Outline
I. God Drags Your Life into the Arena
Satan returns for round two, but God initiates the test, spotlighting Job as unmatched in integrity. Suffering isn’t random—God allows intensified trials to expose what we truly hold.
II. Satan Bets Everything on Your Skin
“Skin for skin,” the accuser sneers: every man will curse God to save his own flesh. Satan strikes Job with loathsome sores from head to toe while friends and wife pressure him to break.
III. When Your Closest Voices Urge Betrayal
Job’s wife says “Curse God and die.” His three friends arrive with tears and dust but will soon offer theater and toxic theology. Even the dearest can become instruments of despair.
IV. The Only Move That Silences Hell
Job refuses to sin with his lips. He clings to integrity, declaring we must accept both good and evil from God’s hand. In the ashes, he models holding fast when every comfort is stripped.
V. Skip the Dialogue—Run to the Whirlwind
The sermon’s urgent pivot: don’t camp in the pain or bad counsel. Flip straight to Job 38 where God speaks. In your darkest hour, train your eyes on the Redeemer who will answer out of the storm.
VI. Jesus Took the Blows You Were Spared
Satan was limited—“spare his life.” Christ received no such mercy. He bore the full wrath so we could be sons who face the tribunal unafraid. Job unknowingly dug toward this Redeemer.
Bottom line: Suffering will expose whether you love Jesus more than your skin, your comfort, or your counselors—hold fast to Him alone.
Opening Prayer
…to look to you, to see Jesus, help us to know more of your plan, and when we don’t, to be found faithful, clinging to you as ever as the day draws near. We pray all this in Christ’s perfect and holy name. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING This is Job chapter two, verse one. Again, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them to present himself before the Lord.
And the Lord said to Satan, from where have you come? Satan answered the Lord and said, from going to and fro on the earth and from walking up and down on it. And the Lord said to Satan, have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil. He still holds fast to his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason. Then Satan answered the Lord and said, skin for skin, all that a man has he will give for his life, but stretch out your hand and touch his bone and flesh and he will curse you to your face. And the Lord said to Satan, Behold, he is in your hand, only spare his life.
So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes. Then his wife said to him, do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die. But he said to her, you speak as one of the foolish women would speak.
Shall we not receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this, Job did not sin with his lips. Now, when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, They came, each from his own place. Eliphaz, the Temanite, Bildad, the Shuhite, and Zophar, the Namathite.
And they made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and to comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept and tore their clothes and sprinkled dust on their heads towards heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights. No one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.
Thus far, a reading of God’s word for his people may add his blessing to it.
INTRODUCTION Well, if you’ll allow just a quick introduction from C.S. Lewis, he said once in one of his letters, very affectionately, writing all the people who listened to him, that, I believe in God as I believe in the sun. Not only that I see him and I feel him, feel his warmth, but by him I see other things. Because of God, we’re able to interrogate our own holdings in our hearts, we’re able to interrogate the world itself.
As you just heard, Job is suffering horribly. And as I introduced earlier, this is gonna be something that encounters all of us. Job chapter two focuses on the intensification of Job’s trials, moving from external loss, that is the loss of his property, even the loss of his family, just over and over he’s suffering, suffering worse. Satan asserts that this personal wealth and health that he had is the key to his loyalty to God. But Job refuses to curse God despite of the pressure from his own suffering, his community, the ones he loves most in his life. Job holds fast to his integrity.
To what are you holding today? Or maybe I should put it, as you already know, to whom do you hold today? The key themes that we see throughout this chapter are intensified testing, physical affliction, the role of friends, even in our lives, and we also see spiritual warfare in this text today.
The point that I want to help us to exercise today is that we can skip over all of the dialogue and go straight to chapter 38, where God interrupts, where God speaks, because it is very hard to understand what’s right.
GOD DRAGS YOUR LIFE INTO THE ARENA Not just in the text today, but when you’re suffering, you’re not going to be able to know which way is up. You can remember the Lord Jesus confronting Peter and saying, Satan would sift you like wheat. You’re not going to know which way to turn. You’re not going to know which way is up or down. The whole point that we see in Job is that he is doing something. He’s clinging to God throughout the chapters, regardless of what you hear.
