Doug McMasters: Well, I invite you to take your Bible and go to the book of Job, chapter 10.
Doug McMasters: Job chapter 10.
Doug McMasters: We're in our penultimate look at the Imago Day series.
Doug McMasters: Next week will be our last one.
Doug McMasters: So this is the second to last one.
Doug McMasters: There's a question that arises during times of suffering, and uh we often utter it pretty loudly.
Doug McMasters: It doesn't come quietly into our heart, and we it doesn't move quietly from our lips.
Doug McMasters: And that question is often why?
Doug McMasters: Why?
Doug McMasters: And we don't ask that question in a philosophical way, we ask it in a very personal way, and it's very specific.
Doug McMasters: You know, why this body that's deteriorating?
Doug McMasters: Why this beloved one that I've dearly loved has passed away?
Doug McMasters: Why has this relationship broken up?
Doug McMasters: Why has this prayer request um not been answered in the way that I needed it to be?
Doug McMasters: Why is my loved one suffering as he or she is?
Doug McMasters: That question comes very forcibly from us often.
Doug McMasters: And again, it's not a question that can be answered philosophically.
Doug McMasters: It's one that we want to address personally and very viscerally.
Doug McMasters: The world has uh no adequate answer for it.
Doug McMasters: And it accuses Christianity of not having an adequate answer for it, also.
Doug McMasters: That's why there's this term theodicy, this idea that God has to justify himself in the midst of human suffering.
Doug McMasters: Well, a lot of the people in the world will say, well, actually, in the big scope of things, suffering is meaningless.
Doug McMasters: It's just the forces of nature that are not personal in any way simply crashing up against each other, and we in the midst of this are just part of part of that.
Doug McMasters: And the things that we suffer personally really have no absolutely no meaning.
Doug McMasters: There is no answer to that question.
Doug McMasters: Why?
Doug McMasters: In fact, we shouldn't even be asking the question itself if we really understood that we're simply matter and moving through millions and billions of years that we'll eventually end up in nothing.
Doug McMasters: Well, the Bible does have an answer, but it's a very hard answer.
Doug McMasters: And but it's a more true answer than anything the world can offer.
Doug McMasters: We're gonna look at three texts tonight.
Doug McMasters: We're gonna look at Job chapter 10, we'll be looking at the book of Romans and chapter 8, and we'll also look at 2 Corinthians chapter 4.
Doug McMasters: And as we look through these passages, we'll see a man who's in the middle of suffering.
Doug McMasters: We'll see uh Paul talk about suffering within the scope of all of creation, groaning and travailing.
Doug McMasters: And we'll also catch a glimpse of the destination.
Doug McMasters: Uh, we'll unpack that destination next week, but we'll get a glimpse of it when we look at 2 Corinthians chapter 4.
Doug McMasters: And as we pull these three passages together, one of the things that we'll discover is that God who made us is a God who's with us in our suffering, but he's also a God who has an answer for all of that suffering.
Doug McMasters: And therefore, we can bring ourselves to God in the midst of it, knowing that he holds us while we suffer and that he'll bring us into a place where suffering will be no more.
Doug McMasters: And so we come into his presence not with resignation, but with hope.
Doug McMasters: And so I pray that by the time we finish this evening, we will have at least an understanding of how we can put ourselves before a God who loves us even in the midst of trouble.
Doug McMasters: So the first thing I want us to see is that the hands that made us are the hands that hold us.
Doug McMasters: And here in Job chapter 10, Job is pouring out a complaint.
Doug McMasters: And many of us know the account of Job, a man who lost his uh livelihood, a man who lost his family, a man who lost his health, and uh would have loved to have lost three friends who were not being very helpful.
Doug McMasters: And in the middle of all of these things, he pours out his complaint to God.
Doug McMasters: And here in Job chapter 10, beginning in verse 8, he we get a portion of that that he says to God.
Doug McMasters: He says, Your hand shaped me and formed me.
