Why did this happen to me? #8 - I Know You Can Do All Things
Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores Job 42, showing how Job's journey through suffering leads to four profound movements of faith: from doubt to awe, presumption to surrender, perplexity to understanding, and isolation to intimacy with God. Through Job's story and James 5:11's reminder that "the Lord is full of compassion and mercy," discover how your hardest seasons aren't the end of your story—God promises restoration for those who persevere.
Summary and Application
We've all experienced those seasons when life feels like watching your favorite team lose week after week. Kurt opened his message by sharing how his emotions swing with the fortunes of the Packers and Steelers—high after a win, low after a loss. But as he noted, "We experience life" the same way: "When things are going well, we feel great. When things are going poorly, we say, this is difficult, this is hard."
The book of Job confronts this tendency head-on. After losing everything—wealth, health, family—Job finally encounters God in chapter 42. Rather than getting the answers he demanded, Job experiences four transformative movements of faith that speak to anyone walking through hardship.
From Doubt to Awe
Job's first movement is captured in his declaration: "I know that you can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted" (Job 42:2). Kurt explained that Job "moved from doubting where God was to saying, God, I'm in awe of who you are."
This shift matters because our view of God either expands or contracts during trials. Like a child whose world grows larger each month, or an elderly person whose world shrinks to a single room, "our faith is very similar in terms of our view of God. It's either getting bigger that we're seeing God is bigger and greater and more majestic, or we're letting our circumstances cause our view of God to shrink."
The challenge? Step back from the immediate hardship to see God's character more clearly.
From Presumption to Surrender
In verse 3, Job quotes God's earlier question back to himself: "Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know" (Job 42:3). Job had been presuming he knew how God should work. Now he surrenders to God's mysterious ways.
Kurt quoted John Piper's insight that what makes suffering bearable isn't believing God shares our shock at circumstances, but recognizing "that his difficult providences are laden with love." The book of Job makes clear that "God has not been absent from the process, even that has brought suffering into Job's life."
This is an uncomfortable truth. Yet the movement from presumption to surrender means saying, "God, I understand, or I surrender to however you're choosing to work."
From Perplexity to Understanding
Job's third movement comes as he reflects on God's words: "You said, listen now, and I will speak. I will question you and you shall answer me" (Job 42:4). The complexity doesn't disappear, but Job gains a new perspective—he can say "I have some degree of being able to say that I understand not exactly what you're doing, but that you are doing something."
Kurt beautifully referenced Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter, describing how "the light that shines in darkness calls people on into life, back into the great room, into their bodies and the world, into work and pleasure and goodness and beauty and the company of other loved ones."
Even without complete answers, Job understands he's being called forward—his story isn't finished.
From Isolation to Intimacy
Perhaps most powerfully, Job declares: "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you" (Job 42:5). He's moved from secondhand knowledge to personal encounter. As Kurt noted, "Knowing God is better than knowing the answers."
This intimacy transforms everything. Chuck Swindoll's words ring true: "No matter what happens to us, God always writes the last chapter. Therefore, we don't have to be afraid."
The Promise of Restoration
The conclusion of Job's story initially bothered Kurt—it seemed too tidy when Job receives double his former possessions and new children. But the naming of Job's daughters reveals something profound. Their names—Jemimah (dove), Keziah (cinnamon flower), and Keren-Happuch (horn of antimony)—speak of beauty, goodness, and abundance. Job even gave them inheritance alongside their sons, breaking cultural norms.
"Here's why this is important," Kurt explained. "It's God's way, knowing that this story is preserved for all time, to say the end of your story is not the hardship and the brokenness and the disappointment that you've experienced, but the end of your story will be the restoration and the fulfillment and the reversal."
James 5:11 confirms this: "You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy." The Greek words here emphasize that God feels deeply for what we're walking through and identifies with our hurts.
As Kurt reminded us from "Amazing Grace": "The Lord has promised good to me." Even when we don't see it, we can have confidence through Hebrews 11:1—faith is "confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see."
Questions for Reflection
Which of the four movements of faith (doubt to awe, presumption to surrender, perplexity to understanding, isolation to intimacy) do you most need to make right now, and what specific step could you take this week toward that movement?
How would viewing your current hardship as "not the end of your story" change the way you respond to God today?
