Why did this happen to me? #3 - When Friends Aren't Helpful (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores Job 15-21, revealing that while friends may offer "miserable comfort" through judgment or "better comfort" through presence, the best comfort comes from knowing our living Redeemer who will stand on the earth. When suffering strikes, your ultimate hope isn't found in circumstances or even good friends, but in Jesus Christ who has bought back your life from sin and will one day restore all that's broken.

Message Summary and Application - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2025/10/06/why-did-this-happen-to-me-3-when-friends-arent-helpful

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Transcript

Let's pray together. God, as we've gathered this weekend around Pittsburgh Online and are gathered now, I pray you would work in each of our lives, God. I pray that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

We are continuing our series in the Book of Job, where we are working through one of the longer Old Testament books. It's 42 chapters. We're not taking 42 weeks. We are moving faster. But the Book of Job is a book that deals with a question, and it's a question that is on the hearts and minds of a lot of people.

In fact, we sent a few of our residents into the city just to ask the question. And you heard people respond basically with, here's what's hard for me, here's what's difficult. And then the base question is, and where is God? And even if you're not in the middle of something that's difficult today, chances are you will be. And one of the most natural things when that happens is to say, and where is God in the midst of this?

The Setup of Job

And what the Book of Job does is it sets up a situation, and then it takes chapters to unfold the situation. The situation is set up in chapters one, two, and three, where Job, we're told right at the beginning, is a man who was blameless, who feared God, that he shunned the way of evil. And the point of that isn't to say that he was perfect. It's to say that Job didn't do anything specifically that necessitated what happened in his life. And then we're told that he lost everything that really mattered to him in rapid succession.

And the bulk of the book is after Job has affirmed his faith in God, he has these conversations with his friends. There's three of them. Initially, Eliphaz, some call him Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. And from chapter four all the way through about 37, what we get is we get these conversations that includes Elihu in here a little later.

But the initial ones are these three. And what happens is Eliphaz will speak, then Job, then Bildad, Job, then Zophar, then Job. So a cycle of three, and then another cycle of three, and then there's two that come with Zophar not speaking. And the reason I say this is because if you read through Job, if you're ever in one of those Bible reading plans, and you get to Job, it's interesting, right at the beginning, when the situation's set up. Then it's confusing because you're like, who's talking? What are they saying? Is it Job? Is it one of the friends? How am I supposed to hear this? And then when you get to the end of the book, it starts to make sense again. But what I believe is that God gave us these dialogues for a reason.

The Friends' Flawed Logic

And I want us to try to just sit in them for a little bit. And so last week we looked at the first cycle and we talked about what happens when easy answers don't seem to satisfy. And today I want to ask the question, really, what do we do when we're asking the question, where is God? And our friends aren't much comfort to us. Now, I've tried to depict the idea of the book visually each week for us, at least so far.

And we have this triangle. And here's the basic idea of the friends. And that is, if God is just and someone is righteous, in this case, Job, and there's a principle, the retributive principle of how God works, then the only explanation for suffering in Job's life was that Job had been unrighteous, that Job did something to deserve it. And if you've been here, you've heard me say this, I believe that Job actually ended up turning and saying, in some ways, when he looked at it, God isn't just. The friends said, Job isn't righteous. But what we really need to challenge is this idea of the retributive principle, that is that God always works in such a way that those who do good things get good things. Those who do bad things get bad things.

Now, it requires some thinking, because in the scriptures there is some of that prevalent that the proverbs talk about. When we're righteous, good things follow us. And some of those kinds of principles. But what Job does is it says, it isn't always an ironclad truth that we can apply universally. And it's a little disheartening in some ways because there's a piece of us that wants to say, well, if I do the right things, then I should get good things. But what the book of Job does is it challenges that.

Three Types of Comfort

And what I'd like to do today is just talk about the kinds of comfort that exists. I'm going to just say that there's miserable comfort, there's better comfort, and then there's the best comfort.

Miserable Comfort

So miserable comfort comes from Job. And this is where I get this. If you ever wonder where I get my ideas, here it is. Job 16:2: "I have heard many things like these. You are miserable comforters, all of you." Okay, that's where I get it. Job says you're miserable comforters.

Now, again, the reason it's miserable for Job is because he says, I haven't done anything outside of just kind of normal stuff. I've repented, I've offered sacrifices, and yet I am suffering. And they're saying, no, no, the reason you're suffering is because you've sinned. And as I said, this creates double pain. Because when something goes wrong in your life, you have the pain of what goes wrong, and then you have the pain. If somebody else says it, you say it to yourself. You have the pain of saying, and I deserve it. I did something that caused me it.