Doug McMasters: Will you now turn and destroy me?
Doug McMasters: Please remember that you formed me like clay.
Doug McMasters: Will you now return me to dust?
Doug McMasters: Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?
Doug McMasters: You clothed me with skin and flesh and wove me together with bones and tendon.
Doug McMasters: You gave me life and faithful love, and your care has guarded my life.
Doug McMasters: Job is holding on to two things here about God.
Doug McMasters: And he's bringing both of them to the Lord in the midst of his complaint.
Doug McMasters: And the first one is that God made him.
Doug McMasters: And we looked at this last week when we talked about the right body image in the middle of our Amago Day series.
Doug McMasters: And here he's pulling up these words again that I just want to remind us of that when Job looks back at God's creation, he doesn't see him as some general creator.
Doug McMasters: He sees it very specific to his own life.
Doug McMasters: And you can see just how specific that is in this passage.
Doug McMasters: Your hands shaped me, you formed me.
Doug McMasters: And he talks about this construction that's deliberate and personal.
Doug McMasters: And notice how he puts it.
Doug McMasters: He says, this imagery is interesting.
Doug McMasters: You've poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese and clothed me with skin and flesh, and had woven my bones and my tendons.
Doug McMasters: This sort of craftsman idea that he's taking all of these elements and put them together to make Job as a person.
Doug McMasters: Just like an artisan might make a wonderful aged cheddar or something like that.
Doug McMasters: He's putting them together and he's saying, I'm not an accident, and I'm not just a product of all this matter that somehow crashed together and made life.
Doug McMasters: God, you made me.
Doug McMasters: You made me.
Doug McMasters: You you have actually by your hands crafted my life.
Doug McMasters: Are you going to destroy it now?
Doug McMasters: Are you are you going to stand against that which you took all the effort and the time and the energy and the creativity to form, and now you're destroying me?
Doug McMasters: You're going to feel just how difficult that is for him to hold together here.
Doug McMasters: His body that's suffering is the body that God made.
Doug McMasters: And in verse 8, carries the weight of that.
Doug McMasters: Will you now turn and destroy me?
Doug McMasters: I can't put these together.
Doug McMasters: And he's holding God with this tension that he can't resolve, and wonders if God might, if he would relent and let him come back to life and to health again.
Doug McMasters: And he presses the claim even further in verse 9 remember that you formed me like clay.
Doug McMasters: And that word remember isn't, you know, just sort of recollect.
Doug McMasters: It's it's a covenant remember.
Doug McMasters: It's a remember all the things that you've promised and all the commitments that that you made, that kind of remember.
Doug McMasters: It's the remember that the psalmists use when they talk about calling upon a covenant God, your steadfast love.
Doug McMasters: Remember that, O Lord.
Doug McMasters: And so Job is grabbing hold of this and he says, God, remember my that you created me.
Doug McMasters: Remember that you've loved me before.
Doug McMasters: And in verse 12, he even drives that even deeper.
Doug McMasters: As he recognizes that the hands that made him were also the hands that not only held him in the past, but who were the hands that were holding him even in the present.
Doug McMasters: You gave me life and faithful love.
Doug McMasters: And your care has guarded me.
Doug McMasters: And that word for faithful love is a deep, significant word in Hebrew.
Doug McMasters: It talks about God's covenant faithfulness, of his everlasting love, of his set love with all of his commitment of his character and his promises.
Doug McMasters: And Job is saying, I've been the recipient of this.
Doug McMasters: You've committed yourself to me, God.
Doug McMasters: You didn't just make me, you've committed yourself to me.
Doug McMasters: You've bound yourself specifically to me.
Doug McMasters: You've pledged your love and your faithfulness to me.
Doug McMasters: Why am I being poured out like this?
Doug McMasters: And so he's crying out.
Doug McMasters: And look at verse 9.
Doug McMasters: He says, Your care has guarded my life.
Doug McMasters: And if we were to look at the Hebrew, we wouldn't see that as a past activity, but as a continuing present activity.
