1. "Are you assuming that you can be so busy that death won't find you? Friend, death doesn't work like that. It interrupts the schedules of even the greatest and most important people."

2. "The final issue for you is not what anyone else thinks of you, your parents, your friends, not your employer, not people at church, not even yourself, which is the lie we're told today from birth. That what really matters is what you think of yourself. It's a lie from the pit of hell."

3. "Death is the great equalizer that prostrates all mortal creatures before the one eternal God. Job's righteousness could keep neither him nor his children from death, nor can yours or mine finally keep us from death."

4. "The way you understand life properly is by understanding death properly."

5. "My friend, that diploma in school, or that career that you are giving your life for will soon be over. Before the new week is out, what you regard as the furniture of your life may be removed."

6. "Washington cemeteries are full of indispensable people. One senator whose name was a household word when I came here as a pastor, whose offices in the Capitol building reeked power, I now have to explain to people who he was if I mention his name."

7. "Even if you achieve the height of memorialization, a statue erected in your likeness, it will end up being of more use to passing dogs and pigeons than school children. Nobody's going to be memorizing your work."

8. "If you are somebody who is self-consciously contemplating or even committing serious sins against other people and you feel invulnerable in it because no one else knows, pause. Consider. What should it mean to you that an all-powerful, all-good observer sees all that you do and will have the last word."

9. "It makes life feel like a game so mysteriously frustrating and unfair and disappointing that you just want to turn the board upside down and walk away."

10. "Don't let your ignorant envy of another's lot harm your own ability to trust God and to go to Him trustingly in prayer. Let Him use the weeks and months of trials in your life to teach you to trust Him, even if they're trials no one else understands."

Observation Questions

1. In Job 3:11-12, what two questions does Job ask about his birth, and what physical details does he mention regarding infancy?

2. According to Job 3:13-15, what does Job say would have been his condition if he had died at birth, and what kinds of people does he describe as sharing that condition?

3. In Job 3:16, what alternative does Job present to dying at birth, and how does he describe infants in this state?

4. What three groups of people does Job mention in verses 17-18 who find rest or ease in death, and what specific relief does each group experience?

5. In Job 3:19, what contrast does Job draw between different kinds of people, and what does he say is true of them all in death?

6. Looking at the broader context from Job 1-2, what specific catastrophes had Job experienced before uttering this lament in chapter 3?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why does Job describe death using the language of rest, quiet, and sleep in verses 13-17, and what does this reveal about how he is experiencing his current suffering?

2. What is the significance of Job listing both the powerful (kings, counselors, princes) and the powerless (prisoners, slaves, the small) as equals in death? How does this support the sermon's point that "death equalizes all"?

3. Job's lament contains honest questions directed to God rather than cynical despair or self-destruction. What does this distinction reveal about the nature of faithful suffering and the appropriateness of bringing hard questions before God?

4. How does the sermon's connection between Job's cry and Jesus' cry from the cross ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") help us understand the relationship between lament and faith?

5. The sermon emphasizes that later Scripture reveals far more about the afterlife than Job knew. How does the fuller revelation of Christ's death and resurrection transform our understanding of death from what Job expresses in this passage?

Application Questions

1. The sermon states that "death equals all" and asks whether death seems distant to you. What specific assumptions about your schedule, health, or future plans might be causing you to live as though death won't interrupt your life, and how might you "number your days" differently this week?

2. Job directed his anguished questions to God rather than turning to cynicism or self-destruction. When you face circumstances that make you question God's purposes, what is your typical response, and how might you practice bringing your honest questions to God in prayer?

3. The sermon warns against pursuing worldly possessions and positions that death will inevitably remove. What is one career goal, relationship, or possession you are currently pursuing that you need to hold more loosely in light of its temporary nature?

4. Pastor Joseph Parker testified that his ability to comfort grieving parents came through experiencing the death of his own child. How might a trial you have experienced—or are currently experiencing—be equipping you to minister to others, and who might God be calling you to comfort this week?

5. The sermon urges parents to be tender when children ask hard questions about suffering and God's providence. What is one practical way you could demonstrate trust in God before others (children, coworkers, friends) during a difficult circumstance, rather than hiding your struggles or your faith?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Psalm 90:1-12 — This psalm, attributed to Moses, teaches us to number our days and gain a heart of wisdom, directly supporting the sermon's emphasis on understanding life properly through understanding death.

2. Philippians 1:19-26 — Paul wrestles with the choice between life and death, providing a New Testament contrast to Job's lament by showing how Christ transforms our view of death into hopeful anticipation.

