Clough Faith Rest Drill Lesson 2

1-28-01

…with all the different things that happened in his life, and Hebrews 11:22, remember the reference was to his funeral preparations. And we pointed out that in sighting that evidence of Joseph’s life of his faith, the Holy Spirit directed out attention to the fact that this man of faith found himself in a situation that we find ourselves in in our culture. No matter what you say, no matter what you do in the Christian life, when you follow the Lord, and you’re obedient, and you trust, you will always be in discord with the world around you. It inevitably happens; for a while you can be at peace but eventually there will be a rupture, and we said that in Joseph’s case it was a profound rupture, that here was a man who was high up in the political structure and bureaucracy of Egypt, here he was number two in the super power of that point in ancient history, and he had the gall when he designed his funeral preparations to do it totally in such a way that it was an insult to every royal Egyptian.

We know enough now from ancient history to know that when the Egyptians prepared for death they had this concept that Egypt was part of the cosmos, the eternal order; there would never be a change. And this is why in the tombs of the Egyptians you see the mummified bodies; you see food left there, still there in the grave. Why was the food there? In some cases there were implements there. They would mummify cats, dogs, crocodiles and anything else that happened to be in the household to keep a person company in the life to come. Clearly they believed in a life after death; the problem was they believed in a totally static man’s conceived future. Joseph said no, my bones are not going to stay in Egypt, I am not part of this mythical order of the politician; I am part of the sovereign plan of God for history and the Abrahamic Covenant in 2000 BC set in motion the wheels of history in a direction that people have been irritated about ever since.

I’m assuming that you’ve had the experience in your family somewhere in your home if you’re a Christian of being put on the hot seat for your faith. And becoming a person on the hot seat inevitably you face this objection: Look, your faith is fine, the problem with you Christians is that you believe that you’ve got the only truth; why is it that you can’t accept other people’s views. Well, for one thing, it’s not our view. The Lord Jesus Christ was the One who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes to the Father but by Me.” I didn’t write that, you didn’t write that, so blame it on Jesus; deflect the get the issue back to where it belongs. It’s not your opinion that’s at stake here, it’s what does the Scriptures say. And it goes back to 2000 BC because prior to 2000 BC all people groups had equal say; they were all the sons of Noah that had colonized the earth after the flood. But because of their corruption and their falling away, according to Romans 1, God called out a special subset of people called Jews. And Abraham, the first Jew in the human race, became the father of a nation.

Joseph was instrumental in that and if we turn to Genesis 50, at the time that he’s preparing his funeral, he is saying something to his brothers. And what he says to his brothers opens up an entire issue of how Joseph applied the faith rest approach to life. He says in Genesis 50:19, “Do not be afraid; for am I in God’s place. [20] As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.” Notice the phrase, “many people alive.” That’s a reference, according to Hebrews 11:22, to the Exodus that will happen centuries after this verse…centuries! This verse is about 1800 BC; the Exodus is going to happen three to four centuries later; some chronologists say two and a half centuries. But the point is, it’s centuries future. So when you see that phrase in verse 20, “to preserve many people alive,” that hasn’t happened yet; that’s strictly Joseph’s analysis. Now let’s look what he did because what he did is what we intuitively do; all of us have done this but I’m just going to kind of outline it three steps because today we want to move to a problem area that you will have at one time or another if you haven’t already, and it’s an important one to deal with.

The first step in faith is that you have to recall a fragment, a story, a picture, a promise from the Word of God. “Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.” So you always have to seize upon something that you know of the Word of God. And you have to recognize it as coming from God; it doesn’t come from men, this is not Mike’s word, it’s not the elder’s words, it’s not whatever church you happen to come from word, it’s the Word of God. So that’s the first element and clearly we cannot claim a fragment or a promise or something from the Word of God if we haven’t been exposed to the Word of God. And that’s why habitual exposure, whether you think you need it or not, is training for the future. Remember what Lt. Col. Buschor said, training in the military and be very monotonous, but the interesting thing is when the stress comes, how do you respond. You respond the way you were trained. And so it goes in the Christian life that those of us who take in the Word of God, who are constantly exposed to the Word of God, right now we may not need it, right now we kind of take it for granted; some day when the crunch comes you’re going to be using that. So number one, you have to take in the Word of God.