Doug McMasters: Your hand and your care are guarding my life.
Doug McMasters: Are you not, God?
Doug McMasters: And so he's realizing that these hands that made him and these hands that committed themselves to him, God's, are still the hands that are holding him.
Doug McMasters: And instead of questioning God and questioning faith and saying, I don't know, in the middle of suffering, he's actually coming closer and he says, I need to grip you tighter.
Doug McMasters: I need to hear these words that you've made me, that you've loved me, that you're holding me.
Doug McMasters: It's not an answer to the question.
Doug McMasters: Because the answer isn't philosophical.
Doug McMasters: Job is recognizing that the answer is personal, that the God he's actually asking the questions of is the God he needs to hold on to.
Doug McMasters: And this is what lament is meant to do for us.
Doug McMasters: It's meant to free us up to be able to speak those heart-wrenching questions in the very presence of God, and to do so with full weight and full-throated cries and not hold back.
Doug McMasters: This is exactly what Job is doing.
Doug McMasters: He's not abandoning the truth, he's suffering in the midst of a God of truth.
Doug McMasters: Listen to Psalm 22.
Doug McMasters: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Doug McMasters: It starts out not with praise, but with a lament.
Doug McMasters: Now it ends with praise because he says later on, you have heard my cry.
Doug McMasters: But it starts here in the midst of this.
Doug McMasters: Rather than running away from God, the troubles push him into the presence of God to ask the question.
Doug McMasters: It's the very same cry that Jesus made on the cross.
Doug McMasters: He picks up the psalmist's lament, he picks up Job's lament, and he runs into the presence of the Father with the question.
Doug McMasters: And he takes that lament to the grave.
Doug McMasters: C.S.
Doug McMasters: Lewis is very helpful.
Doug McMasters: Royal and I had the wonderful opportunity the last time we were together in London to go see a play in the West End, and it was called Shadowlands.
Doug McMasters: And you ever get the opportunity to go there, and if it's still running, it was it was wonderful.
Doug McMasters: There's movies, I think two movies, an older one and a more contemporary one, that talk about it.
Doug McMasters: C.S.
Doug McMasters: Lewis was always there with an answer about the Christian faith from a very either philosophical point of view or even a scriptural point of view.
Doug McMasters: He had his arguments about suffering tight, he had his arguments about salvation tight, until he married a lady by the name of Joy, who he knew would probably not live as long as he would because she had cancer.
Doug McMasters: But he wasn't ready for her death.
Doug McMasters: They weren't married very long before she died.
Doug McMasters: And that shook him to the core.
Doug McMasters: And there's a scene in one of the Shadowland movies in which after she's buried, one of the ministers comes up to him and begins to give C.S.
Doug McMasters: Lewis some of some of the philosophical, even religious answers that perhaps C.S.
Doug McMasters: Lewis would have picked up earlier and gave them back to Lewis.
Doug McMasters: And Lewis is there and he says something with raw emotion.
Doug McMasters: He says, that's not good enough.
Doug McMasters: That's not good enough.
Doug McMasters: And there he was, after spending several years carefully defending the Christian faith, was now recognizing that he needed to wrestle not with the management of an answer of suffering, but he needed to bring himself as a suffering soul before God when he couldn't hold the answer in his mind.
Doug McMasters: The right answer wasn't enough.
Doug McMasters: But he recognized later that the right person was enough.
Doug McMasters: And he could trust him even if he couldn't understand it.
Doug McMasters: And so this evening, as we move through this, one of the things that this teaches us is we don't have to manage an answer.
Doug McMasters: We don't have to find a philosophical explanation for it.
Doug McMasters: Because we have a God who did make us and who does hold us, and who will, as we'll see, answer all of that suffering with a weight of glory that surpasses anything that we've experienced so far.
Doug McMasters: And that brings us to our next point.
Doug McMasters: And I'd like for us to go to Romans chapter 8.
