A Faith Like Job

 for those of us who have tried to arrange our lives for growth and service to Him have done something wrong. It's just that God tests us to demonstrate to everyone - ourselves included - the level of faith, the level of commitment we really have to Him. Job couldn't figure out what he had done wrong. He hadn't done anything wrong. He just didn't see the big picture, because it was impossible for him to see - with his eyes of flesh.  Passing tests of that incredibly difficult nature takes seeing things with the eyes of faith, even when all our earthly senses tell us not to trust God. We have to learn to trust Him in spite of what we see.

God is taking us by the hand like little children, His own precious little children, and He is leading us to places it is good for us to go. We may not want to go the dentist to be drilled or the doctor to be shot, and, as little children, we may not understand why this is necessary. But we learn to trust the love and goodness of our parents. Where this analogy breaks down, of course, is that little children really don't have much choice in the matter. We believers in Jesus Christ have the option to fail these tests. The world tells us we're nuts to trust God when everything is falling apart, when we are getting beat up for no apparent reason, when it is abundantly clear that there is no hope whatsoever - we are cooked, and that is that.

But God laughs at the impossibilities of the world. He made the world in an instant through our Lord Jesus Christ, and He has the power to change everything and anything instantly, to make that which is as not, and to bring back that which is no more. God can raise the dead. He raised our Lord. He has promised to raise us. The very worst the world can threaten us with is death - and we profess to believe that we have already gained victory over death in Jesus Christ. If that is true - and it most certainly is - why then are we so prone to fearing things that are not nearly as bad as death? In my observation and experience, it is ever because we allow ourselves to get wrapped up in the details of the "show" we are running. We are indeed responsible to "run a good show", to organize and execute a responsible life, and, human beings that we are, we tend to want to make it run as smoothly as possible. Even when we have separated ourselves from the lusts of the world, this focus on life from our narrow point of view is something of which we have to beware - and believe me when I say that I am preaching to myself as much as to you. 

Trusting God absolutely is, of course, easy in principle, hard in practice. Again, the contemporary U.S. Christian model says it's easy to be a Christian, but Christ told us to count the cost first (Lk.14:28), and that the road was a hard one (Matt.7:13-14). Paul reminds us that the road to the Kingdom is fraught with trial and suffering (Acts 14:22). Being Christian destines us for suffering (1Thes.3:3). It does seem that overwhelming suffering and seemingly insurmountable testing is rare in our day - to the extent that this is true, it is it doubtless because in the lukewarm era in which we live such testing would usually be completely pointless and would not result in God's glory (see the link:  in CT 2A "Lukewarm Laodicea"). There is no point in refining slag - only gold is worth bringing to a greater and greater level of purity (Ps.68:8-12; 1Pet.1:6-7).