Why did this happen to me? #2 - When Answers Don't Satisfy (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores Job 4-14, dismantling three myths about suffering: that doing good guarantees good outcomes, that repentance ends all pain, and that understanding precedes trust. Through Job's story, he reveals how the cross of Christ breaks the retributive principle—Jesus received what we deserve so we could receive what He deserved, offering real hope beyond our circumstances.

Message Summary and Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2025/9/29/why-did-this-happen-to-me-2-when-answers-dont-satisfy

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Transcript

Hey, before we jump into the teaching, I just want to highlight something that's going on here as a church. One of the things that we are trying to do in our region is starting campuses of Orchard Hill throughout the area. We have successful campuses in the Strip District and Butler, and one that is becoming more and more successful in Bridgeville.

You might ask, "Aren't there enough churches already? Do we need more?" But if every church in the Pittsburgh region had all of its chairs filled at all of their services, there still wouldn't be enough chairs for over half the population to go to church on a weekend. This means there is a need for more churches to bring the message of Jesus Christ. We hope that any church teaching the Bible thrives, but we believe there are still opportunities for more campuses of Orchard Hill to be established in different places.

There are some things that are still unique about Orchard Hill that make having a campus in a different part of the city really significant. Among those are the fact that we try to speak to the whole community, not just to the already convinced. As a church, we consistently talk about the grace of God in relation to the law of God—meaning we don't make it about what we do, but we make it about what Jesus Christ has done.

With that, we have been praying about some potential places, and we are going to be holding some interest meetings in the Mars-Gibsonia area in the coming weeks and months. An interest meeting is to gauge interest—to see if there are enough people who say, "We would like to see Orchard Hill in this area" to warrant taking the next step, which would be a launch group.

The first meeting will be on October 9th, which is the Thursday coming up just around the corner. It'll be at the Treesdale Community Center. We have asked Mike and Kimmy Chilcote to give the initial leadership to this gathering as we begin to explore this. If you're in that area or around that area and you would like to see Orchard Hill in your community, we'd like to invite you to that.

I do want to say, if you live there and you drive to Wexford currently and you love coming to Wexford, don't feel any pressure to be part of that. Just keep coming to Wexford as you always have. But if you're there and you say, "We'd love to see this emerge here," or "We like being part of something new," then we'd love to have you be part of that. You can find information about it online and register for the event, or show up on October 9th to be a part of that. We'll continue to pray about how God will help us as a church to help more and more people find and follow Jesus Christ.

Let's pray together. God, we thank You that we're in a position as a church to be able to think about launching new campuses—new extensions of what You're doing here in other parts of our city. God, we pray that we would continue to be able to take Your timeless Word and bring it to more and more people throughout our region. God, today, as we're gathered, we ask that You would speak into each of our lives and that we would be shaped and formed by this time. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.

Introduction

I was talking with my wife this week, and she asked me what we were talking about this weekend in church. She said, "What's the message on?" I said, "Well, it's on Job again." She had been here last week, but somehow she missed that we were starting a series. By the way, she told me after this morning when she heard this, "You made me look bad." I said, "Okay."

Then she said, "So we're going to be in Job for how many weeks?" I said, "About eight." She said, "That's a lot of Job."

To which I said, "There's 42 chapters. I have made this way shorter than 42 chapters." Here's my point—it's not to say this is long or short. It's to say there's a book of the Bible, the Book of Job, that is 42 chapters that God decided to put into Scripture. He wanted us to have a way to address a question that probably all of us ask at one time or another: "God, why is this happening to me?"

You saw it in the video, which, by the way, was not a purchased video—that was somebody in our church that our video team put together. The question, whether you've been a Christian for decades, been around church for decades, or are new to church or still trying to figure out church, is one we ask from time to time when something happens in our lives that isn't to our liking or is disappointing: "God, why is this happening to me? Why are You letting this happen in my life?"

I heard about Leo Tolstoy, the famed Russian author. When he was nine years old, he decided that if he prayed and asked God if he could fly and believed enough that he could fly, if he jumped out of a third-story window, he'd be able to fly. Well, he didn't, and he hit the ground. He survived and ended up being a great novelist. But what he was doing was saying, "I'm going to trust God." When it didn't work out, his own retelling of that has admitted that, at least for a season, he was disappointed in how God worked.

