Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning. We start this new week deep in Job, if you are reading the Navigators Bible Reading Plan with us. If so, you’re in Job 36:1–15 today, which includes a line that raised two perplexing questions in the mind of Chloé, a listener.

“Pastor John, hello and thank you for APJ. It’s a wonderful resource,” she writes. Thank you, Chloé. “My question for you is about a verse in Job from the mouth of eloquent Elihu. I know you trust what he says, based on what I heard you say in APJs 1488 and 1867.” Yes, and I’ll insert what you just said last month in APJ 2099. “My questions for you are about Elihu’s claim in Job 36:15: ‘He [God] delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity.’

“Two questions for you. First, how does God deliver us from our affliction through affliction? And second, what kinds of suffering would God use in our own lives to get our attention today? For the believer, will there be any mistaking it when it comes into our lives, when God is trying to ‘open our ears’ by it? Is it possible for us to miss it?”

Whenever I speak or write about affliction and suffering and pain, I know that I am treading very delicate ground, because what millions of people experience in their pain is worse than anything I’ve ever known. And I must be so careful not to be lighthearted or breezy or facile or simplistic.

I recall one time being in the hospital after a surgery — my own surgery — when the nurses told me, “Now, tell us when the pain becomes unmanageable, and we’ll give you something to help you with it.” So, I decided late one night that I was going to see how far this goes. I’m going to see how far I can take it before I ask for any painkiller. And I lay there for several hours just watching it mount. You know, they say, “Give me a 1 to 10.” It’s moving from 3 to 5 to 6. And there came a point where I pushed a button and I asked the nurse for relief, and she gave me something, and within fifteen or twenty minutes it was over.

And I’m just so aware that millions and millions of people around the world don’t have any button to push, and they live and they die without relief. So, I hope that sufferers who are listening to me now will feel just a little bit of empathy and sympathy for what I know I cannot fully imagine.

Now, Chloé asks three questions about Elihu’s words in Job 36:15: “[God] delivers the afflicted by their affliction and opens their ear by adversity.” She asked, number one, how does God do this? Number two, what kinds of suffering does he use to do it? And number three, do we ever fail to see what he’s doing? Do we fail to understand this ear-opening work of God?

1. How God Delivers with Affliction

So, first, how does God do this? It might be something as straightforward as a friend of mine who was in a car accident in her early twenties and broke her leg. That affliction, as they set the bone, enabled them to spot a cancer in her left calf. It was cut out deeply — she has the scar to this day. She’s alive in her seventies and would be dead had she not broken her leg and they spotted the cancer. So, the affliction of a broken leg saves her life. She was delivered from affliction by affliction. It could be that simple.

A biblical example is 1 Samuel 29:1–11, where Achish, the king of the Philistines, remember, refused to let David go with him because his general didn’t like the idea of David fighting with the Philistine army, because he’s going to turn on them. And so, the king won’t let David and his men go. He doesn’t trust them. David is furious. His men are ashamed. But they returned to Ziklag, their town, just in time to find that the whole town has been sacked by the Amalekites, and all of his possessions and all of his family have been taken away. And because they got there early, they were able to track them down, rescue all the goods and all the family, and save them. So, there they are. The affliction of shaming saved his family. Now, I think things like that are happening in our lives all the time.

“Sometimes God uses affliction to cut us off from a destructive path and set us back on the way of obedience and life.”

Here are three more examples of how the Bible describes the deliverance of the afflicted through their affliction. Psalm 119:67: “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word.” So, sometimes God uses affliction to cut us off from a destructive path and set us back on the way of obedience and life. Thousands of people have had a terrifying experience of hallucinogenic drugs that scared them so badly — you could literally say scared the hell (literally hell) out of them — that they stopped using drugs. They found a more hopeful way forward, and that affliction of terror saved their lives.

Psalm 119:71: “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” Now, Martin Luther loved this text and said that this was a key to biblical interpretation that most books on biblical interpretation don’t include — namely, suffering as a key. He said there are two usual methods of Bible interpretation. He called them, in Latin, oratio (prayer) and meditatio (meditation). But he said there is a third key to rightly understanding the Bible — namely, affliction or suffering: tentatio (trial). “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” Suffering is a teacher of the Bible. God delivers us from erroneous, superficial interpretations of Scripture by affliction.

One more, 2 Corinthians 1:9: Paul says that his affliction in Ephesus brought him to the point of death, and then he adds this: “That was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” So, sometimes God delivers us from self-reliance by knocking all the props out from under our life so that there’s only one reliance left: God and resurrection.

2. What Sufferings God Uses

Chloé’s second question is “What kinds of suffering does God use to deliver us?” And the biblical answer literally is every kind short of final destruction. Paul uses that very phrase in 2 Corinthians 4:8: “We are afflicted in every way” — every way — “but not crushed.” That would include even death. Here’s Isaiah 57:1: “The righteous man perishes, and no one lays it to heart. . . . For the righteous man is taken away from calamity.” So, by the calamity of death, a righteous man may be delivered from a calamity worse than death.

3. How We Understand God’s Designs

Chloé’s final question, third, is “Do we ever fail to see and understand this ear-opening work of God in our lives?” She says, “Will there be any mistaking it when it comes into our lives?” And the answer is yes, we do miss it. And yes, there is a mistaking of it.

“By the calamity of death, a righteous man may be delivered from a calamity worse than death.”

Job missed it. He missed it. That’s one of the points of the book. He accused God of being his enemy. He said, “God is acting like he hates me” (see Job 16:9). He was wrong about that. This is one of the main points of the book: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6). What did he repent from? He regretted that he had not seen more clearly what God was doing. He failed to see, and he accused God of heartlessness. So, yes, we can miss it and fail to submit with trust.

One of the main reasons Christians sometimes do not submit to what God is doing in their suffering is that they have never been taught a biblical understanding of God’s sovereignty, his providence, and the place of suffering in the Christian life. They just don’t know what the Bible says. They can scarcely imagine themselves saying with the psalmist, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). That’s just foreign language. They haven’t been taught that that’s in the Bible or how to think about it.

So, all of us — parents, friends, pastors, teachers — need to teach these things. That’s one of the reasons the book of Job is in the Bible.