He’s holding on to the Lord and God even uses him in chapters 9, 16, and 19. And I want you to read through the book and see if you can find more places than that where Job is learning to call on the Messiah. He’s learning to call on the Son of God. He’s learning to call on humanity with us as a Redeemer. He’s doing that without all of our benefits today. We know more than Job does. So may God move us to chapter 38 in our lives. You can even use that devotionally when you’re reading Job. Just as your ground level, your touch point, you can flip over to chapter 38. Look at the way God speaks. Look at the way man speaks.
We also see a reflection of what’s happening in heaven and on earth in our text today. We remember Westminster’s teaching of our efforts to pray in the third petition, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In this petition, in our daily practice, we pray that God, by his grace, would make us able and willing to know, obey, and submit to his will in all things as the angels do in heaven. Something’s happening here and it is that God is revealing. God is revealing things on earth as it is in heaven. So our charge today as a cure for having no sight is to have sight for our own sore eyes and for the sore eyes of other people around us because God is revealing. May God’s revelation heal our sore eyes today.
Look at verse one with me. This is round two for Satan. Notice, it’s a day when the sons of God came to present themselves. This is military language, they’re all subordinates. Notice, first of all, that God is the one who initiates. God initiates, Satan incites.
He has less insight than we would hope for, but he’s inciting God. That’s what God says himself, meaning he’s provoking him. He’s asking him to consider the frailty of humanity, the failings of humanity. He’s accusing Job wrongly. God himself says it’s without reason. Do you see that in verse three just before verse four? You incited me against him to destroy him without reason.
SATAN BETS EVERYTHING ON YOUR SKIN And Job’s earth has no category for a human son of God in that time. It would be alien, as alien as if you can imagine Adam before Eve. There’s no category for humankind yet in your brain. You don’t know what humankind is. And Job is afflicted by that, does God even think about humans? Does God even care about my suffering?
How lonely, a cold desert this would be, a universe without the plurality of humans around us. Job doesn’t have a name to call on, he doesn’t know the name of Jesus at that time. He doesn’t have somebody that he knows that can elbow his way into that sanctuary the way Satan is doing, but rightly, he needs a redeemer. He needs someone who can intercede.
Do you know of anyone like that, church? Do you have the answer to that question? I see some nodding heads. Some of you know someone who can intercede on our behalf with God. This is a day that Satan is trying to steal. So God reveals, Satan steals. Remember that. You can also see how Satan answers back to the Lord. And friends, this is not something to shy away from. We do need to be able to talk about spiritual things in today’s material world. Don’t be shy about that. People talk about this all the time.
And they get it wrong, like Job’s friends do. And you’ll see that later in the text. Again, remember that God initiates, Satan incites. God says, have you considered my servant Job? There’s no one like him on earth. That means you’re not Job. You don’t get to read your suffering into Job and say, oh, I’m just like that.
The whole world is against me. Don’t you see that Satan’s under every rock and demons are afflicting me? That’s not always true. Some people fall for the agency of enemy invasion compared to the traps of enemy invasion. Just like stepping into a hole, it doesn’t mean that there’s a person there digging it. It doesn’t mean that we’re always being assaulted by demons, by Satan. It means that you fell into something, possibly, possibly.
Okay, so don’t be shy about entering into conversations with your pastor, with your elders, with mature believers in the church. Satan glibly answers, skin for skin. This is the first of what I would like to talk about with you about phrases that sound really cool, right? Skin for skin would be like if you had a little coat or a beaver pelt or a rabbit pelt and you’re trading, that’s what you’re trading like you do at the lunch table, you’re just trading things. And so the enemy of our soul is saying, Man is just willing to do anything for you. He’s protecting himself. He’s protecting his investments, first of all.