Number two, and this is the critical step that has to be dealt with before we can really trust the Lord, and that is we have to have some sort of a rationale in our minds where we connect the Word of God with our situation. In particular, if you’ve been in high school biology remember the pictures they used to show of an amoeba, this slurpy little thing that changes its shape and can swallow up particles. Well, I always like to use the visualization of the Word of God like a giant amoeba slurping up the circumstances. And that’s the picture you want, that whatever this problem area is, in Joseph’s case it was his physical body and how he was acting as administrator in a pagan society, but he encased that circumstance with the Abrahamic Covenant. That was his Bible, Genesis 15.

What did the Abrahamic Covenant do? Three things; it promised a worldwide blessing to all nations, it promised a land of specific real estate boundaries to the Jewish nation, and it promised that there would be a great people. Of course we also know that Messiah was part of that promise. So Joseph, in his situation, swallowed up the situation in getting a handle on it with the Word of God. Now this is easier said than done as anyone knows that has been through a crisis. It is not easy; what happens is, here’s the situation and we try to get a handle on it and we get blown away, because the Word of God doesn’t totally encompass the situation.

So what we want to do is go through a little bit more of Joseph, get a little insight into how he got trained so he could do this, and then we’re going to go to the hardest, most difficult area to trust the Lord in, and when we get into that I hope the sound system will work so we can listen to a famous debate and I’ve taken a section out of that debate because I want you to see what happens when two bulldogs lock horns. And this case you’re going to listen to a very articulate atheist, one of the directors of the ACLU, you know, the Anti-Christian Liberties Union. And you’re going to also hear a man who is very articulate for the Christian faith; it’s going to get down and dirty and kind of nasty but this is the spirit of the world, and this is where we collide with that and we’re talking about a wrestling match here; we’re talking conflict. So I don’t make too much apology, I’m just kind of warning you that we will get kind of nasty today as far as confrontation with the world system because it’s unavoidable. We have to get away from this business.

When we have a situation we’ve got to totally encompass it with the Word of God and that means that we not only positively trust the Word of God in the situation but we destroy all temptations not to trust in the situation. “Every thing,” Paul said, “that exalts itself against the knowledge of God will be brought down,” and it’s hard to bring it down, that’s the struggle that goes on. So I kind of call this thing sort of the private prayer meeting of the soul because that’s where the struggle is. You can have the closest friend, you can have your spouse, you can have your pastor, but ultimately it’s in your soul and it’s in my soul where the struggle happens.

We know that Joseph in this verse was able to very smoothly and clearly proclaim how he dealt with the situation. By the way, the third step is the resting phase but to get to the resting phase we have to go through step two. You have a chart in the bulletin and we’re going to go through details of that chart today. That represents about three or four thousand pages of research and I’ve tried to put it all on one page for you. We’re going to come back to it several times; right now I want to direct your attention to two lines on this diagram. These two lines under where it says “Christian,” you’ll notice that on the top line there’s the word “good.” You’ll also notice on the second line, and for now we can forget the pagan view, we’re not looking at the pagan view, we’re going to look at good and evil. Now this is how the Bible approaches suffering and evil and why there are all these horrible things going on in the world today. That’s the crucial problem and when we get into a jam there’s a tendency on all our parts often to resent God. And we can’t trust Him if we resent Him, and it’s resentment and sometimes bitterness toward the Lord Himself that obstructs our faith.

