Welcome to the For the Gospel podcast, where we provide sound doctrine for everyday people. I'm your host, Kosti Hind, and this is week one of our summer sermon series. Try to say that five times, our summer sermon series. Every summer for about five weeks, I quote unquote, take a break from the podcast because we do this every single Monday. We don't miss a day.
And I want you to have reputable preachers and helpful sermons. that maybe you've never heard before or preachers you've never heard of before that will edify you and encourage you. A lot of people do road trips, they go different places, or if you're staying around the house or working, this will liven up your commute a little more. I want to introduce our first preacher.
What I'll do each week, an introduction, then you'll hear the sermon, and then I'll outro with each one so you kind of know where we're heading next time. This first one is a dear friend of mine, a brother who I love very much. He's been a preaching mentor in my life.
He is Austin Duncan, Pastor Austin Duncan, or as most people affectionately call him, ATD. Austin serves at Grace Community Church, and the reason that I've chosen this sermon first is because it is one of the best sermons I've ever heard, none of that is hyperbole, on the topic of biblical counseling. The sermon title is Ready, Fire, Aim.
Yes, you heard that correctly, I'll say it again. Ready, Fire, Aim. It's from Job 11. And the title of the sermon gives you a clue already.
Ready, fire, aim. Maybe, just maybe, in Job chapter 11, Job's friend Zophar gives the kind of counsel that should make us use more caution. Sometimes, sometimes in the Bible church world and in the biblical counseling world, we can be a hammer and everything can be a nail. So, Austin, the way Austin does with a great deal of biblical truth, excellent exegesis, and one of my favorite things about him, good humor, timely humor, appropriate humor for the pulpit, the story of Zophar, giving advice to Job, and here we go. I invite you to open your Bible to Job chapter 11. The book of Job is nearly in the center of your Bible, right before the Psalms.
You'll find the book of Job. And I'd like to have the Spirit minister to us through God's holy and inerrant and powerful word in Job chapter 11. I always try to choose a text where nobody had their quiet time ever. So this is the text for us tonight. And I think I even have a sermon title for you.
We want to call this one, Ready, Fire. aim. And I won't tell you how many people thought I got that wrong today on the church patio. So it is ready, fire, aim.
And it's intentionally bad advice, which is what we find in Job chapter 11. And bad advice is something that we, I'm sure, are accustomed to in our lives. And I want you to be thinking about that. But first, let me read to you Job. Chapter 11 in its entirety, 20 verses.
It starts with verse 1. Then Zophar the Namathite answered, Shall a multitude of words go unanswered, and a talkative man be acquitted? Shall your boasts silence men, and shall you scoff and none rebuke? For you have said, my teaching is pure, and I'm innocent in your eyes.
But would that God might speak, and open his lips against you, and show you the secrets of wisdom. For sound wisdom has two sides. Know then that God forgets a part of your iniquity. Can you discover the depths of God?
Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? They are high as the heavens. What can you do? Deeper than Sheol, what can you know?
Its measure is longer than the earth and broad than the sea. If he passes by or shuts up or calls an assembly, who can restrain him? For he knows false men, and he sees iniquity without investigating.
An idiot will become intelligent when the foal of a wild donkey is... born a man. If you would direct your heart right and spread out your hand to him, if iniquity is in your hands, put it far away.
And do not let wickedness dwell in your tents. Then indeed you could lift up your face without moral defect. And you would be steadfast and not fear, for you would forget your trouble. As waters that have passed by, you would remember it.
Your life would be brighter than noonday. Darkness would be like the morning, and then you would trust, because there is hope. And you would look around and rest securely, and you would lie down, and none would disturb you, and many would entreat your favor. But the eyes of the wicked will fail, and there will be no escape for them, and their hope is to breathe their last. This is the very word of the living God written for our instruction to show us who God is and how we should live.
Bad advice. You ever gotten any? A little bit?
You remember when you were told to sell that Apple stock 25 years ago and do something smart with your money? Bad advice, wasn't it? Remember when they told you to hang on to those DVDs?
I don't remember what they're called. Because they might be worth something someday. Remember when you quit your steady job to take a risk and it didn't pan out? Have you ever gotten bad advice? Did they tell you, you shouldn't marry that girl?
And they were wrong. I wonder if you've gotten bad advice before and how you look back on it. You know, there's a lot of bad advice in Job, and like most bad advice, there's usually a mixture in it, something true and something untrue, something that may have worked, but the timing was wrong. And I think the trouble when you come to the book of Job, a book we're all familiar with, a book of... of dark tragedy and sorrow that marks such an important place in the Scriptures, 42 chapters of biblical content in the book of Job.
