Calvary Road Baptist Church
“WHERE TO FIND HIM”
Job 23.3
This message from God’s Word had its genesis in my morning devotions as I was reading the book of Job.
I commend the daily reading of God’s Word to every one of you, whether you have tasted that the LORD is gracious or not. Not only does every human being benefit from exposing his mind to the best literature known to man, each of us profits from filling our minds and hearts with timeless truth that brings us into contact with eternal matters on a daily basis. Only by reading God’s Word is this accomplished. It harms no one to be reminded that God is. It harms no one to be reminded of His power, His immensity, His wisdom, His love, His mercy, and our own sinfulness, smallness, weakness, and insignificance in comparison to Him. We human beings are too full of ourselves, imagining ourselves to be more important in the grand scheme of things than we are. To get a daily dose of perspective from reading a portion of God’s Word, even if only a chapter a day from beginning to end, starting with Genesis and eventually ending with Revelation, will over the course of a lifetime do you more good than you can possibly imagine.
Back to my devotional reading of Job. For those of you not familiar with Job, it is a very ancient book that records notable events in the life of a very ancient man by the same name. How ancient, you might wonder? He likely lived even before the patriarch Abraham.[1] However, the book of Job only briefly touches on Job and his family before informing the reader of conversations that transpired in heaven between the LORD and Satan, which set in motion events leading to Job’s personal tragedies and suffering and the subsequent rounds of dialogue between Job and his friends that makes up so much of the book of Job.
Job was the best of his era, a man perfect and upright, who feared God, and eschewed evil.[2] It is therefore difficult for most who read the book to understand that Job’s profound suffering at the hand of Satan was actually instigated by God.[3] “How can this be? Isn’t God good? Isn’t God kind? Isn’t God merciful? How could God not only allow such suffering in the life of so godly a man as Job, but actually instigate such suffering?” Those questions are asked by the readers of the book but were never contemplated by the characters in the book because they were unaware of Satan’s role in Job’s suffering. What Job, his wife, and his friends were concerned with was understanding the tragic suffering of so godly a man for no obvious reason. Job’s wife was so distraught that she suggested her husband curse God and die so his suffering would end, but he rebuked her.[4] When his friends arrived on the scene to comfort him and mourn with him they were so astounded by what they saw that they at first wailed with grief and then sat in quiet astonishment for seven days and seven nights, speaking not a word.[5]
Breaking the silence, Job spoke first. This began a series of rounds of dialogue in which one of Job’s friends spoke and then Job answered, with each friend attempting to explain the reason back of Job’s suffering and Job defending himself against their erroneous and presumptive accusations. They thought it must be for some hidden sin, some hypocrisy, some kind of deceit that was the cause of Job’s affliction of boils. Job vehemently denied their accusations.
My text is found in Job 23.3, which is part of the passage that records the seventh time that Job answers a friend, and in which he expressed a deep longing for God. He would have liked to present his case before God. He was beginning to sense that he was being tested by God, and that God would bring him through his trials. But he lived in an era in which only a small portion of God’s truth was then revealed, and so he had questions for which men did not then have answers.
Job had a longing to come into the presence of God. It would have been wonderful if his friends had known how to bring him into the presence of God’s throne of grace. He didn’t need a throne of judgment; he had already been there. And he had already been to the woodshed for discipline - there is no question about that. Now someone needs to bring him into the presence of God:[6]
1 Then Job answered and said,
2 Even to day is my complaint bitter: my stroke is heavier than my groaning.
3 Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat!
Let me now read to you about the suffering experienced by two whose names you will recognize, in the hopes you will more readily connect with our text:
Job . . . longs to find God, to appear before Him, to present his case, and to hear God’s answers (23:2-7). But finding Him is the problem. In 23:8-9, Job vents a sentiment diametrically opposite to David’s in Psalm 139:8-10. Psalm 139 affirms, God is everywhere and I cannot get away from Him; Job 23 complains, God is nowhere to be seen and I cannot find Him. Psalm 139 expresses what the believer knows; Job 23 expresses what the believer sometimes feels. Why is God sometimes so hard to find and silent when we need Him most? Or is He? This is a massive question for any suffering person.