3. Ecclesiastes 7:1-4 — The Preacher teaches that it is better to go to the house of mourning than feasting, reinforcing the sermon's call to reflect seriously on death rather than avoid it.

4. Hebrews 2:14-18 — This passage explains how Christ's death destroyed the power of death and freed those enslaved by fear of it, connecting to the sermon's teaching that Christ transforms death from trial to relief.

5. Psalm 22:1-24 — Jesus quoted this psalm from the cross; it moves from anguished questioning to confident trust in God, illustrating how lament and faith coexist in the believer's experience of suffering.

Sermon Main Topics

I. Scripture Reading: The Creation of Humanity in God's Image (Genesis 1)

II. The Historical Christian View of Human Life and Abortion

III. The Context of Roe v. Wade and Its Overturning

IV. Job's Lament in Context: Suffering and Questions About Death (Job 3:11-19)

V. Death Equalizes All People

VI. Death Brings Some Relief and Rest

VII. Death Removes Earthly Privileges and Possessions

VIII. Death Stops Human Troublers

IX. Death Can Make Us Question the Reason for Our Life

X. Concluding Exhortation: Trusting God Through Suffering and Death

---

Detailed Sermon Outline

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heaven and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image. In the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. And God blessed them.

And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food. And it was so. And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.

And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Friends, as we read this passage, and then if we were to continue on, throughout the Hebrew Scriptures human life is viewed as being a gift of God and therefore of great value.

When the Lord was giving Israel their laws as they were preparing to enter the promised land, there was a particular case considered of violence against a pregnant woman. And in Exodus chapter 21, the law makes it clear that it's not just the pregnant woman, but also the baby in the womb who was to be protected by the legal penalties against harm being done to him or her. This was reflected in Hebrew and Christian influenced cultures From then till now. So for example, at the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 16th century, it was simply assumed. The reformer of Geneva, Switzerland, John Calvin, commenting on that passage in Exodus says, the fetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy.

If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house than in a field, because a man's house is his place of most secure refuge, it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.

And friends, what Calvin said there would have raised no controversy in his day. This was not a dispute between Roman Catholics and the Protestants, or between the East and the West, or between the Christians and the Muslims. This was assumed human wisdom. And this has been the broadly shared common position across many nations and generations from then until the most recent days.

In God's providence, we meet this morning five blocks away from where 50 years ago this very day, January 22nd, 1973, the United States Supreme Court issued a 7-2 decision in favor of Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey. Written by Justice Harry Blackmun, the decision was that women in the United States had a fundamental right to choose whether to have abortions without excessive government restriction. That then struck down the ban on abortion by the Texas state government, which had prevented McCorvey's legally obtaining an abortion there.

So the Supreme Court declared that it was unconstitutional for American laws to protect the life of the infant in the womb. Instead, it gave the protection of the life of those in the womb entirely into the private choice of the mother bearing the child. Since that terrible decision was handed down, such legal protections of babies have not been allowed.

Until June 24th of this past summer. Since then, abortion is banned in various states, currently 13. In Georgia, where a complete ban was blocked by the courts, it was allowed only in the first six weeks. Eleven more states have restrictions between 15 and 22 weeks of gestation. Abortion is legal even beyond the 22nd week of gestation here in the district.

And in half of the nation's states. I just want to take this opportunity to thank the many members of this congregation who have in so many different ways labored long and hard to work to value human lives of infants and children and vulnerable mothers. May God continue to help us all to live in such a way that, as Calvin once could assume, a mother's womb was the most secure refuge of a developing child.

Now into this very live conflict in our culture, including abortion pills and horrendous votes in the Congress, comes our passage from the Bible this morning. And in it, Job, the once prosperous, now wretched man at the center of a spiritual war he wasn't even aware of, Job, famously righteous, now seems to wish that precious life away.

As you read our passage, it sounds like he's looking with jealous envy over at the person who is miscarried or is stillborn. Our passage is a sharp one. We should remember the context of the trials from chapters 1 and 2, where the Sabeans killed his servants, fire from heaven immolated his flocks and shepherds, the Chaldeans took his camels and killed more servants, and a storm destroyed a house that was filled with all of his children, and they were killed immediately. Then in chapter 2, Job himself was stricken with loathsome sores.