Now Joseph had a chance to be bitter many times in his life and in this verse he has shown us how he won the battle. Notice, in the light of this diagram, verse 20, let’s go through verse 20 carefully, look at it, take it apart, and think about it. “God meant it for good,” in order to bring about this present result. So just look at that one clause, “God meant it for good.” In terms of the diagram Joseph had perfect trust in God’s goodness. No matter how bad the situation appeared to him, no matter how much his personal suffering in the situation, he did not say God’s bad. God is good; He is not only good in the abstract, He is not only good in the theory, but He is good to me. And it took him a long time to get here and we’re going to see because the Bible tells us how long it took Joseph to get here. We’ll see that in a moment but just notice where he is at.

God is good, but then he said before that, “you meant it for evil.” That’s the creature, with his creature choices, with his creature arrogance, with his creature determination to thwart what God has done in the universe. The creatures say we will disobey and God says I am going to work it for good, “all things work together for good,” I control history. “All things” are working for My good, you may think you have a choice down there, you may think you’re going to obstruct something, you don’t obstruct Me; for every piece you move on the chess board I can out-maneuver you—every time. That’s the feeling Joseph got and it’s a powerful, powerful thing in life if you grab hold of this. It ultimately, in your soul, makes you invincible, not because of anything in your soul, it’s because God is invincible. And no matter what the world throws at you, with this concept that Joseph has, that God is good, that He is sovereign, that He is powerful, then there’s nothing the world can do about that. They may object to it, they may ridicule it but they can’t stop it. And the bottom line is, can they stop it.

So how did Joseph get here? Let’s turn to a psalm that tells us how Joseph got there in his life; a psalm that gives us some insight on how God worked prior to this situation in Genesis 50. Turn to Psalm 105, there’s a great passage here; the passage explains completely Joseph’s rationale. Look at Psalm 105:5-6, there’s the background, that’s the heavy Scriptural fragment, step one in the faith rest drill. “Remember His wonders which He has done, and the judgments uttered by His mouth, [6] O seed of Abraham, O seed of Jacob, [7] The LORD is our God; His judgments are in all the earth.” What does verse 8 say? “He has remembered His covenant forever,” what covenant? The Abrahamic Covenant. See, it goes back to a promise that controls history. If history has a pattern and you’re in history, doesn’t it follow that your life has a pattern? If the whole has a pattern and you’re part of the pattern, then you’ve got a pattern in your life whether you recognize it or not.

So there’s the covenant; notice in verse 9, “The covenant He made with Abraham, and His oath to Isaac,” and it goes on and describes that covenantal portion of Scripture that these guys grab hold of and use it to conquer their circumstances. Now what were the circumstances? Verse 16, “God called a famine upon the land; He broke the whole staff of bread. [17] He sent a man before them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave, [18] They afflicted his feet with fetters; he himself was laid in iron, [19] Until the time that His word came to pass,” and now notice the second clause of verse 19, “the word of the LORD tested im.” There’s what happened. Joseph, two years in jail, that’ll test anybody. Here was a guy who was in jail illegitimately. Now you can imagine every day he wakes up in chains; not due to his fault; due to the fact that he had brothers who tried to kill him, he had people who lied about him, everything it seems like had been closed. And you can imagine Joseph getting up in the morning and saying Lord, I want to get out of here. And the answer was no. Next day, I want to get out of here; answer no. I want to get out of here; no. I want to get out of here; no. I want to get out of here; no, no, no, no, no and this went on for two years. Two years, over and over and over. And that’s what it means when it says “the LORD tested him.” And finally we know the story, the king sent and released him.

Why was Joseph in the prison for this long? Now if I were in the prison I’d be thinking about my comfort and most of you would too. The point was that God had a calling on this man’s life to do something in history that was fantastic; Joseph was going to be the deliverer of the nucleus family for God’s chosen nation, that would bring into historical existence the Scriptures that you hold in your lap, though written by Jews; our Messiah who was a Jew, who died for our sins. Now all that was what God had in store for this man, but the problem was Joseph couldn’t see how the pieces fit together, and it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. Oftentimes when we’re in these jams and we’re going through the thing God does not allow us to see His picture. I like to use a puzzle here. We only see the bottom; and we see the pieces and we think to ourselves, well, all I see is a mess, but in God’s mind, not necessarily in our mind, in His mind it fits perfectly together. Joseph, I put him right here, and he’s there with his gift, he’s going to interpret dreams, and I’ve got a deal working here with Pharaoh, I’ve got something else going here, when these two come together I’m going to get him, I’m going to put him in there, he’s going to be number two man; if he’d got of jail his way he’d never be number two man in Egypt.

