Job - How would you handle it (Part 7)

This post is part 7 of a series of 9, feel free to read the rest by following the links.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and 9.

God begins his chat with Job by kind of declaring His greatness. He does this by challenging Job about his knowledge of things only God knows and about doing things only God can do. At the end of His list of questions He says to Job, ok mate, you asked me some tough questions, answer mine and I will answer yours. Fair deal you might say. Job sees this for what it is, God is making a point, if we can not see all things then we can not know what will come from certain events. We may not like things at the time but we can not see the future positives God can work from these disadvantages. Job rightly defers to God and realises he does not know what God has in store.

Still God is not finished though, He lists His greatness and power to Job asking if he dares challenge Almighty God. God who can do anything to anything rounds off on Job by asking Him if he is brave enough to face up to God with his accusations. At this point Job knows the score, he has realised his mistake and knows he needs to put it right. He tells God that he knows what he has done wrong, he knows he has no idea of what he was talking about. Job says that after seeing with his own eyes and hearing with his own ears the glory and wonder of God he is dying of embarrassment and that he will never do it again.

Now when thinking of doing this series of posts there was one major point I just couldn't understand. Why on Earth would God allow His main man to be torn asunder and destroyed by the enemy. Why did God not protect Job and throw the devil off his game. This point troubled me for sometime and is in part the reason why this series got slightly derailed. I have however been thinking about it a lot and I think I have reached a conclusion on this. The fact that God allowed this to happen is not the point to be focusing on at all, what we need to think about is that no matter what we have or do not have we should be thankful to God for it. God does not owe us anything, we have no reason to expect anything from God. Yet time and time again He gives to us, He even gave us eternal life through Christ. The point is that even when everything is against us and it seems as if God is doing nothing we should still be thankful. We came from nothing with nothing and so anything we do have is a cause for rejoicing. Even if we lose everything we have in reality we have lost nothing since we had nothing to begin with.

The thing is though that when we are in situations like Job's we tend to only look on the short term. If we do look long term it tends to be backwards to the past. What we need to realise is that God works on time scales of His own. In His time he will bring His plans to fruition. All we need to do is keep our focus on God through all things. Many times the enemy will attack us in our lives, we have to stand firm and trust in Gods defences and plans. Wherever He places us is where He wants us to be and there we must do His work.

Next time I intend to look at God's response to the Job comforters.