Job - Pt. 4

 

Now there was a day when his sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother’s house, and there came a messenger to Job and said, “The oxen were plowing and the donkeys feeding beside them, and the Sabeans fell upon them and took them and struck down the servants with the edge of the sword, and I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was yet speaking, there came another and said, “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants and consumed them, and I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was yet speaking, there came another and said, “The Chaldeans formed three groups and made a raid on the camels and took them and struck down the servants with the edge of the sword, and I alone have escaped to tell you.” While he was yet speaking, there came another and said, “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother’s house, and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you.” (Job 1:13-19 ESV).

 

While we are still in the beginning of this very complex book of the Bible, our reading tells us of the calamities that fall on Job. Job loses nearly everything dear to him. He is put into a position where he has every earthly reason to give up on God. We will see later (cf. Job 13:24) that God appears to act like an enemy, like someone who has betrayed him. It is a clear revelation that there is this sense in which God must allow these temporary and tragic interruptions in his goodness if he is to prove the reality of our relationship with him. This is the case because a relationship with God for God’s sake is the only kind of relationship that will save us. As I wrote yesterday, the true character of our faith, whether we have faith at all, is exposed in this kind of crucible. This is how we arrive at the answer to our first question of “Who is ultimately in control of our journey?” It is God.

 

With this answer in mind, we can move to the second question (which is usually our first one): “Why is this happening to me?” I am reminded of a wonderful quote from C. S. Lewis. Although he was not discussing the book of Job, he expressed this conundrum well as he journeyed through the collapse of his faith:

 

If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which “took things into account” was not faith but imagination. . . . It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labelled “Illness,” “Pain,” “Death,” and “Loneliness.” I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now that it matters, I find it didn’t.

 

When our rope fails we must have an answer to why it did so. Knowing the character of God and having received the bounty of His grace in the past, how could we be abandoned at such a time as our present trial? The answer is simplest in the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans: And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28 ESV). Everything that God directs in our life is a part of His design to bring good to us. Of course, that does not appear comforting as the pain of trial is always at the very limit of our perception of our ability to bear it. However, as we are going to see in Job it all absolutely works for Job’s good.

 

When God allows extreme and inexplicable suffering, when he appears to treat those who love him as if he hates them, the book of Job teaches that God is delivering us from our trivialization of God as a means to our ends and giving us opportunity, in the midst of unhidden and public grief (cf. Job 1:20), to worship God as God, for his own sake, regardless of any secondary blessing we might gain or lose. Such worship is painful, costly, and deeply honoring to God as the LORD and not a pet deity. Without these tragic experiences, even the best among us will slowly and unconsciously drift away from Job’s costly and beautiful worship in the first chapter of this book. In suffering, God is saving us, delivering us into a relationship with him where he is actually God and Lord. And, that after all, is the best “good” to be experienced.