C. S. Lewis kept a spiritual diary while his wife was battling cancer -- a battle that she ultimately lost....
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble? ...
Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?
What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were “led up the garden path.” Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture.
I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try it over again. Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic sadist, the spiteful imbecile?
Or could one seriously introduce the idea of a bad God, as it were by the back door, through a sort of extreme Calvinism? You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing -- the very fact that we think something is good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact -- our worse fears are true -- all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It’s only our depravity makes them look black to us.
Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain? It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.
Adoniram Judson also echoed the pathos of Job in 23:1-9. When war broke out between Burma and England in 1824, English foreigners became espionage suspects. Execution of spies was routine. Judson and a fellow missionary were imprisoned. Nightly, their shackled ankles were raised over their heads until only their shoulders touched the ground. Daily, the executions continued. At one point, Judson contemplated suicide. After more than a year in prison, he was summoned to assist as an interpreter in peace negotiations. Near the end of a long absence from his wife, he received word that she had succumbed to fever and died. His baby girl followed a few months later.
Judson’s instinctive reaction was to throw himself relentlessly into translation work. Inwardly he wrestled with loneliness, guilt, and grief for over a year. Guilt and grief gave way to despair and doubt. He left mission work, built a hut in the jungle, and dug a grave where he perched for long periods of morbid meditation. Lost in a desolate wasteland of mind and soul, this veteran missionary penned a pathetic plea to his dead wife’s parents: “Have either of you learned the art of real communion with God, and can you teach me the first principles? God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I find him not.” This may not sound very spiritual. But it sounds very human, and remarkably like Job in chapter 23.
When and why does God hide Himself? Two verses in the same neighborhood articulate the paradox between promises of God’s presence and experiences of God’s absence. Psalm 46:1 exults that “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Psalm 44:24 asks, “Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction and oppression?” They are within twenty verses of each other but express opposite sentiments about the accessibility of God in times of trouble. If God is a very findable help in trouble, then why does He seem to be unfindable and unaware in our times of need? Isaiah famously sums up this spiritual anomaly: “Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Saviour” (45:15). He is our Savior and yet hides Himself when we need Him?
Sometimes God is silent and hidden because of our sin (Deut. 32:20; Isa. 8:17; 57:11; Jer.14:8; Ps. 50:21). But sometimes He hides Himself from His people even when they cry to Him in distress (Job 13:24; 34:29; Pss. 10:1; 13:1; 22:1; 30:7; 44:24; 88:14; 89:46), prompting them to implore Him to manifest His presence and intervene (Pss. 27:9; 69:17; 143:7).
Citing all these passages makes a point: when you feel like that, you are not alone. God’s saints throughout history have known this experience. To find yourself in the company of Job is no small consolation. Start here: open your heart and examine yourself to see if the reason for His withdrawal is in you. Then wrap one of these biblical cries around your pain and frustration. Pray back to God some of these inspired prayers. Using these passages in prayer is an act of faith. Like Job’s, these cries insist that the world be experienced as it is and not in a pretended way. God includes them in His Word as prayer templates, to sanctify such feelings and experiences as a proper subject of discourse with God.
The advantage we have over Job is a reservoir of written revelation. Access amplifies accountability. However silent He seems to us, God has spoken. If you want a word from God, go to the Scriptures and immerse your soul until you recognize His voice to you there. If you are looking for God amid your suffering, you will not find Him apart from His Word. Sometimes God seems silent only because we are not listening to what He has already said.[7]
Do you find yourself suffering? It would not surprise me, since we are all somewhere on the spectrum of suffering, with someone always suffering more than you while another is suffering less than you are. With some it is physical pain and discomfort. With others it is profound heartache. With others it is mental anguish of one kind or another. Suffering is painful. Perhaps your suffering arises from a combination of sources, like Job, who lost his beloved children in one stroke and then lost every aspect of his health but physical life itself in another stroke. Then he lost his friends. Sometimes suffering is the result of known sin or folly as the cause of the pain or the grief. In Job’s case, his friends thought they knew the cause of his suffering, and it may be that their accusations were feeble attempts to root out his problem to relieve the suffering. But they were wrong, completely wrong, painfully wrong.
