Knowing that God is Trustworthy, Part 2
Job
St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
July 13, 2025
Rev. Juvenal Cervantes
As we continue on the life of Job, we are getting into what it means to wrestle with so much loss in life. In chapter two: his wife says you still believe? Really? Curse God and die (we all deal with grief differently). This is the final straw. None of us can walk through illness easily.
The bulk of the book is this conversation he has with his friends. And all of his friends offer worldly advice that we would hear. This is how it plays out:
1) “Job, you’re not so good. Something’s up, because this would not be happening to you. Again, we think, “You’ve done something wrong so you’re being punished.” That is the theology of today and this is clearly not the way God works; we’ll see this in scripture.
2) “Maybe God is not good. If you’re good, God is not good.”
3) “Maybe God is not all powerful. He’d love to help you, but he can’t.”
4) “Maybe God is not all loving, because if he was all loving he’d want to help.”
5) “Maybe God does not exist at all.”
Yet we all know that God exists because of cause and effect. We can’t get something from nothing. This sets up what theologian’s call “theistic set,” there is a whole branch of theology called “theodicy,” the study of evil and suffering in the world.
Evil itself is a mystery and it is a problem for us because we don’t understand it; it is not much a problem as it is a mystery.
It sets up a theistic set. “Theo” is God, “decai” is justice. So, the study of God is that God has justice or is just in the face of evil and suffering; it is a vindication of God in the mist of suffering.
The theistic set includes:
God is all loving. God is all powerful. Evil and suffering exist. Those three things existing together, at the same time creates a problem, primarily in Christianity, because we believe those three things exist, and not everybody believes this.
We assume that is God is all loving; he would want to remove all evil and suffering. Maybe not evidently. I think we get tripped up on the second: God is all powerful, he can do anything. How many of you believe that God can do anything, raise your hand.
Can God make a rock so big that he cannot move it? Yes, he can do it, wait than he can’t move it. Can he make two mountains beside each other without a valley in-between? Yes, God can do anything. How about this: God can do anything that cannot be done. That is illogical. There are certain things that cannot exist. The point is, “Can God create a world in which we are significantly free to choose to love him or not to love him where evil does not exist?” Can he? Evidently not, otherwise he would have done us.
We can argue that evil is simply the choice that we make that is not good.
The bible tells us that sin has not only created a problem with us, it is a condition of the heart so we can’t rescue ourselves and sin has impacted all of life, in all the universe. It is a cosmic problem.
What we see here is that God gives us a free will to choose him or not because “true love is chosen love.” To chose to love him or to chose not to love his thus sin and all that comes with it that leads to so much suffering in this world.
Now there is gratuitous suffering. When we choose not to love him, it leads to all kinds of suffering. Here is the problem with Job: in the midst of all of his conversations with his friends, he needs a mediator, he needs an advocate. Nobody is advocating for him.
In the midst of all of this, chapter nineteen, verse twenty-five:
PP: For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.[a]
PP: And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in[b] my flesh I shall see God,
PP: whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!
What is he talking about? This is before Christ was born. It looks like he’s won the wager. He is staying faithful through it all and that is what’s happening.
Yet we all know and all of his friends think and say, “If you do well, all will go well and if you don’t, you’ll pay the price.”
Yet you and I know some of the finest people that we know are going thought such unimaginable pain and suffering, some of the most committed believers that I know, that are wrestling with so much and yet, they continue to stay faithful.
II. Job’s deconstruction
Deconstruction is when we kind of drift off from orthodox Christianity or when we have been hurt by people who claim to follow Jesus, “church hurt.”
Some people who used to go to church, used to be committed and you’re not anymore and it is because, we’ll there a million reasons, “That person, and that happened, and you know, that pastor. I don’t know about him or her, that person hurt me and I’m out!” I want to challenge us: it never was about any person. Evil has caused you to be broken away from the body of Christ, instead of focusing on Jesus. Knowing that Jesus is greater, that he is the perfect one. There are no perfect friends, there is no perfect church, but a bunch of imperfect people who are just seeking the lord.
This is noteworthy that Job struggles with friends and he struggles with God, he’s wrestling with God.
This is the encouragement I want to bring to you today:
As a young man, Nikos Kazantzakis, a Greek journalist, tells a story in his autobiography where he goes to Father Macarius, a sage old, wise, monk. And he asks, “Father Macarius, do you still wrestle with the devil?” and he answered, “Not any longer, my child, I have grown old now and he has grown old with me, he doesn’t have the strength, I wrestle with God.”
“With God? And you hope to win?”
“No, I hope to lose, my child. My bones remain with me still and they continue to resist. I want God to take me down.”
Have you come to that point in your life. Because this is what happens in Job 23:
Then Job answered and said: “Today also my complaint is bitter; my hand is heavy on account of my groaning.
Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!
I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments.
He is saying, “If I have my day in court, I would have some questions for God.”
My friends, we come to God with our questions, with our pain, with our loss and he promises to be with us.
In the midst of unspeakable tragedy in the floods that impacted central Texas, New Mexico and South Carolina, stories of survival and hope are emerging as well.
In Kerr County, Texas, a family of thirty-three and a woman and her two dogs are among the survivors of one of the deadliest flood disasters in Texas history. Rev. Jasiel Hernandez Garcia, who was in charge of receiving survivors from Camp Mystic at the reunification center, witnessed children “being offloaded from the bus, missing shoes, having dirt all over them, being hungry, seeing their parents from a distance and their weeping out of joy.”
Many who are grieving their losses are using their platform of suffering to share their hope in Christ with the world. Tavia Hunt, wife of Kansas City Chiefs CEO Clark Hunt, posted that their family lost a young cousin. She nonetheless wrote:
“If your heart is broken, I assure you God is near, he is gentle with your wounds. And he is still worthy, even when your soul is struggling to believe it. Trust doesn’t mean you’re over the pain; it means you’re handing it to the only One who can hold it with love and restore what was lost. For we do not grieve as those without hope.”
Tavia Hunt is so right in encouraging us to give our pain to “the only One who can hold it with love and restore what was lost.”
Corrie ten Boom, who lost her parents to the Nazis and had to watch her sister starve to death in their Holocaust camp, nonetheless testified:
“Faith sees the invisible, believes the unbelievable, and receives the impossible.” God is trustworthy.