Insight for Living

Bill Meyer: When someone you love is suffering, what do you say? Sometimes silence is a gift, but Job's friends couldn't leave well enough alone. In our last program, Chuck Swindoll introduced us to three men who traveled a great distance to comfort their broken, grieving friend. And then, they opened their mouths.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck paints a portrait of their awkward exchange. It's a painful illustration of what graceless words actually sound like and the devastating damage they cause. Let's pick up the study in Job 15. Chuck titled his message, Graceless Words for a Grieving Man.

Chuck Swindoll: Eliphaz speaks the second time. Actually, he throws his fist. They're called words. In chapter 15, he delivers a series of rebukes. These are graceless words for a grieving man. In case you wonder what they sound like, they begin with pride, verse two. Should a wise man answer with windy knowledge and fill himself with the east wind? The word "himself" is really in the Hebrew "belly." Should he fill his belly with east wind?

There's pride in verse two, followed by insult. Should he argue with useless talk or with words which are not profitable? Indeed, you do away with reverence, you hinder meditation before God. Then there's guilt. For your guilt teaches your mouth, and you choose the language of the crafty, you deceiver, you. Your own mouth condemns you.

So there's condemnation. And then in seven, eight, and nine, there is exaggeration and sarcasm where one humiliating question after another is later asked. Verse seven, were you the first man to be born? In other words, you think you have a monopoly on truth and wisdom, Job? Were you brought forth before the hills? Do you hear the secret counsel of God? Has he somehow brought you into a corner and whispered to you his insights? You think you've got a corner on inspired information, Job? Verse nine, what do you know that we don't know? What do you understand that we don't?

Verse 11, are the consolations of God too small for you, even the word spoken gently with you? He saw himself and his friends as speaking gently. Gently. Referring to God, behold, he puts no trust in his "holy" ones, and the heavens are not pure in his sight. How much less one who is detestable and corrupt, man who drinks iniquity like water. Having rebuked him, he follows it with reminders of the fate of the wicked, verses 17 to 35. Job, because you're wicked, you writhe in pain, verse 20. So there's pain all your days. You're getting what you deserve, Job.

Verse 25, because he, that's Job, you have stretched out your hand against God, you conduct yourself arrogantly against the Almighty. That's why. And Eliphaz backs away and stares at him with that glare. You are getting exactly what you deserve. You are getting exactly what you deserve.

I tell you, I admire the 38 verses that follow Eliphaz's rebuke and unfair reminders. Job, in effect, says, you want to take the gloves off? I'll do it. My hands are covered with sores, but I'll take the gloves off. And I find four responses in Job that are admirable and, honestly, I do not find them shocking. Some of you may. First of all, he is disgusted with his friend.

By the way, no extra charge for this little insight. People who are graceless don't usually connect the dots unless you are really strong in return. It just goes "whoosh." So you have to plan a blow right on the schnoz, you know. You have to be sure that you get through, so sometimes, bear with me, sometimes you have to fight poison with poison. You have to be blunt in return or they'll walk all over you and stomp you into the dirt. Job says you are a sorry comforter.

Speaking the truth cuts through the fuzzy, vague, feel-good verbiage that often characterizes our talk. That's why I plead with all of us to learn how to speak truth, ideally in love. But if I've got to have truth without love, I'll take truth. It's better with love, but truth is always best. "Truth hurts" is a familiar saying, but there are times when unvarnished, direct blows are needed.

And you know when you sometimes hear them? When you lose your job and someone who is in authority and has the unhappy task of facing you with the loss of job, that person, if there's integrity, you know what I mean, if things are in place, it's appropriate. That person at that moment is telling you things you should never forget. He or she is cutting through the veneer and getting to the reason you have lost that job. And in this case, Job is saying, your words are wrongly stated. There's a bad motive. There's an intent that's tarnished. There are words used that are brutal, and I'm telling you, you are a sorry comforter.

The second, after disgust, he's distressed. Verse seven. And if you will allow me, he is distressed at God. Now bear with that. I know that's shocking for some of you to hear it, but it happens. He's talking about God. I think correctly the "H" in verse seven is capitalized. He has exhausted me. He even sees him as angry, verse nine. His anger has torn me and hunted me down and gnashed at me with his teeth. Verse 11, God hands me over to ruffians. Look at these guys that showed up. He tosses me into the hands of the wicked.

Now watch this. It's like he's a rag doll in the mouth of a Rottweiler. I was at ease, verse 12. He shattered me. He grasped me by the neck and has shaken me to pieces, set me up as his target. Verse 13, his arrows surround me without mercy. He splits my kidneys open. He pours out my gall on the ground and breaks through me with breach after breach. He runs at me like a warrior.

That's the way I'm feeling, says Job. He is distressed. If you find fault with Job, it's because you've never been there. There's not a counselor who has been in the work of counseling very long before she or he meets up with someone who is distressed over the way God's treating them. They don't understand it. Remember, Job still doesn't know the plan between Satan and God. We were introduced to it clearly in chapters one and two. Job never was in on that conversation.