Doug McMasters: And what we'll find here is that our groaning has a direction.
Doug McMasters: Our groaning has a direction.
Doug McMasters: And there the Apostle Paul says, I considered that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that's going to be revealed in us.
Doug McMasters: Now, one thing you'll notice immediately when you read that verse is that Paul is not minimizing human suffering.
Doug McMasters: He's not minimizing it at all.
Doug McMasters: He's calling it sufferings of this present time.
Doug McMasters: The difficulty is, as often in Christian circles, we do try to minimize suffering, or we do try to brush past it pretty quickly.
Doug McMasters: And this came home to me very, very hard.
Doug McMasters: I had just spent 10 days watching my mother unconscious suffering with being septic in hospital.
Doug McMasters: And she had her her organs were all shutting down, and her body had gained so much uh fluid that she was barely recognizable to me.
Doug McMasters: And it was excruciating to spend 10 days by her side watching that happen.
Doug McMasters: And I had I had to fly home.
Doug McMasters: She was still clinging on.
Doug McMasters: And she died while I was in the plane coming back to California.
Doug McMasters: And Sunday, when I went to church, uh, one of my friends came up to me and had heard that she had passed, and he knew that she had come to Christ uh after I had.
Doug McMasters: And he made a statement about her being in heaven.
Doug McMasters: And honestly, I wanted to punch him.
Doug McMasters: I really, really did.
Doug McMasters: I that was the wrong thing to say at that moment.
Doug McMasters: I I had just watched my mother suffer into death.
Doug McMasters: And yes, she's in heaven, and yes, I'll get to the point where I can rejoice over that.
Doug McMasters: But I wanted her there.
Doug McMasters: I wanted to hold her and to say I loved her and to hear her say that to me, and not to watch 10 days of suffering.
Doug McMasters: It wasn't the right thing to say.
Doug McMasters: But too often we try to minimize that kind of suffering and try to blow past it with answers rather than to sit alongside those who are dealing with hardship.
Doug McMasters: And Paul doesn't dismiss this.
Doug McMasters: He says, the sufferings of this present time, he speaks about them.
Doug McMasters: And he talks about them as groanings.
Doug McMasters: And look at verse 22.
Doug McMasters: He tells us something, though, that these groanings, as real as they are, are not an end of themselves.
Doug McMasters: They actually have a destination.
Doug McMasters: We know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now.
Doug McMasters: What's a remarkable metaphor?
Doug McMasters: I mean, he could have just stopped with the the creation is groaning until now, right?
Doug McMasters: He could have just said, the creation is weeping until now, and just left it there.
Doug McMasters: But he throws in this little focus that's that just opens it wide.
Doug McMasters: Labor pains.
Doug McMasters: A woman in labor knows that pain.
Doug McMasters: None of us who are guys will ever know that pain.
Doug McMasters: But every woman in labor who's given birth to a child knows that that pain, as real as it is, has a destination point.
Doug McMasters: That it's moving toward birth, it's moving toward life, it's moving toward something that will change, and that this pain is temporary and not permanent.
Doug McMasters: And here, this metaphor that he's using, he brings into our real existence and says, yes, it's very real pain.
Doug McMasters: And yes, it causes us to groan.
Doug McMasters: And yes, we are not alone in that groaning, the whole creation groans, but it has a destination, it's a labor pain that will one day give birth to life.
Doug McMasters: And in verse 18, just going back to it, he gives us a bit of that proportion of it.
Doug McMasters: I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing to the glory that is going to be revealed in us.
Doug McMasters: Now, this is Paul who has gone through prison, shipwrecks, beatings, stonings, and several other things.
Doug McMasters: He's not in any way dismissing this, but he's saying comparatively we can't.
Doug McMasters: We just can't compare it.
Doug McMasters: And here in verses 19 to 23, like I said, he gives the scope of it.
Doug McMasters: But in the middle of this, he talks about a hope that gets anchored in our heart.
