Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

• Job 2:13

I still dread all my sufferings, for I know you will not hold me innocent.

• Job 9:28

All his days the wicked man suffers torment, the ruthless man through all the years stored up for him.

• Job 15:20

But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering; he speaks to them in their affliction.

• Job 36:15

You have all seen this yourselves. Why then this meaningless talk?

• Job 27:12

Again I saw something meaningless under the sun:
There was a man all alone;
    he had neither son nor brother.
There was no end to his toil,
    yet his eyes were not content with his wealth.
“For whom am I toiling,” he asked,
    “and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?”
This too is meaningless—
    a miserable business!

• Ecclesiastes 4:7-8

Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun:
I saw the tears of the oppressed—
    and they have no comforter;
power was on the side of their oppressors—
    and they have no comforter.
And I declared that the dead,
    who had already died,
are happier than the living,
    who are still alive.
But better than both
    is the one who has never been born,
who has not seen the evil
    that is done under the sun.

• Ecclesiastes 4:1-3

“Misery. – Solomon and Job have best known and best spoken of the misery of man; the former, the most fortunate, and the latter the most unfortunate of men; the former knowing the vanity of pleasures from experience, the latter the reality of evils.”

• Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (thought number 174)

I am in a strange mood.  Do I go south to help my son?  Do I stay in Pennsylvania to avoid the oppressive heat.  Thinking of suffering, I went through two months of antibiotics to kill off an infection caused by the insertion of scopes to rid me of kidney stones – not totally rid of them, but the tiny fragments are too small to worry about going after.  I say all that in that I only had about three days of a very low-grade fever, one or two headaches, but terrible night sweats.  And the night sweats correspond with a high sensitivity to heat.

Now that the infection seems to be gone, the sensitivity to heat lingers, and it will be months before the high for the day is in the sixties.  I welcome it.  High humidity and high seventies to low nineties in temperature and I feel like I did the first time I went to Thailand.  The first night in Thailand, I was extremely ill with stomach upset.  But I think the worst was about 10-12 years later when I went to southern Italy.  Maybe not as hot, but I was older.  Now, I am older. Diabetes is not completely under control. I am taking a lot of medications.  So, there are a lot of factors that make my heat stress worse.

But looking at the Scriptures, I hope I have them in an order that makes sense.  Job’s friends could not comprehend the pain and suffering Job was in.  And as C. S. Lewis talked about part of the pain being the shadow of the pain, the seeming injustice for having the pain, Job knew that his friends would never ever accept that he was innocent.

That reminds me of the last time my wife visited the grandchildren and some idiot (best name I could think of) barged into the room, performed a faith healing, as if he could.  He put his hands on her missing hair, she was ready for bed, and had taken off her wig.  Then, he pronounced eternal damnation upon her because “Christians never suffer.”  No, Christians suffer, and when people of his ilk suffer, they either lose their mind or lose what little faith they had in their self-created god.  So, if my wife can now be in Glory, I can await Glory myself, having been assigned by a mere human with differing beliefs, assigned to eternal damnation.  God makes that call and He knows my heart.

But Job had similar “friends” who remind him that the wicked will continue to suffer.  To read the book of Job properly, you have to read it all the way through.  Note that God personally rebukes Job’s friends who never gave Job solace; they only probed to find out what horrible sin Job had done to cause all this suffering.  The suffering was a test, as illustrated in the first two chapters.  Job demanded an audience with God.  He got one, and God put him in his place.  But Job never blamed God, nor did he curse God as Job’s wife said he should do.

I flipped the biblical order of the last two Job quotes.  The one from Job 36 speaks to all of us that we will all suffer.  We need to suffer.  God speaks to us in our affliction.

The verse that is out of order is Job’s rebuke of his friends, or so-called-friends.  Everything they had said was meaningless.

While Blaise Pascal uses “vanity,” the NIV uses “meaningless.”  The first two chapters of Ecclesiastes is that everything is meaningless under the sun.  Then the term “meaningless” returns in Ecclesiastes four.  Our toil under oppression is meaningless.  When it is meaningless when we reap what we sow, how more meaningless to reap a meaningless crop that ends up on another’s table.  And all we get are the stripes of the whip because while we get no comfort, being oppressed, the oppressor gets no comfort either.  His life is meaningless, and the lashing out in frustration at a subject that had probably done nothing wrong harms the worker so that the work becomes inferior, and the frustration remains in that the oppressor is only frustrated that his life is meaningless.

But Job never wavered, and Solomon figures it out by the end of Ecclesiastes.  Our comfort comes from God.  But most importantly, our meaning, our purpose comes from God.

The phrase “by His stripes we are healed” has nothing to do with us not suffering.  It has everything to do with us taking up our cross like Jesus did, and as we suffer in our cross bearing, that suffering is not in vain, for Jesus Christ promised that when we take up our cross and follow Him, the one who bore those stripes, ours is the kingdom of heaven.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.