One of the duties I believe I have is your pastor is to preach and to pray in such a way that when your calamity comes you won't curse God.

And even more I think to preach and to pray in such a way that when your calamity comes you will in fact worship God and bless

him in it. And therefore for the next five weeks we're going to try to understand the message of the book of Job and be changed by it.

Virtually everybody in this room will sooner or later experience a bitter calamity.

And you can mark it down ahead of time.

When it comes, it will seem absurd and undeserved and meaningless.

And you will cry out why a hundred times.

That's why the book of Job is so relevant because Job's suffering seems to come out of nowhere

and have no connection to his character.

His story, I think, is recorded for us in scripture because the Lord wants to use it to equip us to endure our calamities and not just endure them with a stiff upper lip like the stoics,

but to worship in them and to bless God in them.

Today we're going to look at the first section in the book which extends through chapter 2, verse

10. I invite you to open your Bibles to Job, which comes right before Psalms in the middle there.

We're only going to spend five weeks on this big book, but I think we can learn the message of the book in five weeks. We can't begin to exhaust it with 42 chapters, having spent 20 weeks on 1st John with its five chapters, but we can learn

the message, and if we do, we'll be changed.

Verse 1 of chapter 1 introduces the man Job and his character. He was a blameless man, it says,

upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

In other words, if suffering is intended as a punishment for evil, he's not a very good

candidate for calamity.

He is a good man.

He turns away from evil because he fears God.

He pursues the right.

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