God has a plan.  The plan is much bigger than any of us.  Mountains we can see; the depths of the ocean we do not.  We are each in God’s plan.  You and I have plans, hopes, dreams, goals.  We’ve even in some cases worked out in our heads how we’ll make it happen, even if we never do.  Life happens, the situation changes; we didn’t account for all contingencies.  God will accomplish His plan and fulfill His purpose for all things: that is sure.

He tells us what He will do.  All throughout Scripture, He tells us.  What He says through Jeremiah reminds us.  “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jer 29:11).  He plans to bless us.  Great!  When?  How?  Those are the questions that take front and center.  God invites us to ask another question.  It’s all about asking the right question.  God asks us to ask why He plans to bless us.  That’s a very good question.  The answer is not because you and I are so worthy of blessing.  The answer isn’t even that we have a God who loves to bless, though He surely does.  We hear what He says, in answer: “Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.  You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.  I will be found by you” (Jer 29:12-14).  He means for us to find Him.  The blessing is given to draw us to Him.  People do good things for us, kind things.  We barely notice, let alone thank them.  God wants us to call out to Him, come to Him, pray to Him.  Why?

Yes, He assures us He will listen.  We know He has listened, even if, at the same time, we also feel as if He didn’t in some cases that sort of mattered to us, a lot.  Job cried out to God; he was very eager to go to the Lord; it was painfully clear to Job, how God was wronging him.  We may say (knowing we need to be humble and all), we may tell others that God has never wronged us . . . we might not be quite as sure in our hearts.  And I’m not here tonight to argue, but to share with you what God says to Job, and how Job responds.

Over nearly forty chapters, Job agonizes over why bad, sad things happen to good people: him, for example.  His friends, such as they are, remind him that no one is good, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Job finds little comfort in that.  Like Job, his friends also wrestle to understand what’s happening: why these reversals, disasters, trials, and chastisements?  His friends, such as they are, at first suggest and then begin to insist that God is punishing Job for Job’s sins, though Job is not aware of any sins he has committed against God or anybody.  An innocent man living by faith!  And here’s a point that is hard for us to wrap our minds around, let alone our hearts.  None are innocent.  It is not committing a sin that makes one a sinner, or seven sins or thirteen.  We are all, at our core, already sinners, complete and finished.

We are all out of right relationship with God.  We live in a Do It Yourself society.  You and I can do nothing to fix our broken relationship with God.  Apart from God’s intervention, we cannot even cry out to God, go to Him, or pray to Him.  It would never occur to us.  All the brokenness is on our side; all the grace is on God’s side.  We cannot get to the grace, cannot rise and go to the grace.  God must bring it to us.  God must help us to value and want the grace.  We are each of us as Lazarus, bound in death in the dark.  Then, a voice calling—and we somehow, miraculously, hear, and move!  Now, how does a dead person hear?

Job is more occupied with what he regards as the injustice of God, the injustice of life, than with the grace of God.  Job isn’t thinking of grace or praying for it.  He is much more concerned with what he believes he deserves; he is not getting what he just knows in his heart he deserves from God.  He wants to argue with God, show God that God is wrong to be treating Job the way God is treating him.  If Job could only get God to see—see things Job’s way, how it’s all so unfair, unreasonable—Job just knows all could be made right.  If Job could just hear God say, apologetically, mortified—“Job, I’m so sorry.  You are so right, and I am in the wrong, on this.  Please, Job, forgive me?”

The point, however, the point all through this big, heavy book we say is so vitally important, is to start seeing things God’s way.  God will make all things right.  That’s the plan.  God will because we cannot.  God must because we won’t.  God does because we don’t.  Part of the plan involves us crying out to God, coming to God, praying to God.  But we need eyes to see, ears to hear, strength to get up and go, and the courage to do it.  It takes some courage, beloved, to come before God.  One does not simply stride into the presence of God.

Job has been feeling sorry for himself, mystified by the God in whom Job has always believed, to whom he has prayed.  I believed in You!  I prayed to you!  What sort of reward is this?  In this world, love seeks its reward.  Where’s the payoff?  In this life, we love the one worthy of our love.  God loves those who are unworthy.  Here, at the end of Job’s long complaint, God at long last has seen fit to speak with Job more directly, more openly.  It’s not just for Job’s benefit.  God reminds Job that it is not the place of the servant, the slave, to question or challenge the master, the lord, as though God were subject to our review and criticism.

Job spent much of the book talking; it’s good to talk.  We need to talk things out, have an opportunity, a safe place, to express ourselves, give vent to our present emotions through words, whatever words, any words, as they come.  And when someone is hurting, our primary role is to be there to listen, give that person a space to let it all out while we hold our peace, recalling our own hurts.  Job, talks, oh my, yes.  Thank God, Job also knows how to listen.  Some people know how to talk but not how to listen.  Talking comes easy, but listening—real listening, meaningful listening—comes with difficulty, time, and cost.  Job responds to God: “You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’” (42:3).  The NLT puts it pointedly: “Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorance?”  It’s as if Job—at long last, at the end of it all—is taking a deep breath, a deep, clearing, cleansing breath, looking away from himself at long last, and seeing what is around him, has been, all along, and who is there, still.  It’s like looking up at a clear night sky after a long day.  Or, better, like seeing the peach-colored light beginning to haze the eastern horizon: the new day is coming.  There’s got to be a morning after.

Breathing in, and out, remembering that where there is life there is hope, what does Job, acknowledging his ignorance, say to God?  “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (42:3).  Eugene Peterson paraphrases it this way: “I babbled on about things far beyond me . . . wonders way over my head.”  Out of our depth, out of our element.  Sometimes, we talk more confidently than the subject and situation warrant.  We sometimes express ourselves with great confidence and certainty where we don’t have solid ground for either. The mountains we can see, but not the depths of the seas.