That isn't just a story for somebody like that. Many of us have had moments—whether it be a marriage that didn't live up to our hopes or expectations, whether it be kids that we thought we had raised in a certain way and then they go in a different direction. We say, "I thought that if I did the right things, I'd get the right outcome." Or maybe it was a health situation that came into our lives, and we say, "God, why is this happening in my life?"

The Story of Job

The reason the book of Job addresses this is because it starts by saying there was once a man named Job who lived in the land of Uz. He was blameless, he feared God, and he shunned evil. The point isn't to say that Job was sinless, but the way the book starts is by saying Job was walking with God.

Not only that, Satan comes and appears before God, and God says, "Have you considered my servant Job? He fears me." Satan's response is basically, "Does he fear You for nothing? You're blessing him. Take away the blessings and he won't fear You anymore."

God says, "Go ahead, you can take away the blessings." What happens in chapters one and two of Job is one blessing after another is taken away from Job—his wealth, his reputation, his business, his family, and eventually his health. One after another, these things are taken away.

He responds by saying, "The Lord has given and the Lord takes away. But either way, the name of the Lord be praised." When his wife comes along and says, "Job, just curse God and die," he says those lines that I said you should not say if you are married to your wife: "You're talking like a foolish woman." Then he says, "Should we accept good from God and not bad?" We're told he doesn't sin in what he says.

In chapter three, he starts asking the "why" question. His worship response, his deference response, is not incompatible with asking the question "why."

Job's Friends and Their Theology

Then what we get in the book of Job are speeches from his friends. In chapter four and following, for about twenty-some chapters, you get cycles of speeches. First you get Eliphaz, then you get Bildad, then you get Zophar. You have these three speeches from these three friends and then Job's responses. They come in cycles.

We're going to look at chapters 4 through 14 today where we get this cycle of the first set of speeches. In a way, what's happening here is the friends are basically saying, "We are giving you our theology." We know that the theology they give is flawed because at the end of the book, God basically says to the friends that their way of looking at this hasn't been right.

What is their theology? It was basically this: If God is just and a person is righteous—in this case Job—if Job is righteous and God works on a retributive principle, then what that means is you get good things for being good and bad things for being bad. So the only way that Job got bad things is if Job wasn't righteous.

The friends come along and say to Job, "You've sinned, you've done wrong. That's why you're getting bad things or suffering in this life."

What we need to do instead is say retributive justice is not an absolute principle. This requires us to think with a little bit of nuance. When you read your Bible, sometimes it's easy to read one verse and say, "This is the way it is all the time." But what the book of Job does is it makes us think beyond that way of thinking and say there are times that something is true, but there's also times in which that truism is met with an exception.

This leads to what I want to do today—to say here are three myths that are often propagated to ourselves or to others when we are suffering.

Myth #1: If You Do Good, You Get Good; If You Do Bad, You Get Bad

The first one is this: If you do good, you get good, and if you do bad, you get bad. This is the retributive principle just stated. It is a myth in this sense: when you make this your default setting, what you're doing is saying it is an absolute thing from God—that if you do the right things, then you get blessings, and if you do bad things, sinful things, then you get bad things in your life.

Here's where we see this. This was read earlier, but this is Job chapter 4, verses 7 and 8:

"Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it."

What does he say? You get exactly what it is you deserve. In his attempt to alleviate suffering, to explain suffering, he probably added suffering. Here's why: Job didn't just have the indignity of all the loss in his life, but he had his friends coming along and saying, "And you deserved it."

Sometimes when we have this idea that says, "If I do good things, I get good things, and if I do bad things, I get bad things," what happens is as soon as something bad comes into our life, we have no other way to explain it other than to say, "I must have done something wrong in order to end up here."

Now, this is not without some reason. This is why I say we need to be able to think in nuance here. The Bible does teach this idea of retributive justice in this sense. Galatians chapter 6 says, "Whatsoever a person sows, this he or she will also reap." That's retributive justice. Proverbs talks about doing things a certain way and expecting a certain outcome. There is a general principle that says if you do good things, you'll get good things.