So all of it has a purpose, but Joseph didn’t see that; all he saw was two years, 104 weeks, over 700 days of waking up in jail, over and over and over and over and over again. And he could have gotten mad and I wouldn’t doubt but he had bitterness at times. Thank you God for putting me here, I really appreciate this!!! And it went on and on and on; finally though he learned; he had to cope with the situation. Remember the deal he tried to work, hey, when you get out of jail would you put the good word in for me. And you remember the Bible says they forgot. Every gimmick that he tried to get out of jail God said no, not your time yet. Well I’m going to try this; no! Well let me try this; no, doesn’t work. And every time he got a no I can well imagine he had to cope with bitterness. , just like we have to. Well, he learned somewhere in those two years to handle the situation. He finally must have in the depths of his soul said to himself, God, I can’t figure it out; my life is in pieces, but if I know that you are a good God and not a bad God, those pieces have to fit together and so we go back to this diagram that God is a good God and that we are down here in the grunge and that we can’t get the big picture. So that’s the background for Joseph.

Now we want to move on and deal with an issue of the suffering on the pagan side of the house. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to move to unbelief. We’re not going to pull any punches because if I were a non-Christian and I wanted to argue my case, do you know the case I’d pick? Evil. And historically this is where Christianity, if it’s vulnerable anywhere it’s vulnerable here, vulnerable not because God is vulnerable but vulnerable because we don’t perceive the power of our own position. Foolishness has got to be exposed. On this bottom line on the diagram you see the pagan view and why do I call it the pagan view? Because if you look I the dictionary the word “pagan” means one who does not believe in the God of the Bible.

So what does the pagan have? Now I’m not picking on non-Christian, if you’re here and you’re not a believer I’m not picking on you, okay. What I’m doing here is I’m dealing with the idea; I’m dealing with an idea that Satan has put into the minds of millions of hearts; I’m dealing with an idea that tempts us, so we want to look at this thing in the raw. If you look at this bottom line you see the hopelessness of unbelief. You can ridicule the Scriptures and you can laugh at Christians but you have got nothing in response. Maybe you never thought about this before but if you drop the Bible and if you flush the idea that the God who speaks into history, this is all you’ve got; you’ve got good and evil going on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. You’ve got death going on forever and ever and ever and ever. You have misery going on forever and ever and ever and ever; you have no reason to believe that the universe itself is anything but callous, cold, indifferent and inherently evil. You have no idea of how it started whereas the Bible does; the Bible says the universe was created good and it fell; nothing down here about that. The Bible says there will be a future judgment in which God will separate good from evil; nothing about that. And that’s unbelief in the raw, so is the grass really greener on the other side?

I’m going to play a portion of this tape and as you listen I want you to approach it this way: don’t consider this as a scholarly argument, which it is by the way. What I want you to do is think of this as the voices that speak to our souls. I want you to perceive of Mr. [?] who is a Jewish atheist and one-time director of the ACLU, wrote speeches for our former President, this man is a person who is very angry at God for allowing his Jewish grandparents to be gassed to death at Auschwitz. This is a touchy subject; why did God do this. And he’s dumping this venom out right at this point in the debate, and he’s angry and he’s attacking the idea and he’s trying to put down the whole issue of God Himself. [Tape apparently played for audience but not on tape]

If God is not there you shouldn’t be bothered by evil, if you’re bothered by evil you’re borrowing from the Christian worldview. So what we want to move onto is one other diagram this morning; I want to use this to show something about the dilemma that we have when we disbelieve Scripture, because when you and I disbelieve the Word of God we are thrust into the position of this Mr. [?]. Here’s what happens. Something bad happens; 99% of the population believes it’s bad, and it’s not bad because it’s preferential, it’s not bad because it’s been voted upon, it really is absolutely bad. Now once we accept that we’ve already bought into the Christian position because the Bible says that yeah, that is bad, bad because God says it’s bad, bad because the universe has fallen away by the fall.

