God-life: Job and You
God-life: Job and You I am reading the book of Job again in light of all that is happening over the world with the injustice of life and I am realising again that "life isn't fair but God is good".Job in the same way had to go through what He did before He finally saw that the God He had only heard rumour of, he could now see and know intimately. . Jesus death is a place fo life and death, in fact it is where they meet. Jesus had no guarantee thatHis life would be happy, but He knew that His life would be worth it." The book Of Job actually hit me very hard as I read what it says. He had friends who tried to give him counsel by reasoning with him about why all of this was happening.
There is nothing new under the sun. Allow God's life to meet you at your point of greatest suffering, it might be a relationship, a sickness, a death or a situation, but in everything, greater is He that is in you than anything that can come against you and ultimately, just as in Jesus, your will be more than a conqueror.Jesus saw through the cross to the life that it would give to mankind. In fact His friends guidance was on par with any wisdom that man could give today.Suffering is not from God, but it does reveal to us where our dependancy is and is a good test of character.
Job suffered terribly. It is also where our faith is tested.Suffering has been a part of life ever since the fall and yet God turns it around for our good.Maybe it's because bad things happen to all people, and if anything, that is exactly what God has promised us as believers.As Job put it,"Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. there is no God and life is a pathetic joke, It is in our suffering that we are most dependant on our life in Christ, for our life is hid with Christ in God. Job is one of the earliest books ever written, and yet not much has changed since then.Job had everything to lose at the beginning of the book and actually did lose everything in a very short period of time. God is powerless, or If we could focus on God and believe that He really does work all things out for our good, it may just be easier to understand why bad things happen to good people.(Hebrews 11) Abel believed God and he died, Enoch believed God and he did not die, Noah believed God and pretty much everybody else died. In our suffering too, we have a joining of our death, frailty and weakness with God's raighteousness, salvation and eternity in us.I also found it interesting that Job never once blamed Satan for his suffering, when that is what we do first and foremost. He will not give us more than we cna bear, but I think at times it sure will come close! The importance of the matter is that we believe and trust God in spite of it all. takes incredible faith. God is alive and at work in our lives but we do not always completely understand what he is doing. His "yolk is easy and His burden is light"The problem of suffering leads us to one of four conclusions, Job saw the centrality of God in the universe and his own life.Jesus had to trust God in His life as well as His death, He had to trust that He was the Son of God in spite of His creation rejecting Him and He had to trust God through the suffering of the cross, to know that His death would be worth it.Jesus was all man and all God, He was not part-man or part-god, He had to learn who He was as a Son of God, being made perfect through His suffering! How can Jesus who was perfect be made more perfect through His suffering? The fact is that we move fro faith to faith in our belief of God, our trust deepens as we recognise our need for God and revelation from Him in all that we go through. God is cruel and arbitrary and cares nothing for mankind, All that matters is if we believe, because then we can supernaturally bear all of the often overwhelming circumstances and situations of life by our simple faith in God. His suffering would be on par with those in Africa or Asia or with any third world nation like Mozambique or Madagascar, where there is terrible demoralizing poverty. The only thing that they had in common was that they all believed God and it pleased Him. Is it that Job did not have a concept of Satan? Every time Job contemplates his suffering, he asks, "Why God?". It is incredible that Satan had to ask God's permission to terrorise Job, he doesn't seem to have free reign, and also seems to be leashed, so that he can't take Job's life ultimately
