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Guest (Male): Welcome to Turning Point. Going through hardship is never enjoyable, but it's almost always beneficial. Today, Dr. David Jeremiah considers how that truth plays out in the life of Job, who learned firsthand how God can bring the greatest of blessings from the worst of circumstances. From the series *Making Sense of It All*, here's David to introduce his message, "When Trials Become Our Teacher."

Dr. David Jeremiah: Well, there's one man in the Bible whose trials surpass everybody else's, and that man, of course, is the man Job. We're going to look at the second chapter of the book of Job today and draw some wonderful principles that help us understand what to do when trials become our teacher. We'll get there in just a moment.

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Today, I want to talk with you about the subject of when trials become our teacher. I have often recounted the tragic circumstances surrounding the writing of "It Is Well With My Soul." You may remember that the song came from the heart of a man who was torn by testing and loss.

Horatio Spafford was a very prosperous senior partner of a successful law practice. Prosperous and successful, that is, until the Great Chicago Fire, which destroyed much of his wealth along with most of the city of Chicago. Horatio remained in Chicago after the fire to finish a case that was pending, and his family set out for Paris. He was to join them later.

On November the 21st, 1873, the luxury ocean liner taking Anna Spafford and their four daughters to Europe was rammed by another vessel, and in less than 20 minutes, it sank. An unconscious Anna Spafford was rescued from some floating debris, but all of the children perished. While on the way to be with her in Europe after he received her note that all the children had been lost at sea, Horatio asked the captain of the ship on which he was traveling to alert him to the place along the way where this tragedy had occurred.

He went up and cried out to the Lord and went back to his cabin, and on a piece of hotel stationery from Chicago, wrote down the words to the song "It Is Well With My Soul." Almost as familiar as his song are the words of Anna's telegram to her husband. When she was notifying him of what had happened, she sent simply these words: "Saved alone. What shall I do?" To a fellow survivor, she said, "God gave me four daughters. Now they have been taken from me. Someday, maybe I will understand why."

Job had lost his children—not four daughters, but seven sons and three daughters. They were swept away when the house in which they were having a party was struck by a tornado and the house collapsed on them, killing them all instantly. The loss of Job's ten children was the final stroke in Satan's first attack against him. In round one, Job lost all of his possessions and all of his family except for his wife.

Now, at this point in the story, at the end of chapter one and the beginning of chapter two, the central question of this book shifts. It shifts from the question, "Can a man lose everything he has and still bless God?" to "Can a man lose even what he is and still remain under God's blessing?" So we begin the second chapter with Job accused by Satan.

In verses one through three of chapter two, we read these words: "Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the Lord. And the Lord said to Satan, 'From where do you come?' So Satan answered the Lord and said, 'From going to and fro on the earth and from walking back and forth on it.'

Then 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, one who fears God and shuns evil? And still he holds fast to his integrity, though you incited me against him to destroy him without cause.'" Using the same words that we are familiar with from the first chapter, we are told that Satan returns and is in the presence of Almighty God along with God's ministering angels.

As in the first meeting, God initiates the conversation and he turns to Satan and he says to him, "What do you think of my man Job now? I let you give him your best shot, but Job hasn't cursed me. No, in fact, he hasn't cursed me. He's actually blessed me. Satan, I'm telling you there is nobody like Job on the face of the earth, and you will never break him."

But how many of you know Satan doesn't give up easily? Can I get a witness? If he would not give up on Jesus Christ until after he had tempted him three times, he's not going to give up on Job after one, and he's not going to give up on us either. And so we learn first of all about Satan's persistence, and then we learn about his persuasion.

In verses four and five, we read these words: "And Satan answered the Lord and said, 'Skin for skin! Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse you to your face.'" Satan says to God, "God, I went as far as you'd let me go. I took away Job's possessions and I took away his family, but that's all you allowed me to do.

Job still has his health, God, and because of that, he can get another family and he can start another business. But I'll tell you what, Lord, if you let me touch his health, that'll be it. He'll curse you then, Lord. He'll curse you to your face." Now, what he's saying is this: he's accusing Job of sacrificing his children, his animals, and his servants in order to preserve his own hide.

Satan was convinced that Job would give all he had for his own life. In other words, Satan is saying that Job only loves God because God protects him and keeps him healthy. So he says, "God, you let me take away Job's health. That'll be it. He'll curse you then, Lord. He'll curse you to your face." So we move from Satan's persistence and his persuasion to his permission.

Notice verse six: "And the Lord said to Satan, 'Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life.'" God issues Satan a permission slip with virtually unfettered power to harm his body, but God restricted Satan and would not let him kill Job. Now, it's important to know before we go any further that God is always in control.

Satan could not do anything that God would not let him do, and God is allowing Job to be a testimony, if you will, to a man's ability to trust in his God when all the props are taken away. But mark it down, Satan doesn't have unrestricted power. He can't do what he wants to do. He has to get permission from God. So we move from his persistence and his persuasion and his permission, now notice his persecution in verse seven.

