“So … Satan … where ya been?”
“As if You didn’t know, LORD … I’ve been here and there … to and fro … looking about … You know.”
“And while you were ‘looking about,’ did you happen to notice my faithful servant … Job?”
“Oh, yeah …”
“Good man, that Job … no one like him. Always does the right thing. He goes to synagogue all the time … faithfully observes all the festivals and fast days … tithes … he’s generous … kind to everyone … helps out anyone in need … faithful to a fault, that guy … as blameless and upright as they come.”
“Yeah … everything that You say about him is true. He’s kind … devout … generous to a fault … but he’s had a pretty amazing and blessed life so far because of You. What if …”
“’What if,’ what?”
“Well … what if you were to ‘change’ his circumstances … put a little pressure on him … would he break? Would he turn his back on You? Would he be ‘faithful to a fault’ as You put it? I bet I can get him to curse You to Your face …whadduya think, LORD?”
“You’re on!”
So begins one of the most famous and well-known challenges in Biblical history. To keep the challenge fair, God puts certain restrictions on Satan. After all, Satan is a super-natural being. None of us could defeat Satan by ourselves. We have certain tools and weapons … prayer, the Bible, the Holy Spirit, the name of Jesus … but even armed with these, we stand no chance against a supernatural presence like Satan without the power and protection of God.
What God does is limit or confine the challenge to the physical realm. Satan can take Job’s possessions. Satan can take Job’s family. Satan can take Job’s health … but that’s as far as Satan can go. Satan cannot take Job’s life or Job’s soul. Satan agrees to God’s terms because he is convinced that that should be sufficient to get Job to curse God and turn his back on Him.
What happens to Job would be enough to cause most of us to do just that … to curse God and turn our backs on Him, don’t you think? I’ve known people who have turned their backs on God and even cursed God who have experience nothing close to what Job experienced. I mean … in one day Job loses his livelihood … he loses all his property … and then loses all of his children. When that doesn’t break him, Satan covers Job’s body with sores, boils, infection, and parasites. Job was in constant physical agony whether he stood, sat, or lay down. At the height of his agony, the last love of his life … his wife … tries to get him to curse God and die. Three of his friends come to comfort him but they only add to his spiritual distress by accusing him of bringing all this misery upon himself because of his sin and pride.
Can you relate to Job? If you can, then you have my heart-felt sympathy because I’ve never had everything taken away from me or had to experience the level of chronic pain that Job has … not even close … but there is someone else in the Bible who can relate to Job’s pain and suffering … the Apostle Paul.
Like Job, the Apostle Paul knew the heights of God’s blessings. At the beginning of 2nd Corinthians 12, Paul describes a sublime, supernatural experience that he had … an extremely rare honor that I don’t think very many people have had the joy and wonder to experience. “It is necessary to boast,” Paul says, “though nothing is to be gained by it. But I will go on to visions and revelations of the LORD. I know a person in Christ,” says Paul … referring to himself … “who 14 years ago was caught up to the third heaven … whether in the body or out of the body I do not know … God knows … and I know that such a person … whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know … God knows … was caught up into paradise and heard things that are not to be told … that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (vv. 2-5).
Paul says that he was taken up to the third heaven. Some ancient Jewish scholars … and some modern Jewish and Christian mystics … believe that there are different levels of heaven. Some believe there are three, like Paul … some believe that there are seven … others, like the Hindus, believe that there are many, many more. Some scholars suggest that the word Paul uses for “heaven” really refers to “realms” of existence … the earth, outer space, and heaven. However your interpret what Paul meant by “heaven,” it’s clear that what he is saying is that He was taken up to “Heaven” … the spiritual realm beyond the physical universe where God dwells … something that I look forward to seeing someday for myself … though probably not while I exist in this physical body … and I hope you expect to experience the same thing too when you shed these mortal coils, these tents of flesh, amen?
