Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Comfort in Chaos | The Writings | Job 3-28

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

What do you say to someone who's grieving? How can we comfort our friends in a season of suffering? In today's episode, Tanya looks at Job 3-28, giving us 4 ways that we can be a good friend to people in a time of mourning. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Job 3-28

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about how to be a friend, a good friend, to someone that you love that is suffering. So when I went through a grieving process myself, one of the ways I handled it was by becoming a student on how to handle grief. And I read a great book by Nancy Guthrie called What Grieving People Wish You Knew

about what helps and what hurts. I highly recommend that book. But we're in the book of Job. There is definitely a lot of suffering and grief going on. And today, in the chapters that we're looking at, chapters 3 through 28, we're going to meet Job's three friends and look at how they handled Job's grief. So when we saw our college friends for the third time in as many years at a funeral for one of our parents recently, I had this feeling.

as I was standing in the greeting line, what am I going to say? I don't know what to say when I get to them and hug them both. Now, I've been on the other side of that line, and I still had that feeling. I think I blubbered something and told my friend graciously pulled me into a hug

and said, we need to find a better time to get together. It's hard to know what to say when your friends are grieving. The first time you see them, it's like a hurdle you have to jump over to keep the relationship together. And if you don't jump it, do you even have a relationship?

You don't want to be awkward or hurtful. You don't want to make them cry. But honestly, it's not so much about what we say at visitations or funerals. It's what we do afterward that sticks. Being a friend to a grieving person is a marathon, not a sprint. The best friends keep the conversation going long after the loss. Now, the book of Job isn't really, about grieving people. Well, I mean, it's about Job and he is grieving. But that's not the real

purpose. It's not even really about suffering. It's actually wisdom literature about God. But in the middle of the book of Job, he has the same kind of experience we often have, where some friends come along and kind of assume they know more about how and why he is suffering than Job does. and those friends think if Job will just listen to them and get right with God, his life will get better. All in all, the friends tried to make sense of Job's loss and suffering, and they hurt Job and made wrong assumptions about God. While they searched for answers about why God allowed all these bad things to happen,

the book of Job reminds us that God has a bigger picture of this life than we do. It gives us a framework to talk about what is and isn't helpful when our own friends are grieving. And today we're going to look at four things. One, don't stay silent. Two, let them take the lead. Three, avoid making assumptions. And four, be present in the present. The last thing our friends need when they're grieving is another person who avoids talking to them.

Don't stay silent. The day after my own dad's funeral, our oldest son Braden had an eighth grade basketball game. He was ready to get back into some normalcy, so we made the drive back home to get him to the game in time. The things had happened really quickly, so a lot of the people in our lives didn't know that we had just gone through the ringer as a family. One of the sweetest things that someone did for us happened that night at the basketball game. A couple who had no children on the team came to watch the game and sit with us, just so we wouldn't have to try to make small talk with people who didn't know what had happened. They just came and sat and cheered for Brayden.

It was like having escorts into a party we didn't really want to attend. They just took care of everything for us. This is something to keep in mind as you walk through grief with your friends. They don't want to make small talk or pretend they're okay. They need you to acknowledge what happened. Remember that hurdle I mentioned earlier? It's still there. you jump it. Don't worry. There's nothing you're going to say to make them feel worse than they already

do. They just need to know that they are known and seen by you, that you know what they're facing, say something so they feel safe with you. Just last week, my sweet friend asked me if we missed my dad at Aubrey's graduation. It's been six years, and she still asked me that. When I got quiet, she said, I'm sorry. Should I not have brought it up? And I said what I meant, Thank you for asking. I always love being asked. I'm okay now, but I am so grateful you've remembered.

Number two. Let them take the lead. Job's friends showed up at the end of Chapter 2, Elifaz, Bill Dad, and Sofar. Now, at first, these three friends sat in silence with Job for seven days. How patient and kind. But they must have been planning their speech. and waiting for the eighth day to dawn the entire time. Because when it did, they let Job have it.

They talked and talked and talked. Problem is, they talked about what they wanted to talk about, which was like hearing someone play the comparison game and relive their own degree of suffering and hardship when you're trying to swim through your own. Oh my gosh, I have totally done this. When someone is uncomfortable, because they're trying to talk something through that's hard,

I've tried to relieve their discomfort by talking about my own hard things. I'm actually cringing now as I say this. Or when someone is quiet for a while, rather than just sitting with them in the silence, I try to be vulnerable about my own struggles to get them to talk and to relieve myself from the silence. See, getting outside ourselves isn't easy. It requires us to focus on someone other than me.

which is hard to do. It's not to say that your personal story won't help that person someday or maybe even further down in the same conversation. But if you hang around and sit around with your friend for a while, try listening more than you talk. Just being physically present is often enough. It lays the foundation for your friend to know that someday, when they're ready to talk, you'll be ready. When they find the words, you'll be there. Number three, don't make assumptions. Now this is what really leads us back to the heart of Job. At the beginning of the book, we find out there is no one on earth more righteous than Job. God himself says Job is upright and blameless.

So why then did God allow so many bad things to happen to him? This is what we think the book of Job is going to answer for us. But it doesn't. Job's friends try to answer this question, though, by looking at the quality of Job's life and his degree of suffering. They assume that if his life is not going well, it must mean something isn't right between Job and God. So they make up all kinds of things Job didn't do to explain his situation.

They accuse him of stealing and lying and cheating in secret, just to validate their point that God is punishing him and making him suffer. We need to be careful about the assumptions we make when our friends are suffering. We may assume they don't want to be around people, but do we know that's true? Have we asked? That's just an easy one. The more complicated assumptions we can make is about why our friends are suffering or grieving. There's this sneaky way that our brains go back to thinking in black and white,

meaning doing bad means bad things happen, and doing good means good things happen. But this seems to be just the kind of effect. thinking that the book of Job is trying to speak into. God has a bigger and longer perspective of how and why he allows things to happen than we can even begin to understand. Be careful about your assumptions so you don't subconsciously treat your friends like they're inferior or that they're suffering because they're inferior. Listen to what Alifaz said. He said to Job, as I have seen, those who plow iniquity and so trouble reap the same. In other words, he told Job that in his assessment, someone's circumstances are the illustration of their character.

And then Bill Dad, well, he tried to make sense of why Job's children and spouses all died. He said, your children have scattered because of their sin. And to paraphrase, Ophar, if you, Job, will just step back and look at your pride and repent, God will change your circumstances. Now, they weren't completely wrong or from left field on all of their theology, but they were taking wisdom literature like what we find in Proverbs and making broad theological brushstrokes that just aren't always accurate. Remember again how this whole thing got started. Job was upright and blameless. Now, I think we make these assumptions on one hand, because we've all experienced hardship that we did bring on by our own poor choices.

And it makes us feel justified to think others are experiencing the same. But it's not always the case. It wasn't for Job. And it wasn't for Jesus either. Remember, for Jesus, it was our sin that led him to the cross to suffer. Not his. But the same kind of thinking happened at the foot of the cross as well. Those who wanted to find a reason found it in Jesus' size.

suffering, a reason to mock him and mimic him and say that he had it coming. Number four. Finally, be okay with the present. Don't just point your friend to what their life will be like one day, but be that quality of life for them right now. One of the things we often say is about how one day you'll see your loved one again. We say this out of hope. We say this because we believe in the resurrection. These are good things. But right now, your friend is lonely. And you have the power of the Holy Spirit in you to be the fellowship they need today. Now, our friends that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that lost perfectly healthy parents, they feel that lost deeply when there's a grandparents' day or graduation or, heck,

even an eighth-grade basketball game. There are people like us that can come. come to be their kids' biggest fans or sit through a middle school assembly or invite them over on Christmas Eve to remind them not only what God's kingdom will be like one day, but what's like today? When God's kingdom comes to earth through his people, to be with people in their loss and their grief and their suffering, I think that's what it means for God's kingdom to come to earth, for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.