The problem… and this is what blocks our faith, the problem is they can’t advance with this, they have a complaint that something’s bad but what do we do with it. Here’s what we do with it; it must be justified to the creature, in other words, God, if You’ve got a reason for this thing happening at Auschwitz or anywhere else, or my baby got killed, somebody ran over my son, if you’ve got a reason for that I’m not going to believe until You come down here and justify it to ME! I’ll decide, and after I pass on Your plans then everything will be cool. But you see, to do that is to repeat what Adam and Eve did; we will test whether or not Satan’s word is true or whether God’s Word is true. Satan said you eat you won’t die; God says don’t eat, you eat and you will die, two conflicts. So we will decide between Satan and God, we will be the final arbiters. No, God’s Word has implicit authority. If we don’t take God’s Word on the basis of authority then it’s no longer His Word. And that’s the dilemma we face in our drill of faith; we grab a set of Scriptures, step one; step two, we have to work it out so we can trust that God’s Word, not only is the answer to the situation it is the ONLY answer to the situation.

This explains now why in the book of Job there’s this angry discourse, in Job 38. In three places in the book of Job, in Job 38 Job gets a rather rough treatment at the hands of God, if you think about this. Look at this and imagine this suffering man. Now you would expect that God would have a little bit more gentlemanly counsel in this situation; you would expect God to come along and put His hand on Job’s back and say “poor Job, Job I love you.” But you know what’s remarkable and critics for centuries have pointed this out. God doesn’t come at first saying He loves Job. Now we’ve got to come to grips with this because there are people who say this, see, “the God of the Scripture is not a loving God,” and they do so on the basis of this text. We’ve got to answer the question, why, when God confronts Job He’s almost harsh with him. And if we can grab that it helps that step two of our faith resolve, when we get tendencies to try to be bitter at God for allowing this in my life and this and that.

Job 38:2, God says, “Who is he that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? [3] Gird up your loins like a man,” and if you look up the Hebrew word for man there it’s gibbor, and it’s the word for warrior, he says YOU’RE the man, this is all sarcasm. So he’s saying you’re the man, okay, Gird up your loins now babe, we’re going to go for it. So he comes in and I will ask you and you go ahead and instruct Me; do you see the sarcasm in here? In the Hebrew, in the original language it’s very sarcastic, and almost hurtful, that God would come to someone in such pain and such sorrow and He says…He ridicules him in effect—you’re the big man on the block, are you, okay, you sit down here and you instruct Me! And then he goes on in a big long quiz here.

Turn to Job 40, this continues, it’s not just one place God does this; He does it again in chapter 40. He even gets more sarcastic here, Job 40:2, “Will the fault-finder contend with the Almighty? Let him who reproves God answer it.” And it’s a participle construction in the original language and it’s more like, oh, let the God-corrector spout off now. [Tape turns]

…to see this kind of attitude, what is the problem here. Why does God do this? [3] “And Job answered the Lord and said, [4] Behold, I am insignificant,” is the translation I have, it’s the Hebrew word that was used in the flood, when the waters went down and drained down and became shallow; he’s saying shallow, I am shallow Job says, “what can I reply to thee? I lay my hand on my mouth. [5] Once I have spoken, I won’t answer; even twice, and I will add no more.” Now is Job angry here or has Job discovered something? There’s where we start to peel open the text. Do you think that Job is responding in anger to this almost put-off intrusion of God, or has he realized something, that all of his speculation, all of his demands to fit everything together, was illegitimate? What he should have done was trust God with the plan because God doesn’t tell him the plan here; at no point in the book of Job does God ever tell Job why he suffered.