WHEN YOUR CLOSEST VOICES URGE BETRAYAL Didn’t you see that in the first chapter when he lost everything? He lost his home, he lost his family, and possibly even his religion at that time. You can look back, if you’d like, to chapter one. Job is trying to intercede for his children in case they curse God in their hearts. Now I’ve considered also that this might be the advent of personal religion, vicarious redemption. He’s trying to redeem. He’s trying to do something with his children. Okay, maybe he’s heard of it from his friends. Maybe he’s heard it from Israel.
But the Lord is going to show him through suffering, God is going to advance towards the cross. He’s going to advance towards the Son. And he’s going to reveal the Son, even through Job, as you’ll see later in the chapters 9, 16, and 19. Man’s accuser is going to be the one who will bring us to tribunal over and over, but God is the one who will bring us to see his face.
So what that means for us practically is anytime that Satan attacks, that sin attacks you in your conscience, that death threatens you, these things are only doing it to their own destruction, to the advancement of their own destruction. God is just gonna show out through these things, through your doubts, through your fears, through the threats of enemies. You can see this play out in Exodus. For example, Exodus 5, Israel was suffering under Pharaoh, and they can’t see, listen to what Moses pens.
God says in chapter five, I have heard the groaning of the people of Israel, whom the Egyptians hold as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say, therefore, to the people of Israel, I am the Lord. I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I’ll redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment. I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God. And I will show you that I am the Lord God who has brought you out from under the burden of the Egyptians.
Now listen to this, Moses continues, Moses spoke to the people of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery. They can’t hear it. They need a pastor, they need community. They’re not able to hear what God is saying to them. Verse 10, So the Lord said to Moses, Go in and tell Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, to let the people Israel to go out to his land. Moses said to the Lord, Behold, the people of Israel have not listened to me. How then shall I speak to Pharaoh? God is going to use Pharaoh just as he uses Satan. He’s going to use it to glorify himself.
All the enemies, it’s just the drama of redemption playing out, even in our lives today. Later in Exodus, Moses explains that this life is hard to us. We can hear this from Moses. God is glorifying himself and displaying his plans, destroying the wicked, and comforting generations of God’s people. Verse one of chapter 10 says, the Lord says to Moses, go into Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants. so that I may show these signs of mine among them. God is using this as a foil to push against and to advance his cause. Most of us are not going to be able to bear the suffering. This is a time for us, even today, in worship, to prepare our hearts.
Most men who see God’s progression of revelation, they drop. They go unconscious. They lose consciousness. Think of Adam at the revelation of womankind. Think of Abraham at the covenant. Think of John at the revelation. This is the beloved John, who fell at his feet like a dead man. He was the beloved. He knew Jesus, walked with him, ate with him. And then the risen Lord Jesus revealed himself to John in revelation, and it dropped him. Most of us are not going to be able to handle it when God is revealing something through your suffering.
And you’re going to need your community. You’re going to need your pastor. You’re going to need something more than someone saying skin for skin or someone around you using a hashtag moniker in your life. And I’m going to get to this later, but there’s an awful lot of habit in our circles to say, well, God is sovereign.
I call this soft bombing. Like love-bombing? Some people just soft-bomb people when you’re suffering. They say, well, God is sovereign. That doesn’t help you. You probably can’t even hear it. You probably know God is sovereign, and you’re struggling under that just like Job is doing.
Because Job himself talks about God’s sovereignty, so do his friends. His friends talk about it all the time. Something else his friends talk about is don’t despise the discipline of the Lord, but they’re using it wrongly. And in the end, Job is the one that’s going to be there to pray for his friend.
THE ONLY MOVE THAT SILENCES HELL Let’s move to our second point. So we’ve seen God is sovereign in his revelation. God is the one initiating these things with Satan. Satan’s foolishly taking the bait. Satan’s taking the bait to that. Just like Pharaoh, just as all God’s enemies. Let’s continue now in verse six, if you’ll look with me. This is where you see that God is handing Job over to Satan with limits.
He always places limits. So at the first it was, You can touch his possessions, not the man. Now it’s you can touch the man, not his life. Keep his life, you don’t get to touch it. Hands off is what he’s saying. So verse six says, the Lord said to Satan, behold, it’s in your hands, only spare his life. Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. He took a piece of broken pottery, excuse me, with which to scrape him while he sat in the ashes.