From head to foot. All of this has made Job in the chapter we are considering, Job chapter 3, lament to God and in the hearing of his friends who've come to mourn with him, who've been sitting in silence for a week. In the passage we come to today, the very kind of little lives that we have put so much energy into protecting, Job himself seems to be reconsidering their lot. And in our passage this morning, the middle of chapter 3, Job meditates on what death takes and gives from the rich and from the wretched. In the middle of such surprising sentiment, we find important truths for us to consider today.

So please open your Bibles, turn to Job Chapter 3, if you're using the Bibles provided, you'll find it on page 418. 418. And you'll find these verses on the right hand side, in the right hand column, 418. First, I want you just to look at it and let me talk to you about it before I even read it to you. I think I can explain it pretty simply, and that will be to your benefit.

So just put your eyes down there on those nine verses, verses 11 to 19. I want you to notice, first of all, that this can be easily divided in half. The first half is verses 11 to 15. You can see it begins with those why questions. They're in 11 and 12.

And then, if you look down at verse 16, there's another why or why. So that's like a paragraph division in a poem. So you've got 15, or sorry, you've got 11 to 15, and then you've got 16 to 19, both halves beginning with why. In verses 11 and 12, Job presents the idea of him having died at birth. Verse 16, the second paragraph, the even more radical idea, but parallel of him having been stillborn.

The two, of course, are not the same.

But they are both functioning to make the same point here. Job is saying that would that... if that had been the case, either one of them, he would not have known the troubles that had come upon him.

So in Job 13 he considers that his future would have been what he called euphemistically rest. Look at verse 13. You see the progression inside it from laying down to been quiet, to slept, to been at rest. That is a sequence every parent here is aware of.

Only here, Job is seeing this as an image for death. And he says the same thing in the second paragraph, verse 17, about the weary.

So the distinction between these two halves, you'll notice, is not so much the differing fates, whether the death comes before or after the birth, but rather it's in the company noted among the dead. So if you look there in the first paragraph at the end of it, verses 14 and 15, those in view of his fellows in death are kings and counselors and princes. Whereas in that second paragraph, verses 17 to 19, we see including prisoners and small and the slave. So whether Job is looking into the future of the king or the future of the slave, Job seems to raise the question of preferring death to life. As if the temporariness of this life in both its blessings and its trials somehow includes more pain than it's worth.

Sort of the opposite of Tennyson's favorite, Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Well, Tennyson, maybe not for somebody who's had as much pain as Job.

Well, listen now. See what you think. Let's climb back into Job chapter 3. We considered the first section last week. Remember, Job is still lamenting, but here he moves from cursing indirectly the day of his birth to more more directly questioning.

He drops that artistic indirect cursing we considered last week of the day of His birth in the first ten verses and He shifts to these much more direct questions, questioning His own birth. Job 3 verse 11, why did I not die at birth, come out from the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive Me? Or why the breasts that I should nurse? For then I would have lain down and been quiet.

I would have slept, then I would have been at rest. With kings and counselors of the earth who rebuilt ruins for themselves. Or with princes who had gold who filled their houses with silver.

Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child as infants who never see the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they hear not the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there; and the slave is free from his master. Friends, this passage is difficult to understand not because it is obscure, or complex, but because it is a hard matter plainly stated in this morbid lament.

The way I'm going to do this sermon is in a more Puritan fashion than I normally do. The fashion of the Puritans in preaching was to do a brief exposition at the beginning and then have two long sections, a long section first of doctrines to be raised out of the text, and then uses or applications to be made from the doctrines. Because we're not accustomed to such long and meaty sermons here, I am going to simply combine those two, the doctrines and the applications, and put them together. I've done the exposition already in the brief overview I just gave you of the sort of two paragraphs, as it were, of the poem. Now I'm going to raise five uses, five uses.

And kids, see if you can write down all five during the sermon and do two things: So kids, I'm telling this to you because this may seem like an obscure topic to you, but it's not. And I want you to write down all five. They're all five short, I promise. And I want you to do two things. One, I want you to pick one of them to talk to your parents about.

And two, I'd like you to pick one of them to talk to a friend about. You get to pick which one and which friend. And you can check with me at the door afterwards to see if you got all five.

Here are five reflections on death that we see here and that I trust will be useful for you today. Number one, death equals all. And by equals I mean equalizes, makes equal. Death equals all. Death comes for all and to a certain extent treats everyone equally.

Job's presentation of the afterlife here is incomplete, but it is the presentation of an afterlife. He knew that the grave did not end life.