-
Quotes
“Knowing God is better than knowing the answers.” - Chuck Swindoll
“This chapter [Job 42] assures us that no matter what happens to us, God always writes the last chapter. Therefore, we don't have to be afraid. We can trust God, no matter how painful our situation may be.” - Warren Wiersbe
Books
The Misery of Job and Mercy of God - John Piper (2002)
Hannah Coulter - Wendell Berry (2005)
-
One of my vices in life is NFL football. I spend more time watching it than I probably want to admit to myself. And so it's one of those things that I just allow myself to take in. And I'm a Steeler fan second and a Green Bay Packer fan first. So I grew up not far from Green Bay.
And if you grow up in northern Wisconsin, it's kind of like growing up in western Pennsylvania. It is part of the DNA that you like that football team. And so I've kept that through all these years. And having lived here for 20 years, as soon as I got here, I jumped on the Steeler bandwagon. And I've never seen much of a conflict because usually their interests are not at odds with one another, except when they play one another.
And the best case scenario every year for me is what happened several years ago when the two of them make it to the super bowl and then the packers win.
So two weeks ago they played here in Pittsburgh. And I was able to go with all four of my boys, one of my daughter-in-laws to the game. We were with some friends who had made it possible with some of their season tickets to go and be part of this game. And it was spectacular. It was one of those games where it was a beautiful night and it was a good game and the Packers won, so it was very good.
But then what happened was the next week the Packers lost a game they should have won against the Carolina Panthers and the Steelers beat the Indianapolis Colts, who had been having a really good year. And here's what I observed after the Steeler-Packer game. As a Packer fan, I was feeling very high. And then the next week I felt very low. And as a Steeler fan I was feeling down, but because they were against each other, not too down.
And then the next week I started to feel very good because they had won. And what I realized is the NFL—if you're a fan of the NFL or a team in the NFL, the way that you experience the season is the way many of us experience life. When things are going well, we feel great. When things are going poorly, we say, this is difficult, this is hard.
And we start to say this team stinks or everything's bad, or we do it with our life and we say, where is God? And we start to doubt, we start to question, we start to struggle because things are hard. Well, we have been looking at the book of Job over the last several weeks. And Job begins with his account, the account of his struggles, of him losing his wealth, his health, his family, everything that was significant to him. And then the book goes through these cycles of speeches, his friends trying to explain it, Job trying to justify himself.
And last week we finally heard from God, who had not spoken throughout the entire book. And here God comes along, and instead of answering the question, why is this happening? What God does is he poses more questions to Job. And imposing the questions, in many ways, we hit the emotional peak of the book. Job covers his mouth basically, and says, I get it, I don't have anything to say.
And today we're going to look at Job 42. But I want to just say something about faith from Hebrews 11. First, Hebrews 11 is often called the faith chapter, and it begins with this assertion: Now, faith is the confidence in what we hope for and the assurance of what we do not see. And what that means, very simply, is that faith is a confidence for something that we're saying.
This is my hope, and I'm confident that it is coming about. And it's the assurance of what we do not see. What faith is, in many ways, is being able to say, when I don't see things moving in a good direction, I still have hope. And when we come to Job 42, what we see is how Job responds to God in the midst of all of his hardship and what we see in many ways. Here are four movements for Job that are movements of faith for any of us, really, when we've walked through a difficult season of life.
From Doubt to Awe
The first movement is this. It's from doubt to awe. We see this in verse one and verse two. It says, then Job replied to the Lord, "I know that you can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted."
And so he moves from basically saying, God, it seems like you're unjust God. It seems like you're inactive to a moment of him saying, God, I know that you can do all things. He moved from doubting where God was to saying, God, I'm in awe of who you are. And the reason this is one of the movements of faith when we walk through a hard time is because when we're seeing only what is in front of us, seeing the week that is in the NFL or whatever that is, what we're seeing in many ways is the hardship. But when we step back, we get to see the character of God.
And it helps us to say, he is big, even in the midst of our hardship. I don't know if you've ever been around a young child or somebody who's kind of toward the end of life. But there's different experiences in those two moments. Somebody who's a young child, what happens is their world starts really small. And then with each month, it seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger until the whole world is in front of them.