You gotta love Paul. Despite what Paul says, it would be awfully tempting to interpret this honor as a sign of special favor … something to “boast” about. How tempting would it be to let people know: “Hey … I’ve been to Heaven! I’ve seen things … I know things you couldn’t possibly imagine.” “Yeah … like what?” “Things … sacred things … holy things … things so amazing that I can’t even repeat them … and if I did, you probably couldn’t handle it because your heart or your head would probably explode or something.” “Yeah? Then why did you get to go? How come you got to see and hear all that holy, sacred stuff without your heart and head exploding, huh?” “Well … I’m just special, I guess.”
“It is necessary to boast; though is to be gained by it” (2nd Corinthians 12:1). You can see and hear Paul struggling not to boast, can’t you? He doesn’t want to boast but what he actually ends up doing is what? Yeah … boasting. I can appreciate how tough it would be not to boast if something like that happened to me, that’s for sure. I mean, how many people have been swept up to heaven while they were still alive? Enoch … the Prophet Elijah … Paul. What a truly rare and singular honor for those whom God has chosen to experience Heaven or Paradise in this way. So Paul tries … I emphasize the word “tries” … to stay humble … boasting on the behalf of the person who went to the third heaven … thereby not boasting about himself … even though he’s the person who was given a personal tour of the third heaven by an angel. “On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations.” (2nd Corinthians 12:5-7). Whew! That’s a long way to not boast about himself while he’s boasting about himself, amen?
Believe it or not, I understand what Paul is trying to say or do. He had this tremendous experience … an experience that no one listening to him has even come close to … and that experience is key to what he’s about to talk about next … but it’s hard to talk about it without seeming to suggest that there was something special about him or that he did something that earned him this special experience … but the fact that he is struggling not to be boastful is key to his message at this point … because, you see, God has His ways of keeping us humble and down to earth.
And so, lest Paul get a big head or too full of himself and be ruined by this special revelation of Heaven, God sent him something to help him keep it in perspective. “Therefore, to keep me from being elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated” (2nd Corinthians 12:7).
When you hear that Paul had a “thorn” in his flesh, what do you picture? Something like this … [hold up drawing of a stem with thorns] … a thorn off a rose bush or some other plant? Something small and irritating … annoying?
Have you ever gotten a burr on your pant leg or sock or somewhere on your clothes where you can feel it but you can’t find it? A little painful … maybe … but mostly annoying, right? Is that what you picture when Paul says that God had given him a thorn in his flesh?
In Paul’s day, a … quote … “thorn in the flesh” … unquote … was a euphemism for a large wooden stake … something like a tent peg … only larger. According to Paul, God allowed Satan to drive a stake into his flesh and “buffet” him with it. The Greek word that Paul uses for “buffet” means to “torment” someone … in other words, you grab their “thorn” or their “stake” and you keep twisting it and turning it and wiggling it all around … Yowch, amen?
What was this “thorn” or “stake” in Paul’s flesh? Ahhh … centuries upon centuries of discussion, analysis, research, and debate has yielded many, many possibilities. Some thought … or think … that Paul was suffering from malaria. Some have concluded that Paul suffered from epilepsy. Other theories include gall stones … gout … rheumatism … sciatica … gastritis … leprosy … lice … deafness … a dental infection … or remorse for the way that he tortured and persecuted Christians before he was converted.
The dominant theory right now is that Paul was losing his eyesight. It was a very common problem in those days … which is why we hear or read about it in the Bible so much. Support for this idea comes from some comments that Paul made in his letter to the church in Galatia. In chapter 4, Paul wrote: “… even though my illness was a trial to you, you did not treat me with contempt or scorn. Instead, you welcomed me as if I were an angel of God, as if I were Jesus Christ Himself. What has become of the good will you felt? I can testify that, if you could have done so, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me” (Galatians 4:14-15). Paul’s suggestion that his host or friends in Galatia would have ripped their eyes out for him could be another euphemism, but at the end of his letter to the Galatians Paul says, “see what large letters I use as I write to you in my own hand” (Galatians 6:11) … suggesting that he was, in fact, having a hard time seeing and that he was possibly losing his sight … a particularly difficult challenge for someone like Paul who traveled and wrote a lot. Later on, he has to have an assistant write his letters for him. At the end of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, his scribe, Tertius, says that he wrote down the words that Paul dictated to him (see Romans 16:22). Again, we don’t know. Maybe Paul needed an assistant … not because he couldn’t see … but because his hands suffered from some form of arthritis. For now, we have no definitive way of knowing what Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” was … and I guess we won’t know until we meet him heaven, amen?