From this dilemma Job lived with, I want to lift only one of the many complaints that frustrated him, that discouraged him, and that caused him so much grief. Then, from our perspective thousands of years later, and with the completed revelation of God’s Word, I want to address his complaint in the hopes of alleviating your suffering. And if your suffering cannot be alleviated, at least it can be addressed. From Job 23.3, my text is, his words were,
“Oh that I knew where I might find him!”
Think of it. Surrounded by friends who might have been more faithful than anyone you or I have been privileged to know, and blessed with a faithful spouse who stayed close by through it all, Job still felt alone, spiritually alone, profoundly alone. His suffering isolated him from the comfort and companionship of his wife in one way, of his children in another way, and of his friends in yet a third way. More importantly, however, in his suffering he felt isolated from God:
“Oh that I knew where I might find him!”
Is that your heart’s cry? If it’s not it will be. There will come a day, either before or after you pass through death’s door, when you will cry,
“Oh that I knew where I might find him!”
Let us, right here and right now, address this complaint that is uttered, first, by the sinner, second, by the saint, and, third, by the disciple:
First, THE PERSON FOR THE SINNER
“Oh that I knew where I might find him!”
Let us first consider this complaint as being uttered by someone who is lost. You are dead in trespasses and sins. Your righteousnesses are to God as filthy rags. Your life is adrift on a sea of confusion and doubt (or arrogant certainty, which is the same), with guilt crashing over you from time to time like surf after a violent storm.
You want to do right, but you can’t. You want to want to do right but you can’t. When you would do right you haven’t the strength.[8] And when you seem to have the strength to do right, you no longer want to.[9] You make resolutions to stop sinning in this way or that way, but as quickly as you promise yourself that you will do good you dismiss the promise made to yourself and do wrong once more.
Were this complaint the words of a lost man, I would say that you need to give it up. You seek God, where He might be found, not realizing that God is discoverable by no one who is lost, is approachable by no one who is lost. The gulf between where the lost person is and where God is is too broad an expanse to be traversed, too vast a gulf to be overcome. Besides, if you who are lost could find God you wouldn’t be lost, would you? Lost means you will not find God.
Which is why God sent His only begotten Son. You cannot find God, but Jesus Christ can find you. Indeed, He said about Himself,
“For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost,”
in Luke 19.10. Your situation is spiritually what blind Bartimaeus’ was physically. I read Luke 18.36-42:
36 And hearing the multitude pass by, he asked what it meant.
37 And they told him, that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.
38 And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.
39 And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me.
40 And Jesus stood, and commanded him to be brought unto him: and when he was come near, he asked him,
41 Saying, What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.
42 And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved thee.
As the Savior sovereignly passes by today through the message of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, you can cry out to Him for mercy. And you can have faith in Christ as that blind man did, and be saved from your sins, as he was saved from his sins and healed of his blindness. Thus, the unsaved man needs not to find God, for you cannot find God, much less approach God. But you can come to Christ. You can be found by the Savior. Indeed, that may very well be why God has brought you here this morning, for an encounter with the Savior.
Second, THE PLACE FOR THE SAINT
You may be here this morning already a child of God through faith in Jesus Christ. God is your heavenly father and you are not a child of the devil. You have been redeemed. Your sins are forgiven. You know Christ as your Savior and you are sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise. And while you make no claim of sinless perfection, you are not walking in open disobedience to the will of God as you understand it. Yet you are suffering.
People don’t use the word suffering as much as they ought to. When you are in the hospital for several days and you are not yet twenty-one years of age, you are suffering physical affliction that will likely change your life forever. The likelihood of a second surgery once you have had a first surgery is incredibly high, with the odds for another surgery going up each time you have had a surgery. That is suffering.