And we're all familiar with the basic story, right? I mean, there was a man, he's introduced us to in Job chapter 1, who was a God-fearing man. He was a righteous man.
He was a man who knew God and feared God and lived for God. And God, in turn, had... blessed his life in extraordinary ways.
Job was a magnate in his days. The opening verses of the book of Job list his possessions, and it's almost indescribable to try to fathom the kind of wealth and influence, the kind of significance that Job had in his society. He was a man blessed economically.
He was blessed politically as a chieftain of his region, and he was blessed on a personal, familial level. He was a man with 10 grown children, and they had to love and honor their dad. And he cared about them, not just on a regular basis, but he prayed for them. He offered sacrifices on their behalf. I mean, the opening scene of the book of Job is so serene and beautiful that the switch to the scene in heaven is so stark by comparison, because what you have happening next in the book of Job is you have...
The accuser, the devil himself, Satan, entering into God's presence along God's attendance. And God, God offers up Job as an example of one who truly worships him. And then that famous exchange between God and Satan, where Satan accuses Job of worshiping God, not for God's sake. but for the blessings that God has given him.
And the exchange continues, and Job now is under the hand of Satan because God allowed him to be so. And Satan goes and he strikes all that Job has, and Job is bereft of everything. He loses all his economic prosperity instantly with these marauding hordes that steal his camels. raid his armies and destroy his possessions.
All of it gone in an instant. And then messenger after messenger bearing bad news comes, including the one that says a strong wind came and knocked over the house. Your kids were all together celebrating.
And I'm the only one, just this messenger who survived. And so bereft of his beloved children and all of his possessions, Job continues to worship God. He famously says, naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I will return. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But the devil wasn't done with Job because God wasn't finished proving the validity of Job's worship.
And so the devil strikes Job's health with God's explicit permission. Everything that happened to Job passed through the fingers of the sovereignty of God. Every single tragedy, every single sorrow, all of them came not ultimately from the devil, but from his good and loving father. And then Job's health was wrecked, his body covered with sores and boils. And out to the ash heap he went, presumably to die.
to lament and pray and sing his last and to wait for God to finish him off. But what happens next is potentially as bad as everything that happened before. Because as Job sits in mourning on that ash heap, scraping and lacerating his own sores with broken pieces of pottery, three of his friends, men of influence, travel a great distance together, and they come with the express purpose of ministering to Job.
And in their finest hour, when they arrive at Job, they find him almost unrecognizable because of how his sorrow and his trial and his physical suffering has wrecked him. They surround him, and according to the custom of the day, they sit with him, and they sit in silence for seven days. mourning with Job, empathizing with Job. And that turns out to be their brightest hour.
The best thing they ever said was nothing. And when they sat with him, at least they were present, they were sympathetic, the author actually tells us that they came to offer comfort, they came to console. But then in order of likely age, they all speak.
Each one. offering their ideas to why Job has found himself in such a place of suffering. And first you hear from Eliphaz. And Eliphaz is probably the oldest of the friends, and that's why he speaks first.
And he gently, to a degree, begins to prod at Job and ask Job exactly what he'd been doing with his life. Basically chalks it up to mystery. And then Bildad, who has a great understanding of how the world works, he waxes eloquent for a few chapters, and he has another idea. Perhaps, he says, your kids were really, really bad. That's why they died.
I mean, how ugly is that? How unhelpful. You see, only the reader knows that there is nothing in Job's life that caused this to take place.
God is demonstrating that Job's worship is authentic, that Job, of course Job is a sinner, Job out for sacrifices for his sins and for his children's sins. Job is never claiming to be sinless, but God is demonstrating that Job is truly one who worships God for God. The friends don't get this. And so in three different cycles of speeches, they take turns.
And we're here in the second act of Job after Eliphaz has mused eloquently and Bildad has accused his kids of being sinners. Now we have the worst friend Zophar. His name is Zophar.
And he's probably the youngest of the friends because he's speaking third. He's had the most time to think because Job has responded to the other friends and he has pleaded for his innocence. He's... asked for an audience with God because he doesn't understand why all this is happening to him.
And I thought tonight we'd listen to Zophar. We listen to this young man because I think he has a lot to show us. I think he's a counselor that is not uncommon. Zophar is a counselor who is familiar to me because I've met him.
in churches. This character Zophar, portrayed by one commentator, Francis Anderson, as, quote, the least engaging of Job's three friends. We all have a friend like that, don't we? your least engaging friend. He goes on to say, there's not a breath of compassion in his speech.