Let’s go back to our friend Job for just a moment. God allowed Satan to test Job. He knew that Job would pass … even if Satan, Job’s wife, Job’s friends, or even Job himself didn’t. In the course of his suffering, Job prayed for answers. Job prayed for understanding. He prayed that his incomprehensible suffering and torment would stop … that God would save him or take him out of the horrible situation that he was in. “O that You would hide me in Sheol … that You would conceal me until Your wrath is past … that You would appoint me a set time … and remember me” (Job 14:13).
Despite Job’s lament that his prayers were falling on deaf ears, God did hear his prayers … and answered them! I used to think of chapters 38 through 41 of the Book of Job as God slapping down Job … hard! “Gird up your loins like a man,” God commanded. “I will question you, and you shall declare to me!” (Job 38:3) … yikes! “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth (v. 4)? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone (v. 6)? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb …. And said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no further, and here shall your proud waves be stopped (v. 8,11)? Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion (v. 31)? Were you there when I created the stars, the sun, the moon, little man? Can you name all the stars? Do you know the depth of the ocean? Do you have the strength to keep the ocean from over taking the land?”
As I said, all this sounded like God slapping down Job … putting him in his place … which He was doing … but I almost missed the greater truth. Behind God’s stern language was profound love! There is so much love … deep, deep love … in God’s answer to Job. He is not calling Job an ignorant, weak, little man … though Job … and you and me, for that matter … are, in fact weak, ignorant little people compared to God, amen? You see, Job had passed the test. Neither Satan nor his loss nor his suffering … neither his wife nor his friends were able to get Job to curse God and turn his back on Him
As I see it now, God’s answer in chapters 38 through 41 were a gift from God. You see … we are weak … we are ignorant … we are little people compared to God and that’s a good thing … a great thing … because we have God, who is not weak but all-powerful …who is not ignorant but all-knowing … who is not little but incomprehensibly huge. When God asks Job how many stars there are in the heaven … Job doesn’t know … and there is no reason for him to know because he knows God and God not only knows how many stars there are in the heaven but knows every star by name because he made them and named them. Do you understand what I’m saying? Job doesn’t need to know how deep the ocean is because he knows God, who does know exactly how deep the ocean is down to the milli-milli-milli-meter, amen? Who knows exactly how many grains of sand there are … not just on the beach but in the whole world. Job doesn’t have to be strong enough to hold back the ocean or keep the planets in their orbits because God has the strength to do all those things and is doing them right now as we speak, amen?
What is the gift that Job receives at the end of chapter 41? Is it the restoration of his fortune? No … it’s something far, far more valuable. It’s the knowledge … the faith … that God’s grace and God’s strength are sufficient. As big as our problems might seem … and Job faced some big problems … God is always bigger and better equipped to handle them than we are … and that truth gives us the hope to keep looking to Him and the strength to keep going when all we want to do is lie down and quit … or die.
Back to Paul and his “thorn.” “Therefore,” says Paul, “to keep me from being elated, a thorn was given me in my flesh” (2nd Corinthians 12:7). The thorn was there to “buffet” Paul but it wasn’t God who was twisting and turning and wiggling the stake in Paul’s flesh to torment him. “A messenger of Satan” was sent to buffet and torment Paul … to keep him from becoming too elated. Another way that you could read this is that the messenger of Satan was, in fact, the thorn or stake in Paul’s flesh who … like Job … God allowed to buffet and torment Paul to keep him from becoming too elated … too boastful …too prideful.
“Three times I appealed to the LORD about this, that it would leave me,” Paul laments, “but [God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2nd Corinthians 12:8). In other words, God is reassuring Paul that He will send Paul sufficient grace and strength to deal with his “thorn in the flesh” (v. 7).
