Job 7:1-10 ( I hope you wil read Job 6-7. It will make my story more understandable)

Years ago I was teaching an adult Sunday school class on Job and someone was struggling with the book’s seemingly unending theme of suffering. They proposed a solution in resolving the tension between the futility of Job’s life and what they perceived the abundant life of Christ to be. It was really quite simple. They proposed that we just ignore Job. They reasoned before the class, “since suffering and futility were such minor themes in the Bible, that we should simply discount the life of Job. I recall almost falling over when they said this because it was ingrained into me early on that all scripture was inspired by God. Just because I didn’t like it, or I didn’t understand it, did not exempt me from considering its relevance to my walk with God.

What can we take away from the book of Job? Today’s passage is representative of Job’s story. He is steeped in emotional and physical pain so intense that He has asked God to take his life. Job’s only remaining consolation is that maybe, if God quickly answers his request, he may die before he denies God. Have you ever been this distaught in your circumstances? I think I must have a low TfS index (Tolerance for Suffering) because I felt like this in 1990 and my situation was a cake walk compared to Job. None of my children had died and my skin was not falling off (yet). Here is my brief story. I bother telling it because suffering is something we all have in common.

That year a host of problems, which had been gaining momentum on me, converged all at once. Some were of my own making. Some were beyond my control. The areas of my life that were impacted were physical health, emotional health, estranged members of my immediate family, a failing business, a collapsed vision of life and ministry and the separation between myself and my closest friends and a familiar environment I loved. When I lay down, I could not sleep. I was haunted at the living nightmare my life had become. When I was awake, I was just barely able to put one foot in front of the other.

My orientation to God, my theology (which I could not off-load for convenience sake) instructed my heart that God was intimately acquainted with all the details of my life and that He was personally leading me along a particular path for the sake of His name. (Psalm 1, 23, 139). I was to take comfort that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him (Romans 8:28). The strain of all these converging pressures was crushing me. I thought I was going to suffocate. I wasn’t sure just how much more of God’s intimate attention and lovingkindness I could handle.

In my life, Job’s friends were there on the radio and in the books offering me all their standard council. Options they presented were; 1) Deny God exists and at least releive yourself of the burden of reconciling your miserable life with some fairy tale you have subsribed to. 2) Deny God is soverign and involved in intimate ways so that you can at least salvage God’s reputation as one associated to the debaucle of your life. 3) Swap theologies for a more victorious version that would offer a new (more comfortable) track to ride on. 4) Repent more thoroughly of the hidden sins that have obviously attracted God’s judgement 5) Have someone cast out the demons that have been assigned to destroy you and rob you of the abudnant life. 6) Take the antidepressents the doctor has prescribed and see a mental health professional. 7) Just praise your way to victory. 8) Pray more frequently in your prayer language 9) Deny your prayer language. Let me say emphatically, I definitely could not handle any more council from men!

Back to the Sunday school experience. If I were to have bought-in to the idea that Job’s expereince should be ignored, I would have forfeited the deep truths (and future grace) that God had embedded in Job’s life and in my own. I would have also started down the road of making a cut-and-paste theology that may have provided some shallow comforts along the way but would have eroded the all dimension of scripture’s revelation. It is a common transaction, but swapping the eternal for the temporal is a terrible trade.

I feel no duty to know if that season of intense pressure was an attack or a test (or both). It was not my refined understanding of biblical truth that carried me through that period. It wasn’t many of the things that Christianity holds out as the pat answers to problems such as I was facing. It was just trusting in who God is and what He is like, as a good Father; that He was in that storm with me. It was just holding on by faith to a truth that I deeply believed but could not feel at all; that He loved me and that there was purpose buried in the apparent futility of my life.

We are to comfort one another with the comfort with which we have been comforted. If my story has any comfort – value to you, it should be that our greatest blessing is currently disguised as our biggest obstacle. The problem or crisis we entrust to Him is the place we will look back upon as the place our faith grew most dramatically. It is the place we will look back upon where we grew to know Him and love Him at a new and deeper level. And, when we arise from the ashes we can speak with confidence and authority in these specific areas where we proved to be over-comers.

Father, you are good. You are kind. You are sovereign. In the midst of our trials and tests (which seem to suggest otherwise) give us the grace to persevere and to overcome for Your Name’s sake. Whether we are escorted around or through our trying situations, be glorified as the world sees us falling more deeply in love with you, more yielded than ever to the soverign, mysterious paths You lead us on. Amen.

Note: I spoke about emotional honesty yesterday as a foundational aspect of walking in relationship with God. Job got this. (Read 7:11) `