Or you have battled or are battling cancer. That is suffering. The pain of arthritis and complications of heart disease are suffering. There are many forms of suffering that are the direct result of physical ailments and maladies, be they inherited or acquired, be they contagious or chronic, with the suffering taking the form of sharp and excruciating pain, dull and debilitating pain, or affecting one’s mood so that the battle is not against pain but against discouragement and gloom. This is all suffering.
Sometimes suffering arises from sickness or disease. Sometimes suffering arises from accident or injury. At other times suffering arises from bitter disappointment or betrayal by colleagues, by loved ones, by family members, or from looking into the mirror and facing your own personal failures and sins. Life is full of suffering, with some always suffering more and others suffering less. But your suffering is your suffering and no one else’s, and it does no one any good to compare your suffering with someone else’s.
That said, if you are a child of God you are indwelt by the Spirit of God, described by the Lord Jesus Christ as the Comforter, John 16.7. His ministry as comforter is not necessarily to make you feel better, but to come alongside you and minister to your spiritual needs in a beneficial way. Thus, whether you feel alone or not, if you are a Christian you are not alone!
With that fact in mind, you do not need the person of Jesus Christ. You already know Him. You have already trusted Him. Neither do you need the Holy Spirit. You already have Him. He indwells you, despite the loneliness you may feel. Therefore, not needing a person, God’s Word shows that your recourse is to a place. Not a geographical place, but a spiritual place, the throne of grace.
Because you know Jesus Christ as your Savior, and because you are indwelt by the Spirit of the living God, you are therefore encouraged by Hebrews 4.16 to approach God the Father in prayer at any time, for any reason, to ask of Him any thing:
“Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”
Are you in pain? Cry out to God for grace to deal with it and ask Him to remove it. Do you feel all alone? Cry out to your Father to comfort you, encourage you, and lift your spirits. Are you beset with enemies who torment you? Again, fill your prayers with complaints to Him about such things and plead with God for defense, for vindication, and for relief.
Don’t complain to someone who can’t help you. Go to God in prayer and complain to Him. He can help you. Feeling isolated and unloved? Go to the One who loves you so much He gave His Son for you, and is never far from you no matter how lonely you feel. Sometimes God alleviates the suffering. Sometimes God uses the suffering to make you wise and mature. But He always works to your good to use every experience of your life to conform you to the image of His Son, Romans 8.28-29. Therefore, be encouraged by your privilege of prayer and make frequent use of the privilege.
Finally, THE PRIVILEGE FOR THE DISCIPLE
The suffering sinner needs the Savior, but cannot find Him because of his spiritual blindness. The suffering saint sometimes feels alone and isolated, yet he is most certainly neither alone nor isolated. He needs to be directed to the throne of grace to pour his heart out to his heavenly Father. Thus, one needs the Person of Christ, while another needs the place of the throne of grace.
Standing in the midst of this spiritual battlefield called Earth, with casualties scattered around us, are those few Christians who are disciples in the Church of Jesus Christ. What do we who are disciples do? We do the Great Commission. We have this ministry of reconciliation. We seek to reach the least, the last, and the lost for Christ, as well we seek to reclaim those already reached who are suffering and wandering about in a daze of discouragement.
The Savior challenged His apostles and His embryonic Church with the Great Commission to make disciples by going, by baptizing, and by teaching people to observe all things He commanded. Thus, those of us who are disciples of Christ are constantly about the ministry of triage, as battlefield medics, nurses, and doctors who seek to minister to those we encounter. Is this one lost? He needs the Person of Christ. I will seek to evangelize him. Is this one a believer? I will seek to bring him to Church so we might baptize him. Is he a disoriented and suffering Christian? I will escort him to the throne of grace. He does not need the Person of Christ, but he does need the believer’s place of prayer.
Where do you fit in when Job 23.3 is considered? I know you suffer. We all suffer to a greater or lesser extent. Some people know they suffer, while most are suffering in some way but their suffering is so constant, so relentless, that they pay little attention to what it truly is.