What about you? What is your “thorn in the flesh” (v. 7)? And have you prayed for God to remove it? Sometimes He does, amen? And sometimes He tells you that He will give you His grace … not your grace … not my grace … but His grace to help you live with it … because His grace … not your grace … not my grace … but His grace is what? Sufficient!
Every Friday the great British preacher Charles Spurgeon would speak to the students under his tutelage. Here’s what he said during one of those Friday lectures:
“The other day I was riding home after a heavy day’s work … and I was weary and depressed … when as swiftly and as suddenly as a lightening flash this text laid hold of me: ‘My grace is sufficient for you.’ When I got home I looked it up in the original [Greek] and finally it dawned on me what the text was saying … ‘My grace is sufficient for you!’ ‘My grace … ‘my grace’ … God’s grace … is sufficient for you’ … and I said to myself, ‘Why, I should think it is!’ … and I burst into laughter. And it seemed to me to make unbelief so absurd! It was as though some little fish, being thirsty, was troubled about drinking the river dry …. And Father River said, ‘Drink away, little fish, [for] my stream is sufficient for you.’ Or as if some little mouse in the granaries of Egypt, after the seven years of plenty, feared least he should die of famine, and Joseph said, ‘Cheer up, little mouse, [for] my granaries are sufficient for you.’ And again, I imagine a man way up in the mountains saying to himself, ‘I fear I shall exhaust all the oxygen in the atmosphere,’ and the earth cries out, ‘Breathe away, old man, fill your lungs … [for] my atmosphere is sufficient for you.’” (From: “Streams in the Desert,” Mrs. Charles Cowman; submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College.)
Do you hear what Spurgeon is saying? When we pray and we hear nothing from God or we think God is not listening or we think God is saying ‘no,’ we might think that God won’t or is not dealing with our prayers. My brothers and sisters, let me be very clear about this! God hears your prayers … make no mistake about it! He hears your prayers and He is dealing with them … He is working on them … right now … even as I am speaking … He is listening to our prayers and He is taking care of them. But while He’s working on them … while we’re waiting to see the result … here’s what God wants you to remember. His grace [pause] …. is what? His grace is sufficient for me. His grace is sufficient for you! His grace is like the mighty river to the little fish. His grace is like the over-flowing granaries to the little mouse. His inexhaustible grace is like the atmosphere that surrounds us.
Through situations like what Job and or Paul went through, we see the reality of “difficulty” in the believer’s life. God has not promised you or me that we’re gonna just sail through this life trouble free … at least He hasn’t made that promise to me … He may have made that promise to you, in which case, I praise God for it. You’re very, very blessed. I don’t hear or read of God making that promise to any of the men or women in the Bible either. They all … from Adam to Jesus to Paul to us … had trouble or difficulty in their lives. But what I do find in the Bible is God’s promise that His grace will be sufficient for every need and every difficulty we will ever encounter in this life.
Those of you who have been Christians for a while know this to be true, amen? Trouble will come … count on it … that’s life. Problems will come … that’s just part of the human condition. Disaster will come … but God’s grace has been … and will always be … what? Yes! Sufficient! We know this not only because the Bible tells us so but because we’ve experienced it over and over and over again, amen?
You may not have a thorn in your flesh right now … you may be sailing along … clear skies … calm seas … right now … but I promise you … listen …. I’m not trying to rain on your parade … enjoy it … but let’s face it … you know that what I am saying is true. Sooner or later … at some point … somewhere down the road … you’re gonna hit a bump or a bump is going to hit you … and Oh, how blessed is the Christian who is prepared for the difficulties of life because they know the Word of God … the truths of God … the promises of God … [pause] … the grace of God … and are able to apply these truths and His promises to their situation, amen?
The LORD told Paul that the only way he would ever experience the fullness of God’s strength was to be made aware of his weakness. Why is that? Well … when we rely solely upon our own strength and our strength is sufficient, why would we need to rely on God’s grace or God’s strength, right? Yeah … we got it, man! When we’re going through good times … prosperous times … it’s so easy for us to take the credit for our good fortune and forget where all that power and prosperity really and truly came from, amen? And we get to thinking and believing that we don’t need God … we don’t even think of God … because our strength … our resources … our skill … is what prevailed.