The point Job makes incorrectly is that in death earthly trials are ended. In that sense death is the great equalizer of all that it claims. These earthly lives lived in and hounded by the shadow of coming death do not go on forever. Remember that Job's trials have not come to him as the result of his sins. Trials are part of this fallen world and chief among them is this trial of death.

I realize speaking to a young congregation on Capitol Hill about death may seem strange, but particularly if you're here and you're not a Christian, let me just press this on you for a moment. Are you assuming that you can be so busy that death won't find you? Friend, death doesn't work like that. It interrupts the schedules of even the greatest and most important people.

This inevitability of death may be a strange note to say in this congregation filled with people in their 20s and 30s. Himself preaching from Job, the young Jonathan Edwards once shared these thoughts: Perhaps when you read the history of Job, you read it as a strange thing that happened but once in the world. But for the time to come, read it as a thing that happens daily and frequently, for every man at death is as much deprived of all his worldly goods as Job was. The history of Job is only a shadow of death. It is no more than happens to every man in the world.

We cannot think too often of our latter end. Death serves all alike. As he deals with the poor, so he deals with the rich. Is not awed at the appearance of a proud palace, a numerous attendance, or a majestic countenance, pulls a king out of his throne and summons him before the judgment seat of God with as few compliments and as little ceremony as he takes the poor man out of his cottage. Death is as rude with emperors as with beggars and handles one with as much gentleness as the other.

Edwards keeps going. Such is the folly of the world.

They pursue violently after the world, slave and tire themselves for a little of it and exceedingly anxious and careful about it. Their minds are gnawed with care and anxiety. They undergo abundance of difficulties for it and will often violate their consciences. Disobey their God and go very near hellfire, so near as to scorch them, come so near to the pit that their feet are very moment ready to slip before they were careless and at ease, as if death were not one to come into their parts of the world.

Friend, does death seem distant to you? Do you realize that death does come into your part of the world?

Are you careless of that fact? Does the thought leave you feeling easy or like you still have some preparation to do?

The final issue for you is not what anyone else thinks of you, your parents, your friends, not your employer, not people at church, not even yourself, which is the lie we're told today from birth. That what really matters is what you think of yourself. It's a lie from the pit of hell. It'll be revealed very clearly at death that the most important thing is not what you think of yourself as if you were really your most severe critic. You have no idea.

No, your question you want to ask is how can you secure God's loving reception of you?

Even today. A sideways blessing of God is that when one is deprived of some blessing, others around take note. Your neighbor has some trouble that you don't. You quietly thank God not for your neighbor's trouble, but for your blessing. When we as a congregation just in this last year have seen Connie and Aaron and Emma and herb and others removed from the church militant and promoted to the church triumphant, we're reminded that our own stay here is not as secure as we may be lulled into thinking as we meet here Sunday by Sunday.

That's true for all of us here this morning, the small and the great and all of us who are somewhere in between. Death is the great equalizer that prostrates all mortal creatures before the one eternal God. Job's righteousness could keep neither him nor his children from death, nor can yours or mine finally keep us from death. So one of the most basic tasks as Christians is to learn to deal with our own approaching death and to learn to deal with the deaths of those around us. In fact, true wisdom always keeps the end in view.

Remember what the psalmist says in Psalm 90:12, Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Psalm 90:12. The way you understand life properly is by understanding death properly. I pray that God will help each one of us with this important task today. Remember, death equals all.

Number two, death brings some relief and rest. Job may be longing for death to come, but he knows killing himself would be wrong. He continues to trust God and that he questions. As opposed to just becoming cynical and nihilistic, assuming there is no reason for anything, everything just happens randomly. And Job doesn't disobey God's law and kill himself.

He continues to respect even if he doesn't understand why he lives. And he does perceive something of the benefit that the cessation of this life will bring, some rest, some relief. As clear as Job is on the inevitability of death for all and of its deliverance of us from the trials of earth. He's not really that clear on what is to come. This is not the main place you look for if you're trying to figure out what is the afterlife like.

No, he does see death as a place where earthly distinctions cease to be relevant. All will rest from earthly labors and their earthly burdens will be eased. That's true. But there is clearly more specific revelation to come about death. So if you're new to Christianity and you know that we believe the Bible is true, that's accurate.

But please also understand we know that God has acted in history and that He's revealed more of Himself over the time we see the Bible being written. So from the earliest stages, which would be a book like Job, on through the Psalms and the Prophets, up into supremely the coming of the Son of God Himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, and then His Spirit sending the apostles and filling the apostles. We are taught far more about these truths that are merely introduced here. So for example, later in both the Old and New Testaments we learn that both the old heavens and the old earth will perish and that a new heavens and a new earth will be established. The New Testament is clear that not everyone will be going to a heavenly home, but that there will be many who are eternally lost in sin and rebellion against God.

