No Hope for the Wicked

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Well, not too long ago, some of my family and I were sitting around, as you do, sharing memories and talking about funny stories. And somebody brought up the time that I had to intervene to keep my grandfather from mowing my yard. And I’ve told y’all stories.

I tell stories all the time about my Papa Louis. Passed away a few years ago. But this was a few years back when I was in the process of selling my house in Arkansas to move back here.

And he and my dad accompanied me on one of the trips over there. This is for company and a little help loading some things up. And we were loading some basic small things on the trailer.

Now, keep in mind, this man had just turned 90 years old about two months before. He was out there trying to mow my yard. Had to make him stop.

He’s 90 years old. I had to hide my lawnmower from him. And I don’t remember what he was trying to do next, but I remember having to hide the ladder.

He was that kind of person. We used to joke that he would live forever because when death came to find him, he wouldn’t be home. He’d be out running the streets.

Death wouldn’t be able to find him. Sadly, that was not the case. But we talk about him all the time and how he liked to stay busy.

And one of my life goals is to be like him. And I may have succeeded because Charlo looks at me all the time and says, I married Papa Louis. But he could not sit still.

And I’d talk to him on the phone and he would tell me all the things he had done that day. And I’d say, don’t you think you ought to rest sometime? And he would tell me, no rest for the wicked.

He’d say it just like that every time. No rest for the wicked. And after a few years of hearing that, I started to wonder, wait, is he calling himself wicked?

I was really confused by this. Number one, because I thought the expression was no rest for the weary. But also, does he realize he’s calling himself wicked?

And I don’t think he. . .

I don’t think that’s. . .

I don’t think he was doing that on purpose. He came to faith later in life. He was a Christian by then.

But I don’t think you’re out there being wicked. But he would say, no rest for the wicked all the time, talking about himself. And that saying of his came to mind this week and last week, as I was reading over the passage we’re going to look at today, because as we’ve been studying hope the last several weeks, and I’ve been reading through some of the many passages.

There’s no way we could have covered all of the passages in the Bible that deal with hope in this series. But as I’ve been reading and studying myself over some of these passages, I came to the one that we’re going to look at today, and that phrase came to mind, but not necessarily no rest for the wicked, but no hope for the wicked. If I was going to summarize the passage that we’re going to look at this morning, that’s really the point of it, is God saying that there is no hope for the wicked.

We’re going to be in Job chapter 8. Job chapter 8. If you would turn there with me in your Bibles, If you’re using a device of some kind, there’s a link in our bulletin that’ll get you there, or it’ll be on your screen.

But we’re going to look at this passage in Job chapter 8, and Job is kind of a notoriously difficult book to tackle in just a short setting, but I’m going to give it my best shot this morning to walk us through what’s happening here. We’re going to be in Job chapter 8, and we’re going to look at verses 8 through 17 here. And this is a man named Bildad, who is a friend of Job, when he’s speaking to Job about the suffering that Job is going through.

And he says, shall perish, whose confidence shall be cut off, and whose trust is a spider’s web. He leans on his house, but it does not stand. He holds it fast, but it does not endure.

He grows green in the sun, and his branches spread out in his garden. His roots wrap around the rock heap, and look for a place in the stones. You may be seated.

So just to summarize, and this is why I say it’s kind of a difficult book to tackle, is because it’s basically about the suffering of Job, a man who in spite of the fact he didn’t do anything to deserve it Job ended up losing his family he ended up losing all of his possessions he ended up being afflicted with some really painful sores and the rest of the book, 40 plus chapters deal with Job and his friends trying to sort through the theology of it trying to understand the evil that’s befallen Job and then Job, we talk sometimes on Wednesday nights about there being a difference between asking God questions and questioning God? Well, Job does the questioning God bit, which is kind of an accusatory thing.

And so God then cross-examines Job and puts him in his place before Job finally comes to the realization that God is sovereign and he can trust God even if he doesn’t understand why God allowed these things to happen. And ultimately, God blessed him back greater than all the things that he lost. And when we get here to chapter 8, it’s in the midst of these conversations. Now, Bildad is one of these friends, and if you read through the book of Job, you hear what his friends say, and they keep coming back to, it must be something you’ve done.

It must be your fault. Like one of our kids gets hit or knocked down or something. We’ll hear about it after children’s church or after Charlie gets out of school, and some teacher will be real apologetic.

I’m sorry they got hurt and it was an accident. It’s fine. We’ll just say it’s for something they’ve done and gotten away with, right?

that’s sort of their approach to job you know all you’re lying to yourself you think you’re so innocent but clearly all these bad things happen to you it must be because you’ve done something bad well they’re they’re wrong in that okay the bible teaches that god causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust which depending on whether you need rain or not that could be a good thing or a bad thing. But the point of the scriptures in that is that sometimes good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people and good to good and bad to bad. And it’s just part of living in a sinful world where the effects of sin affect us, whether we’ve done anything to cause that specific incident or not.