The problem comes when we make it an equation and we make it an expectation. We say, "Now that I've done good things, I demand from God that He give me the good things that I think I should get," rather than being able to say, "This is not an absolute principle that works all the time."

By the way, this idea is in our culture all the time—Christian and non-Christian. Let me give you just one example. This is an older example. In the film The Sound of Music, there's a moment where Maria sings a song to the Captain, and she's taken with the idea that the Captain loves her. What does she do? She sings and says, "I must have done something good to have deserved him." What's the implication? I do good, I get good. I do bad, I get bad.

Here's the challenge. Warren Wiersbe once put it like this: "If you obey God only because He blesses you, the shallowness of your faith will show up in a time of testing." Meaning if you're serving God to say, "I want the good things that God can give me," not because He's God and you worship Him for that reason, what will happen is when you have some things in your life that are disappointing or displeasing to you, the shallowness of your faith will show up because you'll start to say, "God hasn't worked in this setting the way that I thought He would."

What will happen, back to that triangle, is you'll either say God isn't just, He isn't right, or you'll say, "I haven't been righteous." Now, in one sense, none of us are righteous, but the point of Job is that we don't have a God who works on the retributive principle in a way that makes it an absolute equation all the time.

You know how this works. Think about health food. Most of us today would say we understand that there are some meals that are healthier than others and that long-term, if we eat a healthy diet versus an unhealthy diet, we will end up in a better place. You may go through the McDonald's drive-thru once in a while, but you say a steady diet of that is probably not a good life choice. Sorry if I'm bursting anyone's bubble.

But here's what you also know is true: some people eat poorly for decades and live long, healthy lives. Some people eat bird seed and vegetables for decades and get sick. The point of that is just to say it's not an absolute. That doesn't mean it's still not a better life choice to eat healthy and to say, "I'm going to make choices that I think will extend my healthy window of years in life." That generally works, but it isn't an absolute.

When we make God into an absolute worker of this retributive justice, then we expect and we demand and we say, "God, You must." Our worship becomes conditional on what God does or doesn't do.

Myth #2: If You Turn to God, Your Suffering Will Cease

Here's the second myth: If you turn to God, your suffering will cease.

We see this in a couple of places. Here in chapter 7, where Job is speaking, responding to Eliphaz:

"Why do you not pardon my offense and forgive my sin? For I will soon lie down in the dust. You will search for me, but I will be no more."

He says, "Why doesn't God forgive me? I think I've repented. I think I've turned."

Then in the speech from Zophar in chapter 11, we see this in verses 14 and 15:

"If you put away the sin that is in your hand and allow no evil to dwell in your tent, then, free of fault, you will lift up your face. You will stand firm without fear."

"If you would just repent, Job, things would go your way."

Then in Job chapter 5, verse 8, again from Eliphaz:

"But if I were you, I would appeal to God. I would lay my cause before Him."

What is he saying? "If I were you, I'd just pray. If you just pray, Job, turn toward God, God will alleviate your suffering. If you would just repent of your sin, then everything would go well in your life."

Now, what's the problem with this? Sometimes we will turn toward God when we've sinned in repentance, and we'll still have consequences from our sin. Secondly, sometimes we'll turn toward God, and if God has chosen another reason to allow suffering in our lives, He may not alleviate our suffering just because we ask.

Sometimes you'll hear pastors—this is where there are some differences in churches—sometimes you'll hear pastors say things like, "Don't ever say the words when you pray, 'If it be God's will,' because you're destroying your faith." Their idea is basically if you believe strongly enough and ask God, then God will do what it is that you ask Him to do.

But the reality of the situation is this: sometimes God, for whatever reason—reasons we don't know, reasons that Job didn't know—we will end up suffering. Turning toward God isn't the answer because we aren't in the situation in the first place because of what we did wrong. You see, it's a way of saying, "I'm taking the retributive principle and saying I must just do good now so that I can appease God and have God alleviate my suffering."

I remember years ago when I was pastoring a church in Michigan, a guy came in one weekend. It was the kind of setting where I could see people who were newer, and I went up to him and said, "Hey, I'm Kurt. Nice to meet you." He started telling me a little bit of his story. His wife had gotten cancer and died over a course of several years, and this was his first weekend back in church.

