Job chapter 5. This chapter is
a continuation of the speech which began in chapter 4, verse
1, by Eliphaz, one of Job's three friends who came to visit him
in his trouble. I've heard it said Job's so-called
friends. No, the Bible says they were
Job's friends. They were men who came to Job
in his misery and sat with him seven days without speaking a
word. That's back in chapter 2 and
verse 13. Though they did not know Job's
situation, They did not understand his situation. They were just
operating in the life they had as his friends. They were doing
what we're all guilty of doing, this kind of forming our own
opinion of what the situation really is when we don't really
know. And they didn't really understand. They thought he had done something
awful for all this to be happening to him. But they came and sat with him,
did open their mouth for seven days. They didn't say, well, I'm not
going around him. After what I've heard, I'm staying
away from him. I don't want anything more to
do with him. No, they were his friends. They were his friends. And that's the difference between
friends and acquaintances. They went. sat in the ashes with
him seven days. Misunderstanding as they were,
these friends of Job made some very true and profound statements
through these chapters in the book of Job. And I want to read
us just four verses here in chapter 5, verses 8 through 11. Eliphaz says, I would seek unto
God, and unto God would I commit my cause, which doeth great things
and unsearchable, marvelous things without number, who giveth rain
upon the earth and sendeth waters upon the fields, to set up on
high those that be low, that those which mourn may be exalted
to safety. Verse 8, I would seek unto God. Some prefix
this verse with the words, but as for me, making it an affirmative
statement from Eliphaz personally. He's saying, but as for me, I
would seek unto God. If I were in your shoes, If it
were me in your shape, Job, my friend, I tell you what I would
do. I would seek unto God. And unto God would I commit my
cause. I'd commit my case to Him. It's
the only wise thing to do. In your shape, Job, the mercy
of men is not worth a lot. Only God can help. And then in verse 9, he says,
I'm talking about the true and living God who doeth great things
and unsearchable, unsearchable. Ecclesiastes 3.11 said, no man
can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to
the end. Just as certain as you think
you've got it figured out. what it is the Lord's doing,
I can promise you He's not doing that. And I try to steer clear of these
folks that are so religiously up the ladder until they can
tell you all about what the Lord's in and what He's not in and what
He's doing and what He's not doing. No, He's bigger than that. He's bigger than you knowing
all about what He's doing. Absolutely. Romans 11, 33, oh,
the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of
God. How unsearchable are his judgments
and his ways past finding out. Verse nine says they're marvelous
things, things to be marveled at and without number There's
no end to the marvelous and great workings of our God. Job, in
the 37th chapter, in verse 5, he said, God thundereth marvelously
with his voice. Great things doeth he which we
cannot comprehend. Then he says in verse 10, and
this is what I want to talk about just a few minutes, the blessing
of rain. the blessing of rain. And wouldn't
you know it would be raining a little bit today when I'm going
to talk about this. And that's all right. The blessing
of rain. Verse 10, who giveth rain upon
the earth and sendeth waters upon the fields. Now, when you get up in the morning
and get ready to go out and you discover it's pouring rain, The first thing you consider
is not what a blessing this is. No, your first consideration
is what an inconvenience this is. I hadn't counted on this. I was hoping it'd be dry. And
so you get your raincoat and you get your umbrella or you
just skip all that like I do and you just run to the car. And you start out to try to get
where you're going without getting soaking wet. But when we consider
the setting of this text and what is said and Job and his
friends and where he lived, Job and his friends under that hot
Eastern sun with the earth parched. and go for months without a drop
of rain. They knew what a blessing of
God it is when God waters the earth with rain. One writer said about this verse
of scripture, and I want to read you this. This is from the pulpit
commentary. Here's what he said. To the dweller
in the parched regions of southwestern Asia, rain is the greatest of
all blessings and seems the greatest of all marvels. When for months
and months together, the sun has blazed all day long out of
a cloudless sky, when the heaven that is over his head has been
brass, and the earth that is under him iron. A great despair
comes upon him, and that it should ever rain
again seems almost an impossibility. Where is the rain to come from?
From the cruel, glaring sky which has pursued him with its hostility
week after week and month after month, or from that parched earth
in which, as it seems, no atom of moisture is left. When God
at length gives rain, he scarcely believes his eyes. What? The blessed moisture is once
more descending from the sky and watering the earth and quickening
what seemed dead and turning the desert into a garden. All
Eastern poetry is full of the praises of rain, of its blessedness,
of its marvelousness and of its quickening power. Very naturally,
Eliphaz, in speaking of God's marvelous works of mercy, mentions
rain. So he talks about what a blessing
this is, the rain. Now in Job's country, for it to rain, Water has to
be carried by God. Now think about this. Some of you are old enough to
have had to carry water a little bit when you were young. For
it to rain in Job's country, water has to be carried by God
from the Mediterranean Sea several hundred miles and then be poured
out on the fields. How can God do that? How does
God do that? I said He carries the water. Well, He don't use buckets. He carries it. Well, how heavy
is it? How much does water weigh that
God must carry to give rain? For one inch of rain to fall
on one square mile of farmland during the night, that's 17,377,000 gallons of
water that God moves in a night without a bucket. Or if you want to break it down
to to weight 144,735,360 pounds of water. That's almost
145 million pounds. That's heavy. That's heavy. Well,
then we think how does God get it up there in the sky, out of
the sea, and move it all these hundreds
of miles to pour it back out on the crops, on the fields.
