We often don’t Have a Clue!
Job 12:2 “No doubt you are the people, And wisdom will die with you!
Life is full of Tragedy
Recently, life in our corner of the world has been filled with tragedy. God has been good to us personally, but people that we know have experienced unusual accidents illnesses and sorrows I have noticed that most Christians consider it their moral duty to figure out why God has caused or allowed these tragedies Of course, normally Christians think it is because the people involved have “missed the mark” somewhere in their relationship with God.
Job’s Friends
Job had friends like that. Job lost his family, his possessions and his health. He had three friends that came to comfort him. They sat for seven days and seven nights without saying a thing. That was where their wisdom stopped because once they started telling Job why he was being afflicted, they proved that they didn’t have a clue.
I have always thought that if God is going to chastise or correct those who believe in Him, He needs to tell us why He is doing that or it won’t do any good. Good parents usually tell their children what they have done wrong before they spank them—excuse me—that is old-fashioned. However, not all chastisement is negative, that is, it is not always the result of doing something wrong. Sometimes it is to make us better. A good athlete is disciplined. He works hard and we often hear the phrase, “no pain, no gain.” The athlete who undergoes that kind of chastisement or discipline is not being punished, he is being trained to be better than others. Chastisement is discipline and that discipline can be positive instead of negative. Chastisement is not penal punishment in the New Testament. Chastisement is for the believer while punishment, retribution and vengeance are going to be inflicted on unbelievers. The believer’s penal punishment has been born by Christ at the cross.
Job’s Self-Righteousness
Job’s problem was that he didn’t know why he was being “punished.” Of course, he wasn’t being punished. He was being disciplined and the discipline was the result of being righteous. But nobody told Job. He was a testimony to Satan who didn’t understand a person like Job who would worship God when things were going well as well as when everything seemed to be falling apart. Job said a lot of things that indicated he was pretty satisfied with himself and his first three “comforters” thought he was self-righteous. But even he didn’t have a clue as to what was happening.
Elihu, the last man to “comfort” Job, seems to come out of nowhere. But he is perplexed by one thing; and that was that Job justified himself rather than God (Job 32:2). All four men say things that most of us have said in our counsel and some of us have said these things in our sermons. But all five men were ignorant about what was going on—that included Job. Usually that is the case with us. We would be a lot wiser if we would sit with those who need comforting and if we would stay silent because only God knows the reasons why.
Things that we Know For Certain
The older I get, the less I know for certain. I wish I were still as smart as I was when I was 20 years old and had newly come to faith in the Lord. Things were a lot simpler then. But as I have gotten older, I realize that what we see is NOT always what we get. The Lord does things we don’t understand and unless we have the insight of a Peter when Ananias and Sapphira lied to the Holy Spirit in Acts 5, there might be wisdom in just keeping quiet and praying for those who are suffering.
We may not know for certain why some people go through deep waters, but I do know for certain that we are not ready to live until we are ready to die. We are not ready to die until we have been reconciled to God by accepting the forgiveness of sins offered through the sacrifice of the Lord at the cross. Then we need to have enough confidence in God to let God be God in any and all circumstances of life.
Bruce Collins
Meditation for the week of July 6, 2014