I asked him, "So why did you come to church today? Is this new for you, believing in God?" He said, "Oh, no. I've been a Christian for a long time. In fact, I was deeply involved in a church." I said, "Well, what happened? Why didn't you go back to that church? Were the people not around you and supportive through your wife's death?" He said, "Oh, no, it was the opposite. Everybody was there."

I said, "Well, why didn't you go back to your church?" He said, "Here's why. At the church, we believed that if we prayed enough and believed enough, that God would heal my wife. So the reality is, when I go back to that church, I have failed to have enough faith, and that's why my wife died."

Here's what I thought in that moment: I thought that church, that theology—Job's friends' theology—creates double pain. Pain because you have the loss, but pain because they say it's your fault that it happened. If you could have just believed enough.

Here's the other flaw in this thinking: worship of God should not be worship of God who gives me what I think I want. We worship God because God is God, because He's in control of the universe and He is good, not because He gives me what I want.

That doesn't mean there aren't questions. It doesn't mean there aren't doubts. But it means I don't come to the God of the universe to negotiate a better deal for me in this life. What I do instead is I come to God in humble submission, and He either grants my request or says no. But whatever it is, I'm saying, "I worship You because You're God, not because of what I get." Those are two different approaches to God and to faith.

Myth #3: If I Understood, Then I Could Trust More

There's one more myth that we see in these chapters: If I understood, then I could trust more. I could trust God more.

In chapter 9, we see this again. Job, now responding to Bildad, one of the friends, says this about God in verse 11:

"When He passes me, I cannot see Him. When He goes by, I cannot perceive Him. If He snatches away, who can stop Him? Who can say to Him, 'What are You doing?'"

Job is saying, "I'm not sure I can understand God."

Then we get again a speech from Zophar in chapter 11, starting in verse 2:

"Are all these words to go unanswered? Is this talker to be vindicated? Will your idle talk reduce others to silence? Will no one rebuke you when you mock? You say to God, 'My beliefs are flawless and I am pure in Your sight.' Oh, how I wish that God would speak, that He would open His lips against you and disclose to you the secrets of wisdom, for true wisdom has two sides. Know this: God has even forgotten some of your sins."

"Know this, Job. It could be worse. You deserve worse because God's already forgotten some of your sins." That's not very comforting.

"Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do? They are deeper than the depths below—what can you know?"

Here's what he's doing. In some ways he's getting this right in this moment, because he's saying you can't fully understand. But the myth is to say, "If I would just understand what God is doing, if He would tell me why, then I could endure."

Philip Yancey wrote about this years ago in his book Disappointment with God. He was talking about how you get to the end of the book and God never answers Job's "why" question. Job never knows about Satan and the little drama at the beginning, and God never gives him a definitive why.

Here's what Philip Yancey says: "Maybe God's majestic non-answer to Job was no ploy, no clever way of dodging questions. Maybe it was God's recognition of a plain fact of life: a tiny creature on a tiny planet in a remote galaxy simply could not fathom the grand design of the universe. You might as well try to describe colors to a person born blind, or a Mozart symphony to a person born deaf, or expound the theory of relativity to a person who doesn't even know about atoms."

C.S. Lewis, in writing about experiencing God after the death of his wife, said this: "This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and the sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You might 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."

What he's saying is the experience of loss and pain—often it seems like God doesn't give us an answer, like there's no way of bringing understanding, even though sometimes we think, "If I just got it, then I would know why and I'd be able to have faith."

Paul Tournier once put it this way: "Where there's no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith."

His point? Sometimes the way that we express faith is when we say, "I don't know what the next step should look like."

We have a deck that has a motion light set up above it, and it's set so that when you walk to the deck at night, you can see the stairs. When you approach it from the ground, the light lights up perfectly and you can hit each step as you go up. But when you approach it from the deck, the way the light is positioned, you don't actually see until you take a step into the dark.

Now you might say, "Well, you should change the motion light." But the way that it is set, because I know this and I've done this hundreds of times, I know that when I come to the edge of the step, even if I can't see what's next—and I know I'm making some of you nervous right now—I know that I have to take a step into the dark knowing that there is something there even when I can't see it.

