July 11th, 2024
20 Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshipped. 21 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.” 22 In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.
It isn't normal for us to ask God in prayer to test our hearts and our faith. We would rather spend that time in thanksgiving or by making personal requests to Him. However, whether we want it or not, testing is the normal experience of every true follower of God. Our passage today invites us into one of these experiences. It is taken from the book of Job which details for us a blameless and upright man whom God had decided was worthy of testing. Let's look at how he responded to such a trying time in his life and see how we might learn something from his own heart and confession.
We meet Job in our passage right after he had received news that that all of his servants had been murdered, his livestock destroyed and his children killed beneath the collapse of a house. In a sense, everything Job had at the beginning of the chapter had now been taken away. And we know that all of this had come from the divine permission of the Lord. It was no accident and no surprise. God had orchestrated a full-scale disaster to emerge in Job's life. It really is a jarring story to read and take in. Some might insinuate that the Lord is cruel for allowing Satan to wreak such havoc on Job’s life. To take everything away within an instant without any forewarning, without any natural cause or explanation feels all too ruthless, and some might say evil. Yet, we are in the midst of learning something new about God or, in the least, we are unlearning our previously held notions about Him and how we think He should function.
We might have painted God to be some kind of guardian angel watching above, only there to be at our beck and call. Somehow only to be responsible for all the good and blessings in our life, and the tragedies must only be from the devil. Well, we see such a case today where we come to find out that God was the one who had permitted the devil to devastate Job's life. How can we reconcile this in our own hearts? Job was blameless, upright in character and a man who feared the Lord. Why would God engage with one of His own children in such a way? While we may feel justified questioning God's heart and motivation, we will certainly find ourselves on the wrong side of the equation. The tragic mistake in our theology is that we had only pegged God to be the fun father who always gives gifts but not the good father who is also a teacher.
The Lord holds many titles, and it is within the boundaries of His nature to perfectly deal with every one of His children. In this case, the Lord disciplines and tests the one whom He loves (Hebrews 12:6). And even if we conclude that we do not have any sins worthy of God's discipline and testing, the Lord who sees all and knows all may have a different perspective. Our problem is that we are not capable of accurately judging our own heart. We may only assess the surface of our character and overall goodness of our attitude but we will never examine and inspect as intently as the Lord would. The Father is the great gardener and whatever branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit, He will cut off and burn away. And if the branch does bear fruit, that He will prune and test and discipline to bear more fruit (John 15:1-2).
We must see that the hand of God is always at work in our hearts doing whatever is necessary to make us into His own image. If He not be allowed to test the strength of His own workmanship, how might we know how strong we really are? How might we know that God has taught us anything? How can we know that we have gained what is needed? We shall never know if the soldier is indeed a great man of valour unless he is placed in the war to prove it. We must be tried and tested in the fire to show ourselves that surely God is and will be the anchor of our souls. The fire will not disprove our faith rather, it will refine it and strengthen it. There is a good taking place even when we cannot comprehend what the Father is doing.
It is within this heavenly perspective that Job responds. His immediate reaction is not to curse the Lord. Instead, he is a man of lowliness and mournful humility. A man that did not choose to fight but in a sudden moment chose surrender. While Jacob, in the book of Genesis, chose to wrestle with God throughout the night, Job sits and accepts the divine decree applied to him. He understands something of the nature of God that encompasses His perfect sovereignty. He is not only a God who gives and neither is He only a God who takes away. Somehow Job believed that He is the Lord of both. God balances in perfect harmony the ability to bless us and the ability to take from us. We have no right to stand in His way when He takes just as we have no right to demand His blessing. Yet in both circumstances we are called to respond the same, blessed be the name of the Lord. Take inventory of your own life today. Would you be able to sing the same song in the middle of your trial?