Responding to the Suffering of Others

Now when Job's three friends heard of all the adversity that had come upon him, each one came from his own place—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. For they had made an appointment together to come and mourn with him, and to comfort him. And when they raised their eyes from afar, and did not recognize him, they lifted up their voices and wept; and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven. So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.

When someone's world has fallen apart, how should the people of God respond?

A Broken World and the Problem of Pain

How do you respond when you walk into the house of a family whose son has just taken his life? What do you say to the mother whose oldest son is lying dead on a gurney in front of her? What words do you have for the person who tells you, "The doctor said it's terminal—maybe six months"? How do you answer the man in the hospital bed who asks, "Is it okay for me to be afraid of death?"

These are challenges we find ourselves facing because we live in a broken world. That is a statement nearly everyone can agree with—even the person who doesn't believe in Scripture or in God. I would assert that the very fact you can recognize the world is broken testifies that there is a God, but that's another discussion.

Job, as we've seen the last couple of weeks, was the most righteous, pious, wealthy, and blessed man of his time. In a matter of days he lost everything—his children, his business, his wealth, his health. According to the worldview of his day, the assumption was clear: Job, the things happening to you are happening because you're not as righteous as you appeared. The view of his friends—and of everyone observing—was that the righteous do not suffer, so if you suffer like this, you must be wicked and receiving your just deserts.

A Book That Challenges Our Worldview

But as readers, we are given an insight they didn't have. God Himself says twice—in chapter one and again in chapter two—that Job is the most upright man in all the earth, who fears God and shuns evil and maintains his integrity even when everything falls out from under him. That makes the book all the more difficult, because it conflicts with our worldview.

The book of Job is so challenging that many Christians read it once and never return to it. They may not like what it seems to reveal about God, and they struggle with what it seems to reveal about us. Job addresses one of the most challenging aspects of life for conscious beings: the fact that we recognize the world is broken and can imagine a world without suffering. That capacity indicates something about our nature that separates us from animals.

Conscious Beings and the Weight of Suffering

We are, as far as we can tell, the only beings who experience consciousness in the way we do. This points back to how we were made. The Scriptures say God created us in His image, fashioned man from the dust, but did something miraculous—He breathed into us the breath of life and made us living souls. Because of that consciousness, we realize the brokenness of this world and are confronted with the problem of pain.

For many years I've worked as a chaplain with the fire department. I've observed that many people go into healthcare, emergency medical work, or law enforcement because they want to make the world better. But within twelve to twenty-four months, that often breaks down, because they see suffering on a scale the average person can't comprehend—children shaken to death, people stabbed—and their core values shatter. What we now call post-traumatic stress disorder is often a worldview that cannot comprehend or explain the wickedness it confronts. Sometimes it's not just witnessing horror, but seeing yourself do something you couldn't have imagined.

The Problem of Evil and the Loss of Faith

This last week I listened to a conversation between a theist and an atheist on the subject of consciousness—an area where the scientific community struggles, because while we can use fMRI technology to see which centers of the brain light up, we can't explain what a person is actually feeling. On that program, a consciousness researcher from the United Kingdom, an atheist, said this: "I positively believe that faith in God is false. I am definitely an atheist about God as traditionally conceived, because of the problem of evil."

How is God traditionally conceived in a Western, Judeo-Christian mind? All-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful. He says he doesn't believe in that God because of the problem of evil. That is the issue of theodicy, and the book of Job addresses it more than any other book in the Bible.

Point one: the problem of pain and suffering is one of the greatest problems we face. I believe that's part of why I've received more feedback on the last two messages than on the previous twenty combined. We live in a society that has mitigated suffering more than any other in history, yet we also see the suffering of the world in greater capacity than any culture before us. An earthquake in Indonesia once might have taken weeks to reach us; now we watch tsunamis sweep people away in live HD. One reason people in the West are losing faith so quickly is that they cannot conceive of a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing while the world is this broken.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

A Jewish rabbi named Harold Kushner wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People in the early 1980s. It became a New York Times bestseller, written in response to suffering he and his wife experienced. Their son Aaron was diagnosed at two years old with an incurable genetic disease and died at fourteen. The book's first sentence reads, "There is only one question which really matters: Why do bad things happen to good people?" He adds that virtually every meaningful conversation he's had about God and religion either started with or got around to that question.

