Trust in Jesus

Job 1:1 There once was a man named Job who lived in the land of Uz. He was blameless – a man of complete integrity. He feared God and stayed away from evil.

Job 42:5 I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes.

So in my Bible reading plan we have been on a journey through Job. And what a wild ride it is.

Job is a hard book. It’s strange and different.

In Job, I have seen sides of God that if I’m being honest I’m not sure I like or can reconcile with the American Standard Version we have been sold here in the good ole US of A.

I mean isn’t God there to cater to my desires, hear me when I call, answer all of my selfish, needy prayers with an overarching yes?

How does that God match up with the God in Job?

You know God, the creator of heaven and earth, along with his Son – the Crucified and Risen Jesus who has all authority in heaven and on earth. The Supreme One. The Comforter (which the name implies that we will require comfort). The One who is Sovereign over everything… even the painful, messy parts.

You see, we all live in a world full of pain and loss. It’s not theoretical. If it hasn’t hit your life in some way. It will. That’s not being negative. It’s just being honest.

Death, pain and loss will hit all of our lives in one way or another. (I was actually writing this when I learned about another devestating loss.)

The question becomes do I have a theology about God when it does. And if I do have a theology does it match up with the Bible? 

You see God doesn’t change to fit my circumstances. My thinking about Him must change to align with Who He really is. That whole “renewing your mind thing….” 

Romans 12:2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. 

The story of Job has plenty of lessons. I’ll just touch on a few.

1. What do I believe about God when He allows Satan to mess with my stuff? 

Job lost his servants, his animals and then his children. And in Job 1:20-22 he worships God. 

Job 1:20-22 ESV Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.

2, What do I believe about God when He allows Satan to mess with my health? Job gets “sore boils” on his body, from head to toe. Ouch!! And in Job 2:8-10 Job responds to his wife’s request to “Curse God and die!” “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” In all of this Job did not sin with his lips. Wow! 

One powerful lesson I learned during this trip through Job is to stop looking for what Job did to deserve what was happening to him.

Don’t be Job’s friends, convinced he did something to deserve all this. The Bible makes this clear, he didn’t do anything to deserve this suffering. (Job 1:8, Job 2:3 tells us he was blameless and upright) Now listen, blameless doesn’t mean he was perfect. But that nothing in his life caused the current circumstances he found himself in. 

Sometimes you can be doing all the right things… and all the wrong things happen.

What then? 

Bob Sorge in his book “Pain, Perplexity and Promotion” says 

“Sometimes God is totally perplexing. God operates in a dimension that totally surpasses our human analysis. And here’s a signature of God’s ways: He loves to redeem impossible messes.”

There is so much to mine here… but I’ll close with the verses I started with.

Job started with a fear and knowledge about God and ended with a first-hand revelation of God and also of himself. 

“I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

Job learned things about himself and about his God that changed his life forever and for the better. Think about it, most theologians believe that Job is the 1st written book of the Bible, one of the earliest human records we have. If this is true, it would seem that Job had very little written about God to go on and yet he kept on talking to God. He was hungry to know God beyond sacrifices and living a good moral life.

And so Job set out to know a God he didn’t have a Bible to help explain.

Here we are with The Holy Bible available in over 3000 versions and 2000 languages, and are we hungry to not just know about God but to actually, intimately know Him?

For us Job is not our only example of suffering. 

We have the ultimate example in Jesus.

Job was a man who suffered. Jesus is the God who chose to suffer so we could know HIM!

Suffering was the necessary proof of His love to us and proved the reality of His love and obedience for His Father. 

Will I be like Job and even much more like Jesus?

Will I be one who no matter what the circumstances of my life look like be the one who loves Jesus and obeys Him?

Will I worship God in the worst of times and not just in the best?

Job is a picture of God and His beautiful Grace who meets us in the midst of our sufferings. 

That may not mean He intervenes to make everything all better. 

But He will come, right into our suffering, stooping down into our mess.

He may not give me the answer why… but He will give me the Answer… and it’s HIM!

We have been taught to avoid suffering at all cost and yet…

Jesus is the God-man who entered and endured pain and suffering on a cross to show us how.

If your theology doesn’t include how to suffer, it’s lacking and hollow.

The cross of Jesus literally beckons us into His suffering, knowing that He is the God who suffers with us.

Tim Keller said “…the deepest revelation of the character of God is in the weakness, suffering, and death of the cross. This is the ‘exact opposite of where humanity expected to find God.’”

If we will allow our suffering to work in us what God wants, our eyes will move off of us and our problems and onto Jesus.  If we will suffer well, we will do exactly that, find God. 

We will see Jesus in His glory.

 And the question will change from why me? To why You? Why would you enter this world of evil? 

Why would you willingly go through loss, weakness, hardship, sorrow, pain and death? 

Why would You do this for me?

And we will find the truth

That He did and He did it for love, for the joy set before Him. 

Like Job, my prayer for you and me is that we come out of suffering with a new vision of this God and His ways. He truly is God with us. 

And that we come out looking more and more like Christ.

“So suffering is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It is not only the way Christ became like and redeemed us, but it is one of the main ways we become like him and experience his redemption. And that means that our suffering, despite its painfulness, is also filled with purpose and usefulness.”

Let’s suffer well….