If you are a suffering person who is lost, you need to understand that even if you do not feel alone you are alone. You are without God in the world. You do not want to be without God in the next world. Job’s cry might be a cry you would utter, though it would be a cry you can do nothing about. You cannot find God. You cannot approach God. It is for that reason God sent His Son, Jesus Christ. He came to seek you and to save you, and you can come to Him. Come to Him and He will never leave you nor forsake you.
If you are a suffering person who is a believer in Jesus Christ you can certainly feel alone, profoundly alone. However, you are not alone despite how you feel. You have Jesus Christ as your Savior and He will never leave you nor forsake you. You have the indwelling Holy Spirit who seals and comforts you. And you have access to God’s throne of grace at any time to pray to the Father and plead with Him for your heart’s desires.
However, you may very well be a Christian whose life is not dominated by suffering and you are not overwhelmed at present by feelings of loneliness, isolation, and despair. Great. But don’t just stand there. Take steps to engage in Christian ministry to reach the lost with the saving Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to minister to the saved by encouraging, helping, teaching, and in other ways blessing others.
Don’t know what to do? Approach me and say, “I don’t know what to do,” and I will take care of everything else. Intertwine your life with ours as we seek to serve God, to reach the lost, and to minister to the saved.
Finally, notice the outline below that I have prepared from C. H. Spurgeon’s sermon on prayer using as his text both Job 23.3-4. The sermon is titled “Order and Argument In Prayer” and can be found at http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols10-12/chs700.pdf. The outline will be very useful to anyone who seeks to order his prayers to God, especially in times of isolation and loneliness.
ORDER AND ARGUMENT IN PRAYER
by C. H. SPURGEON
Taken from sermon #700
“Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.” — Job 23:3, 4
1A. First, IT IS NEEDFUL THAT OUR SUIT BE ORDERED BEFORE GOD
1B. Gaining From Observation
It is well to approach the seat of the King of kings as much as possible with pre-meditation and preparation. Our spiritual sacrifices should be offered with holy carefulness. God forbid that our prayer should be a mere leaping out of one’s bed and kneeling down, and saying anything that comes first to hand; on the contrary, may we wait upon the Lord with holy fear and sacred awe. Abraham may serve us as a pattern;
#1 he rose up early — here was his willingness;
#2 he went three days journey — here was his zeal;
#3 he left his servants at the foot of the hill — here was his privacy;
#4 he carried the wood and the fire with him — here was his preparation;
#5 and lastly, he built the altar and laid the wood in order, and then took the knife — here was the devout carefulness of his worship.
2B. Second, Getting Into Order
1C. I am not about to give you a scheme such as many have drawn out, in which adoration, confession, petition, intercession, and ascription are arranged in succession. I am not persuaded that any such order is of divine authority. It is to no mere mechanical order I have been referring, for our prayers will be equally acceptable, and possibly equally proper, in any form; for there are specimens of prayers, in all shapes, in the Old and New Testament.
2C. The true spiritual order of prayer seems to me to consist in something more than mere arrangement. First feel that we are now doing something that is real.
3C. We shall be humble yet bold petitioners, humbly importuning mercy through the Savior’s blood. We shall not have the reserve of a slave but the loving reverence of a child, yet not an impudent, impertinent child, but a teachable obedient child, honoring his Father, and therefore asking earnestly, but with deferential submission to his Father’s will.
4C. When I feel that I am in the presence of God, and take my rightful position in that presence, the next thing I shall want to recognize will be that I have no right to what I am seeking, and cannot expect to obtain it except as a gift of grace, and I must recollect that God limits the channel through which he will give me mercy — he will give it to me through his dear Son. Let me put myself then under the patronage of the great Redeemer. Let me feel that now it is no longer I that speak but Christ that speaketh with me, and that while I plead, I plead his wounds, his life, his death, his blood, himself. This is truly getting into order.
3B. The Next Thing Is To Consider What I Am To Ask For?
1C. It is most proper in prayer, to aim at great distinctness of supplication. There is much reason to complain of some public prayers, that those who offer them do not really ask God for anything. It is well not to beat round the bush in prayer, but to come directly to the point.
2C. I like that prayer of Abraham’s, “Oh that Ishmael might live before thee!” Say “Ishmael,” if you mean “Ishmael”; put it in plain words before the Lord.