Doug McMasters: That God has promised something that that labor pain is going to produce, a realization that there's glory to come.
Doug McMasters: What is he telling us here?
Doug McMasters: He's telling us that suffering is part of being made in the image of God as we experience life in a fallen world.
Doug McMasters: That salvation doesn't give us a free escape from any suffering.
Doug McMasters: Just like the Son of God Himself, the very image of God, suffered.
Doug McMasters: So we too, as the children of God, are not in a place where we have to say it doesn't exist or downplay it as if it's just a lack of faith, but it is a real lived reality in our life.
Doug McMasters: This groaning, this suffering is also not a sign of God's abandonment in our life.
Doug McMasters: I dealt with my cousin Danny about this, who fell off of a wall where he was trying to build a house, and he fell 10 feet down and smashed his feet flat on the ground, and the bottom of his feet were completely black.
Doug McMasters: And he said to me, He said, I rebuked the pain in the name of Jesus, and the pain went away.
Doug McMasters: Were black.
Doug McMasters: Of course they were.
Doug McMasters: He fell ten feet flat on them.
Doug McMasters: And he said to me, He said, If I had only had enough faith, I think even my feet wouldn't have turned black.
Doug McMasters: What was he saying?
Doug McMasters: That pain and suffering and difficulty can be erased by faith.
Doug McMasters: That somehow it's contrary to faith.
Doug McMasters: And that if he had only had enough faith, he could have not had any of that trouble.
Doug McMasters: And one of the things I said to him was he was going to come to the realization that suffering and faith were not contradictory.
Doug McMasters: And if he kept that, he was going to find himself disillusioned with God and would leave God.
Doug McMasters: But God was still there, even in the midst of that.
Doug McMasters: And I encouraged and invited him to come to God even in the trouble and the pain.
Doug McMasters: So the Apostle Paul is telling us essentially that here in Romans chapter 8.
Doug McMasters: And that brings us to 2 Corinthians chapter 4.
Doug McMasters: Just want to sort of brush up against this because we'll see more of it next week.
Doug McMasters: The hands that made us are the hands that hold us in the midst of suffering.
Doug McMasters: Our suffering has a direction.
Doug McMasters: And that direction has a glorious destination.
Doug McMasters: A glorious destination.
Doug McMasters: And in 2 Corinthians chapter 4 and verses 17 and 18, the Apostle Paul says this our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable, eternal weight of glory.
Doug McMasters: So we do not focus on what is seen, but what is unseen.
Doug McMasters: For what is seen is temporary, and what is unseen is eternal.
Doug McMasters: Like I said, Paul's biography includes floggings, shipwrecks, imprisonments, sleeplessness, hunger, stoning.
Doug McMasters: He's not being dismissive about the pain at all.
Doug McMasters: But notice how he describes it.
Doug McMasters: He says it's light, momentary affliction.
Doug McMasters: I don't think we would call any of those things that he suffered light.
Doug McMasters: Right?
Doug McMasters: If we were hit with rocks, we wouldn't call that light.
Doug McMasters: If we were whipped, we wouldn't call that light.
Doug McMasters: If we were imprisoned with no sense of hope of escape and some guy pressing us every day for a bribe for two years, we wouldn't call that light.
Doug McMasters: What makes it light is the comparison.
Doug McMasters: Because he said this is in relationship to something else, very light.
Doug McMasters: And notice how he calls this an absolutely incomparable, eternal weight of glory.
Doug McMasters: Paul is saying, I've got two pairs of scales here.
Doug McMasters: Let's take all of our trouble, all of those afflictions, all of those difficulties, everything we've experienced that's been bad and hard and difficult and heartbreaking in our life.
Doug McMasters: And let's put it on the scale.
Doug McMasters: And then let's take on this scale the eternal, incomparable weight of glory that's going to be ours forever, and put that on the scale and see how they measure.
Doug McMasters: That's how he's describing this.