Now something that we can consider is Job is suffering on the outside, but what about if Job’s loathsome sores were on the inside? What’s your cure? How can you cure a sore on the inside? What if you’re struck with loathsome sores? That’s all of humanity. We’re all struck with these sores, all of us, and there’s only one cure. Doctors can’t find it. Nobody’s gonna be able to make people live forever.
That’s a gospel on its own. That’s a materialistic scientific gospel. Satan attacks the sons of God to his own destruction. The proof is in the outline and the point for us today is to try to skip over the suffering and go to chapter 38 and to hear straight from the Lord himself, even as he’s struck. You can see also in verse nine, if you’ll look with me, sometimes God will use those dearest to us, even in our suffering. The wife said, do you still hold fast to your integrity? He’s still ministering to her. Bear in mind, they have children in the end. They’re still together.
Something that, as I was becoming a Christian, my granddad told me is that the church can hurt you like nobody else. The point is because we love the church. The people who love you, the people who you love, they can be sometimes the most hurtful. But she’s with him in the end. They stay together. They have children.
There’s wonderful things happening that God has planned for Job. And he even reasons with her. You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall not we receive good from God, and shall not we receive evil? In all this, Job did not sin with his lips. That’s an important thing to highlight. because the Holy Spirit is testifying. Job hasn’t sinned in chapter 1 and chapter 2. I stopped just shy of chapter 3, which is probably the first time.
Job does not receive this commendation right here, verse 10, because Job curses not God, like his wife is saying, he curses himself. This is something in pastoral care and in counseling we can encourage our own habits of our hearts. When you’re counseling your soul, when you’re preaching the gospel to your heart, not to curse yourself. We bless God. That’s the answer. Move to chapter 38. Do that as a daily practice. Go straight and listen to what God has to say to you.
This is a very helpful thing for us as I’m trying to survey all of Job, if you’ll bear with me. Notice that God limits Satan in this military language. This is a call for us to be the church militants, to radicalize and to really take seriously the gospel, really take seriously the afflictions and the threats. We’re behaving like CIA mercenaries in this regard. We’re vigilant, we’re watchful, we have an enemy. And he’s training us in the rules of war.
Or rather, the agency is God’s. God himself is training my hands for battle, my fingers for war. God is doing all of this. He’s in control. And remember also, friends, that in all of this pain, think about the illustration earlier about Job’s outward affliction and your inward affliction.
Remember that your Savior, Jesus, received no such pardon. Jesus didn’t receive this limitation on Satan. God told and limited Satan, don’t touch his life. Jesus didn’t receive that. He bore the full penalty. He bore the full unmitigated wrath of the Father. He didn’t have that kind of protection.
So you’re looking to the Son. You’re not looking to how good men bear under suffering. You have to set your face on Christ. You’re going to have to do that, or you’re going to have somebody around you remind you of the Son who suffered for your sins.
The only servant who sat in silence and worshiped perfectly, that’s Jesus. He is the priest ruler who prays for us, even in his suffering, upholding the universe by the word of his power as he’s being crucified for your sins and mine. For us to know him and know God and enter into that tribunal as sons. This epiphany was something that Job is unearthing in Jesus being realized in redemptive history.
So remember, Satan is the one who strikes the body. Fear is spreading out to his friends, to his community, to his loved ones, to his wife. I want to tell you a quick illustration about a minister I heard about. In 1657, he was appointed the preacher of St. Margaret’s in Westminster in London, the UK. This is a historic church adjacent to Westminster Abbey.
This man died of tuberculosis at the age of 40. When he knew death was imminent, he worried that he’d done so little with his life, even though that he had done so much, the anxiety was catching up to him. He wrote a book called The Great Concern, and he exposits death. If you want a spiritual challenge, this is a wonderful text. He’s a little despairing in the end of life. He’s a little despairing of life, so he can be a little negative towards it.
The point throughout is to know that God has broken the back of the enemy. He’s broken Satan, sin, and death through Christ. And so it can only be good news. Just as Moses can do nothing to condemn us, but only refine us. But this is something that he reminded me to think about. to think about death. What does death do? It deprives us of our sweet comforts. It dissolves the union between soul and body. What else does death do in a word?