And in God's just punishment, He will punish them for their rebellion. The Lord Jesus Christ particularly brought clarity on this topic. He taught that ultimately after death there would not be a kind of universalistic, compulsory heaven for all, but that some would be excluded from God's presence. That they would suffer everlastingly, that the wicked would be separated from the righteous. He taught that evildoers would be eternally rejected from his presence and that unbelievers would not be saved but rather be condemned under God's wrath.

And he taught that the very Satan of Job chapter 1 and the wicked angels would go into eternal fire. Friends, I don't know what kind of Jesus you've assumed there is, but the only Jesus we have any record of ever really having historically existed just taught all that very clearly. This is the Jesus who tells his people what they should expect in what is to come beyond the grave. Now, that's not all he taught. He taught that he himself had come to turn the bad news into good, in that he came himself to live not a life of wickedness, but a life of goodness.

And to live a life of perfect trust in his heavenly Father, and to die himself, not because he needed to, because of his own sins, but to die in the place of all of us who would ever turn from our sins and trust in him. He died as a substitute, bearing God's just and right and good penalty and wrath against wickedness and wrong. He died on the cross bearing God's just wrath for all of us who would turn and trust in him. God raised him from the dead. He presented his sacrifice to his heavenly Father.

We've just thought of that at great length this last year as we've gone through the book of Hebrews. There are studies there that you can go back and listen to. But friends, this is good news for you, and it's good news that changes death from a trial itself to a relief from trials. For believers. Believers can now rest in the peace to come to us in and after death.

That's why so many of the songs we sing have these pleasant images about death. It's not to try to get us not to grieve or not to mourn, but to realize that we, unlike our secular friends, know that the grave is not the end. That at the grave there is a transition for those of us who are Christians to, as one of our songs we sang today said, to glory to eternity's day, or that powerful evocation of the second coming of Christ in the last stanza we just sang of It Is well. The Lord haste the day, when the faith shall be sight, the clouds be rolled back as a scroll, the trumpet shall sound, and the Lord shall descend. That's why we pray for Christ's return.

And we understand Paul's very different wrestling with the thought of death in Philippians 1. In some ways, you know, Philippians 1 is a little bit like Job 3. Here you have two great righteous men wrestling with death. For Job, it seems near despair, whereas for Paul, he sees hope here and more hope there. But yet for the good he can accomplish, he would stay here.

You can read Philippians 1 this afternoon for the contrast, where he says, My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is better. Paul knew that what Job presented about rest and relief was true, being at ease, but he also knew far more through the Lord Jesus revealing himself and through the Psalms and the prophets and ultimately through the Lord Jesus himself. So you can understand why saints sometimes can speak longingly of death in a way that's not bitter at all. I think of that conversation I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had with Herb Carlson when Herb at his hundredth birthday was talking to me and wondering, why has the Lord made me wait so long? There wasn't bitterness in that.

There was a real honest question. There was pain, but there was also faith. And there was bright hope even in the way he phrased it. I wonder if you're a Christian here today who, like Herb, did once rest and relief today. You tire of the struggles with sin and with grief.

Perhaps you've known even sharper trials. Sometimes it's someone here perhaps in your body or even mentally in your mind. Something in your home. Maybe your husband is abusive.

Trials, temptations, troubles fill your family with discouragement. Friend, if that's true, please don't suffer in silence. Please talk to the pastors who are here standing at the doors on the way out. We stand here in hopes of getting to speak to people just like you.

So talk to one of us on the way out. Let us know what's going on. There may be ways that we can be of help as we counsel and pray. Certainly pray about these matters. But also know what Job says here, that there is a limit for the believer.

There is rest up ahead after this life. Death brings some relief and rest.

Which merges into number three... number three, death removes earthly privileges and possessions. Death removes earthly privileges and possessions. You see there in verses 13, 14 and 15, Job is reflecting really on his own experience when he's talking about these kings and counselors in their building, the princes that have the gold and the silver. You remember that he was a wealthy man.

And he's reflecting on how his own flocks and shepherds were suddenly immolated, his servants and camels, even his children suddenly killed. His own health taken in a moment. He knows that the great ones of the earth are no more invulnerable to death and decay than he was. So in verse 14, what had the kings and counselors bragged about rebuilding? Did you notice that?