There is a story about a woodpecker who was pecking away on a tree in the Pisgah forest. Right in the middle of his pecking on that tree, a bolt of lightening hit that tree and split it right down the middle. The woodpecker backed off and surveyed the situation … looked at it for a minute or two … and then flew away. He returned with nine other woodpeckers. “Behold, my friends,” he boasted, “look at what I did!” How like the woodpecker we are. We know that we didn’t do it … that we could never do it … but it doesn’t stop us from taking credit for God’s work, does it?
Yes … life comes with problems. Yes … life can be difficult … very difficult at times. But life also comes with God’s promise … God’s power … and God’s grace.
Here’s what happens when we go through life’s challenges … we discover the power that is in Christ! “Therefore,” says Paul, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness so that the power of Christ may dwell in me” (2nd Corinthians 12:8b). Did you hear that? “… so that “the power of Christ may dwell in me.” How beautiful is that? How reassuring is that … to know that the power of Christ is resting on you …. dwelling in you?
Paul came to understand that his thorn in the flesh was God at work in his life. Let me say that again. Paul came to understand that his thorn in the flesh was God at work in his life. How does God work by virtue of a thorn? He uses our problem or problems to make us aware of our need so that we will look to Him instead of looking to ourselves … relying on our own strength. What God told Paul was this:
“My beloved Paul … I hear you and I feel you but let me reassure you that you will not be without the grace that you will need to persevere … to get through it … to get the job done. Trust me. Nor will you lack the strength that you will need to be my ambassador. But … because of that thorn … you will magnify and glorify me in such a way that no one will ever be able to look at you and explain what you were able to do in human terms.”
The power of Christ resting on us and in us … on me and in me … on you and in you … it makes me want to bust out in prayer: “LORD … God … give me such power that when people see me … when people see what I’ve been through … or what I’ve accomplished … they cannot help but see .. they cannot help but realize … that there was no way that I could have done that on my own … that that kind of grace and power had to come from You alone … amen.”
That ought to be the prayer of everyone of us here. In fact, let’s pray it right now. Repeat after me: “O God … do something so great in my life … that when it is done … You are the only One who can get credit for it. Amen.”
When we get to the end of our strength, guess what? We come to a wonderful place. We come to the place where we realize that our strength is not enough but God’s strength is. When we reach the end of our strength, we have reached the point where we have no choice but to tap into God’s amazing divine power! And it is at this point that God can do great and marvelous and miraculous things with us and through us! Man … that just gives me the goose bumps … or spirit bumps, as one of my friends used to say. How about you?
Paul says that he is content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecution, and calamities for the sake of Christ. That might sound a little strange to the secular ear. It sounds backwards to the way in which the world sees and experiences these things. How in the world can Paul be “content” with weakness … content with insults … content with hardship? The answer … he can be content in all of these situations … not only for Christ’s sake but because of Christ’s strength … Christ’s inspiration … the Holy Spirit, amen? And it is because of all of these things … weakness, insults, hardships, persecution, and calamities … that Paul gets to experience the grace and strength of God in his life. And … just as importantly … others get to see it in him as well.
No one … including you … gets to see God’s power, God’s grace, God’s strength in theirs lives when we’re just sailing along … but we really see it and experience it when we’re going through difficult times … and the world can see it to! And trust me, brothers and sisters, if the world knows you are a Christian, they’re watching! And when they see the difference that Jesus makes in a believer’s life … when they see the difference that God’s grace and strength can make in our lives … when they see us pass through the raging rivers of life and not get swept away … when they see us walk through fiery trials and not get burned (Jeremiah 43:2) … how can they not marvel, amen? How can they not wonder aloud: “How did you ever get through that alive?! How did you get through that without going crazy?! How did you get through that with such confidence, such peace, such contentment … contentment?!
And that opens the door for you to tell them the reason. Like Paul, we are challenged to boast … not in ourselves … except in our weakness … but to boast in the One … capital “O” … who gave us the strength and the confidence that was not our own to survive and even thrive as a result of our ordeal.