You know, this is the couple that is struggling with infertility and just hoping to have a baby. And somebody saying, well, maybe the reason this has happened is because of something you did in high school. Or somebody who has lost a relationship. And maybe they had participated in some ways, but somebody comes along and says, wow, you know, the reason that that relationship is gone is because... And then they point to something. Do you hear how it creates double the pain?

And so miserable comforters. Here is the way that Job describes his friends. In chapter 19, he goes on a little further. Beginning in verse 12, it says, "His troops advance in force." This is speaking of God. "They build a siege ramp against me and encamp around my tent." And then he says this: "He has alienated my family from me. My acquaintances are completely estranged from me. My relatives have gone away. My closest friends have forgotten me. My guests and my female servants count me a foreigner. They look on me as a stranger. I summon my servant, but he does not answer, though I beg him with my own mouth." He's saying, everybody's left me.

Then he says this, verse 17: "My breath is offensive to my wife." Don't have to be suffering for that to be true, by the way. "I am loathsome in my own family. Even the little boys scorn me when I appear. They ridicule me. All my intimate friends detest me. Those I love have turned against me."

What Job is expressing here is this hardship of feeling as if not only is he suffering, but either people have abandoned him completely or when they do speak to him, they are telling him that he is the cause of the problem.

Understanding the Friends' Error

Now we know something about how to see this book. And we know it because at the end of the book, Job 42, we're told how God sees the three friends. This is verse seven, verse eight says this: "After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, I am angry with you and your two friends because you have not spoken truth about me as my servant Job has."

So the friends don't speak truth. Job, he says, has spoken truth. Now remember Job was questioning the justice of God. The friends were saying, Job, you've sinned. This is why this has happened.

Verse 8: "So now take my seven bulls, my seven rams, and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has."

So in case you didn't get it in verse seven, he repeats it in verse eight, you have not spoken truth. Job has. So when you're reading through Job and you come to these little sections that say Bildad, Zophar, Eliphaz, these are not to be understood as truth. But here's what makes this hard. When you read it, a lot of times it looks like it is speaking truth. You read it and you say, that sounds right.

And here's why this is hard. Because false teaching, false doctrine, doesn't parade itself as false doctrine that's always completely wrong and obvious, or it wouldn't be tempting to anybody. It usually contains parts of partial truths, truths that are real truths but aren't applied correctly. It takes something and it twists it so that you say, I think that's right when it's not right.

And by the way, false teaching can happen on church stages, on TV, on podcasts, but it also happens when you're sitting with friends having coffee at Starbucks or wherever you have coffee and you are saying, I think it's this way. And whenever we start to say, here's how I see God working and we're interpreting something, there's a danger that we're getting it wrong. The friends got it wrong with being mostly right. Because when you read through Job in the sections, you'll say, well, that sounds like that's probably right.

And here's where I think their error was. It wasn't that what they said always was a blatant falsehood. It's that it was something that they took as being absolutely true all the time and they applied it universally. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that truth is negotiable, but what I'm saying is when you take something and you say this is how this works, and I know it definitively, and it's my experience, and I back it up with Scripture, and it's true for everybody all the time. You can, in your rigidity, promote something that isn't true.

And the way you see this work does often create pain. Have you ever been around a parent, Christian parent, who's tried to raise their kids to follow God in their lives, and for whatever reason, some of the kids—one of the kids doesn't. And then sometimes you'll get parents maybe, well-meaning, whose kids seem to follow God, who will come along and say, well, you know, if you had done it like we do it, and they don't maybe mean it quite that way. But the implication is, I did it right. That's why my kids are on the right track. If you had just done it right, then your kids would be on the right track.

Do you hear the double pain and the rigidity of the application? Because in Isaiah 1, the God of the universe has raised children and some of them have rebelled against Him. Meaning you can't always apply everything universally with rigidity.

Here's the other thing that was true of the friends. They were proud in their conversation. And what I mean by this is they didn't actually listen to Job. When Job started to talk, they said, no, no, no. I have my theology. I have my answer. What you're saying is not possible. My triangle exists. And instead of being able to think about it more broadly, they had their way of thinking that it had to be.

See, miserable comfort is whenever either somebody says to us, we say to somebody else, or we say to ourselves, here is how I know that God is working in this situation. And we take a truth and we universalize it, and we don't listen to the situation.