And sometimes the grace of God rubs off on people who don’t deserve it. And all of that’s just baked into the cake. So Bildad and the other friends are wrong in in the way they keep accusing Job and saying that he had to have done something wrong to cause all of this.

But it doesn’t mean that everything that they say is wrong. And that’s why I picked up in verse 8 instead of going to the beginning of the chapter, because I thought, I don’t necessarily want to spend a long time with you going over the things Bildad said that were wrong. And by the way, that doesn’t mean there are errors in the Bible.

When I say Bildad was wrong, the book of Job accurately records what Bildad said. It just so happens that Bildad was wrong. okay if you say something that’s incorrect and I write it down and say this is what they said was I incorrect or were you y’all awake if jimmy ann give if jimmy ann says two plus two is five and I write it down and I say to y’all jimmy ann said and I quote two plus two is five am I wrong or is jimmy ann wrong jimmy ann maybe I should have reversed that because it’s probably a bad move for me to get the whole church to say you were wrong.

Okay, so reverse that. Reverse that. I’m the one that said two plus two is fine.

All right. So the Bible in recording Bildad being wrong is not wrong. Okay, it’s accurate in recording Bildad being wrong.

But he’s not wrong about everything. That’s where we get to verse eight. And he begins to talk about what the ultimate fate is of people who reject God.

He’s wrong in saying that this applies to Job, but he’s right in addressing what happens to those who reject God. And the first thing that we need to understand from what he tells us, and looking over my notes again, from writing this message at the beginning of this week, I did not expect, I did not anticipate telling you this after having lost two family members in the last 24 hours. But he teaches us that life as we know it does not last forever.

And some days that’s more apparent than others. Life as we know it does not last forever. Especially when we’re young, we think nothing can ever hurt us, we’re invincible, everything’s just going to go on and be perfect, and every generation thinks they’re the ones that are never going to get old and they’re going to take the world by storm, and yet it happens to all of us eventually.

My birthday was Friday, and my kids asked me how old I was, and I said, I’m 18 again. Of course, I think that kind of confused them until I said, what, two times 18 is 36. You can do the math, right?

I’m 18 again. And then I realized I am no longer freshly out of high school or even freshly out of college. I’ve been an adult half my life.

And that kind of stinks because it means I’m getting old. And I know some of you are thinking, cry me a river, but I’m getting there just, I’m a little bit behind you, but I’m getting there too. It’s going to happen to all of us.

Life as we know it does not last forever. And it sort of speeds up as you get closer. I’ve begun to glimpse that and some of you have told me that.

But the world thinks everything’s going to go on the way it’s always been. Everything’s always going to be wonderful. And that’s not what the scriptures teach and that’s not what experience teaches.

Here, Bildad uses two different examples to make that point. That life is fleeting. Life changes.

Life ends. He points Job to the former generations. He says, look at people in history.

And there’s some debate over whether he means the generation that just preceded them and says, you know, look to their wisdom or experience. Some people say, well, he’s talking about in the days before Noah, when people lived hundreds and hundreds of years, look at them. And there’s some arguments to be made on both sides.

I really am not all that concerned with which specific group he’s talking about. He’s pointing and saying, look at those who’ve gone on before. Look at those who’ve gone on before.

And the point there is that every generation that had gone before them had eventually died. Whether he’s talking about their parents’ generation, those that they looked at initially that they were so strong. When we’re little, we think of our parents as superheroes.

They didn’t have superheroes then, but I’m sure they thought of their parents as strong and able to conquer anything. And then he says, look at the ravages of time and look at how life comes to an end. Or if you consider that he’s talking about these people that lived eight or nine hundred years.

That’s a long time to live. But even they eventually passed away. And he says, look at all of these that have gone before us.

And in contrast, he teaches in verse nine that their days on earth were a shadow. And he even says, we were born yesterday. Now that he does not mean literally that they were born yesterday.

That’s an expression to say, we’ve just been here a short time. I assume by this point that Job and his friends were probably at least middle-aged, to have as many kids as he had and to have amassed as much wealth as he had. And yet even that, he says, it was just a shadow.

The Bible says life is like a vapor. It’s here and then it’s not. But even looking, he says, look at these.

When he talks about inquiring of the former age and the things discovered by their fathers, he’s telling Job to look at the testimony of every previous generation and you’ll realize that we are no exception. Time does what time’s going to do, and eventually, time runs out for each of us. I was speaking at the Veterans Center last Sunday, and was talking about how eventually, if the Lord tarries His return, eventually, it was because of what I told you all last week about our hope can’t be in our circumstances.