He says, flat beer compared to Job's seismic sincerity. Other commentators describe Zophar with words like this, a friend who is cold, cruel, censorious, blunt, insulting, accusatory, caustic, abrupt, openly scornful. Whereas all these friends have said things that were barbed and sharp and harsh, nobody is quite as bad as Zophar.
He exhibits an unbending and ungracious nature. He lacks any regard for treating Job with kindness or sensitivity. But what's so remarkable about Zophar's speech is how orthodox it is.
And this is almost true of everything the friends say. You see, their problem isn't that they have bad theology. Sometimes they're not exactly right, but their theology is usually right.
They all affirm the absolute sovereignty of God. They all affirm that sin will be punished by God and righteousness will be rewarded, but they have such a wooden understanding of who God is and how He works that they misapply theology that's true in and of itself to the situation that's before them. These guys truly ready, fire, aim.
And I think there's lessons for us here. Lessons in how we provide counsel and how we receive counsel. Lessons to help us minister to others with a gentle approach when they're in need of either consolation in their suffering or confrontation in their sin.
So far, speech can teach us. how we handle the theology that's been entrusted to us. Big things like transcendence, incomprehensibility, things that should drive us not to shove counsel down people's throats who are hurting, but to practice patience and tenderness and to encourage repentance when it's absolutely necessary to understand what rebuking is really for. And so I think there's a lot to learn from Zophar. And so I think we should dive into this speech and learn how to be better counselors and better friends and learn how to handle our theology with wisdom and with grace instead of like a sledgehammer.
So I think the best way is to look at this in three parts. Verses 1 through 6 we can call a reckless rebuke. Verses 1 through 6 are a reckless rebuke. Verses 7 through 12, the middle section is prideful pontification. prideful pontification, and then it closes out with what we'll call an appalling altar call, an appalling altar call.
Let's learn from Zophar, our worst friend Zophar, in his reckless rebuke. Verse 1, Zophar the Namathite answered. We don't know where Namath was, but we know Zophar was from there, one of the friends from the east.
I don't take this book to be mythological. I don't take it to be. ah, historical. I think this all really happened. I think this was in the days of the patriarch.
You can read your MacArthur Study Bible to find out more about the background and details, but know that this friend came from a place, all of them were men of great significance, and this is the first thing he says to suffering Job. The first thing he says to his bereft friend, to his bankrupt friend. This is the first thing he says to this man. who is hurting, who is mourning, who is in pain and who is suffering, he says, shall a multitude of words go unanswered and a talkative man be acquitted.
Zophar is upset that Job has spoken at all. You see, he thinks Job's complaints, Job's questions, Job's Seeking after an audience with God is unnecessary. He expects Job to act differently and to speak less in his trial. And what Zophar doesn't understand is that God can handle your messy response to your troubles.
I wish Zophar would have read the Psalms. How often does David wail and mourn before God? How often does...
David, in a wild lament, speak his whole heart to God. That's all that Job has done so far. But Zophar, in this harsh rebuke, tells Job he should shut his mouth. A talkative man will not be acquitted. A multitude of words go unanswered.
But here we are again looking at something that's proverbially true. There's trouble in a multitude of words according to the Proverbs. But in this case, Job had every right to talk to God because God was his friend. He was a man who lived at peace with God.
He didn't understand how exactly it was that his sins were forgiven, except on the basis of the mercy of God. But he accepted that mercy by faith. And Job lived before the face of God with integrity and uprightness. He was a righteous man.
God is being proven right in Job's life. And so when Job suddenly receives this great trial and this great suffering from God, He knows that God's behind it and God's responsible, but he's full of questions. He wants to know how this could be, why God is doing what he's doing. And though there's times in the book of Job where Job will start to overexert his righteousness, that really hasn't happened yet, but Zophar thinks Job has talked quite enough. What do you do with this?
Well, I think when you look at this rebuke, just at the very beginning of it, Job has pled for God to take his life. The gloom and darkness that Job's portrayed in chapter three and four and chapter nine and 10, Job is full of despair, but some of Job's prayers are so theologically powerful that Zophar is telling him to be quiet, and if Job were quiet, we wouldn't be able to hear Job say in Job 9.33, There is no umpire between us, he says to God, who may lay his hand upon both of us. Let him remove his rod from me.
