By Allen F. Harrod
Job 19:25-27
Paul Azinger was a popular professional golfer a few years back that had just won the PGA championship and had ten tournament victories to his credit. Then, at the age of 33 he was diagnosed with cancer. He recorded his feelings about the experience, "A genuine feeling of fear came over me — I could die from cancer. But then another reality hit me even harder: I'm going to die eventually anyway, whether from cancer or something else. I am definitely going to die. It is just a question of when. But everything I had accomplished in golf became meaningless to me. All I want to do is live."
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Then he remembered something that Larry Moody (who teaches a Bible study on the pro tour) said to him: "Zinger, we are not in the land of the living going to the land of the dying, we are in the land of the dying trying to get to the land of the living."
When I read that story, I thought about that ancient question of Job, "If a man die will he live again?" (Job 14:14). That is not only the oldest question of philosophy; it is the most important question we can ask ourselves today. And who better than Job to ask it! Out of this ancient book breaks the challenging question that we all have to face —
"Why were we born?""What is the meaning of suffering?" "How shall we face death?"and "Where will we spend eternity?"
Here is a man robbed of almost everything precious to him, stripped of his human dignity, reduced to suffer in the ashes of pain, while his estranged friends sit pitiless in judgment over his condition, and his wife turns against him. Even God seems to be strangely silent to his appeals. It appears that he will die without a witness to his noble life. If there were only someone who could tell his story, someone who could record his life in a book, someone left to etch on his epitaph a worthy word. But there seems to be none. Yet out of his swollen and parched mouth there peals a poem of praise. "I know that my Redeemer lives, ..." It is a trip that all of us must one day take unless Jesus comes. So, on this morning, a day that the world calls Easter, the day we call Resurrection Day, what word to a world that is hurting, does the ancient suffer bring?