Does God have angels with water buckets dipping it up? No, that's
not it. And if water is all that heavy,
how does it stay up there until God gets ready to dump it out?
All these are questions with no answer but God. Well, how does it get up there?
It's by evaporation. You all know what that means. And I'm not trying to be funny.
I'm just trying to talk to you about how great God is. Evaporation
means that water stops being water for a little while so it can go up instead of down. Now, you never have spilt a glass
of water And it goes to the ceiling, and it goes to the floor. But
God, our God, through evaporation, takes it up, pulls it up. I can't explain that, and I don't
really care to hear anybody that can, you know. But it's God. It's God. And when it goes up,
and He carries it hundreds of miles, how does it get back down? That we call condensation. At
the right time, in the right place, it starts becoming water
again. Only God can do that. Only God. Having come up out of the sea. It's saltwater, you know, saltwater
would destroy the crops. So before God sends it down,
he takes the salt out of it. All of these are things that
only God can do. Now I'm sure science has a simple
explanation for all of this, but I'd rather just believe what
this Bible says, what this verse said, that God does it. That
God does it. I remember years ago when the space
program was so You know, so in the news, they're sending up
satellites and all this kind of stuff. And every time it rained
a few days, somebody would say, Oh, it messes up the atmosphere.
Every time they send up one of those Sputnik things or whatever,
you know, they had all kinds of things. Wasn't that real intelligent? NASA don't govern God's work. It rains when God says it'll
rain. It's his work. We used to watch those old westerns,
and the Indian would do the rain dance. You know, it'd be hot
and dry and scorched and crops drying up. They believed that
would make it rain if we got this Indian guy to do the Rain
dance. And he'd do it every day. He'd
do that rain dance every day for weeks and weeks till it rained. And then when it rained, they'd
conclude that it worked. You know, got it to rain. No, it was God. It was God. It's amazing how people will
take the glory which belongs unto our God. I read one time
about a certain primitive tribe of people in some jungle, and
every morning their chief would come out of his tent and he would
point to the rising sun in the east with all the people watching. When he pointed to the sun, then
he would do like this all the way over to the west as if he
were commanding the sun. to make its way over and set
in the West. And those people believed that
the Son did that because He commanded it to do it. Isn't that strange? No, it's the work of Almighty
God. And when God is ready for it
to reign, He don't just dump millions of pounds of water all
at once. That would crush everything. That would destroy the crops.
It'd crush buildings. It'd kill us. But God dribbles, just dribbles,
millions of gallons of water in little drops to sustain His creation. He is
so sovereign in this as in all things. It is God who determines
if it will rain, where it will rain, when it will
rain, how much it will rain. And then He declares in His Word
that in His time it rains on both the just and the unjust. That's how big and how great
our God is. People make plans for a special
event and say, Oh, we've worked so hard on this. I sure hope
it don't rain. Let it rain just about 12 hours. Even if it's been dry for a month,
let it rain 10 or 12 hours. People start saying, I'm sick
of rain. And somebody else says, I hate
rain. But imagine the old farmer who's
got everything he owned invested in his fields. And day by day, he's watching
the plants dry up in the ground parch. And when it rains, he
looks out his window and says, thank you, Lord. for your blessings
on me. There's so many ways to look
at this subject of rain. We've talked about it as a blessing,
the divine prerogative. We could have looked at it scripturally
from the perspective of God's purpose, the divine purpose.
As in Noah's day, when the rain was for judgment, Then later in the wilderness
for the Israelites, God gave rain and He gave water for the
blessing. We could have looked at it in
its symbolism of spiritual blessing. There are numerous references
in the scriptures to the early and the latter rain. You find
that in the book of Deuteronomy. You find it in Proverbs. You
find it in Jeremiah, Hosea, Joel, Zechariah. And then in the New
Testament, we find it in the book of James chapter five and
verse seven. And I'll just read this verse.
We'll be through in a minute. Be patient. Therefore, brethren
under the coming of the Lord, behold, in other words, look
at this. Now the husband that is the farmer
waited for the precious fruit of the earth and have long patience
for it. until he received the early and
latter rain. In those eastern countries there
were two rainy seasons and the crop depended on it. The early
rain when the plants were just getting coming up and getting
established and set and growing and then after season of dryness,
then there was the latter rain, where right at the end it would
really put on that vegetables or fruit and produce the good
crop. In the spiritual sense, the early
rain being the rain of blessing in regeneration. When the Lord
first came into our heart, gave new life, spiritual life, Relationship
to Him. We begin to grow. Begin our journey. And then the latter rain is the
measure of God's blessing in His faithfulness all along the
way. And He'll be faithful to sustain
us to the end, the early and the latter rain. But I wanted
to share with us this morning Just this specific thought from
this one verse in the book of Job chapter 5, who giveth rain
upon the earth and sendeth waters upon the fields. We couldn't
survive without it. God is gracious. He's merciful
to us. All right. The psalm says repeatedly, O
give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, his mercy endureth
forever. Let's stand together.