Let him not dread and terrify me. He's not a man that I may answer him, that we may go to court together. This and many other places in Job, Job is grasping towards the concept of a mediator. He needs a mediator.
He needs a redeemer. He needs a hope of resurrection. Something that the New Testament will give us.
in full, Job longs for. That's how deep his faith is. That's how sound Job's theology is.
And Zophar wants him to be quiet. Zophar, whose name sounds like one of the many drugs advertised on TV. Zophar's side effects include dry mouth and suicidal thoughts. Those commercials are so scary.
And Zophar rebukes his ability to talk to his God. He's policing Job's prayer. Job's asking difficult questions, and you know what?
God can handle that. Job's simply asserting he hasn't done anything to elicit God's judgment in his bereavement, the loss of his kids, the loss of his fortune, the loss of his health. Job is at his lowest point, and Zophar decides it's a good time to rebuke him. I wonder how trigger-happy we are with our rebuke.
I wonder how often we think that should be our job to come in and tell somebody to quiet down. I wonder if we misapply the Proverbs like Zophar does. If we hear someone in their pain and sorrow and think, maybe you shouldn't talk so much.
I mean, he's given five chapters of Job's speech, and apparently Zophar thinks he shouldn't speak. The irony of this is that Zophar is talking for 20 verses right now. He's basically calling Job a blowhard, that he has windy speech. And the fact that this young man is telling his friend to close his mouth shows what an inept counselor we have before us. The rebuke is repulsive at the start.
Zophar will go on to give more speeches, some of them even longer than this one, and he'll go on to rebuke Job. And his rebuke is repulsive because he thinks he can set everything in order that's happened to Job. He rebukes and dissects Job and tells him to be silent.
In those seven days of empathy, he thinks he's earned this right to speak. And so he says in verse 3, Should your babble silence men? Should your boasting or babbling silence men? Shall you scoff and none rebuke?
And then in verse 4, he mischaracterizes what Job has actually said. For you have said, My teaching is pure. I'm innocent in your eyes. Well, Job never claimed perfect innocence.
Job never claimed sinlessness. Job, at the beginning of the book, is offering sacrifices for his sins and for the potential sins of his children. Job understood that sin needed to be atoned for. Job didn't claim to be sinless. Job claimed to be forgiven.
Job claimed to be in fellowship with God. Job didn't have any secret sins, nothing he knew of, nothing on his conscience. But Zophar can't live with that kind of a system because Zophar and the friends all have this conception of God that is a wooden understanding of God's system of justice.
It's a retributive principle that says, well, sinners are going to be cursed of God and judged by God, and that's true. And so they think, the friends think, well, that's what their life should look like on earth. Everything they put their hand to should fail. Whereas righteous people who are promised the blessing and favor of God, everything they should do flourish.
This is Psalm 1 on steroids. This is Psalm 1 applied that the righteous will be blessed, the wicked will be blown away like shaft, and they think, well, that's got to happen on my timeline as a human being rather than in God's ultimate judgment, which is how it works. Zophar is unhelpful because he's operating from a man-centered perspective and not recognizing that God is the one who's going to mete out judgment, not Zophar. You see, he doesn't have place in his theology for inexplicable suffering, which honestly just means that Zophar doesn't understand how broken the world is that we live in.
I mean, there's going to be in a fallen world inexplicable suffering. And though it's never going to be inexplicable to God and his purposes, it often remains inexplicable to us. Job has no secret sins that he's harboring and needing to repent of.
And so Zophar's rebuke is irrelevant. It's misplaced. He's telling Job to be quiet.
He's telling Job he's not as innocent as he thinks. He's not even listening to his friend. And in verse 5 he says, But that God would speak and open his lips against you and show you the secrets of his wisdom.
For sound wisdom has two sides. Know then that God forgets a part of your iniquity. He says, God needs to speak to this, and since he's not speaking, I'll go ahead and speak for him.
And then he says, Job, your sin is so bad that God isn't even giving you what you deserve. A dear friend of mine right before church said something that I've heard a thousand times at Grace Church. I said, how are you? And my dear friend said, better than I deserve. It's a theological how you doing.
And I get it, because we all deserve, according to the catechism, the wrath and curse of God. But you know, it is okay for you to say, I'm well, how are you? Sometimes we are just very aware of the debt that's been paid, and so we say, better than I deserve.
Zophar is telling Job, you're not doing better than you deserve. You deserve worse than you're getting. How insensitive is that? How? awful is that?