He doesn't know why one day the bottom drops out and tornadoes and fires and death and destruction and finally ill health and all of that breaks on him, and God doesn't say a word to him. And he's visited with God all of his adult life. No wonder he's distressed. I have been through times, I'll confess to you, where I have just said in unguided moments, God, what in the world are you up to? What is this about?

To the best of my knowledge, I am not doing this wrong. I am not doing it for the wrong motive. I haven't gone into this to in any way please me or placate somebody else. I'm trying to walk in obedience and boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like you're driving home from work and you had a bad day at the office, and the guy behind you runs into you, and the guy in the Ferrari in front of you, you run into him. Ferrari drivers tend not to like that when you hit them from the rear. And he climbs out of his car. When you get home, you don't have any milk, and your dog's hungry and he's been gnawing on a cabinet. And your kids are mean, and they're gnawing on each other. And you're out of money.

And you think, wait a minute, what is this all about, God? What is this about? And no answer comes, and tomorrow's worse than today, and next week is intensified, all of it making last week look like a piece of cake. On top of all of that, you lost your job, and on top of that, I just could go on and on. Your imagination's as good as mine. Believe me, in the unguarded moments when the lights are out and the doors are closed and Swindoll isn't around to listen and nobody's going to tell on you, you think like this, or you are weird. You are weird.

Don't tell me you're too spiritual to think like that. You see him running at you like a warrior. And of all things, he doesn't even tell you why. And so, you could guess the third reaction, he is depressed. He is depressed. Look over here at 17, one and two. My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me. Surely mockers are with me, and my eye gazes on their provocation.

Eugene Peterson renders this in The Message: My spirit is broken, my days used up, my grave dug and waiting. I believe what brought Job to this point of depression is best expressed in the Latin words "Deus Absconditus." I came across those words this week. Deus, D-E-U-S, is the word in Latin for God. Absconditus gives us our word abscond. What does abscond mean? Webster says it means to conceal, to depart secretly and hide oneself. He's gone.

I can't figure him out. When I pray, I don't get answers. When I devote myself even more deeply to doing his will for all the right reasons, I continue to lose. And the heavens are brass. God has absconded with the blessings. Hold on tight. C.S. Lewis said it like this in A Grief Observed: Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing him, you will be, or so it feels, welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and a sound of double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. Deus Absconditus. It expresses the problem without any ruffles and without any literary lace. He's hit bottom. Disgusted, distressed, depressed, and finally completely despondent and ready to die.

Verse 11 of chapter 17, my days are passed, my plans are torn apart, even the wishes of my heart. You know what that sounds like? My dreams are dashed. My hopes are gone. They make night into day, saying the light is near in the presence of darkness. Now look at this verse. If I look for Sheol as my home, that's the grave. Sheol is the Hebrew word for the place of the departed spirit. If I look for the grave as my home, I make my bed in the darkness. If I call to the pit, that's where I'm going to be dropped in my coffin. If I call to the pit, you are my father. To the worm, which is down there getting ready to eat on my body, you are my mother and my sister. Where now is my hope?

Let's call this Job's requiem. Will it go down with me to Sheol? Shall we together go down into the dust? One man renders: if all I have to look forward to is a home in the graveyard, if my only hope for comfort is a well-built coffin, if a family reunion means going six feet under and the only family that shows up is worms, you call that hope? No. If hope and I are to be buried together, I suppose you'll all come to the double funeral. You know what he's thinking? Everybody's talking about heaven, heaven, heaven. I'm going to the grave.

You know what he's missing? You know what he's missing? He is missing what only grace can bring him. He has no grace from anybody around him. Nobody there to reassure him. He is totally confused. In an outstanding book, Disappointment with God, we read: once a friend of mine went swimming in a large lake at dusk. As he was paddling at a leisurely pace about a hundred yards offshore, a freak evening fog rolled in across the water. Suddenly he could see nothing. No horizon, no landmarks, no objects or lights on the shore, because the fog diffused the light. He could not even make out the direction of the setting sun.

Picture this. For 30 minutes, he splashed around in panic. He would start off in one direction, lose confidence, and turn 90 degrees to the right or left. It made no difference which way he turned. He could feel his heart racing uncontrollably. He would stop and float, trying to conserve energy and force himself to breathe slower. Then he would blindly strike out again. At last, he heard a faint voice calling from the shore. He pointed his body toward the sounds and followed them to safety.

Something like that sensation of utter lostness must have settled in on Job. As he sat in the rubble and tried to comprehend what had happened, he too had lost all landmarks, all points of orientation. Where should he turn? God, the one who could guide him through the fog, stayed silent. But Satan had challenged whether Job's faith could survive with no outside help or explanation. When God accepted those terms, the fog rolled in around Job.