We want answers and accountability.  When we are hurt, we want to hear some expression of regret, remorse, signs of sorrow.  God knows.  Knocked around by this broken life in this broken world as we are, God knows.  And, by grace (though Job never calls it that, may not even be able to recognize it as grace, yet) by grace, Job is listening to God who says: “Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me” (42:4).  We talk.  We like to be the one talking, with others listening.  That makes us the center of the action, the center of attention.  We live in a world full of talk, crowded with talk.  Any talk you want to hear, you can hear.  We also hear all kinds of talk we don’t want to hear; much of it isn’t good to hear: doesn’t build up, doesn’t shine light, doesn’t call us to higher or better.  The one talking to whom we ought to listen is God.  Consider what God chooses to do for us: He intervenes to make us into people who can hear when God speaks.  Some seem willfully deaf; the old missionaries spoke of the invincibly ignorant.  Even more so, when it comes to anything God might have to say.

Listening isn’t just receiving sounds through our ears.  Listening, biblically, is taking in what you hear and permitting it to do its God-appointed work in you.  Eugene Peterson paraphrases God this way: “let me do the talking.”  Yes, that’s best.  When God speaks, things happen, good things.  If you pick up this book and begin to look into it, you’ll find God has a lot to say.  We talk to establish and maintain relationships.  So does God.  We exist for relationship—in a special sense, so does God.  We talk and thereby order reality and establish truth: words give shape to reality.  God knows.  We can listen to our own words, the words of others, or the Word of God.  We do all three, and our lives reflect it.  But let God do the talking, and let us do the listening.  Love has a voice.

Job continues: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you” (42:5).  Job does not see the face of God, nor one like a Son of Man.  God “spoke to Job out of the storm” (38:1, 40:6).  So, God, somehow, is in the storm, speaking out of the storm.  Storms are loud.  We’ve been through storms.  It can be hard to hear when the storm is upon us.  Job hears.  He had heard, before, heard of God, heard about God.  We each know some things about God, second-hand, by the accounts of others, by the account of Scripture.  This book is not our book, until, by grace, it becomes our book.  Then, our book, God’s book, speaks to us out of the storm, too, and we listen; then, we can hear, receive.  We go to this book in the storm to hear God, not to hear about God but to hear God, who, here, is speaking to each of us.  God is not speaking to humanity in general, like announcements over the airport PA system.  Through this book, God speaks to you, to me, to each of us, personally.  He has something important, crucial, to say to each of us, personally.  He speaks so that we can see.  His Word opens our eyes.  His Word makes His way into our heart—that darkest, stormiest region, and there He says, “Peace, be still.”

Job has listened.  He has seen.  God speaks; those whom He wants to know Him, know Him better, know Him truly—for these He causes true hearing.  Those who know Him truly cry out to Him, come to Him, pray to Him.  At the end, Job confesses, “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (42:6).  Amen.  Beloved, let that also be our prayer, tonight.  Dust and ashes are signs of mourning and sorrow unto repentance, personal repentance.  It is not a hopeless thing.  It is waiting, in hope.  Job says he despises himself, and we may want to say, thinking we’re offering comfort, oh, don’t be so hard on yourself, Job.  Don’t despise yourself; you’ve got to learn to love yourself, like the gospel according to Whitney Houston . .  you know, the greatest love of all.  Beloved, Scripture often puts things strongly, because the built-in resistance in these hearts of ours is a strong resistance, continually compounding.  We talk about ourselves as being weak; our resistance to God is not.  Strength overcomes strength.  Jacob wrestled with God; Job wrestled with God; we have wrestled.  In each case, including ours, we emerge from the struggle with a blessing: life.

Jesus said that those who do not hate “their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).  That’s not the Jesus we like, not the Jesus we like to hear.  Strong language, disturbing.  Let’s see if we can find a gentler paraphrase.  Matthew remembers how Jesus said, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Mt 10:37).  Loves more, loves this one, this thing, more than Jesus.  Anyone who loves his or her life, this life, more than Jesus . . . cannot be his disciple.  That person already has a master, a lord.  Jesus isn’t being cruel or strange; he’s being honest, if blunt.  Jesus is, as always, telling the plain truth, even if in rather stormy words.

“Whoever does not take up their cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Mt 10:38).  What’s this cross Jesus is talking about, our cross?  Job knew.  Job can tell us.  The cross is where we die to sin—rebellion against God, justifying ourselves, loving our life more.  The cross is where we live to God in Christ.  The cross is where our grief meets God’s grace.  To take up the way of the cross, the Jesus way, in dust and ashes is, remarkably, miraculously, the way to life, abundant life, bright, eternal, glorious, blessed.  Jesus tells us, “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Mt 10:39).  Let’s draw out an implication, here.  Life is for the sake of.  Life can be for the sake of . . . Christ; that is life that will endure.  That is durable life.  Life can be for the sake of . . . what is not Christ: self, for example.  That is life that cannot endure, life that will come to nothing.  When we let go of life for our sake and reach out for life for Christ’s sake, something truly wonderful happens: God in Christ bends down to lift us up, up from the dust and ashes of our pride, our self-righteousness, our woefully wandering will and sin-blinded hearts, into his light, his love, his peace.

Beloved, the storm does not go away, in this life, but there is a way, a true and living way through the storm.  The ashes of Ash Wednesday are a most biblical sign and symbol.  Remember that you are dust.  All of us.  Let us remind ourselves that our lives, without Christ, are ashes.  In the cross of Christ, be our glory, ever.