How punitive is that? Know that God forgets a part of your iniquity. His rebuke is inaccurate. It's unhelpful.
It's harsh. He's not thinking how to approach a suffering man because Zophar has constructed a theological box and his theological box has been violated. And so he's going to let Job have it.
And he's going to say, in his understanding, that his doctrine isn't pure enough, his life isn't clean enough, and he's not blameless enough. In other words, this is a clear case of God's retribution on Job's life. Job, in fact, you're not even getting all that you deserve.
But Job says he's right with God. And according to heaven's perspective, Job is right with God. Job isn't in need of repentance. And the repentance that Job will bring after God's speech at the end of this book isn't the same repentance that's sought after here. This is a superficial kind of repentance being asked for.
When Job goes face to face with the Almighty and God reveals himself to Job in a storm, Job will repent, but he will repent not for secret sin. He'll repent for not recognizing the all-powerful wisdom and ways of God that will be revealed to him at the end. Zophar is so positive that Job has secret sin. And this classic meddling counselor, like an RA at a Christian college, just, what's your secret sin?
What's your secret sin? What's your secret sin? And if you can't find any, they must be hiding it.
God would speak and open his lips and Job will repent immediately, but when this guy just wails on him, he doesn't get it. He says, you deserve worse than you have. Makes me think Zophar is probably the one that's got something hidden in his closet. And so he brings a reckless rebuke.
Look, don't misunderstand me. I'm not against rebuke. Rebuke is part and parcel of the Christian life. We have to be about the ministry of rebuking in our church.
2 Timothy 4.2, Paul, his final letter to his protege. Remember those words he said, reprove and rebuke. Reprove, rebuke, exhort, and then what does he say? With complete patience and teaching.
Jot that verse down, 2 Timothy 4.2. You probably know that verse. You might have learned it in a counseling class. We all know that sin isn't to be ignored.
Sin is to be confronted. And we know the Bible says if you rescue your brother from a sin, it's like saving him from the fire. And we, I hope, learn to be rebukers when something is serious and needs to be confronted and challenged.
And I think we've all learned to receive rebuke when we need course correction in our lives, when we're going a... certain way, and we welcome bad news. We want to be corrected. We want to be admonished, reproved, rebuked, exhorted. We're willing to take it if we're willing to give it.
And Paul is telling his protege Timothy, a man who had a very timid nature, that he was on the brink of bailing on the apostolic imperatives that he'd received from Paul, that he needed to be stoked towards courage and stoked towards faithfulness. And so Timothy had to be told to do those things in a certain way, and Paul told him to reprove. That word means to correct, to expose, or to convict. Paul uses in the book of Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 11. He says you're to convict them. It's a word of speaking to exposing an unknown offense, of correcting a wrong pattern.
And Christians are to reprove one another. It's an uncommon word in the Bible, but it's right there in 2 Timothy 4. Not only does he tell Timothy to reprove, but he tells Timothy to rebuke. And I found this so interesting as I studied this word.
It occurs about 30 times in the New Testament. That's not a lot. And I think of the Apostle Paul the way I think of John MacArthur.
I mean, the guy is high integrity, high intensity. He's doctrinally precise. I mean, Paul was a serious Christian leader, courageous and faithful. And I was very surprised, and I've read the Bible more than once, that this is the only time that the Apostle Paul uses the word rebuke.
I mean, I think of the intensity of the Apostle Paul, and I thought, out of 30 times, it's got to be 15 Paul, right? It's only one time, Paul. It's a caricature sometimes we have of the apostle.
After all, he's the one who said in Ephesians 4.15, speak the truth in love. Remember, he's the one who penned that beautiful tribute to the necessity of Christian love in 1 Corinthians 13. It's Paul who wrote to the Colossians, let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer each person. Of the 30 times that word is used, Paul only uses it here.
And almost all the other times, it's talking about the Lord Jesus Christ. It speaks of him rebuking with full authority in the gospel. He rebukes the waves and they're calm. Jesus rebukes the wind and it stops. Jesus rebukes the demons and they're cast out.
He rebukes fevers and they're eradicated from the body. Jesus rebukes false teachers and they're rebutted. Jesus is the chief.
rebuker in the Bible. And when he does so, he does it with the absolute authority of God. So your roommate's getting on your nerves, huh? Is it time for a rebuke?
Are you sure you have the authority of God in this matter? I just, I'm finding some balance here, are you? I'm not asking you to reprove or rebuke less.