Look at the word. What had they bragged about rebuilding? Ruins. Really? Had they never thought that somebody had built them in the first place?

And what had happened to them? And what was likely to happen to what they built?

My friend, that diploma in school, or that career that you are giving your life for will soon be over. Before the new week is out, what you regard as the furniture of your life may be removed. Yes, by sudden unemployment or unexpected injury. But Job brings up even more certain circumstance. Of death.

Remember, only the time of death is uncertain to us, but its effect will certainly be to remove you from your position, to take away from you your wealth and advantages, your power. Even the fame that you may have achieved through your work will soon be lost. Washington cemeteries are full of indispensable people. One senator whose name was a household word when I came here as a pastor, whose offices in the Capitol building reeked power, I now have to explain to people who he was if I mention his name.

Even if you achieve the height of memorialization, a statue erected in your likeness, it will end up being of more use to passing dogs and pigeons than school children. Nobody's going to be memorizing your work.

I think of the poet Shelley's poem about the imagined monarch Ozymandias. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand half sunk a shattered visage lies whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, tell us that its sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

The poet there was capturing something of the same desolation that death and time would work on all earthly grandeur and wealth. Of course, the passing nature of our monuments means death will also cause us to lose the opportunities that we have now. My brothers and sisters, do you realize your families that you treasure are not permanent possessions? Think carefully about what opportunities and obligations you have now that even ten years from now you won't have.

I wonder which opportunities those might be that are more temporary than you're now considering. And think carefully about the evangelistic opportunities that you have this week at your workplace. Friends, those people need the good news of Jesus. Will you share it with them? Or must God bring someone else to do that?

Age, experience, and more than anything else, Scripture should help you to see that worldly privileges and positions and possessions must be viewed in the true light of their temporariness and passingness because death removes earthly privileges and possessions. That's number three. Number four, death stops human troublers. Death stops human troublers. That's verse 17.

Look at verse 17. There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. That there, that Job repeats in verses 17 and 18 and 19, is a reference to death in the grave. You see it, there, there, there. In Job's exhaling his thoughts to those sitting there with him, he does acknowledge this positive aspect of death.

It limits the depredations of thieves and murderers like the Sabeans and the Chaldeans. In all of its destructiveness, it turns the tables on much of Job's consideration here. The grave swallows the bad as well as the good. There is some consolation in this. Part of God's larger plan is for good to triumph over evil, and in that sense, any stopping of wickedness is a part of a loving coming inevitable triumph.

God intends our lives to finally validate His claims about Himself and His world. And part of that will be in the defeat of evil and the echoes that future reality find every time a crime is paid for, or an injustice is interrupted, or a wrong is put right, or an abuser is arrested in the course of His misusing another person.

In that sense, God is glorified in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, of corrupt court of King Belshazzar, blasphemously using the confiscated temple articles in pagan partying. That very night, we read in Daniel 5:30, Belshazzar the Chaldean king was killed. The Bible is full of God using death as His obedient minister.

His servant dispensing justice. Think of this scheming Haman being hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai in Esther 7. Or evil King Herod in Acts 10:22 being proclaimed by the crowds as a god. And then we read in Acts 10:23, Immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last. Oh yeah, whatever else Herod may have been, he was no God.

From death's appearance in the wake of the garden sin of our first parents, to the slaying of the entire generation of Israelites who had been delivered from God by the world's superpower of Egypt through spectacular signs, and then refused to trust Him to deliver the small nation of the Canaanites into their hands.

Death has been God's obedient minister. We know the stories of deaths we would not have planned, but we don't know the stories of what may have happened had death not intervened when it did.

That's not for us to know. We read in Psalm 116:5, Precious In the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. He will not lightly take the life of anyone made in His image, especially not of His own dear children.

His grace is shown in what appears to us cutting short the path of the sinner or of the saint.

But I should warn you, if you are an evildoer here today, I don't mean that merely in the sense that all of us are imperfect and all of us sin, but no, I mean if you are somebody who is in the process of self-consciously contemplating or even committing serious sins against other people and you feel invulnerable in it because no one else knows or no one else understands what you're doing, pause. Consider. What should it mean to you that an all-powerful, All good observer sees all that you do and unerringly sees all that you intend to do and that this observer will have the last word.

I hope God grant you repentance today.

God's good uses of death are His business, not ours. Any desire we have for our own deaths in order for it to be godly desire, I think, has to follow that pattern that we see there in Philippians 1 of Paul, motivated not so much by our avoiding trials as by our having closer fellowship with Christ. But in the meantime, until he calls us, until he sees fit to send for us, we should bide his timing and serve him here.

