Chapter 3
Joy
Our Need – Job 1:1–4, 13–21, 2:7–10, 3:1
[A]nother messenger came and said, “Your sons and daughters were feasting and drinking wine at the oldest brother’s house, when suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the four corners of the house. It collapsed on them and they are dead, and I am the only one who has escaped to tell you!”
At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”
After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.
We are all living on the precarious edge of disaster. Some of us have experienced that unexpected moment that changes life forever. It does not matter how long life is after that moment or how well we learn to live in our “new reality,” life is irrevocably changed from what we knew.
Job’s life keeps us all on the proverbial edge of life’s seat. Once we hear or read his story, we do not forget it. In a cosmic game of chess, Job had everything taken away from him except his wife and the four servants who escaped to bring him news of his losses. All his possessions and all his children were gone in a moment. His health reduced to pain and misery. His lone support—the one thing saved from destruction in the maelstrom that had become his life, his wife—also shared his losses, but lost faith in him and in their God. Her advice was not sympathetic, but perhaps the anguished counsel of a life robbed of joy.
And though Job does not follow her offered wisdom, in his own pain and torment he curses the day he was born.
Joyless.
Every blessing Job had received had been stripped from him. Though he remained faithful to God, the rest of his story is told from the point of him cursing his birth. This is a man for whom joy was a mockery. It was a fleeting reality that can be taken away in a moment, at any moment.
Some of us know Job’s joyless pain. We have been stripped of those things both important and most important, the day of our birth seeming only to remind us of what we had and have lost.
It is true that there is redemption in Job’s story. His confrontation with God opened his eyes to a deeper reality of God’s power and purpose. But what a terrible grace that deeper knowledge was! It came at such a cost. Job’s encounter with God cost him everything.
God does give back to Job more than he allowed Satan to take away, even sons and daughters. Let us not, however, assume that new life erases the pain of lost life. Sheep, camels, oxen, and donkeys . . . who cares. Job had lost his children. Seven more sons and three more daughters did not bring with them forgetfulness of his first children. Job, like any father, mourned their deaths the rest of his days.
Any joy Job knew was forever diminished by his loss. Yet, if nothing else, Job proves that you can be faithful to God even when there is no joy.
The brokenness of life impedes and takes away the joy we all long for.
God’s Provision – Luke 1:5–7, 13–15a,16–17, 24–25, 57–58
[Zechariah and Elizabeth] were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly. But they were childless because Elizabeth was not able to conceive, and they were both very old.
But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to call him John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord.
After this his wife Elizabeth became pregnant and for five months remained in seclusion. “The Lord has done this for me,” she said. “In these days he has shown his favor and taken away my disgrace among the people.”
When it was time for Elizabeth to have her baby, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy.
Any husband and wife hoping to conceive know the joy of those first suspicions that perhaps they had succeeded. The hope and excited anxiety fill them as they await confirmation that, yes, a baby is on the way.
Zechariah and Elizabeth had waited for years to embrace that joy and the child that would bring it. Yet with the passing of years, their expectations withered. Life went on. Zechariah still served. Elizabeth still waited. They had accepted that the joy they yearned for would not be theirs. They would remain childless. Their family line would follow them to the grave.
But God has a way of coloring outside our lines—changing our picture.
Faithful Zechariah received a visit. And though the initial reply he gave the angel was an understandable bit of skepticism, in the end, he proved that he was, indeed, faithful.
Joy was coming. Through all the long waiting, all the seemingly unanswered prayers, finally the desired joy, the long–hoped–for child would come. Old bodies were no obstacle for the creator and Lord of life. And it wasn’t just joy for the late–life parents. His friends and neighbors would share her joy at the unexpected and improbable mercy of God.
The birth of John is the precursor to the birth of Jesus. In his announced arrival we catch a fleeting glimpse of the joy that Messiah brings. Jesus came to bring life to the barren and broken. To fulfill the hopes of those who have suffered the curse of sin. Jesus’s work—poured out in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension—waters the parched and weary landscapes of our lives, bringing joy where once only cracked and withered disappointment lived.
This tiny baby, given to an aging and faithful couple, was the first oasis of joy that was coming into the world because of Jesus. Elizabeth, Zechariah, and “her neighbors and relatives” all shared joy over God’s mercy.
The joy of new life is the joy that Jesus brings.
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