I'm asking you to find that biblical balance, to not be a Zophar in the face of a suffering friend. Because Paul goes on to tell Timothy to exhort a wonderful word. a word that Paul uses lots and lots of times. It means to appeal, to urge, to encourage, reprove, rebuke, and exhort.
And all three of those words obviously overlap and have synonym-like qualities to them, but all of them have the qualification for Timothy and for us that when we rebuke and when we encourage, exhort, when we appeal, we do that with complete patience, complete patience. patience. I don't know if I've ever done anything with complete patience.
Certainly rebuking with complete patience is what Zophar needed to hear. I got a book on my shelf about Sometimes I waste my book allowance, just to say that at the outset. It's called the marshmallow test.
I like marshmallows. What can I say? Turns out the book is about a psychological experiment in the 1960s by Walter Mischel. He designed an experiment to study the concepts of patience and self-control. It was a test on children.
It's when psychologists were allowed to do this kind of thing. They'd put a marshmallow in front of a kid, and they'd say, if you wait... 10 minutes or whatever, you could have two marshmallows, and then they'd leave the room, and the kid would go, and eat the marshmallow. Most times, some children would wait patiently and get two marshmallows, and they'd double down and say, longer, you get four marshmallows, and eventually they all break. That's the fall.
They go back and study these same kids years later, because psychology, and... They found that the kids who waited had better long-term outcomes, and the kids who chomped all the marshmallows immediately had bad social skills and were in prison and stuff like that. I don't remember exactly what the book said.
But I do know this, patience is a fruit of the Spirit. It's something God works in His people to help us to not be reckless. rebukers.
And it's exactly what Zophar didn't do. He didn't have complete patience in teaching. He didn't know, like the Apostle Paul, that he needed his speech to be seasoned with grace. And he rebuked a righteous man.
Well, the second lesson, I think, is a theological one, and it's in verses 7 through 12. And let's quickly consider this theological truth. I think it's familiar to you. Look at what he says.
Can you discover the depths of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? They're as high as the heavens. What can you do?
Deeper than Sheol, what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. If he passes by or shuts up or calls an assembly, who can restrain him? For he knows false men and he sees iniquity without investigating. An idiot will become intelligent when the foal of a wild donkey is born a man.
I love that last line and I just have to explain it first. It's pretty easy. You'll notice that when those 37 babies with extraordinarily complicated names came up here, those 37 babies, they were human babies because their parents were humans. I have to explain this because we live in a weird society where somebody probably says, you know, I'm actually a donkey, my pronouns are hee-haw.
or something. It's a simple proverb, right? When the foal of a wild donkey is born to man, that's when a stupid man will be intelligent. In other words, no people are having donkey babies. That's not how donkeys work.
That's not how people work. That's the chance of a foolish person, a stupid person, becoming intelligent to what Zophar is teaching as he waxes theological. I call 7 through 12 prideful pontification, and Zophar actually has immaculate theology here. He sounds just like some of the greatest psalms.
He sounds like the prophet Isaiah. He's teaching a doctrine that the greatest theologians write for pages and pages on. Bovink starts his His dogma book, his theology book, with this line, mystery is the vital element or lifeblood of dogmatics, of doctrine. What Zophar is featuring for Suffering Job is a lecture on the incomprehensibility of an unfathomable God. And Zophar is right.
God is incomprehensible. His purposes are beyond our understanding. Solomon, when he dedicated the temple, 1 Kings 8, said heaven and the highest heavens cannot contain you.
The apostle Paul prays in Ephesians 3, the understanding of the depths and the heights and the width of the love of God in Christ. God is truly an unsolvable God. You could never figure him out.
This is the doctrine of incomprehensibility. To Zophar, God has unending depths, unlimited might, a height that is so far beyond us, verse 8, a depth beyond the deepest thing in the universe, which is the grave, longer than the earth, broader than the sea. No one can stop him, verse 10. He knows everything. He knows all your sin without having to use any detective work. He's talking about the thought of God being beyond us.
And he's absolutely right. What he's saying about God, the knowledge of God, cannot be contained by the creature. This is incomprehensibility.
It's an important doctrine. It's a reminder that there is no thought of God that we can have that could ever equal who God really is. In his glory and majesty, Zophar is preaching good, solid, reformed theology. He's absolutely right.
and he's totally wrong because he's misapplying it. And that's where we have to be careful as theologians, and we're all theologians. When we claim to know God, we read the Bible, we have a conception of God, that's our theology.