Through prayer, whatever means he leaves to us. I pray that God will help you today to trust him in this way, knowing that one good purpose God has in death is to stop human troublers. From world leaders to private domestic tyrants, to other rogues who injure others to help themselves, God is watching and God is waiting until just the right time. When he will dispatch death to stop these human troublers. I watched a lot of Leave It to Beaver, and one thing I lament in American network public entertainment these days is the lack of this note.

And our society pays for it constantly. I remember one episode in which Beaver had done something wrong, the child in the story, and the parent is talking to him, I don't know if it was mom or dad, and Beaver thought he was getting away with it, and the parent had come to find out about it, and the parent said, Did you really think nobody knew? And Beaver said, Nobody was there. And the parent said, and do you think that meant no one knew? And just stares at Beaver, and the character there is given the line and just says, oh, you mean God knows.

The parent nods up and down. Can you believe CBS, NBC, and ABC used to give us that? That was public entertainment.

A fifth thing.

Death can make us question the reason for our life. Death can make us question the reason for our own life. You see these why questions here in verses 11 and 12. 16, and friends, this is what I think is really going on here. I think all the things I've said have been true.

But in trying to emotionally empathize with Job and his position, trying to understand what's going on when he's saying these things, I think this is it.

As Job heard of the death of those he loved, including his own children, the reasons for his own life just seemed to drain out of him.

He had given so much. He had, remember, if you read chapter 1, you see, he would go out and give sacrifices for them in their stead in case they had done something wrong. I don't know what all of his theology was. We don't know when Job happened. It's clearly very early on, but he loved his children dearly.

And when they died, why keep living? If those that I have loved so much have been taken from me by death, It makes life feel like a game so mysteriously frustrating and unfair and disappointing that you just want to turn the board upside down and walk away. I think that's what Job is feeling here. And the deaths of others can make us question the reason for our own life, especially the deaths of those we love. I think especially how tenderly parents feel for children.

When we were looking at this passage on Friday, Caleb Murrell reminded me of a passage in an unpublished memoir of our church's second pastor, Joseph Parker, in which he, as a young man, he came from Vermont, he first pastored up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just right outside of Boston. This is in the early 1800s. And he's recounting a time, he said, During the autumn of the first year of my pastorate there, there was much sickness in the congregation and many deaths among children. In several cases, two in a family, and in one or two cases, all the children. I was familiar with the scripture promise and teaching in regard to affliction, but often found myself unable to administer the consolation which it seemed to me a Christian pastor ought.

This was a great sorrow to me, and as the year passed away, it seemed as the spring ran into summertime, that I must be furnished with gifts which I did not possess for comforting the mourner. I craved the ability to be a good pastor. I longed for it, prayed for it by special season set apart with fasting. For two or three months, I spent hours in prayer every week, importunately asking for this blessing which I desired above all things else. We had these two children, a daughter and a son.

The son would be a year old in September, the 20th day. There was the usual prevalence of cholera infantum and my little boy had a slight attack but was only a little sick. He was a remarkably active and bright child, walking at ten months, talking quite intelligently at eleven. We did not regard his illness as at all serious until one night. He appeared to be in the act of dying.

I could not believe it was really so. But after waiting a little while, it was quite apparent the end had come.

As I closed those bright eyes so recently gleaming with intelligence and glowing with affection, I felt that a part of myself was torn away, and the wound was deep and the pain, unlike any I had before felt. It came to me clear as sunlight at midday that here was the answer to my unfortunate prayer, which I had urged for months.

And I saw the blessing which I craved could be obtained in no other way. I found when I met bereaved mothers, God had furnished me with what I had so much desired. I seemed especially qualified to speak comfort at the burial of children and therefore had much of that to do. It wasn't, as the apostle said, I could comfort those in affliction with comfort wherewith I had been comforted. Friends, I have no doubt that in Job's after years, however tender he may have been before his troubles, he was even more tender after he had been troubled by the deaths of his own children.

Did his friends know financial reversals, trials of health, loss of children? What trial could they have had that he himself had not been through?

It's almost as if God were deliberately raising up one who suffered in an exemplary fashion, not suffering for any sin of his own, but for the display of the love for God and his righteousness. God would have that example fixed in the mind of his people.