A Note on Emotions

Now, I do want to just say one other thing here about this. If you read through these chapters in all of Job, you'll see that in Job, Job is expressing a lot of emotion. He's struggling with God. He's asking questions. He's saying, God, I don't get it. And I just want to say, if you find yourself in a place where you're telling yourself that you shouldn't feel a certain way or you shouldn't express your emotions, that I don't believe that that's of God.

And the reason that I say that is because sometimes, especially in faith communities, people will get the idea that says, if I'm a person of faith, then I should always be okay, I should always be positive, I should always be happy. And I should never say that this hurts, or I'm struggling, or I don't understand God. But we have 42 chapters that tell us otherwise.

And what happens when you get into the space where you say, I'm not going to express my emotion is—and maybe sometimes it's proper to say, I don't want to tell all of my emotion to everybody I meet, so I don't have to tell all of it. But what happens is then you start to hold your emotion, and you don't let yourself feel your emotion, express your emotion, receive comfort, or even be honest with yourself about what you're feeling. And you're miserable in the midst of it. And that is part of the miserable comfort.

Better Comfort

So there's miserable comfort, and then there's better comfort. And the better comfort, I'm going to suggest, is found in two things. First, all the way back in the beginning of the account of Job, when Job first suffered, his three friends came and the text says that they sat with him and didn't say a word for seven days. What they did is they just came and they sat. And that was probably their best reaction in the moment.

Job in Job, chapter 21, verse 2, says this. He says, "Listen carefully to my words. Let this be the consolation you give me." What's he saying? Here's what I want you to do. I want you to listen to me. I want you to hear me, be with me. That's my consolation or my comfort. And he goes on in chapter 21, and he talks some about just the path of the wicked and how God really treats the wicked, rather than their theology of how he treats the wicked. And what he's doing is he's bringing truth to his situation. But he's also saying, and I want you to hear me, to sit with me.

And maybe this isn't clear here, but let me give you a couple places where this is clear. Romans, chapter 12, verse 15: "Rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn."

And then in Proverbs, chapter 12, verse 15, we're told this. It says, "The way of a fool seems right to them. But the wise listen to advice."

So what does the Bible say about friendship, comfort in these times? Mourn with those who mourn, rejoice with those who rejoice. And that the wise listen to a rebuke or be willing to receive a challenge.

So let me just talk about those for a moment. This is better comfort to mourn with those who mourn. Seems fairly obvious, but let me ask you how many people in your life would come and sit with you for seven days when you go through loss and not say a word? How many people would you go sit with for seven days? Do you hear what that is? It's saying, I am with you. I identify with you. I feel for you. And I don't have to bring a corrective word in the moment because of what I do.

I often will find myself in a place where there's an obvious question hanging in the air, and that is, why did God let this happen right now? But I can tell you that what I've learned in years of being around situations like this, that that is not the time that people actually want me to break out my Bible and give them an understanding of the theological problem of evil and why a good God allows suffering in human beings. What people need and want is presence and compassion.

I heard a podcast the other day. It was the Zach Lowe Podcast. And he was talking to a comedian named Gary Gulman, who I'd never heard of. This is not an endorsement of his comedy. I have not heard it. But this guy is a comedian who had been depressed. He was depressed as a young adult. He was living with his mom and dad, unable to really function at all. And he was talking about his journey out of his depression.

And he said this, and he said, I had a friend. And he said, my friend had been through a bad relational breakup, and he was living with his fiancée and his daughter. And he said, here's what my friend did. When he knew I was struggling, he invited me over, and they lived in Boston, he said, to watch every Boston Celtics game for an entire year. Now, if you don't know the NBA, that's 82 nights that he invited his friend to come sit on his sofa and watch a game.

And here's what Gary Gulman said about it. He said, there were nights, especially at the beginning, that we hardly spoke a word. Or maybe we said, that was a nice play. Can you imagine sitting with somebody who's so depressed for 82 nights that they hardly talk? And my takeaway was that guy was being a friend. He was mourning with his friend. He was walking with him. And now his friend's on the other side saying, that was instrumental in me coming back from my depression.

Mourning with those who mourn, rejoicing with those who rejoice. This is sometimes underappreciated, but it's important to also celebrate the good things that God has done, the victories that people have. Not just to be there when it's tough. But to be there to celebrate the good things.

If you're in a living situation with family, roommates, friends, whatever it is, there are some things in any living situation that are the jobs that nobody wants to do. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, doesn't matter where you live. There are just things that it's like, nobody really wants to do that.