3C. Why not be distinct, and say what we mean as well as mean what we say? Ask for what you now need, and, as a rule, keep to present need; ask for your daily bread — what you want now — ask for that. Ask for it plainly, as before God, who does not regard your fine expressions, and to whom your eloquence and oratory will be less than nothing and vanity. Thou art before the Lord; let thy words be few, but let thy heart be fervent.
4B. You Have Not Quite Completed The Ordering When You Have Asked For What You Want Through Jesus Christ.
1C. There should be a looking round the blessing which you desire, to see whether it is assuredly a fitting thing to ask; for some prayers would never be offered if men did but think. A little reflection would show to us that some things which we desire were better let alone.
2C. There must be mingled with acceptable prayer the holy salt of submission to the divine will.
3C. Put these three things together,
#1 the deep spirituality which recognises prayer as being real conversation with God -
#2 much distinctness which is the reality of prayer, asking for what we know we want -
#3 and withal much fervency, believing the thing to be necessary, and therefore resolving to obtain it if it can be had by prayer, and above all these complete submission, leaving it still with the Master’s will;
4C. Still prayer itself is an art which only the Holy Ghost can teach us. He is the giver of all prayer. Pray for prayer — pray till you can pray; pray to be helped to pray, and give not up praying because thou canst not pray, for it is when thou thinkest thou canst not pray that thou art most praying; and sometimes when thou hast no sort of comfort in thy supplications, it is then that thy heart all broken and cast down is really wrestling and truly prevailing with the Most High.
2A. The second part of prayer is FILLING THE MOUTH WITH ARGUMENTS
1B. Why Are Arguments To Be Used At All?
1C. This is the first enquiry; the reply being,
Certainly not because God is slow to give, not because we can change the divine purpose, not because God needs to be informed of any circumstance with regard to ourselves or of anything in connection with the mercy asked: the arguments to be used are for our own benefit, not his.
2C. He requires for us to plead with him because this will show that we feel the value of the mercy. The successful argument is always founded upon grace. Besides, the use of arguments is intended to stir up our fervency.
3C. The very act of prayer is a blessing.
1D. To pray is as it were to bathe one’s-self in a cool purling stream.
2D. To pray is to mount on eagle’s wings above the clouds and get to where God dwelleth.
3D. To pray is to enter the treasure-house of God.
4D. To pray is to grasp heaven in one’s arms, to embrace the Deity within one’s soul.
5D. To pray, my brethren, is to cast off your burdens, it is to reach the highest point of Christian health.
2B. A Catalogue Of A Few Of The Arguments Which Have Been Used With Great Success With God.
1C. #1, It is well in prayer to plead with Jehovah his attributes.
2C. #2, A mighty piece of ordinance in the battle of prayer is God’s promise.
3C. #3, An argument to be used is that employed by Moses, the great name of God.
4C. #4, So also may we plead the sorrows of his people.
5C. #5, Brethren, it is good to plead with God the past.
6C. #6, We may even use our own unworthiness as an argument with God.
7C. #7, There was once an occasion when the very Godhead of Jehovah made a triumphant plea for the prophet Elijah.
8C. #8, The grand Christian argument is the sufferings, the death, the merit, the intercession of Christ Jesus.
CONCLUSION:
If the Holy Ghost shall teach us how to order our cause, and how to fill our mouth with arguments, the result shall be that WE SHALL HAVE OUR MOUTH FILLED WITH PRAISES.
__________
[1] Edward Reese, The Reese Chronological Bible, (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1977), page 19.
[2] Job 1.1
[3] Job 1.8; 2.3
[4] Job 2.9-10
[5] Job 2.11-13.
[6] J. Vernon McGee, Job, (Pasadena, CA: Thru The Bible Books, 1977), page 129.
[7] Layton Talbert, Beyond Suffering: Discovering The Message Of Job, (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press 2007), pages 133-136.
[8] Romans 5.6
[9] Romans 3.11-12
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Pastor@CalvaryRoadBaptist.Church