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The sermon portrays God’s contention with humanity not primarily as hostile anger but as merciful, corrective love. For believers, trials reveal and strengthen grace, expose sin, cultivate humility, and conform them to Christ’s sufferings. For seeking sinners, conviction is necessary because Christ does not heal a wound while self-righteousness remains intact. The sermon concludes with a strongly substitutionary and Christ-centered appeal: salvation, healing, and life are found entirely in Jesus Christ crucified, not in human merit or religious labels.
Theological center: God sovereignly uses affliction to sanctify His people and awaken sinners to salvation wholly accomplished through the crucified Christ.
Applications: Examine trials for hidden sin · Seek deeper repentance · Look to Christ crucified · Consider God’s loving purpose
Primary texts: Job 10:2 · 2 Corinthians 13:14
“Shew me wherefore thou contendest with me.” Job 10:2 AND will God contend with man? If God be angry, can He not take away the breath of his nostrils, and lay him low in the dust of earth? If the heart of the Almighty is moved unto hot displeasure, can He not speak in His anger, and will not the soul of man sink into the lowest hell? Will God contend—will He set himself in battle array against His creature? And such a creature?—the creature of an hour—a thing that is not, that is here today and gone tomorrow? Will the Almighty contend with the nothingness of man? Will the everlasting God take up the weapons of war, and go out to fight against the insect of a day? Well might we cry out to Him, “After whom is my Lord the king gone forth? After a dead dog: after a flea?” Will You hunt the partridge on the mountains with an army, and will You go forth against a gnat with shield and spear? Shall the everlasting God who faints not, neither is weary, at whose reproof the pillars of heaven’s starry roof tremble and start—will He become combatant with a creature? Yet our text says so. It speaks of God’s contending with man. Ah, surely, my brethren, it needs but little logic to understand that this is not a contention of anger, but a contention of love. It needs, I think, but a short sight for us to discover that if God contends with man, it must be a contention of mercy. There must be a design of love in this. If He were angry, He would not condescend to reason with His creature, and to have a strife of words with him, much less would He put on His buckler and lay hold on His sword, to stand up in battle and contend with such a creature as man. You will all perceive at once that there must be love even in this apparently angry word, that this contention must, after all, have something to do with contentment, and that this battle must be, after all, but a disguised mercy, but another shape of an embrace from the God of love. Carry this consoling reflection in your thoughts while I am preaching to you, and if any of you are saying today, “Shew me wherefore thou contendest with me,” the very fact of God contending with you at all, the fact that He has not consumed you, that He has not smitten you to the lowest hell, may thus, at the very outset, afford consolation and hope. Now, I propose to address myself to the two classes of persons who are making use of this question. First, I shall speak to the tried saint, and then I shall speak to the seeking sinner, who has been seeking peace and pardon through Christ, but who has not as yet found it, but on the contrary, h…