It is the sharpest of all outward afflictions. This is something that people fear, and you’re gonna be able to counsel them in life. Sin, Satan, and Sheol. Death, as one person observes, is the greatest leveler in all the world. It’s the great equalizer. It levels. Scepters and plowshares, it makes the prince as poor as the peasant. There’s nothing anybody can do about it.
People go through their whole lives fearing death, but that’s not something you fear. A lot of our anxieties in our culture today are splintered fears. If you fear God, you fear nothing else. If you are fearing something else, if you have other things, they’re gonna manifest themselves as anxieties in your life, as latent little fogs, and they’re gonna cloud out your vision of the Son.
God has called us to be sons, to belong to Him. It’s going to be a life of suffering. We don’t pursue it like some religions do. We don’t call pain pleasure or anything like that. It’s not a mark of holiness. It’ll find you, so you don’t have to go looking for it.
SKIP THE DIALOGUE—RUN TO THE WHIRLWIND As we come to a close now, let’s look at the last section of our scripture today.
This is where his friends enter in. And I included the wife just previously because of how that is so close to Job and it’s so nearing and setting the stage for his friends to just come in. So now he’s got like societal pressure coming and crashing against him at this point.
Let’s look at verse 11 together as we close. When Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, They came, each one from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Namathite, and they made an appointment to show him sympathy and comfort. Now look at the next verse, they raised their voice and wept, and they tore their clothes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Now just having experienced the love of his life, tell him something that he didn’t want to hear.
He has now his friends come to him, and he’s experiencing shame. He’s experiencing his own culture, the people he worked around, the people he had known, the people who made an appointment to come see him. They themselves are not supporting him in his affliction.
They’re not doing what they set out to do. So they’re coming to him later, and they’re kind of making a show. They’re throwing dust into the air. You can almost hear the crowds at the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus went to raise Lazarus, and you have the funeral procession, and you have the wailers who are just wailing. They’re making a big, big production of things, right?
That’s not helpful. Neither is the silence. You can see some folks will say, well, they just sat. He needs a word of comfort. He needs a word of peace. He’s going to need Christ like we see him learn. He’s going to need chapter 38 later. Something helpful to structure this is to really take aim at that chapter 38 where God answers Job out of a whirlwind, questioning even someone who seems innocent, Elihu.
We’re not really sure where his placement is in the chapter, but he says, who is this who counsels by words without wisdom? Who is this who counsels someone in the dark? We’re not sure if he’s saying, Job, are you counseling yourself in the dark? Is it Elihu? Who is in fact your counsel today? Who are you listening to? Is it the talking heads on ESPN? Is it all the people hashtagging in the world of excellence and greatness? all the self-image that we’re infatuated with today. You can see some evidence in the names of the people that there might be a tie to Israel. This is what I said earlier. The Temanite may be a relative. The Temans were relatives to Esau themselves. So our question today is, where do you get comfort from? Is it going to be your practice, your workplace? Is it going to be your family? Is it going to be your friends? Or is it Christ himself who comforts you? Is it Christ who counsels you?
So let’s together resist the soft bombing, the theater, the optics, even as like it looked very impressive that they’re bewailing the suffering of his friend. Something else that they do. that they’re guilty of later in the chapter you’ll see is that they pit God’s attributes against one another. So we can confuse sovereignty with power. When some things happen, we say that’s God’s sovereignty. They’re also pitting God’s power against his comfort. So God is at once powerful and sovereign and comforting, both at the same time.
You don’t have to pit those things together. So our response to this in seeing Job’s friends display this when they were called upon to give him sympathy and comfort and they’re sitting with him and they didn’t speak a word. Our call is to call on Jesus to strain for his face in your habit, to look to him, the son who comforts you. Do it because you might lose the opportunity to do this when the wars and the storms come and when the sickness comes. Job had no name to call upon, but practically, we can see that friends can be helpful, and in the end, our spouses are someone who bring us closer to Christ.