And we need to have a place for incomprehensibility, but when you study incomprehensibility in the Bible, Some things happen to you. First off, it excludes ever putting God in a box. But here's Zophar talking about how incomprehensible God's ways are, and then explaining God's ways.
He has a caricature of God, a preconceived formulaic understanding of God. But he's boxed God in with a doctrine that says that you cannot fathom him, that he is greater than the greatest thought we could express of him. And so let me just go ahead and punch him into my calculator.
And Job, well, you're wrong. He's missing the point. A true doctrine of incomprehensibility doesn't box God in.
It also exposes idolatry. But here's Zophar's conception of God is one that's idolatrous because he's telling Job that the incomprehensible God is now comprehended in his unseeable ways in Job's story because Zophar knows exactly what's going on here. Incomprehensibility is supposed to expose our idolatry. And just so you understand what I'm saying here, incomprehensibility When we find God incomprehensible, as J.I.
Packer says, it doesn't mean not making no sense. Incomprehensible means exceeding our grasp. That's what that doctrine means.
Augustine said, if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend. It's idolatry. And here's Zophar talking about the incomprehensibility, the height and the depth of God, but applying it with a sledgehammer wrongly. Incomprehensibility should expand our worship.
Knowing that the more we grow in our knowledge of God simultaneously, the more he becomes unknown to us. And that will be our testimony for all of eternity as we worship and adore him. And that should be the ultimate end of incomprehensibility, is it encourages us in our pursuit and knowledge of God.
That's why Paul prays for the Ephesians that you would know the heights and depths. of a God who will never be fully known to our human imagination and understanding. You see, Zophar has the screws tightened up theologically, but he doesn't know how to apply this to a hurting person. He fails, though he's perfectly orthodox in his understanding of God's loftiness and transcendence.
It turns out that he's more like a stupid wild donkey baby than Job is. God is truly incomprehensible, but that needs to provoke us to worship, and that should make us very careful as we seek to explain and understand his workings of providence in this world. Zophar, perfectly orthodox, but perfectly wrong. Third and finally, verses 13 through 20 tell us or show us an appalling altar call. And this passage is always a dilemma to me because it's one of the most powerful sermons on repentance in the entire Bible.
And there's some of you here who need to hear this sermon because you haven't yet repented of your sin. The problem is, is so far... is preaching repentance, but he's preaching it to someone who doesn't need to repent. That's what's happening here. He says, if you direct your heart right, verse 13, and spread out your hand to God, if iniquity's in your hand, if you would put it far away, if you'd get rid of wickedness in your tents, the implication is there's stuff that Job's hiding in his tents.
And then indeed you could lift your face without moral defect, for you would forget your trouble. As waters have passed by, you would remember it. Your life would be brighter than noonday.
Darkness would be like the morning. There's just this compelling reason for hope. Then you would trust because there's hope. You would look around and rest securely. You'd lie down.
None would disturb you. Many would entreat your favor. The eyes of the wicked will fail.
There'll be no escape for them, and their hope is to breathe their last. It's an appalling altar call because, again, it's misdirected. He's talking about the freedom and power of forgiveness that comes from repenting of your sin, exposing secret and hidden sins. He says that God's mercy will show forth, and he's right. That's exactly what happens when a sinner repents.
He says that despair will be replaced with hope, and that's exactly what happens when a sinner repents. But what Zophar fails to see is that Job is the one that has repented and knows God truly and knows God fully. Job's aware of his shortfalls. Job has gone to God again and again, bowing his head, seeking God's favor and forgiveness, trusting in God's mercy and grace. And Job doesn't even know about the cross, but he's not.
grasping on the edges of God's mercy and justice. And so much of Job's prayers are cruciform, even thousands of years before Messiah would come because Job lived by faith. He offered sacrifice.
He walked with God in humility and truth. He was a true believer. But what Zophar is preaching is not genuine and true repentance, which is the work... of the grace of God that grants us real repentance.
What Zophar is preaching is what so many religious people preach today, and it is a horrible replacement for repentance. It's something called cheap guilt. It happens in the form of legalism when you bind somebody else's conscience, when you don't care about biblical rules but man-made ones and regulations placed on someone. telling them this is the way you'll finally be pleasing to God is adhering to these things.
The Pharisees talked to Jesus about his need of repentance all the time. Do you see how he treats our traditions? We have to be careful that we don't trade the beauty of real repentance for the folly of cheap grace. One author explains it this way.