I told them the same thing. I can’t put my hope in my health, because eventually, if the Lord tarries long enough, I’m going to get sick and not recover. Something’s going to happen and it’s going to lead to my death.

And that’s just part of it. Death eventually comes for all of us. No matter how good we have it, no matter how great things are going, eventually it comes to an end.

But he also, not just pointing to the former generations, he points to some plants that would have been familiar to them. In verses 11 and 12, he talks about the papyrus and the reeds and how in verse 11 they grow up and they flourish for a while. And for a while they appear strong and prosperous.

They look like they’re just going to live forever. They look like they’re that strong. But these plants, in reality, seem to have been fairly fragile from his description.

Because no matter how strong they appeared to be, no matter how robust they looked, they would die quickly if the conditions weren’t just right. Some of you have probably tried to raise plants like that, like I have. The ones you don’t want, they live forever, right?

The things you try to kill in your yard. But there are the desirable plants you want and you baby them. You treat them better than you treat your children sometimes, and yet you look at them funny and they die.

Anybody else had that kind of luck with gardening or is it just me? All right. Some of you know what I’m talking about.

These plants, if the conditions weren’t just right, if they didn’t have the marshy soil they needed, if they didn’t have this overabundance of water, no matter how strong they looked, they were just gone. And so Bildad here is reminding Job from experience. that life is fleeting from some things that they could look at and that they could relate to.

That life is fleeting. When we’re young, we feel like nothing can ever hurt us and we’re going to live forever. But eventually we all get mugged by reality.

Our lives can be uprooted in an instant. Many of you have been on the receiving end of those phone calls where everything changes in an instant. And even when life is good, it goes by quickly.

And so it’s a reminder to Job, and by extension it’s a reminder to us, that life does not go on forever. And so we can’t put all of our eggs in this basket of things being great in this life because it’s not going to last. And this realization, this realization leaves us searching for something to hope in. Now, everything we hope in besides God will ultimately let us down.

And I know up to now this is kind of a downer of a message. Like I’m getting depressed telling you some of these things. And I can feel like I’ve sucked all the energy out of the room.

It leaves us, you know what, it should be that way because this is serious business. But we’re not left without hope forever. The problem is, though, that everything we hope in besides God will ultimately let us down.

Now, Bildad described correctly what it looks like when people put their hope in other things besides God. In verse 13, he says, these are the paths of all who forget God. Everything they put their confidence in in the future is going to be cut off, he says in verse 14.

Everything is going to be cut off. Everything that we could put our hope in is going to be destroyed. It’s eventually not going to be there.

We talked about these things last week, our health, our finances, our relationships. Eventually, something’s going to happen. There’s going to be a financial catastrophe.

There’s going to be a bad report from the doctor. There’s going to be a death or something in a relationship. And those things that if we’re not careful and we put our hope in those things, our hopes are going to be dashed because they’re not going to be there.

Bildad says that these other things that they would put their trust in, they have the strength of a spider web. That’s what all the talk is about verse 14. Whose confidence shall be cut off and whose trust is a spider web.

Spider webs are irritating, but they’re not super strong. We have some of these orb spiders at the house. Beautiful to look at, but I don’t want them anywhere near me because I see them in my nightmares.

They’re these big spiders that have the color, they have the zigzags on their abdomen, whatever. That’s fine as long as they stay over there. But there’s this one that builds a web.

I’m thinking there are shorter places you could span, but for some reason it builds its web constantly between a fence post that I’ve put up and my workshop. We’re talking a good eight-foot span through the air. Now the problem is, stupid me, I forget that this ridiculous spider does it every night.

And it doesn’t matter how many times I walk through it, he’s just going to put it back up. But also the stupid spider doesn’t realize that no matter how much work he puts into it, and I’m sure he’s reinforcing his web at this point, that as soon as he puts it up, the idiot human that lives there is going to walk through it and do a little dance, right? But I don’t have to be running through there.

I don’t have to get out my machete. The only reason I have one of those is because we have this really troublesome But I don’t have to get a gun and blast my way through the spider web. I just walk through mine and my own business, and it’s gone.

And you’ve all experienced that. I can tell by the laughter, you’ve all experienced things like that. All that work that spider’s putting his trust in for his home and his dinner, and he catches me, and it’s gone.

Everything he put his trust in, everything he put his hope in, is just gone. And we think, well, silly spider for building it right there over and over. But Bildad says we do the same thing.

If we’re putting our trust in something other than God, it’s like putting our trust in the spider web. The spider, he makes his home there. It describes it in verse 15.

He leans on his house, but it does not stand. He holds it fast, but it does not endure. So he’s sitting up there having finished his web, thinking it’s going to provide him a home, thinking it’s going to provide him a meal, and then anything can tear it down.

even in some cases a strong wind can bring it down. It’s just not going to endure the storms of life. And then he returns to the example of the plant.

