Sermon on November 9, 2025
“Good Things, Bad Things“
Job 19:23-27a
By: The Rev. Ernie Lewis
All of us, or most of us anyway, pretty much subscribe to the notion that if people are good, good things happen to them. And conversely, if they’re bad, bad things are more likely to occur as life goes on. This is generally the way we raise our kids, train our dogs and deal with our friends. It summarizes our general view of life.
And, generally, things do go along pretty well on the basis of this scheme. But not always!
As theologian Fleming James has pointed out,[1] “Life is after all too big, too passionate, too unpredictable to be confined within the limits of the ordered, everyday scheme drawn up by the sages.”
So, what do we do when things do not go according to that scheme?
The longtime, faithful federal co-worker suddenly finds his job has been eliminated, the respected history teacher finds her position in jeopardy because of a discussion in her class about lynchings of Black people following the end of Reconstruction. What about the faithful long term care giver who is picked up off the street by ICE, or our trans friend who is not able to board an airplane to travel to visit a distant family member who is ill or, perhaps the most dreaded of all, the biopsy comes back positive or the loved one dies unexpectedly and too young?
These are all good people!
They’re our friends and neighbors; people we know and love and respect!
Suddenly we feel betrayed, unmoored, angry even.
As ethicist and theologian Cornelius Plantinga has said, “It’s not the way it’s supposed to be!”[2]
These and a million others pose one of the most vexing questions we confront as human beings and as Christians: Why do bad things happen to good people? If God is good?
This morning, we heard the story of Job. Job, the guy whose name is synonymous with those whose “luck has just run out”! Job may not have been a real person, but his situation is very real. Job, it turns out, is a really good guy!
He’s happily married and has a bunch of wonderful kids. He’s a very successful landowner with lots of livestock. He’s active in his community. He lives in a big, beautiful house. He’s wealthy and, best of all, he really loves God! He observes all the religious rituals expected of an upstanding worshiper, and God really likes him!
BUT—!
A questionable bet emerges out of a conversation between God and Satan. Satan claims that the only reason Job loves God so much is that he enjoys all the good things that God provides for him. The bet? “Take away all his ‘perks’, God, and he’ll curse you to your face!”
And God’s response? “You’re on!” Go ahead and do whatever you want to him, except, you can’t take his life!
And so, Job’s troubles begin!
One after another, messengers breathlessly run to him with news of awful disasters: all his livestock have been slaughtered or stolen and all the herders killed. Another arrives telling how something like a tornado hit the house where all Job’s children were having a party. The house collapsed and all his children have been killed.
But that isn’t all!
The final blow: Job is stricken with a disgusting disease and is covered from head to toe with sores which itch so intensely that he is driven to the point of desperation and throws himself on a pile of garbage and scratches at his sores with a piece of broken pottery!
His situation is so terrible that he curses the day of his birth!
He simply can’t understand how all this is happening to him since his relationship with God has been so close. He feels utterly betrayed!
But he still has three good friends who do not abandon him. They get together and come to visit him to give him comfort.
They are so moved by his plight that they simply sit in silence near him, saying nothing. They’re unable to even find words of comfort.
But eventually they get to thinking and they fall into that old trap: Job must have done something terribly wrong for this calamity to have come upon him, and they begin, one after another, to give him advice, lots and lots of long-winded advice!
“Job”, they conclude, “you just have to suss out what evil you’ve done. You have most certainly brought all this on yourself!”
“You need to repent!”
But Job is having none of it! Repent of what? He has done nothing amiss! He has been faithful to God!
The situation goes on so long that even Job’s wife, no longer able to watch her husband’s suffering, cries out and begs him, “Curse God and die!”
But in the midst of all his suffering and his friend’s false advice, even in the face of his wife’s plea, Job still hangs on to his faith and he proclaims the words we heard earlier:
“For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another.”
He will not give up his trust in God whom he has trusted so long! He doesn’t understand, but he trusts!
Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does evil sometimes seem to have the upper hand? None of us can penetrate that mystery or give any logical or “satisfactory” answer. So here is the point of decision: despair and guilt, or struggling faith and trust in the constancy of God’s presence, love and goodness, no matter what! That decision will, at some point in time, come for most of us!
Perhaps we can only ponder those words of Job and claim them for ourselves:
“For I know that my Redeemer lives,
And that at the last he will stand upon the earth:
and after my skin has been destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
and my eyes shall behold, and not another”
Thanks be to God!
Amen!
[1] Fleming James, “Personalities of the Old Testament”
[2] Cornelius Plantinga, “NOT The Way It’s Supposed To Be”
[i] This quote and the other references to Rowan Williams’ theology of baptism are from his book Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer (Eerdmans, 2014).
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