"So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and he struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head." Satan afflicted Job with a disease. We do not know for sure what that disease was. It is identified primarily in the text in a very graphic form. He had painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.

He was covered with sores. The Hebrew word for the word "boil" means a burning sore. The word is used for the boils with which the Egyptians were smitten in the plagues of Exodus chapter nine. Job was covered with these burning, inflamed sores from his foot to his head. The disease was likely the dreaded black leprosy of the Near East, often referred to by the title "elephantiasis."

The name for elephantiasis comes from the fact that the limbs in this disease take on a dark color from heavy incrustation due to the sores and the extreme swelling, which makes the limbs of the person look like elephant's legs. And they say the suffering with this disease is absolutely indescribable. If you read through the rest of the book of Job, you will run into some of the things Job was feeling and the symptoms of his disease.

I just made a list of a few of them and I won't ask you to look them up, but let me just tell you what they are. We begin in the second chapter with boils in verse seven, severe itching in verse eight, degenerative changes in his facial skin in verse twelve of chapter two. In chapter three, we discover he's lost his appetite and he's full of depression, verses 24 and 25.

In chapter nine, he has difficult breathing. In 19, he has foul breath. In 19, he also has the loss of weight and continual pain and fever. These are just a few of the things Job was experiencing because Satan was allowed to touch his body. Apparently, Job found relief from the itching by scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery. So now we see Job outside of the city sitting on an ash heap.

The city garbage was deposited and burned there, and all of the rejects lived at the dump. The people living there are begging for alms from whoever passed by. At the ash heap, dogs fight over something to eat, and the city's waste is brought and burned, and the city's leading citizen, Job, is now sitting at the dump on an ash heap outside of the city.

Before we leave this section, I want to take just a moment and share a couple of summary paragraphs about Satan because we run the risk right here of either giving him more credit than he deserves or not giving him enough. I came across a couple of paragraphs by a Welsh preacher by the name of Peter Williams, and he writes this. He says, "We are sometimes in danger of adopting one of two extremes where Satan's power is concerned.

On the one hand, we overrate his power and treat him as if he were almost equal to God. He is not, for he is a created being and he does not possess God's attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The limits of his power may be seen in the fact that he can only do to Job what God allows him to do. But even greater is the danger of underestimating his power, which is also very extensive.

The first two of Satan's attacks upon Job are connected with his manipulation of men. He uses the Sabeans and the Chaldeans to do his work. The second two temptations show his control over the forces of nature, the fire and the wind, and the last temptation uses sickness of his subject's body to get across his point. For all of his sinister cunning and power, Satan is a created being and therefore he is no match for the sovereign God who created him.

He is the enemy of our souls and he will use every means at his disposal to bring about our destruction, but we must never forget that he is already a defeated enemy. All the vicious attacks upon the believer are but counter-offensives that are doomed to fail. Let me tell you something, friends: Satan was sentenced at the cross of Jesus Christ. The sentence hasn't been fully carried out, but one day it will.

In between the sentence and the judgment, we're living in that period of time, and Satan's kind of on the loose and he's a frantic, desperate creature because he knows his days are numbered. So don't be taken aback by Satan. Keep your guard up, but don't let him make you believe that you have to do anything he tells you to do. He reports to Almighty God and he can't do anything that God won't allow.

The Bible says there has no temptation taken us but such as is common to man, and God is faithful who will not suffer us to be tempted above that we are able, but will with the temptation also make a way of escape. We can be victorious over Satan, and he does not have power over us to do anything that we don't open the door of our lives to let him do. Hallelujah. Job accused by Satan.

But now, we've got to talk about the second part of this story, and I've been looking forward to this with fear and trembling. We're going to talk about Job's wife. We read first of all of her advice in verse nine: "Then Job's wife said to him, 'Job, do you still hold fast your integrity? Why don't you just curse God and die?'" I read a lot of books when I'm studying a series like this, and I love to read Chuck Swindoll's books because he sits loose in the saddle.

And he always wants to make sure that while we deal with serious things, we don't get too serious. Right here in his book, he tells this story. He said there was a couple in bed one night and the husband got up in the middle of the night and he went downstairs, and after he'd been gone for a while, his wife realized that he should have come back. She gets worried and she goes downstairs.

She walks in the kitchen and he's sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee staring out of the window. She says, "Honey, what's wrong?" He said, "Oh, nothing." She says, "No, no, you wouldn't get out of bed and come down here in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen, drink coffee, and stare out the window if there wasn't something wrong. What's wrong?" He said, "Well," he said, "the words don't come easy."

And as she walked over to see him, she saw he was crying. He said, "You remember 20 years ago when we had our first date?" She said, "Yes." He says, "You were 16 and I was 21." "Yes." "Do you remember the night we were sitting out in front of the house and we were smooching? And your dad saw us, and he went back in the house and he came out with the pistol, and he put the pistol in the window and he said, 'Anybody who kisses my daughter like that will either marry her or spend 20 years in prison.'"