Well, my wife and I have developed a little rhythm in our marriage. Whenever one of us does one of those jobs, we'll just say, hey, did you notice that was done? And the other person—now, this has taken some years—says, that's awesome. I've never seen anything that great. Now, it's a goofy little ritual that we have that really is not rejoicing with those who rejoice other than this. And that is, it's a recognition that sometimes you just want somebody to see what you've done and recognize it and celebrate it with you. And that's part of good comfort.

But so is this idea of challenge. Says the wise will heed rebuke. And we may get the idea from Job that the best comfort is simple silence. But there are times that a challenge is fully appropriate, that we need a friend to say to us what no one else will say to us and call us to something better than where we're currently living. And when we have friends like that, they can be invaluable in the process of working our way through grief, working our way through sadness, getting back on our feet in different ways throughout our lives.

But sometimes we just don't want to hear it at all. And certainly it takes discernment to know when those times exist, when we can say something and when not to. But I don't think Job is a call to utter silence, but it's a call to make sure that when we challenge, we're challenging people when they're ready, when they're wise enough to hear it and heed the rebuke, rather than us just saying, well, I'm just gonna challenge because I can, and I think I know better.

The Limits of Human Comfort

But I want you to see something else that the Book of Proverbs says. And this will not feel encouraging when I first read it, but this is, I think, important to acknowledge. This is Proverbs 14, verse 10: "Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy."

Now, what does that mean? It means even if you have the best comfort from friends, family and other people in your life, there is no one who will fully understand the bitterness that you feel, the hardship that you feel, the pain that you feel, and there is no one else who will fully get your joy.

Now you can see why I said that's not that encouraging, because what do we want? We want somebody to enter in and make us feel better. But the reason that that verse is important is it leads us to where we need to go in this. And that is what is the best comfort. And the best comfort comes not just from saying, I demand from my friends that they treat me better than miserable comfort, or from my family, but it comes from being able to look back beyond the comfort of friends to the one who is the ultimate comforter.

The Best Comfort: A Living Redeemer

Here's what we see in Job 19, verse 25. And following this is one of the famous verses of Job. In the midst of his pain, he says this, "I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth."

Now that word earth here in the NIV that I'm reading from has a footnote. And the footnote down at the bottom of the page or electronically, however you get there, says, "or on my grave." And most translations will have something to that end. And usually when a Bible version gives you a translation and then the footnote says, or this at the end, the reason they're saying this is because it can be translated this way or this way. And they're both pretty legitimate. And they chose this way because they had to choose one. But it could be either the earth or the grave.

Now you say, well, what's the difference? Earth or the grave? It's actually pretty big here. The original word is dust. And the reason I say it's pretty big is because the earth—when he says, I know that my Redeemer lives and we'll see him stand on the earth, he's saying, I'm going to see it in this life. If it's in the grave, it means I'm going to see it in the future. But it's ambiguous because it's dust.

And I think it's actually ambiguous because the point is not to say you're going to get it now or in the future. And biblical kind of hope is not the optimism that says, God's going to do everything now. But it's also not a kind of escapism that says, I have no hope now. It's all in the future. And it is that my Redeemer lives and he will be seen either now or in the future.

And what this means when you look at it, is that he is resting his hope in something much deeper than simply saying, I hope that it gets better. Redemption means that something is bought back. And here, his Redeemer that he's speaking of in Job 16:19, he has an advocate from heaven. Here. He says it very explicitly. "I know that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God."

There's a Redeemer who's going to buy back my life. I myself will see him with my own eyes. I and not another. How my heart yearns within me.

What's he doing? He's saying, I have a Redeemer who is going to take and buy back what I have lost. Because that's what a redeemer does.

Understanding Redemption

Now, I want you to just think with me for a moment. Redeemer pushes us toward Jesus. And sometimes in the broader church, the way that God is spoken of is this. And that is God is love. God is so much love that if you would just give your life to God, God's love will encompass you and your life will move forward in a better way than it would without God's love. But that is not the picture of redemption.

Redemption means that you are bound to something that you have no control over, no hope from. And somebody comes along and does something that you couldn't do to buy you out of it.

Maybe a way to think about it is this. If you're in a relationship with somebody and they say, I love you. In fact, I love you so much, I'm going to cut off my hand to show you how much I love you, you would say, ooh, and don't do that. That's weird. That doesn't mean that you love me. That does nothing for me. But if your kidneys were in failure and somebody who loved you said, I am going to give you one of my kidneys. I'm going to have one of my kidneys cut out for you, you say, oh, my goodness, that is loving, because you're sacrificing something of yourself for me.