Turn to Job 42, the third time this happens, and now we have resolution. Job 42:1, “Then Job answered the LORD, and said,” now you notice Job talking. The first one, in Job 38, God spoke; then in Job 40 God spoke, and now Job answers the Lord, and look what rolls out of his heart; something has happened deep down I his soul as a result of this. [2] “I know that You can do all things and no purpose of Thine can be thwarted.” What attribute of God is he talking about in the first part of this? “You can do all things,” His omnipotence. Second part of the verse, “and no purpose of Thine can be thwarted.” Attribute: sovereignty. [3] Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. [4] Hear now, and I will speak; I will ask Thee and you instruct me.” You see what’s happened? What was the previous verse? Okay God-complainer, come on down and instruct me, and God gave him a whole series of His questions. Job, you’re so smart, you’re so brilliant, I’ve got 42 questions I’d like to ask you; why don’t you just answer them, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, just like a machine gun, boom, boom, boom, boom, all the way down thru chapter 38, by the time Job gets through this, hey, wait a minute, I can’t even answer the first question.

What has happened in his soul? What has this process of this strange form of counseling achieved in Job’s heart that enables him now to roll with the punch and move on in life? It says, [5] “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but not my eyes see Thee,” see who? See God. [6] Therefore I retract and I repent in dust and ashes.” See the word “repent,” it means change his whole attitude. Why did God come in on Job like this? You heard on the tape an angry man and that anger has to be met and it has to be met in our hearts when we have bitterness and anger to the things that God allows in our life; we have to confront that. And that’s the hard part, this is not easy, it’s not easy for me, I’m not saying I do it, I’m saying though that we are all called at this point to come to the fact, the Job test. And in the Job test the only thing you can do is surrender, with the confidence, you know, I’m just mouthing off here, I have no understanding of my life, I have no understanding of where I’m going to be, where I’ve come from, I really don’t know what I’m talking about and therefore I freely choose to accept the role of being a creature in God’s universe. Now God can say He loves me. But you see, God can’t start with that; He has to come in and He has to walk into our lives as God and after we get that straightened out then we can talk about “He loves me.”

Remember the confrontation that happened in the Gospels with Jesus? You remember the one incident in His life, He encountered somebody that had more faith than anyone else in Israel? It was a Roman Gentile centurion. A centurion was an officer in the Roman Army, and he had many men under command. And what Jesus did, the centurion, you remember, he asked Lord, can you heal my child. And the Lord offered to come to his house, yeah, I’ll come down to your house, where are you and I’ll come down to your house. No-no Lord, don’t bother, you see, I’m an officer in the Roman army, I have rank and I have authority; if I tell somebody to do something he does it. You’re the Lord, you just tell the disease to go away and it’ll go away. And the Lord exclaimed, in the Greek the Lord Jesus Christ is excited about that, and He says you know what? I haven’t seen faith like that in all this land, all these Jews here been yakking-yakking about the Old Testament, here’s a Roman army officer who’s got it together. Why did he get it together? Because he understood authority.

And Job here, with his repentance that’s going on, I believe that’s one of our fundamental clogs to trusting the Lord, is that we will not submit to His authority. And in our generation what’s the one issue that’s out there? Everybody is going to do their own thing; a whole culture is directed to exalt self, my interests are first, and I have my power this, or I’ve got this technique, and I’m going to run, I’m going to do all the rest of it. You see, when we’re imbued with that kind of attitude it doesn’t work, and that’s why people say well, the Bible doesn’t work, gee, I memorized five verses and it doesn’t work. Well, it doesn’t work because like Job, maybe you need a whack on the side of the head. That’s what happened to him, and that’s what happens to me. That’s the way the Lord did it. So you remember how God dealt with the suffering issue of Job; He came in with a 2 x 4 and once he got Job’s attention everything was cool.

Father, we thank You for….