And he said, "I just realized tomorrow was the day I would have gotten out." Now, I have to recover from that very quickly because I sort of noticed that the majority of the laughter sounds sort of masculine. I don't see a lot of ladies laughing at that. But I wanted to tell you that because the rest of this is interesting, to say the least.

After Satan struck the first time against Job, all Job had left was his wife and his friends. Now we read that even his wife has abandoned him. You cannot imagine how painful that must have been to the patriarch. Chrysostom, a church father who's not supposed to have any sense of humor about this at all, wrote that the only reason Satan didn't kill Job's wife when the rest of his family was killed was because he knew he was going to use her later on to do some more damage to Job.

And the most difficult thing to accept about the seventh verse of this chapter is the fact—if you look at it carefully—Job's wife asked Job to do exactly what Satan wanted him to do. Did you see that? Satan wanted Job to curse God and die, and she said to him, "Why don't you curse God and die?" One of the things we have to be careful about here is to recognize that even though people are close to us, sometimes they can give us wrong messages.

Adam listened to Eve. Abraham listened to Sarah. Job's wife advised him to give up his faith and commit suicide. But I want to tell you something, there's another side to this story that we need to be careful to mention. Before we throw Job's wife under the bus, I'd like to try to put this whole scene in perspective. Don Baker has written a book called *Pain's Hidden Purpose*, and in that book, he has written these words.

He says, "Many have speculated as to just what Job's wife might have meant when she looked at that emaciated and blackened body and suggested that Job end his suffering. Some see Job's wife," he wrote, "at this point as hardened and bitter, unconcerned for his relationship with God. I see her," wrote Don Baker, "as a sensitive, caring, concerned woman who loved Job and honored his commitment.

No family could have enjoyed the oneness that Job's family shared if their mother had been calloused or cruel. But she was stretched at this point. Weeks of suffering had passed without relief. Every morning, she woke up to the same pain, only to find it intensified. Every night, she'd pray for her husband's healing, but it never came.

And there was no medication, no Tylenol 3, no Percocet, no Demerol, no morphine to ease the pain, no Valium, not even an aspirin to help him go to sleep. His suffering was so intense, his looks so hideous, his condition so infectious that he was forced to move out of the house and relocate at the city dump. And she couldn't stand it any longer.

In a moment of deep and frustrated anguish, she suggested, 'Job, why don't you curse God and die? Tell God you've had enough. He's not going to heal you. He's gone back on his promise. He's not even aware of your problem. Job, I'd rather see you dead than like this. Maybe we could die together.'" It's hard to blame this woman, isn't it, when you realize what she was experiencing?

But to his credit, Job didn't listen to his wife's advice. He gave a solid answer in verse 10. He said to her, "You speak as one of the foolish women. Shall we indeed accept good from God and shall we not accept adversity?" In all this, Job did not sin with his lips. Job's response here was profoundly simple. As you read the language, here's basically what he said to her.

He said, "Woman, don't talk like a foolish person. You're talking like an unbeliever. Don't do that. Shall we accept good from God," he said, "and not accept his adversity?" And he rejected her suggestion. Job was slowly, methodically being stripped to the very nakedness of his spiritual being. All the things that clothe the spirit of man were being ripped apart.

All that man leans upon for help and strength was taken from him until we now see this man left alone, a soul that was forced to stand naked in the universe of God. All the props removed. I want to stop for just a moment and put a little counsel in here if I might. I want to take just a moment and remind all of us, now that we've done away with all of the ups and downs of Job's wife, and just say to the wives here: don't ever, ever underestimate your importance to your husband. Don't ever think your words of affirmation are less important than others. I promise you, your husband cares more about what you say than what anybody else on the earth says. Amen.

And these instructions from Job's wife are quite amazing, aren't they? Some of you are saying, "Well, sure thankful I don't have a wife like that." And hopefully none of you do, but she was quite a piece of action in this story, and Job had to overcome some of the things that she said. We'll talk more about that when we get together again tomorrow right here on Turning Point.

We're talking about *Making Sense of It All*. It's a series of lessons on some of the explanation passages in the Bible. We've talked about finding strength through weakness, finding courage when fatigue drains you, and so many other thoughts that are part of this discussion. We still have quite a way to go. So if you're looking for encouragement, don't miss Turning Point every day. July is a month of encouraging messages from the Bible, answering your questions, motivating your heart, making you want to continue to serve God with everything you have. We'll see you next time right here on Turning Point.

Guest (Male): For more information about Dr. Jeremiah's series *Making Sense of It All*, please visit our website, where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine *Turning Point* and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at davidjeremiah.org/radio. That's davidjeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of Robert J. Morgan's inspiring book *100 Bible Verses That Made America*. It's yours for a gift of any amount.

You can also purchase the *Jeremiah Study Bible* in the English Standard, New International, and New King James Versions, available in your choice of handsome and durable cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, davidjeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue the series *Making Sense of It All* on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.