You could read Job's story, then breathe a deep sigh of relief. God settled that problem. After proving his point so decisively, surely he will return to his preferred style of communication, communicating clearly with his followers. You could think so, unless, that is, you read the rest of the Bible. I hesitate to say this because it is a hard truth and one I do not want to acknowledge, but Job stands as merely the most extreme example of what appears to be a universal law of faith. The kind of faith God values seems to develop best when everything fuzzes over, when God stays silent, and when the fog rolls in.

Disgusted, distressed, depressed, despondent. The chapter ends. You know why I love the Bible? On this earth, everybody doesn't live happily ever after. That's a fairy tale. Or to borrow from my military life, that's a crock. You're believing a hoax if you're waiting for it to get better. This earth doesn't deliver better.

That's why we need grace. Marriage doesn't get easier, it gets harder. Work doesn't get easier, it gets more complicated. Child-rearing doesn't get easier. These people with babies one and two years old, they think they got it tough. Wait till they're 14. And wait till they're 18. Don't amen that, you know, you'll discourage the high schoolers. It gets harder.

You thought you were fat when you got married? Look today. Gets harder. We're all—I always tell brides and grooms, enjoy the pictures, you'll never be thinner. Never. It's harder. We need grace! We need grace! Grace, grace, God's grace. We need grace to survive. We need grace to drive. We need grace to stay married. We need grace to keep a church in unity. Grace, grace, grace when we are going under. Grace, don't kick us. Don't hold us under.

You know, if I called the shots, I would have relieved Job five minutes after it had all gone, you know. I'd have brought all those kids back to life. I'd have cut the lips off of Eliphaz after three sentences. That's the way I'd do it. Cut those lips off, baby. That didn't work. I'd take the neck, you know, just go after it. Who needs Eliphaz?

But you know, you know, you probably wouldn't mature a lot under my kind of style. You'd just enjoy the comfort and we'd all go on a motorcycle ride and have fun. As Cynthia says to me sometimes, honey, if everybody handled things like you want it, all we'd bring to the party is balloons. Nobody'd think to bring the food.

So the fogs rolled in. All hell is broken loose. Welcome to the human race. That's why the Savior died. That's why God gives us salvation because we'd foul it up. We'd come in our own works and be proud that we got there by our own effort, strut around heaven like a peacock. "Hey, what'd you do to get here? How many sermons you preach? 40? I preached 80. Well, I preached 250." Graham, "I preached 80 million." Then we'd all be there because of pride.

Nobody will feel that they've deserved it because we get there by grace. Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. 'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home. Get it. Get it. Quit working for it. Quit laboring over it like somehow you've got to keep him on the cross and you hold him up and maybe you'll make it. Nope. Given our own way, we'd all be worse than Eliphaz. And so, even though Job thinks he's going to miss heaven, even though he thinks the grave is the end, bless him. There is a tomorrow and there is a way beyond.

Thank you, Father, for your grace. Thank you for loving us when we're running away from you. Thank you for pursuing us when we don't want to have anything to do with you. Thank you for when you find us, for holding us close, forgiving us, understanding us, renewing us, and helping us to go on. We love you, Father. We learn from you and we praise you. Blessed be the name of the Lord. In the name of Jesus we pray. Everybody said, amen.

Bill Meyer: Grace. It's the word that holds this entire message together, and it may be the very word your heart needed to hear today. Chuck Swindoll has reminded us that life doesn't get easier, but grace makes it bearable. Chuck titled his message, Graceless Words for a Grieving Man. It's number nine in a 22-part collection of messages. To access the recordings of Chuck's study in the book of Job, just go to insight.org/offer.

Insight for Living is pleased to provide companion resources for every study that Chuck presents, and this biographical series on Job is no different. For instance, Chuck wrote a practical book that pairs naturally with his study. His book is titled Finding God When the World's on Fire, and it's available right now at insight.org/donate.

You know, suffering has a way of stripping away every answer we thought we had. It challenges tidy theology. It makes us second-guess our confident prayers. Suffering tests the assumption that following the rules means we're spared from heartache. Well, Job discovered something better than easy answers. He discovered a God who shows up in the dark, and so can you.

Chuck Swindoll's book, Finding God When the World's on Fire, is an honest, Bible-based companion for anyone whose faith is being tested by real life, by loss, by illness, by uncertainty, by a world that refuses to settle down. Chuck doesn't pretend the hard things aren't hard. He just shows us that God is bigger than all of it. We'd love to put this book in your hands. Contact Insight for Living with your contribution today, and we'll send it to you with our gratitude and our prayers.

Request the book, Finding God When the World's on Fire, by going to insight.org/donate or call 800-772-8888. Here's our contact information one more time. Go to insight.org/donate or call this number, 800-772-8888.

I'm Bill Meyer. Join us when Chuck Swindoll presents Reassuring Hope for the Assaulted and Abused, Tuesday on Insight for Living.