And when somebody's coming toward the end of their life, what often happens is the world that was once big starts getting smaller and smaller and smaller until all of a sudden it's centered around basically a room and who comes to visit. And the point that I just want to say is that our faith is very similar in terms of our view of God. It's either getting bigger that we're seeing God is bigger and greater and more majestic, or we're letting our circumstances cause our view of God to shrink who we see God to be. And we're seeing our challenges as being bigger.
And so one of the movements here for Job or for any of us is to move from really doubt to awe.
From Presumption to Surrender
But then there's another movement that we see, and we see this in Job 42, verse 3. And I'm just going to say this is from presumption to surrender. Here's what we read. It says, "You asked, who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge? Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know."
And this is a quote from Job 38:2, where God begins to query Job a little bit. And here it is as a question, who is this that obscures my plans, words without knowledge? And so Job picks this up, and what he's doing is he's in essence saying, I was presuming upon how I thought you worked. And now I move to a place of surrender in terms of being able to say, I know that even though I have this sense of wanting you to work a certain way, I'm willing to say, God, you work the way that you want to work. And when we get to that place, what happens is we are able to say we've moved from saying, God, you ought to work in a certain way in my hardship to God, I understand, or I surrender to however you're choosing to work.
I have quoted John Piper a couple times in this series, and I have another quote from him, this time from his book, The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God. Last week, when I quoted John Piper, somebody asked me afterward, because I had made just a little comment, I didn't always love John Piper. And they're like, do you not like John Piper? It's like, well, I have quoted him three weeks in a row.
The point last week wasn't so much that I didn't like him as much as saying I was ambushed in a sense by God when I heard him speak about this. And in essence, you don't have a right to be mad at God. But here's what he has to say about the pain of our loss in this book, The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God. He discusses how pain and loss are bitter providences, noting that everyone who has lived long in this world has experienced deep grief. He warns against the folly of trying to lighten suffering by throwing God's sovereignty overboard, arguing instead that what makes calamity bearable is not that God shares our shock, but that his difficult providences are laden with love.
And here's what he's saying and how this relates to this idea of moving from presumption to understanding. Is he saying, what we tend to do is we tend to think, well, if I'm suffering, the best thing to do is to say, well, God must not be in charge. God somehow isn't involved. God isn't part of this. But he says the exact opposite is what we need. And that is to be able to say, no matter what I'm going through, God's hand has not become slack in having a part in what it is that I'm going through. And even as you read through the book of Job, one of the things that's unmistakable is that God has not been absent from the process even that has brought suffering into Job's life.
Now, I don't know how this strikes you, but if somebody came to see me and told me the story of their life and it paralleled Job's story, which is, I once was living this life and now everything about that has been shattered, there would be a part of me that would not want to say, well, God's hand is in that. But that's exactly what we see here. And the movement is in some ways from I don't get it, to God, I will have a sense of surrender. I presume that I know what is best. I surrender to it.
From Perplexity to Understanding
There's another movement. This is in verse four, and this is from perplexity to understanding. He says, "You said, listen now, and I will speak. I will question you and you shall answer me." Again, he's quoting from what God had said to him, Job, chapter 38. Here it's verse three. He says, "Brace yourself like a man. I will question you and you shall answer me."
So he takes this and he paraphrases. He turns it back around. He says, "Listen now, and I will speak. I will question you and you shall answer me." And this is his way of saying, what felt complex all of a sudden does not feel complex. But it feels as if I'm able to say I have some degree of being able to say that I understand not exactly what you're doing, but that you are doing something. And that's where his movement is.
There's a part of Wendell Berry's story, Hannah Coulter, in which Hannah, who was a single mom, she had lost her husband and was raising a girl and was struggling with life. And Wendell Berry writes about it beautifully, describing how she doesn't just choose life, but life chooses her. He writes about how the light that shines in darkness calls people on into life, back into the great room, into their bodies and the world, into work and pleasure and goodness and beauty and the company of other loved ones.
And what he says, I think so beautifully there is this idea for Job of saying this is so perplexing to me because I don't get it, to saying, I understand that it's not the end and that you're still calling me forward to something in the midst of my pain.
From Isolation to Intimacy
And then we see a movement, I'm just going to say from isolation to intimacy. And this is verse five. "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you."