That’s the first definition of your spouse, is that they’re bringing you closer to the Lord. I want you to listen to a few things and see if you can spot the panacea. Just like we saw with the enemy of our souls, saying, skin for skin, listen to something Eliphaz says. He says, a spirit glided past my face. The hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance. The form was before my eyes.
So Job is invoking some kind of spiritual, or I’m sorry, Eliphaz is invoking some kind of spiritual power. Job responds later, and he says, behold, he passes by me, and I see him not. He’s actually right. Job is correct. So he’s saying that God has not a body like man. Eliphaz is saying, no, I could perceive him, and here’s the truth. So you can see almost religions fighting one another in this case. Our culture especially loves influence. Man loves drama and optics. But Job is going to unearth Jesus, not just to himself, but to his friends. He’s going to not have a name yet. He doesn’t have that name. He doesn’t have the Trinity yet. He doesn’t have that doctrine until The church doesn’t have it until Matthew 28. But Job has his integrity, he’s holding on. And he even says later in this chapter, 9 verse 15, though I’m in the right, I can’t answer him.
I must appeal for mercy to my accuser. Now who’s that accuser? He’s asking if there was an opportunity to have God to intercede for him. Job himself is moving from good to great, if you like another corporate slogan. He says, my complaint is just. He’s actually going from a doctrine of suffering to a doctrine of sovereignty to a doctrine of God’s mercy and comfort, His intercession. He even says that the ones who are withholding kindness from a friend forsake the fear of the Almighty. So he wants his friends to be good counselors to him. He wants Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar to move him towards Christ, but he’s conflicted himself.
See if you can remember this. And just this panacea, this pastoral panacea, Zophar says, a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey’s colt has borne a man. I mean, you could just almost hear people say that in our culture today. Like, you’re foolish, you’re not doing things the way God would have you do it.
Even Elihu proclaims God’s majesty but doesn’t move him forward. But then God shows up in chapter 38. God speaks to Job. And Job is learning prayer. He’s learning through his suffering, through his wife, through his friends. He’s learning not to fear shame, not to fear death, but who his enemy actually is. And we get to move closer to the mark in prayer. That’s how we fight our fights.
Again, Westminster 98 says, So may God move us today from our suffering to the Messiah, to the cure of all our suffering. Our lesson here today from Job, Job chapter 2, is to hold fast to whatever God is doing. And we even know, we get to see some of it. God is bringing his sons forward. Creation awaits with eager longing, Romans 8 tells us. It’s the Father’s will and the Holy Spirit has always given honor to the Son and the Father. And this is what we know. We speak to what we know.
Job held fast to the person while learning to let go of his possessions, his people, his status, his friends, and even creatures counseling him. The Redeemer who is to come is being unearthed and excavated. So Christian, hold fast to your integrity who is Jesus. That’s Job’s integrity right there. The one thing suffering proves is how much you love or don’t love Jesus. It’s going to find you out, and it’s going to help you to grow and to confess your sins. So, dear ones at Living Way, please fight for Jesus, for yourselves, for your communities.
Don’t build yourselves up by contradistinctions towards other people, or that’s so-and-so, they had these other benefits, that’s this denomination or that country. We don’t build ourselves up by contradistinctions. We face the Lord square on. like Job is teaching us here today. So it’s neither the rich nor the poor nor the Democrats or the Republicans or anything like that. You have an enemy, it’s sin, Satan, Sheol. You have a Redeemer. Let Job encourage you to face him.
Imagine his suffering and remember that we are being counseled all the time through our sufferings.
CLOSING PRAYER Let’s pray together. Heavenly Father, the fact that we have you as a judge is good news for us, that you will judge every good thought, every evil thought. Lord, that we struggle this time because of our sin and shame and shifting blames. Lord, please counsel us to not blame shift or shame cast. Please help us to face the Son. Today, help us to repent of these things.
Help us to face you as your servant Job did, as you commend in the book of James, even for us today. May we leave here differently and able to counsel. learning to evoke the Son that you’ve been revealing since the very beginning. We pray all this in Christ’s perfect name. Amen.