Many of you began your true search for God because of suffering—the loss of a relationship, a job, a child, a loved one, or your own health. That's what led you to these chairs. Some of the greatest minds have addressed this problem: C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, Timothy Keller, Gregory Boyd, Joni Eareckson Tada, Norman Geisler, D.A. Carson, David Bentley Hart, N.T. Wright, and many others. And the fact that the problem is a problem to us indicates something fascinating about our nature that points to God.

They Made an Appointment to Come

For our purposes today, I want to consider these last three verses, because they instruct us in how we should respond to the suffering of others. There's much that Job's friends do wrong later, and we'll get into that in the weeks ahead. But their first response was a good response—the right response. They did well at the very beginning.

Because we live in a broken world, we will see others suffer, and we will have the desire to respond and help alleviate their suffering. That desire is a noble and good thing.

Point two: the problem of another's suffering should motivate our compassion. When we see people devastated by the brokenness of this world, it should move us toward them. Notice in verse 11—circle the words "each one came." Not only did each one come, but they made an appointment together. They didn't just happen to be in the same place; they purposed to go minister to their friend.

This matters, because when people suffer, some make a decision to stay away. We justify it with all kinds of reasons—fear of being in the way, assuming someone else will reach out, being too busy, or simply forgetting. And honestly, being around people who suffer is hard and sad. I see this with my wife, who works in the intensive care unit. She is confronted by the harsh realities of suffering on every shift, and it changes the way you see the world. But Job's friends made an appointment together to come, doing exactly what the New Testament exhorts in Romans 12: "weep with those who weep." That same verse says, "rejoice with those who rejoice"—and we love that part. That's why weddings are always better attended than funerals; we don't want to be confronted with suffering and death.

Sympathy, Not Empathy

When the three friends saw Job from afar, they did not recognize him. He was a shell of the strong, wise, wealthy man they remembered. They lifted their voices and wept, each tore his robe, and they sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven.

Point three: sympathetic compassion identifies with the sorrow of those who suffer. I use "sympathetic" purposefully. In the last forty years or so, the word sympathy has often been replaced with empathy. What's fascinating is that, using Google's tool for tracking word usage across digitized literature, empathy does not exist in English at all until the late 1800s—it's a created word. Sympathy, on the other hand, has a long history.

There's a real difference. One can never fully comprehend the weight of suffering another person faces unless one has personally experienced it. Empathy falsely assumes it can understand the feelings of the person going through the trial, and so it says foolish things like, "I know how you feel." You don't. No one could fully identify with Job in his situation. But his friends took specific steps to come alongside him—they wept, they tore their clothes, they sprinkled dust on their heads, they sat with him on the ground. They identified with his brokenness by humbling themselves.

This is what Paul exhorts in Galatians 6:2: "Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." The law of Christ is to love one another as He loved us—coming and bearing the burden of the suffering person so they can carry it a little more. It's what 1 Thessalonians 4:18 means by "comfort one another." The word comfort is parakaleo—to come alongside someone and call them up.

The Good Samaritan

This is what it looks like to love your neighbor. In Luke 10, beginning at verse 25, a lawyer stood up to test Jesus, asking, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus turned it back: "What is written in the law? What is your reading of it?" The lawyer answered with the Shema—love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind—and added from Leviticus 19:18, "and love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus said, "You have answered rightly. Do this and you will live."

But being a good lawyer looking for a loophole, he asked, "And who is my neighbor?" Jesus answered with the story of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves, was stripped and wounded, and left half dead. A priest came and passed by on the other side. A Levite did the same. But a certain Samaritan came.

That word doesn't strike us as it struck Jesus' first-century hearers. They would have expected him to say a Pharisee or a Sadducee. Instead he said Samaritan—a people the Jews so despised that they used the word as a term of disgust. The Samaritan had compassion, bandaged the man's wounds, set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and paid the innkeeper two denarii—two days' wages—to care for him.

Jesus asked, "Which of these three was a neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?" The lawyer answered, "He who showed mercy on him." And Jesus said, "Go and do likewise." A child of the kingdom of God is one moved with compassion as Jesus was. Matthew 9 says Jesus, seeing the multitudes, was moved with compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Go and do likewise.