It’s kind of confused me for a little bit, the way he switches back and forth. But there was a Bible conference that was held here right after I came here where they taught us a new word. I think it was chiasm, where there’s a pattern where you’ll deal with A, B, C, and then C, B, A in a biblical text.

And I think that’s what he’s doing here. Plants, spider, spider, plants. So I think that’s what he’s doing here.

Because he returns to it being green. My first thought was, what kind of green spider is he talking about? But no, he’s gone back to talking about the plants.

Without the marshy, wet, rich soil for these plants to grow in, as he describes in verse 11, the plants themselves are without hope. And he describes in verse 16 how they kind of search in vain. The plant will grow green and spread out in the sun.

The branches spread out in the garden. The roots are wrapping around looking for some place to grow, some place to find the good soil, some place to find the moisture. Even in the rocks, looking for a place in the stones, but it’s not going to find it there.

So these plants are looking for a place to grow without ever finding it. And he says that’s what our hope is like if we’re putting it in something other than God. We’ll continue searching, searching, searching in a place that we’re never going to find it.

Looking for hope in something that was never designed to give us hope. That’s what it looks like when we look to someplace or someone other than God for our hope. We may find something that works for us momentarily, but eventually everything else is going to let us down, and sometimes in catastrophic ways.

Just like the plants are searching the rocks to put down roots, we look to things to provide us something that they cannot provide. Other people were not designed to give us hope. The people that we’re relying on to give us hope are looking for hope just like we are.

So all we’re doing is trying to tap into a pool of hopelessness. Our money is just a tool. Our health is fleeting.

Anything else that we can put our hope in was not designed to give us hope. There is no hope if we persist in rejecting God. If we look at verse 13, this is really the heart of the matter.

Bildad is correct when he says this is how things are going to end for those who reject God. There is no hope that remains for them because ultimately all those other things are gone. They’re like the spider web.

They’re like the dry roots. Eventually all those other things that we put our hope in are gone. So are the paths, verse 13, of all who forget God and the hope of the hypocrite shall perish.

Now to forget means just to mislay. This is kind of an absent-minded thing. This isn’t even an active rejection of God.

This is just I never had time for God. I never had time to concern myself with what He wants or who He is. God’s just always on the back burner.

But this word hypocrite, I don’t understand why it’s translated the way it is. Hypocrite is certainly part of the meaning of it, but really it’s just a description of the wicked. You can be wicked without being a hypocrite.

Some people are honest about their wickedness, right? The word here just describes the wicked. Apart from God, we’re cut off from all hope.

when we spend life rejecting God because of our love of wickedness, or if we spend life ignoring God because we’re just too busy, focused on other things. We ultimately come to the end of life and there is no hope for us. But we don’t have to be cut off from hope.

It doesn’t have to be that way. All throughout here, ultimately the realization that Job comes to is that his hope is in his relationship with the Lord. And it describes here the wicked and their hope being cut off.

But there’s another place in the Old Testament where it talks about something being cut off. It’s when the prophet Daniel described in chapter 9 how the Messiah would be cut off, but not for himself. Around the same time, the prophet Isaiah said that this Messiah would grow up before the Lord as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground.

And I don’t want to read too much into these passages, But I thought it was interesting that here Bildad talks about hopelessness and talks about a plant searching for hope somewhere. And then Isaiah describes the Messiah, our hope, as this plant out of dry ground. He’s the hope in the midst of hopelessness.

And Daniel says he was cut off for us. Where our hope was cut off, he was cut off for us. There is hopelessness.

There is nothing but hopelessness if we reject God. Because eventually all these things that we put our hope in will come to an end. But we do not have to leave this world without hope.

We do not have to endure in this world without hope. Because Jesus Christ came to provide us with the hope that we need. Hope that we cannot and will not find anywhere else.

See, it’s our sin that separates us from God and leaves us hopeless. But Jesus Christ took responsibility for our sins. For my sins and for yours.

Anything you’ve ever thought or done or said or not done that was displeasing to God, just think about some of the things that you’ve done. Jesus took responsibility for that. He took responsibility for every bit of it.

Those things that got in between us and God and left us hopeless and in despair and destined for eternity separated from Him in hell. Jesus Christ took responsibility for every bit of that. And He was cut off in our place.

he was nailed to the cross where he shed his blood and he died not to make a statement not to prove a point but to pay the debt that we owed and to bear all the punishment we deserved so because of jesus and only because of jesus we now have the hope that comes of a relationship with god you and I are separated from god because of our sin I know here we’re talking about the wicked keep in mind this is the wicked by god’s standards not ours you’d look around in a room like this and say well it’s full of pretty good people I think as far as I know by human standards but by God’s standards we’re all sinners we’re all cut off but there is hope because Jesus Christ paid the price for those things that stood between us and God