amen!