And this is his way of saying, I had heard, but now I see. And it's a movement from one form of connection to a deeper form of connection. And you know how this works. If you've ever been on a phone call with somebody but aren't seeing them, there's another step of intimacy, which is to get on a FaceTime call or a Zoom call. And then there's even another step of intimacy, which is to be in person. And so if you're just talking on the phone, it's one level, but if you're FaceTiming, it's another level. If you're in person, it's another level. And what Job experiences here, he's saying, is, I've gone from God just basically hearing you, hearing about you, to seeing you to knowing you.
Chuck Swindoll at one point put it like this in talking about the idea of knowing God through our suffering, he says, knowing God is better than knowing the answers. Knowing God is better than knowing the answers. And then Warren Wiersbe said, this chapter assures us that no matter what happens to us, God always writes the last chapter. Therefore, we don't have to be afraid. We can trust God, no matter how painful our situation may be.
And so he, in essence, in this moment, has had these movements. And then in verse six, he says, "I despise myself." So some translations say, "I reject myself." And the reason for the difference in the words is the Hebrew word can be translated either despise or reject. And in this instance, I think it really is something that could be translated either way.
The essence of it is as he says, I'm saying no to myself. I'm surrendering to you, God. It's pointing to this idea of surrender. And he says he repents in dust and ashes. And it's his way of saying, God, I'm letting you be God in charge of this. And even though I have struggled, I am moving into the place now where I see your good hand. I understand that you're at work, and I can accept it and surrender to it. And I've gotten a better idea who you are.
God's Affirmation of Job
And then God speaks again in verse seven through nine. And we've looked a little bit at this over these weeks. We hear God's perspective on all that's taken place. He says, "After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, 'I am angry with you and your two friends because you have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has. So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has.'"
Do you notice a word that's repeated here about Job? He's called his what? Servant. Four different times in this little section. Do you remember what Job was called at the beginning of the book when Satan first went to heaven to have this encounter, kind of the moment with God where Satan comes in and God says, "Have you considered my servant Job?"
And I know that that story, I haven't been able to give probably a satisfactory explanation to it other than to say it's not normative, because I don't think there probably is one that's better than that. But the idea here, I think is, is at the end of the book, God is saying, he's still my servant, despite all of these questions, all of these doubts, all of this circling around. He is my servant. This is a moment of affirmation. Job has surrendered, and now God is saying, you are my servant. I am pleased basically with you.
And it's striking that here Job prays to intercede for the friends. And God says, basically, on the basis of Job's sacrifice, Job's prayer, I'm going to count your sins, not against you. Do you know who else is called the servant, the suffering servant, in the Old Testament? Isaiah 52:13, Isaiah 53—Jesus is called the suffering servant. Because what does Jesus do? He makes intercession for those who are in need, and he offers the sacrifice of himself.
And so Job here is prefiguring Christ. He's pointing the way to a better kind of Job, who is Jesus, who makes a sacrifice for all, for all time. And what this means, in essence, is that as you even look at this story, you see the message of Jesus Christ even right here, that is available to all of us to say, I come to God not on the basis of what I've done, but on the basis of what Jesus Christ has done. And so he gives us this little picture.
The Restoration of Job
And then we see in verses 10 through 17, this restoration of all that Job has. And this used to bug me, to be honest. And the reason I say it bugged me is because I would read through the book of Job and I would come to this. And it seemed like a trite ending to the book. It seemed like you got to the end of the book, and all of a sudden Job gets everything back and more.
Here's how it reads: "After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before." So whatever Job had, it was doubled. "All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house." So now he has relationships restored. "They comforted and consoled him over the trouble the Lord had brought on him. And each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring. The Lord blessed the later part of Job's life more than the former part of his life. He had 14,000 sheep and 6,000 camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand donkeys. And he also had seven sons and three daughters. The first daughter he named Jemimah and the second Keziah and the third Keren-Happuch. Nowhere in the land were there found women as beautiful as Job's daughters. And their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers."
Now what is going on here? Obviously you get God giving back to Job this restoration of his stuff and his family. But why are the girls mentioned here? Because it's rare in the Old Testament that women are in any kind of mention of a genealogy. And the inheritance went to the boys. The girls were generally married into a family and that was part of how that worked. They didn't have an inheritance. But here Job is said to give an inheritance to his daughters and they're mentioned.