Love and grief bring sympathy and silence and tears. Some of you will know that in these last several days People beloved to some in this congregation have died very suddenly in two small plane crashes. One a week ago Friday and one just this last week. There were yesterday large funerals in Stafford, Virginia and Memphis, Tennessee and more to come. But just as in the case of others whose lives have ended suddenly this past year, the shock of their removal wakes us up from sleepy assumptions of things always being like they are just now.

They awaken us to the limited nature of time in this life and to the fact that it will end. And sometimes that is so hard a thought for us that in sympathetic sadness or angry despair we can simply want to reject all that we dislike in God's providence and check out ourselves.

That's where passages like this one here in Job 3 can be so helpful to us. Job isn't simply venting here. He's struggling before the Lord. He's not despairing in stony silence, confident that there is no reason there could be no reason because there is no God.

No, rather he fires out his questions honestly. Yes, to his friends around him, but ultimately to the only one with power over the things that He had questioned. These why questions are ultimately to God Himself.

Parents, a word to you about questions your own children may have for you about hard things that God allows in your family's life.

Be very careful and prayerful when you hear young ones uttering hard questions. Perhaps God's Spirit is stirring in them. Don't make them think that God judges them for their questions, but be tender with them. Show them your own trust in God. Pray to your Heavenly Father in front of them, even when you're distressed or grieving.

Teach them what God has taught us. About His loving providence for us in Jesus Christ. I was struck in that hymn we sang at the beginning, Jesus strong and kind, by that last stanza. Page 4. Jesus said, if I am lost, He will come to me.

And He showed me on that cross He will come to me. This is the Christ we tell our children of.

So, friend, how are you doing this morning? Would you prefer God had given you someone else's lot, their blessings, or their trials? How are you finding the path of righteousness that God has laid out for you?

Harder than you expected. Don't let your ignorant envy of another's lot harm your own ability to trust God and to go to Him trustingly in prayer. Let Him use the weeks and months of trials in your life to teach you to trust Him, even if they're trials no one else understands. God understands. Let Him show you how trustworthy He is.

Even how you suffer can be a part of how you love those around you as they see you suffer looking at the Lord, trusting Him even when you're not fully understanding. Death can make us question the reasons for our own life. We should conclude Do you ever wonder if the kind of why questions like Job asks here are wrong?

Is it ever right to direct these kinds of questions to God?

I think of the evangelists Mark and Matthew in their Gospels. They both tell us that when God's only Son, Jesus Christ, was dying on the cross, His very last words, He cried out, My God, my God, why have youe forsaken me? Why?

Of course, Jesus had predicted both His death and His resurrection, and yet still He could cry. Even in His cry, He called God, my God.

And His cry is exactly the beginning of Psalm 22, a lament of David which ends in hope. That's what you'll see happens to Job too if you keep reading through the rest of the book. Along the way Job makes some remarkable statements about God. Perhaps the most remarkable is later on in chapter 19. Job says, I know that my Redeemer lives and that at last he will stand upon the earth.

Friends, long after Job's time, his Redeemer would come and stand upon the earth, and he would abide with us that we might go and abide with him forever. So now we have much more light about life after death than Job had. And we can use that knowledge to help cultivate in us an appropriate longing for death, like Paul in Philippians 1, where his confidence of the good God had for him after death reflected Jesus' own confidence. I love that passage in Hebrews 12 at the beginning, Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross. So the cross wasn't the joy.

There was another joy he could see beyond the cross. For the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. Because Christ died as he did and rose as he did, we can look at death differently than we would have before that, even differently than Job did. If we're Christians, our Redeemer's very own Spirit lives in us.

And while His presence won't stop us questioning God, He will help us trust in God. The promise He makes to His beloved one stands firm: I will not leave you or forsake you. No matter what trials may come, no matter what deaths happen around you, because He is doing something more than just your life. His faithfulness to you in your life is displaying the truth about Him ultimately. To you, to those around you, but far more than that, to the very hosts of heaven, rank upon rank of unseen, unfallen intelligences are seeing the glory of God.

I pray that God will help us to fear Him and love Him and trust Him completely for all the days He gives us until He calls us home to Himself. Let's pray.

Lord God, these are weighty matters that yout lay before us in these cries of Job's soul. We pray that yout Holy Spirit would take them even now and work among us that good that yout intend to do, teaching us to trust yout in all the days that yout commit to our hands, to trust yout in our mourning as we do in our rejoicing. To be mindful of youf, to study youe Word, to search after your purposes, and to walk in the fullness of youf Spirit. Fill us with youh Holy Spirit now, we pray, in our minds and our hearts. In Jesus' name, Amen.