Cheap guilt enervates and paralyzes. Like a giant leech, it latches onto the conscience and saps all the dignity and vitality out of it. True contrition, on the other hand, purifies the conscience, bathing it as in tears, even while energizing it with the vision and the power for positive change. How tragic it is when God's children waste precious time and strength, bowed low in the grip of cheap guilt's endless accusations.
We can be so busy repenting that we fail to hear the glorious and forgiving voice of Christ, who alone is to be obeyed. Sadly, I think we do this all the time to young people. Rather than encouraging their faith and fanning that spark of belief into a flame, we think of them as unconverted. We tell them they need to repent, and they say, I have repented. I have asked God to change my heart.
I am trusting in the Savior. I've wanted, I want to be born again. I want to follow Jesus.
And I think sometimes we trade a cheap kind of guilt for a fostering and cultivation of genuine repentance and faith. That's what Zophar is doing to Job, because real repentance is something so ravishingly beautiful, something that is so divinely worked in the soul of man that it needs to be guarded and protected and preserved. and directed towards God alone. And that's probably a good place to take Zophar with us.
We don't want to provide false consolation to a suffering person. And so we ask the Lord to help us do better, to help us cultivate in our hearts a rebuke that's careful and thoughtful, to make sure our theology is not just orthodox, but wisely and carefully applied. and to make sure we reserve repentance for real sin and direct it for God.
You know, Job will survive the accusations of his friends. Job will be vindicated. He'll have an audience with God. He'll express the hope he has for forgiveness. He'll grasp at justice and resurrection, even though he never sees the full fruition of the cross work of Christ until the very end of the book.
It's the very end of the book of Job that does not conclude with the restoration of Job's property and family and health alone. The very last line of the book of Job is that Job closes his eyes in death. That's the resolution that you long for in this book, because now Job knows.
Job knows the fruit. and joy of real repentance because he sees how God forgave all his sins at the cross of Christ. He sees and experiences and lives in eternal admiration of the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God Almighty. And he knows that as he asked God for forgiveness of his sins and put forth his offerings by faith, God, because of his mercy and because of his Son, would set everything right in the end. Job didn't get cheap answers in his life.
He eventually, in the grave, in the presence of God, he got the gospel. And that's the resolution of Job's life. Father, thank you for this word from heaven, for all the blessings that we've been a part of tonight, the children that these families are raising in our church, the wonderful...
baptism testimonies. You've reminded us, God, of what a blessed people we are. We're grateful for the truth that's been opened before us both morning and evening.
God, would you help us to be more effective in God-glorifying as we seek to counsel those in our lives who are suffering and point them towards you, knowing that you have all the resolution in and of yourself. Help us to trust you in patience. to know your grace, and to follow you in true obedience. We ask in Jesus'matchless name.
Amen. I remember sitting there that night. I was actually in the room sitting there. I was at the doctor of ministry, and that was a Sunday night service that Austin preached this sermon that you just heard. And the first thing that came to my mind as things were winding down was this quote from Chuck Swindoll.
He says, hey, you can be right, but you don't need to be ugly about it. Maybe you're a biblical counselor. who that message just schooled or convicted. Maybe you're a pastor and you're thinking, man, that is exactly what our counselors need to keep in mind.
Maybe you're a small group leader or a part of a church. And honestly, maybe you're somebody who has experienced a little bit of the hammer in biblical counseling and you feel like everything was a nail, including you. I think a message like this is one to keep in the file, to send to you. fellow leaders, to use to train counselors, and to remember, we must be biblical. Yes and amen.
We must not let pop psychology and culture and every other wind of doctrine blow us around when it comes to giving counsel from the Word of God. Yes and amen. At the same time, we need to use wisdom, discernment, and even the biblical example of Zophar to remind ourselves that sometimes What people don't need you to do is come in like a pressure washer to unload the truth of God's word on them.
Like you're going to wash them with the water of the word. Sometimes you might have the right truth, but you got the wrong approach. You're right about the what, you're wrong about the how, and you're wrong about the who needs to hear the what. So let me encourage you, take this advice to heart, watch out for the ready, fire, aim. approach.
Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. I'm so excited that Austin Sermon is the way we kicked off this summer. I know it's going to be a blessing to you. I thank you as always for your support and sharing these resources.
I'm sure this one hits the heart. If you want to know more about our ministry, you can go to forthegospel.org. Everything's there. If you haven't already, click the subscribe button here on YouTube if you're watching this on our video podcast format, and you'll get all of our resources directly sent to you.
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I'm not going to tell you who he is, but I can't wait for you to tune in. I'll be back next Monday with another episode. Keep on living for the gospel.