I was speaking to a friend in Derby on Tuesday and he said he didn’t believe in God when I told him I was a pastor, and I thought about this, when you are speaking to people it comes home to you the awfulness of being lost and what it means to be lost and how lost people are, they’re just floundering, and wherever you go you can speak to anybody and in no time at all you start to discover that they’ve got problems. We all have problems don’t we it’s just that we have a wonderful helper but there are problems, problems wherever you go, I don’t know ifyou have ever read the book of Job but Job contains a revelation of what Satan can do to a person and really what is in the nature of Satan to do to a person if God permits him to act, there is a wonderful comfort there because when you read the book you realise that he can’t do anything unless God lets him but within that you see the nature of Satan. All the things that happened to Job to that extent that God permitted him, Job suffered dreadfully but the Lord wonderfully restored him. When you consider his before and after state the contrast is such a stark one before all this happened to him there he was he had children, riches, good health I suppose all the things that most of us would ever hope to have, he had them, in his day folks he had them all but when Satan had done his work Job lost his children, his wealth, and his health and here was a man stripped of everything that seemed to make life worth living for him. At the end of the book it says that the Lord restored everything,
Job 42:10 And the Lord restored Job's losses when he prayed for his friends. Indeed, the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before;
He had double the number of sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys all the hallmarks of being exceedingly affluent in the society in which he lived. But the same number of children as he had before, God said I will give you back double but he had the same number of children, now you may agree with me or not but my understanding is that he had double the children as well because he had the same number of children born again to replace on earth the ones that he had lost and in the hereafter the one’s that he’d lost as well, God doubled everything folks I so believe.
I want us to consider that huge aspect that he was stripped of everything and it just made me think talking to this friend of mine last Tuesday so many people with problems of one sort or another and every single one of us we all have this in common, we all have needs like this when we suffer some loss of some kind it is a wonderful help if we can find the comfort of some good words from somebody now unfortunately in Job’s case his comforters were miserable comforters and they weren’t really up to the mark, they weren’t the comforters that Job hoped they would have been. Properly understood his comforters comforted from, now it wasn’t their fault they did the best that they could it was just that they lacked knowledge, they didn’t know and there is a revelation at the end of the book but that doesn’t answer all the questions as a matter of fact but they answered from three different stand points so closely related, they answered from the stand point of human experience, human tradition, and human merit. It is so easy to look at something from the stand point of human merit and to think to yourself well I know what he deserves and what he doesn’t deserve because look at what sort of person he is and when you look at the sort of comments that his comforters made they dealt with everything from the point of what we experience as people, the tradition that we pick up along the way and what we think we might merit or not merit because of the way that we have lived and all of those things fell short really to explain the situation that this man was in. Here was a man for a time that experienced every human comfort and every hope just absolutely cut off he lost everything folks, there isn’t a person in this room who has experienced the sort of trauma that this man Job went through now some of us I know have had dreadful experiences and I am not making light of that but this man folks, experiences multiplied on multiplied and I don’t know anybody who has had quite his experiences.
Just imagine being that utterly destitute, utterly helpless, utterly in need and not knowing really where to turn for help, when I was thinking about this in some small measure every single one of us, all the people that we meet they have all got problems and you listen to them and one of the things is the lack of help and comfort, there is a remarkable little verse in Job when he is describing these comforters, these friends that have come to him
Job 13:4 But you forgers of lies, You are all worthless physicians, lousy doctors all of you and this is what I started thinking about, you know the world is full of worthless physicians, useless doctors and we have all met them every single one of us and I felt it would be useful and instructive to identify some of the useless physicians that there are and you are familiar with them you have met some of them yourself.
To be continued
Dr Atheist and Dr Agnostic......
Pastor Philip Yendle