George Matheson was a well-known Scottish preacher who, like Paul, had a serious thorn in his flesh … he was blind. Towards the end of his life, he wrote these words: “My God, I have never thanked You for my thorn. I have thanked you a thousand times for my roses but not once for my thorn. I have been looking forward to a world where I shall get compensation for my thorn” … he’s speaking about when he dies and goes to heaven … “but I have never thought of my thorn itself as a present glory.” He then asked the LORD to “teach me the glory of my thorn … [to] teach me the value of my thorn so that I have climbed up to you by the path of pain … [and to] show me that my tears have made my rainbows.” (From Sermonindex.net; “Thanks for the Thorn,” a sermon by George Matheson.)
Thinking that the only way you can be happy is if you are totally problem free is a formula for a lot of distress, frustration, and unhappiness in your life … trust me. The only way you’re ever going to be filled with joy is to understand that problems are a part of life … part of being alive … a part of living in a broken, fallen, sinful world. That’s the way it is for now … for as long was we live and breath on this planet in these bodies. Embrace this truth … but at the same time embrace God’s promise that He will give you the grace and strength … His grace and His strength … to not only pass through your troubles but to grow because of them.
In one of his books, pastor and author Ron Bell wrote: “There are times when God restores to us the things we lose through ignorance, negligence, rebellion, or sin. For Christians, storms are a ‘no lose’ proposition. They help us see and acknowledge the loose shutters, the missing shingles, and the rotten fences posts in our lives while turning back to the only One” … again, “One” with a capital “O” … who can make the necessary repairs … Almighty God” (Bell, R., 2009, Drops Like Stars: A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.) This advice came from a man who lived most of his adult life with a rare form of cancer.
When we go through storms, God uses those storms to purify us … to help us discover who we are in Him … and to recognize our own weakness so that we can appeal to His strength … which leads me to this final thought.
Paul was not the only one in the New Testament who prayed three times to have a “thorn” taken away from him. He was not the only one who had his prayers answered by having his situation stay just as it was. Can you guess who I’m talking about?
Jesus took His disciples to the Mount of Olives and He left them alone and instructed them to pray as He went further into the Garden of Gethsemane. It was there, in the Garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus prayed: “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but Yours be done” (Luke 22:42). When He returned to His disciples, He found them asleep … so He left them and went away once more and prayed. He did this three times. Three times He prayed, asking His Father to “remove this cup from me” and three times He ended His prayer by saying “yet, not my will but Yours be done.”
When Jesus went into the Garden of Gethsemane and walked away from the rest of the disciples, He isolated Himself in that garden before God. In that moment, aware that in a few short hours the sin of all mankind was going to be put on Him and His humanity and He realized what He was going to go through … that a crown of thorns was going to be put on His head … that He was going bear the sins of all humanity on a dirty, shameful cross … talk about a thorn in your side … that on that cross He was going to be separated from His Father because of our sin … made Jesus cry out: “LORD … Father … remove this cup from me.”
Let me ask you … aren’t you glad that God didn’t let that cup pass from Jesus? Looking at it from our perspective, it was Almighty God’s refusal … and I am speaking in human terms … that allowed Jesus to pay the full penalty and to drink the cup of sorrow down to the last dregs so that your sin … my sin … could be paid for. Almighty God kept Him in the midst of that, sustaining Him by His grace. In fact, God sent an angel to encourage Him and give Him strength (see Luke 22:43).
God didn’t let Jesus walk away. He didn’t take away the cup from Jesus anymore than He took the thorn away from Paul. In fact, He allowed a crown of thorns to be placed on His head and stakes to be driven into His hands, His feet, and His side. But in the midst of it all …. the power, the love, the glory of what transpired on that cross has touched and transformed you and me and the world, amen?
The Bible says that when difficult things come our way and we earnestly pray in our humanity, “LORD … please take this or that away from me,” sometimes the LORD will come back and say, “You know what? I could take it away from you, but I’ve got something better for you. I will give you my grace … I will give you my strength … and when you come out the other side of this experience, you will see that it was my love, my grace, and my strength that got you through it. The question isn’t whether I will take away your thorn or not … the real questions is …. Do you trust me?”
Let us pray:
