What if the World isn't Merry or Bright? A Christmas Message (Job 19:25)

SPEAKER_01: There's nothing like Christmas to make you face the fact that life is often neither joyful nor transit. We discovered that Christmas can be really depressing. Net Doctor, one of these online medical sites, they just did a survey on depression at Christmas, and almost half of the respondents said they dread Christmas. And they asked, well, if you're already having a hard time, does Christmas make it worse? 57% said often or always. So then they said, well, why is Christmas so depressing? This was the interesting part to me. The majority of respondents said they laid the blame on who they had to spend Christmas with. Contrary to how they'd like to spend Christmas, more than 70% said they had to spend Christmas with their families. Now it's a problem. So that's interesting. So well you can kind of see how that would happen, you know, as you get separation and divorce and singleness leave people celebrating alone and then they feel particularly isolated at Christmas, or people who've lost a loved one often feel that loss. Especially lost at Christmas time. And if you're unable to travel back to your hometown, you can feel kind of left out. But for those who are surrounded by friends and family, Christmas can is sometimes not much better because you have this holiday stress of large gatherings that you have to cook and entertain for. And for many of us, you know, when your families get together, then all those hidden conflicts, you know, and kind of the long family grudges, they all come to the surface. And you add to that, you know, the financial stress of all the extra shopping and the time demands of holiday activities. And then I don't know about you, but I have these unrealistic expectations that this year we're finally going to have that Norman Rockwell experience, you know. This is the year. And you can see why people find it depressing. I don't know about you, but I aspire to a Martha Stewart kind of Christmas. But at my house it's like Irma Bombek. Much closer. Um, when my husband and I got married, we found that we had really different traditions concerning Christmas. In my family, the tradition was you got one present per person, period, and whenever possible, it had to be educational or functional. So toys, clothes. Now or not, no, no toys. We had clothes and books. So then the first Christmas I got married, we spent with my husband's side of the family. I thought I had won the lottery. I have never seen so many presents under one tree. There were only five of us, and there must have been a hundred and fifty presents. Because for my mother-in-law, it wasn't Christmas unless she bought ten presents per person just from her, you know, at least, ten. And then on top of that, you know, there might be three or four presents from the grandparents or aunts and uncles and siblings, and and her idea of a present was anything you wanted. None of this, you have to need it, or it's useful stuff. I mean that was that was Christmas. So those early years of our marriage were like Christmas plenty. We and we just I couldn't believe it. And I remember asking my husband, do is this normal? I thought maybe because it was our first married Christmas that they were doing something extra, you know, I was like, Do you always celebrate like this? And he's like, Yeah, didn't you? And then once the grandkids started coming, she went crazy. I mean, it was truly overwhelming. Um but then my mother-in-law died a few years ago, and in many ways, Christmas kind of died with her. That first year after we lost her was very hard to celebrate, and it seemed like Christmas famine after these years of plenty. Because now, by any objective standard, there was a truly generous amount of presents under the tree, but it seemed meager because she wasn't there. And I remember that first Christmas thinking, Christmas Eve, I was poking around doing all that last minute stuff, and I realized that I knew what was in every box under the tree because I had bought it. Or my husband had bought it from a list I had made, so I knew what was in it. And there was there were no surprises left, there was nothing to look forward to. And given my experience, I thought, well, no wonder. I mean, people find Christmas depressing. W what what is there to how do you celebrate Christmas when you've lost a loved one? Or, you know, what is all the glad tidings of comfort and joy? Is that like a joke, you know, some divine joke? How do you go through all these close family ties, you know, and the warm fires and the good food and all this joy to the world when for a lot of people, Christmas is accompanied by loneliness and disappointment and unmet expectations? So that's the question we're going to answer today by looking at one of my favorite Christmas stories, Job. I'm serious. You probably know the story of Job, it's pretty familiar. It's he it's one of these stories where Job had everything that we could possibly think of as important and worthwhile and necessary to live, and he lost it all. As the book begins, we're given this kind of look behind the scenes of Satan going to God and asking permission to afflict Job. And then on a single day, Job loses everything. All the wealth he had, all his possessions are taken away from him as disaster after disaster strikes him. His herds and his flocks are stolen, his servants are killed, or they're run off, his houses are ruined or demolished, and then this crowning blow, all of his children are in one place, and the house collapses on them. So in one day he loses seven sons and three daughters. And I can't even imagine what that would be like. But that's not enough. Satan goes back and says, Oh, can I can I go after him physically? And he gets permission to do that. And Job is then afflicted with this terrible siege of boils, which we're not quite sure what they were, but they seem to be these open kind of running sores. They're very painful, and they he's covered with them from head to toe, and it goes on week after week. And isn't this a great Christmas message? You're gonna go home and your friends are gonna say, What did you talk about? And we're going, ooh, boils. You know. Anyway, so we find Job sitting on an ash heap, kind of sc and the text even says he's scraping at his boils with his piece of broken pottery, and he's feeling abandoned by all his friends, and his wife has reached the end of her rope and the end of her endurance, and she comes up and she says, Look, Job, just curse God and die. There's you might as well hang it up. It would be better to die than to be here now. Job is sitting alone, bemoaning this loss, and he can't understand it. He has no explanation for why all this tragedy befell him. So to make matters worse, three of his friends come to comfort him. Only they kind of torture him a little more. You know, it reminds me of the the relatives that come at Christmas, you know, and they point out everything that's wrong in your life, you know. You really shouldn't let your children watch that, you know. You know, there's well-meaning comments are why did you hang those drapes? Um it's those kind of friends. They come and they point out, you know, kind of every flaw. Well, Job's friends are convinced that the reason he's suffering is he has some un some hidden sin that he has yet to confess, and that if he would only confess the secret sin, then everything would be all right again, which of course tempts Job to treat God like a big sugar daddy in the sky, you know, to just confess something to get something. And in Job's case, this is an unjust accusation, and it just kind of sends him over the edge. He is feeling so unjustly treated and so confused, he cries out to God in his agony, and that's we're gonna look at in chapter 19. He reviews everything that's happened to him, his family is estranged or they've been killed, he's lost every material possession, his community has ostracized him, counts him as a foreigner, his wife is turned against him, and he goes through this whole list, and then in 1925 he declares, even though all that's happened to him, he has hope. He says, For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth. So here was Job at the lowest point a human being could possibly be at and still be breathing. And even in that pit, he has this amazing flash of light. I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth. And in that statement, that's 1925, he reveals the two great causes for celebration in the Christmas faith, of the Christian faith. The message of Christmas, which is the incarnation, we have a redeemer who was born in a manger, and the message of Easter, that is the resurrection from the dead, that this uh baby was born to be our redeemer, to die for us. Because God's ultimate answer to all that agony and suffering in this life is the coming of a redeemer who will put it all to right. So a redeemer is simply a rescuer. The word is used mostly of someone who would buy you out of slavery. So in ancient Israel, if you fell on hard times, you could sell yourself into kind of indentured servitude, and someone could pay your debt and buy you back. That person was your redeemer. Or if you were a widow or an orphan or you had no resources left, no one to count on, your closest male relative was to act as a redeemer, someone to come in, use the resources to solve the problems. So a redeemer was someone you could count on who would take responsibility to deliver you from all your peril. And isn't that what we long for? Someone who will come along and take responsibility for everything that's wrong in our lives and fix it. When I was 19, I spent six months traveling and studying in Europe, and I returned home just before Christmas time. And as you know, if you've ever flown in the winter, it's just a real exciting experience. And I got snowed in in the Frankfurt Airport in Germany. They canceled all the flights, they closed the airport, I had nowhere to go back to, and I couldn't get out, and I was running out of cash because, you know, back in the 1700s there were no credit cards, no ATMs, everything was closed on Sunday, everything and Saturday, so there was no place to change money. And anyway, to make a long story short, after 36 hours of being in various airports, of you know, finally getting out on flight out of one only to get trapped in another, I made it back to the United States. And I landed in Atlanta, and I was expecting from there to have like another eight or ten hours trying to get on a plane to Alabama, which was where my family was. And of course, it was the holidays, so all the planes were full, and the one that I had tickets on had left like a day ago. And here I was, I get off the plane, I'm jet-lagged, I'm exhausted, I hadn't slept in like 30 hours. I had no idea where my luggage was, um, what continent even. And I had no money, and I get off the plane, and there's my dad standing at the gate. And I was so happy to see him. It was like, oh, he had money. He had the wisdom to know what to do. So he like takes my backpack and all my carry-on luggage is so heavy, and he carries it for me, and he gets me hot food, and he tracked down my luggage, which had arrived like a day and a half before me. And then he let me sleep, you know, in this warm car all the way home. And at that moment, he was my redeemer. And isn't that what we long for? This loving father who is wise and will come in and handle the problems and take the burden off your back and figure out all the mess and put it right again. That's the message of Christmas. And that's what Job cried out for in the midst of his pain. He said, I know that my redeemer lives, and at last he will stand on the earth. What sustained him when he was at the lowest point you could be at, sitting on this ash heap, scraping at his boils, was the knowledge that he had a redeemer, that someone was coming to put all the wrongs right, and that's the message of Christmas. Because here's the key nothing happened to Job that God could not redeem. Nothing. And he lost everything. Everything that we think of is worthwhile. His friends, his family, his health, his marriage, all his possessions. From our point of view, everything that he could possibly lose, he lost, and yet he suffered no loss that God could not redeem. And that's the promise of of Christmas. And isn't that what we long for? A Redeemer to come to turn everything around, to put all the wrongs right, and deliver us from all our disasters. And that's the message of Christmas. Our Redeemer lives. Our Redeemer was born in a manger in Bethlehem. Have you ever seen Rembrandt's painting, The Adoration of the Shepherds? If you haven't, you can put it in any search engine, Rembrandt, Adoration of the Shepherds, and you'll see about a hundred images of it. It's Rembrandt's interpretation of what it looked like when the shepherds came to the manger and saw the baby Jesus who had been born. And it's a very simple scene. In the foreground, you have the mother and the child, and Joseph's in the shadows in the background, and then around the manger are all the shepherds and all their sheep, and they're looking down on this baby. But arching over the manger, Rembrandt painted a ladder, and the ladder casts a very shuttle shadow in the form of a cross across the scene. Because Rembrandt was too great a painter to just put a cross in a stable, and yet he wanted to suggest what this baby came for. And then on the beam against which the ladder is resting is a rooster, and in those days a rooster was a symbol of betrayal. So what Rembrandt is suggesting is, and trying to tell through this painting, is that this baby who was born, by means of the inner agony of betrayal and the outer agony of the cross, would become our redeemer and our deliverer. But the most striking thing about the painting is the light source. Instead of coming down from the top or coming, you know, in from the outside, the light comes from the manger and the baby itself. So that you have all these faces looking down and the light is streaming up from the baby, illuminating their faces. Now it's not like a halo, like a typical medieval painting where they paint a halo around the baby's head. It's the light source of the painting is coming from the manger. And I think that's Rembrandt's remarkable way of saying what the prophet Isaiah said, that a light would break out on those who sit in darkness. And that light is the story of Christmas. It's the baby who was born. Because all our hope shines and gleams from that baby, because that baby was born to be our Redeemer, the one who shares life with us, who goes through all the struggles, the aches, the agonies, the unmet expectations, the betrayal, the heartache, financial loss, health, uh loneliness, isolation, all the things that mar our Christmas and all the rest of our our lives, our Redeemer understands and he came to solve. He's capable of taking whatever problems we struggle with and doing something about it. Isn't that what we long for? A Redeemer to take everything that's wrong with our lives and turn it around. Now I'm not saying trust Jesus and your life will be, you know, pearls and puppies and roses from here on out. That's not the promise. The promise is not that life will be easy, the promise is God will redeem it. So the promise is that no matter what your Redeemer will get you through, there is no sin so deep that he can't forgive it. There's no disaster so dark that he can't bring light on it, there's no loss so great that he can't uh resurrect joy back to it. The promise is that in the midst of the hardest hardship you will ever go through, God can give you comfort and joy, as he did with Job. So my question for you this Christmas is do you know that your Redeemer lives? Do you know that that baby Jesus was born at Bethlehem so that he could buy you out of slavery to disappointment and death and despair? I mean, your life may be a wreck, but I bet it's not as bad as Job's. Whatever your circumstances are, they're probably not that low. And remember, nothing happened to Job that God could not redeem. And there's that is true for us as well. We have a Redeemer who is ready and willing and able to lift us out of that pit of darkness. In Jesus Christ, we have a Redeemer who will take those problems and begin the process of solving them and putting them right, leaving us out of the death of our present experience into joy and resurrection. And all of that is ours if we trust him. So you can go through Christmas alone without a redeemer, and God will let you do it. You can keep trying to work things out by yourself, but you don't have to. I mean, maybe you're not at the end of your rope yet, but do you really want to wait that long? I mean, you don't have to wait until you're reduced to sitting on an ash heap um before you cry out for a redeemer. Because he's listening now, and he's ready to meet us in whatever the pressures are we face. And if you don't know him, you can go through this season continuing to struggle with all the stressful weeks that lie ahead, you know, maybe pretending to be festive or um ignoring the family that's bickering in the kitchen or the faking the Christmas tear or whatever, because it will all keep coming apart until you put it into the hands of the one who can truly solve it. That's the message of Christmas. Your Redeemer lives. We celebrate his birth on Christmas Day, we celebrate his death and resurrection on Easter Sunday, but you can know his comfort and joy every day by trusting him and asking him to save you. Let me pray. Father, how we long for a Redeemer. How we long for a Savior who will wipe away every tear, forgive us our sins, and save us from the darkness in our lives and in our souls. We confess to you that we're not the people we should be, and left to ourselves we can do nothing about that. We know that you're not obligated to save us, but in your infinite grace and mercy you set your son to be born in the manger and to die on the cross in our place. And we pray that because of the blood of your son or Jesus Christ and Christmas.