Doug McMasters: That the glory that we're about to enter into is so magnificent and so beyond the scope of what we presently experience.
Doug McMasters: It's as if it had never been weighed at all.
Doug McMasters: But this has received the extreme weight of glory in eternity, so much so that it is beyond all comparison.
Doug McMasters: I can compare a drop out of an eyedropper of water to an ocean.
Doug McMasters: I may not quite conceive how vast a difference that is, but I can at least take a physical drop of water and look at the Pacific and say that's quite significantly different.
Doug McMasters: Paul is saying, you can't even do that with your sufferings.
Doug McMasters: And he said, This is why we look to the things that are unseen, rather than resting our life and our focus on the things that are seen.
Doug McMasters: What he is telling us is this what we see is real, but what we don't see is real also and much, much more significant.
Doug McMasters: And so the Christian life is the practice of orienting our eyes toward the reality of the unseen rather than caging ourselves by the reality of the seen.
Doug McMasters: And that's what it means to live in hope, to live with that forward focus toward the unseen weight of glory that's eternal and incomparable to the things that we deal with now.
Doug McMasters: Isaiah, eight chapters before the cross, got a glimpse of that in Isaiah 25, where it talks about what God will do in that day.
Doug McMasters: He will swallow up death forever.
Doug McMasters: And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people will be taken away from the earth.
Doug McMasters: For the Lord has spoken.
Doug McMasters: That's just a glimpse of that eternal weight of glory.
Doug McMasters: Put in real terms, tears and death.
Doug McMasters: Death swallowed up, utterly, completely, and finally finished, tears wiped away, the ones that we've shed in public, and the ones we shed in the car that nobody else has seen.
Doug McMasters: All of them.
unknown: Gone.
Doug McMasters: Gone.
Doug McMasters: And John on the Allah Patmos, in the middle of his suffering, got a glimpse of that when he saw a vision and heard the Lord God speak the very words that Isaiah spoke in Isaiah 25 about wiping away the tears.
Doug McMasters: And hearing also something else to reaffirm that it wasn't just a promise prior to the cross.
Doug McMasters: It was a promise for those on this side of the cross to hold on to as well.
Doug McMasters: When God said, Behold, I am making all things new.
Doug McMasters: What is he telling us?
Doug McMasters: That the weight of glory and the movement to the weight of glory is already in action.
Doug McMasters: I am making all things new.
Doug McMasters: Being brought into the new birth of Christ is the entrance into the new creation.
Doug McMasters: The resurrection that we looked at this morning, and that we'll talk about a lot more over the course of time that we go through the book of Acts, is the firstfruits of that new creation.
Doug McMasters: And as I said, the people of God who are surrounded around the message of the cross and the resurrection of Christ are the front edge of the new creation.
Doug McMasters: And that this world that is groaning and veiling together in pain along with us now will be a part of that as it's part of the new heaven and the new earth.
Doug McMasters: Tonight, we simply stand at the horizon, and we can see that, that it's coming, that it's real, but it also is something that gives us hope in the midst of our days.
Doug McMasters: So as we close this evening, I want to say a couple things to us.
Doug McMasters: I want to put Job with you in the middle of your suffering.
Doug McMasters: Not as an answer, but as a companion, as someone you can cry alongside of.
Doug McMasters: And through all the implications that we've discussed over the past several weeks, we're going to bring it to an end next Sunday and see that image perfected in that eternal weight of glory.
Doug McMasters: Let's pray together.
Doug McMasters: Father, we thank you that you're a God who not only comes alongside us and sympathizes with our weaknesses, but you're a God who has addressed the cause and the effect, and that you will swallow it up by life.
Doug McMasters: Lord, anchor our hearts, and my dear brothers and sisters, as we've heard this word, as we've received once again the assurances of your presence and your promises.
Doug McMasters: And Lord, hear us as we cry, just as John did, even so come, Lord Jesus.
Doug McMasters: And we pray this in his name.
Doug McMasters: Amen.