Here's what I think is happening. The name Jemimah is a name that means a soft-voiced turtle dove. You can see this in the Song of Songs, chapter 2, verse 14. The name Keziah means cinnamon flower. And you can see this in Psalm 45, verse 8. The name Keren-Happuch means a horn of antimony, which is a kind of fragrance and cosmetic approach. And so here what he's doing is he's naming his daughters in essence to say, I have been given back beauty and goodness and it's so abundant that I'm going to go outside of the norm and bless them with an inheritance in a way that is not normal in our day.
And here's why this is important and why maybe this isn't a trite ending because it's God's way, knowing that this story is preserved for all time, to say the end of your story is not the hardship and the brokenness and the disappointment that you've experienced, but the end of your story will be the restoration and the fulfillment and the reversal, the reversal of what is broken, the fulfillment of all of the hopes and dreams.
Remember how we said that faith is the assurance of what we do not see? It's basically the hope, the confidence that our hope will be realized. And here what we're seeing in essence is that God is saying, I want you to know that even in the midst of hardship and brokenness, your story is not over. But so many times, the way it feels to us when we're in the middle of heartbreak, hardship, difficulty, challenge is, this is the end of my story. It feels like we're living the NFL season week by week instead of saying, we know the way the story ends.
Job in the New Testament
The New Testament, by the way, picks up this idea of Job in the book of James. And here's what we see toward the end of James, James chapter 5, verse 11. It says, "As you know, we count as blessed those who persevered. You've heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy."
So he says, you've heard basically, or you know, that we count people blessed who've persevered. The ESV translates that word as steadfast. And then it says, you've heard of the steadfastness of Job and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. So what he's doing here is he's pointing back to this thing at the end and he's saying, God's end, what God did in the end is what you know that awaits those who persevere.
Now, clearly this doesn't mean that in this life you and I are going to get ten times whatever it is we've suffered. But it means that God is full of restoration. And then James adds this statement. He says, "The Lord is full of compassion and mercy." And the Greek word here for compassion, this is the only time the word is used in the New Testament. So it's not a common word for compassion. And if there's any nuance of meaning in it, it means that God feels deeply for what it is that you're walking through and that the story isn't over.
And mercy here is, again, not the most common word for mercy that just means to extend kindness in a hard time. But it means one who identifies with us in our hurts. And so who is the Lord? He's the One who restores, but he's the One who cares about exactly where you are and where I am today. And that matters, because if we don't see God that way, then what happens is we find ourself being suspicious of God. And instead of moving toward awe, toward surrender and understanding and even intimacy with God, we move toward isolation, toward a sense of ongoing confusion and perplexity over where God is in the midst of everything.
Now, in no way do I think this journey is easy, but it is possible that when we walk through hard things to be able to say, God is full of compassion and mercy and the end of the story has not been told, and so I can persevere because God is not done. And wherever you are today, your story is not over. God is not done because he's at work.
The Lord Has Promised Good to Me
There's a song that the church has sung for generations. It's called "Amazing Grace." And often when we sing this song, what we do is we sing it and we focus on the first verse and the last verse. The hymn begins by celebrating God's saving grace and ends looking toward eternity. But in the middle of the song, there are verses that speak to the journey.
And here's just two of them. The first that I just want to highlight speaks of traveling through many dangers, toils and snares, acknowledging that it's grace that has brought us safe thus far and grace will lead us home. And then there's another verse that says the Lord has promised good to me, his word secures my hope, and he will be my shield and portion as long as life endures.
I love that—the Lord has promised good to me. He's not done. If you have come to know and embrace Jesus as the servant, the suffering servant for you, then you can say with confidence, with faith, the Lord has promised good to me. And even when you don't see it and it feels distant, you can say, I have hope that God will restore, that he will affirm my steadfastness and say, you have been my servant through it all.
And the key for all of us is to be able to say, God, I surrender. You know, I don't know how you come here today, through what kind of challenge, difficulty you've been in the midst of. But what I know is that God is not done. And so I pray that for you, for me, wherever we are in our journey, that we would be able to say, I will continue to persevere, to be steadfast, to have patience. And that Job, as James tells us, will serve as an example of what that is, but will ultimately point us to the One who did for us what we can't do.
Let's pray together. God, as we have gathered this weekend, I ask that you would help each one of us, wherever we are, to have hope and to know that our story is not over. And because of that, we would be able to persevere. And, Father, we pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.
This transcript has been cleaned and formatted by AI. While care has been taken to preserve the content and meaning of the original sermon, minor edits may have been made for clarity and readability. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the original audio or video recording.