What we need to understand about this idea of redemption is that it's rooted not just in the love of God, but also in the law of God, and we need to be redeemed because we're sinful. And when we get this, and we say God's love isn't just that he loves me with no reason, but he loves me enough to sacrifice Jesus Christ on my behalf. And when I get this, when I understand, then I say my standing is in Jesus. It's not in what I have here and now.

And if I get that, then I can say, if God has redeemed me from sin and the ultimate punishment, then I can trust, as Job says here, that my Redeemer lives and I will see him stand on the earth or in my grave, that the end of the story is not now. God will buy back what is hard for me here and now.

Practical Applications

Let me just use some examples to help us think about this. Let's just imagine for a moment that you have a dream job, job you've wanted your whole life. Or maybe it's just a good job that pays the bills. And one day you go in and because of corporate forces, you're downsized, you're out.

Now what's miserable comfort? You go back to your friends, your family, and they're like, well, yeah, you were always punching above your weight to have that job anyway. You didn't deserve it. Okay, that's pretty clear.

Good comfort is okay. I'm gonna walk with you. I'm sad. I'm gonna rejoice when something changes. Maybe I'll challenge you a little along the way.

But you know what the best comfort is? It's being able to say, I am not defined by my job. My job is not my life. This isn't everything to me. I have a redeemer who will stand on the earth and in my death, who has made hope possible, and it is not tied to what I am as a vocation. Do you hear the difference?

If you're in a place where there's a lost relationship, something that you invested in and cared about deeply, maybe a friendship, maybe a romance. And you said, this is the thing, and it goes wrong and it is lost. And somebody comes along and says, well, you know, the reason you lost it is your breath was offensive to them. That's a callback, by the way, to that verse. If you didn't pick that up, that's not really helpful in that moment.

But if somebody says, I'm going to walk with you and I'm sad for you and I'm going to rejoice with you, and maybe I'll challenge you if it's appropriate, that's helpful. But you know what the best comfort is? Is not to say, I demand this from my friends, but to say, when marriage is good, when romance is good, when friendship is good, it is a pointer to the ultimate romance of my heart, the romance of God to me. And I am created for more. And I know that my Redeemer lives, and he's gonna buy back the things that are painful here and now. Do you hear the difference?

Or you're walking through, or somebody you love is walking through a health crisis. Miserable comfort says, well, you know, you should follow God better, eat better, do something better. And then you wouldn't be here.

Better comfort says, I'll sit with you. I'll take you to the doctor. I'll rejoice when there's something good that comes along. Maybe I'll challenge you if it's appropriate.

But do you know what the best comfort is? It's to say, when this body is done, and it will be done, my Redeemer will stand on the earth and in my grave. And I was created for more than just the time here. And this body does not define me. Do you hear the difference?

Conclusion

You see, our hope isn't just that we'll be able to navigate this and get some comfort from some people along the way. It's in the Redeemer who does not leave us where we are. And you and I can have that assurance. If Jesus is our Redeemer from our sin issue, to say he's also our Redeemer in all of our lives.

And for that to be true for some of us, what we need to do is come to a point where we acknowledge that we're sinful and need a Savior, that Jesus was perfect, that he went to the cross on your behalf and died. And you can trust him as your Savior. He rose again, ascended into heaven where he is at the right hand of the Father and will one day come back and rebuild what is broken.

And if you believe that and you're in the middle of pain and saying, why is this so hard? Then this is just a reminder to say that Jesus isn't done. God isn't done. The Redeemer has not made his final move in your life. And when you hold to that, then you can find comfort even in the midst of suffering.

Now, as I said, it doesn't mean that you don't say, this is hard, that I'm exploring what it means to live in this reality. That it isn't painful, but it means that there is something to point to beyond the pain and beyond this life.

Let's pray. God, I don't know all the situations that are represented here today, but I know that in a room this size, online, the gatherings of Orchard Hill this weekend, that there are literally thousands of difficult situations. And I ask that you would help each one of us who's walking through that now or will walk through it someday to be able to turn towards you with confidence. Say, I know that my Redeemer lives and he will one day stand. And that that would bring us comfort and hope in the midst of whatever we're walking through. And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Thanks for being here. Have a great week.

AI-Generated Disclaimer: This transcript was processed and formatted using artificial intelligence. While efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, there may be minor errors or formatting inconsistencies. Please refer to the original sermon recording for the most accurate representation of the message.