In a way, that's what faith in God is like when we're suffering. It's saying, "I don't understand, I don't see, but I'm going to take a step further forward because I believe in You and I believe that the light will come even if I don't see it today."

What Job's Friends Didn't Account For

The flaw in Job's friends, in a way, was that they didn't account for Satan. They didn't account for demons. They didn't account for spiritual battle at all. In their mind, there was a retributive principle, and the only way that Job was suffering was because of his own actions. But what we know as the readers is it was Satan who brought about his suffering.

If you read through your Bible, there isn't just Satan—there are demons. They are not omnipresent, they are not omnipotent, they do not have the ability to see and know your thoughts, but they are active and working and seeking to destroy the people of God. Some of the suffering that we experience in this world is a direct result of spiritual warfare.

The friends didn't account for time, because for them the way that things worked is you do something good, you get a good outcome. You do something bad, you get a bad outcome. The time is always right there—it's always linear. They didn't have a sense of a longer horizon and that God may be working in a time frame that wasn't visible or obvious to them.

But their biggest flaw—and maybe you could say this is because they lived before the cross of Jesus Christ—is they didn't account for the cross.

The Hope of the Cross

Here's what I mean: From where we stand, having the Old Testament and the New Testament, we know that the story of Christianity is caught up in the story of Jesus Christ and that Jesus went to the cross. He knew no sin, never did a bad thing, and received a horrible outcome. But we also know that that horrible outcome was the best outcome.

Why? Because what it means is those of us who have done things that deserve a bad outcome get a good outcome through Jesus Christ. It's called grace.

The beautiful thing about the Christian message is that if God really worked on a retributive principle, then our hope, our expectation, could not be what it is. But if you are a person who can say, "I have sinned, I believe that Jesus Christ died for me," then you can say, "The outcome I deserve has been given to Jesus Christ, and the outcome I'm going to get has been earned by Jesus Christ." That is the hope that we have.

I think that there's a little bit of Job who, even though he lived before the cross, understood this. In Job 13, we see this in verse 15:

"Though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him. I will surely defend my ways to His face."

He says, "Even though God slays me, I'm still going to hope in Him."

Where does that hope come from? Verse 22:

"Then summon me and I will answer, or let me speak, and You reply to me."

He still had a hope in God's presence being part of his journey.

Then in verse 7 of chapter 14, he says this:

"At least there is hope for a tree. If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail. Its roots may grow old in the ground and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth shoots like a plant."

Here's what he's doing: He's looking at the plants and the vegetation. He's saying they sprout to new life after they appear to be gone, and this is his hope in what God will do.

If you live in Pittsburgh, you've experienced a little bit of a drought over the last few weeks. If you have grass, it's probably been pretty dormant, pretty close to dead. Even if you have an irrigation system, maybe it hit parts of it and left little parts that were splotchy and didn't grow all the way back. But what do you see when it rained? What happened? It came back to life.

He says, "This is my hope."

You see, optimism says, "God, You'll change my circumstance." Hope says, "God, I know that one day You will make things right and You will make the hard things glorious in their own way. The things that should be different will be made right."

When that is where you and I live, then we can live with a moment of suffering that says, "I can live with hope because I'm not just getting what I deserve."

Again, make bad choices—maybe you get some things that you could say, "That is the retributive principle." But the message of the cross is ultimately that Christ took what we deserve so He could give us what He deserved. That is where real hope is—a hope that transcends even saying, "I want a better outcome in my life. I want something more pleasing to me." That's the God that we worship.

Conclusion

Easy answers don't always work. But when you study the whole of the Scriptures, what you can do is begin to say, "I see how God's hand is at work. There are outcomes and things that God may be doing that I don't even understand in this immediate situation." And so, even though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him.

Let's pray together. God, I would imagine that here today there are many situations represented. Some are significant moments of pain and hardship, some are moments that are just disappointments. But God, I pray that in this moment each of us who's gathered would be able to understand the challenge of some of these myths and be able to turn towards You and say, "Even though things aren't going my way, yet I will hope in You." We can do it because of the message of the cross, because we know there's time and we know that You are good. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Some verbal elements have been refined while preserving the original message and intent. This document was prepared with AI assistance.