Dizerner
Well-known member
On the surface the book of Job seems to be a story in a kind of play format exploring our difficulties in harmonizing the lack of justice we observe in the world conflicting with the perfect justice of God that we know he must exercise to be truly righteous. Somewhere we feel the disconnect so strongly between what we observe and what we ourselves would calculate as proper justice, we feel the need to find the answer. But there is more to what’s going on than just this surface reading; do we really even know why we ourselves feel that disconnect? We make assumptions that we have the ability to even judge and understand goodness and rightness, but we are all fallen creatures with hidden idols, deceptions, and misplaced values that don’t honor and value what God does and is, and don’t make him the primary source of value.
At the end of the story after experiencing subjectively what Job feels to be a complete miscarriage of justice and an act of undeserved cruelty, Job is disciplined and chastised with no logical explanation for why. At this point he finally humbles himself and accepts correction without an answer, and is then fully restored to God and able to even help his friends be restored also, who had also received correction. The depths and layers of the lessons we can learn from Job are an illustration of our proper response to any situation we find ourselves, avoiding the pitfalls of sinful traps and tendencies, and an understanding of how we should apply grace in our relation to God, so that we can find joy in valuing and receiving who God is in the way God ordains, otherwise we are in rebellion setting ourselves up in opposition to God. So the whole lesson of Job can be considered a map to righteous living, and help us hone the proper attitudes.
The frustrating thing that jumps out to us is how Job never does receive an answer and it’s very hard for us to see the reasons why God is doing this. We are given an assumed behind-the-scenes reason for Job’s trials that Job was not privy to, and yet even with that many people feel the story treats Job as nothing more than a trivial bar-room bet who is treated unfairly simply because God is acting something like a bully. If we approach the story on the more solid ground of first accepting the purity of God’s character as a presupposed foundation, we can see that God did not allow this haphazardly just for a lark, but God was actually interacting with Job in the best possible way for Job to refine him and bring him closer, most likely in answer to Job’s attempts to come closer to God. Job fails in many ways to respond correctly at first, but he does pull through in the end.
So what we want to look at is, what were God’s intentions, what were the mistakes Job fell into, and how could Job have passed his test as well as he could. These tests and attitudes apply to our life in any situation and the same principles are repeated for all of us. Job’s end was merciful and his faith was approved as James tells us, but Job could have had an even more merciful end than he did, and Job ended up making things quite a bit harder than they needed to be because he resisted the Lord’s working on him. So let’s examine the following things: God’s ground rules, God’s objective, Job’s pitfalls and distractions, and the right responses Job could have pursued instead.
At the end of the story after experiencing subjectively what Job feels to be a complete miscarriage of justice and an act of undeserved cruelty, Job is disciplined and chastised with no logical explanation for why. At this point he finally humbles himself and accepts correction without an answer, and is then fully restored to God and able to even help his friends be restored also, who had also received correction. The depths and layers of the lessons we can learn from Job are an illustration of our proper response to any situation we find ourselves, avoiding the pitfalls of sinful traps and tendencies, and an understanding of how we should apply grace in our relation to God, so that we can find joy in valuing and receiving who God is in the way God ordains, otherwise we are in rebellion setting ourselves up in opposition to God. So the whole lesson of Job can be considered a map to righteous living, and help us hone the proper attitudes.
The frustrating thing that jumps out to us is how Job never does receive an answer and it’s very hard for us to see the reasons why God is doing this. We are given an assumed behind-the-scenes reason for Job’s trials that Job was not privy to, and yet even with that many people feel the story treats Job as nothing more than a trivial bar-room bet who is treated unfairly simply because God is acting something like a bully. If we approach the story on the more solid ground of first accepting the purity of God’s character as a presupposed foundation, we can see that God did not allow this haphazardly just for a lark, but God was actually interacting with Job in the best possible way for Job to refine him and bring him closer, most likely in answer to Job’s attempts to come closer to God. Job fails in many ways to respond correctly at first, but he does pull through in the end.
So what we want to look at is, what were God’s intentions, what were the mistakes Job fell into, and how could Job have passed his test as well as he could. These tests and attitudes apply to our life in any situation and the same principles are repeated for all of us. Job’s end was merciful and his faith was approved as James tells us, but Job could have had an even more merciful end than he did, and Job ended up making things quite a bit harder than they needed to be because he resisted the Lord’s working on him. So let’s examine the following things: God’s ground rules, God’s objective, Job’s pitfalls and distractions, and the right responses Job could have pursued instead.