Saying Much by Saying Nothing

Back in Job 2, the last verse tells us the three friends sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.

Point four: most often, the compassion that brings the most comfort says much by saying nothing. I can hardly imagine this—I have a hard time sitting on the ground for seven minutes, and an even harder time with silence. We've been trained not to like silence. When the radio drops to dead air for even a second and a half, we wonder if something has gone wrong.

Why did Job's friends remain silent? Because they saw his grief was great. The intensity of what he was going through was something they could not comprehend or step into. Too often, when we see people suffer, we feel compelled to say something—and we say unhelpful things. As we'll see, Job's friends don't stay silent forever, and many of the things they later say are true but not helpful in the moment.

We say some of the worst possible things: "I know how you feel." "This is happening because God knows you can handle it." "God won't give you more than you can handle"—which isn't even a verse. "It could be worse." "Everything happens for a reason." "Everything's going to be okay"—when maybe, in this life, it won't be. Job's friends saw that his grief was great, and so they sat silently with him for seven days and seven nights.

The People of God and the Problem of Pain

This teaches one of the most important lessons about responding to suffering. Point five: the problem of pain is addressed most completely through connection with the people of God. When the people of God minister grace, mercy, and compassion to those who are suffering, the suffering may not go away, but the sufferer's ability to walk through it is increased.

This is also true historically. For the last two thousand years, who has gone out into the world to alleviate suffering—to establish hospitals, build orphanages, and feed the sick? Hands down, it has been the people of God. You'll hear someone like Christopher Hitchens claim that religion is the cause of so much pain, and it's sadly true that religious people have done atrocious things. But it is also true that the vast majority of hospitals, orphanages, and institutions of mercy were founded by the people of God. You almost never see "First Atheist General Hospital."

This flows from a core value: that every human being is intrinsically valuable and possesses dignity because God created them in His image. That belief compels people to minister to the least of these. What does Hinduism say about the least of these? They're getting what they deserve. What have some of the most ardent atheists said about the person with spina bifida or Down syndrome? That they shouldn't live, that they'll be a tax on society. If you want to argue about whether Christianity has worth for society, the history stands stacked in our favor.

Job's friends did the right thing when they showed up to weep with their suffering friend, and the people of God should be the first to respond with comfort and mercy—because we represent this God. Second Corinthians 1:3 says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." The Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, and God sends us forth as His hands of mercy, compassion, and grace.

A Word to Those Who Suffer

The exhortation to those of us who are not suffering is clear: reach out with the comfort and mercy of God. But I also want to give one exhortation to those who are suffering—and in a room this size, there are many of you in the midst of a trial.

Allow the people of God to minister to you in your time of suffering. Ask for their prayer and their help. One of the temptations of suffering is to isolate yourself. I've been blessed to see this church come alongside the hurting for many years, but one of the most distressing things is to hear that someone left the church because "they didn't help me in my suffering"—when we simply didn't know. Most of the suffering we as a staff and leadership know about, we know because of a prayer card. There have been many times someone was upset that we didn't visit them in the hospital when we had no idea they were there. I'm quite horrible at reading minds.

I think the enemy feeds us a lie: "Don't call them; they won't help; you'll just be a drain." But there are people who want to minister the love and grace of God to you, and at the very least we want to pray for you. Prayer connects you to God and to the people of God, to pray with and for one another.

Closing Prayer

God, I pray that You would help us to be good representatives of You. There are co-workers, neighbors, family members, and friends that every one of us has—some who don't know You, some who are angry at You, some who are suffering right now with no one to minister to them. How wonderful when You reach those people through Your people. Move us with compassion. As Paul said, it is the love of Christ that compels us—would You move us by Your love to reach out to those going through trials. Not that we would tell them what to do, not that we would give the "right word," because often what we think is the right word is the wrong word—but that we would simply be there to minister Your grace and love.

Lord, I'm so grateful that when we come to know You, the God of all comfort and the Father of mercies, we discover that ultimately You are preparing a place where there is no suffering. We look forward to that. But here, in this place where there is suffering, help us know how to minister Your compassion and love to those who are hurting. And for those going through trials, would You stir their hearts to lift their hand and say, "I need help," and bring Your love and grace through Your people. We thank You for Your grace. Help us to be conduits of it, bringing it to others. In Jesus' name, amen.