Job 7:1-10 ( I hope you wil read Job 6-7. It will make my story much 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. From my reading of the Bible I had gathered that suffering was one of its major themes. Just because I didn’t like it, or I didn’t understand it, did not exempt me from considering its relevance to my life.

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 succumbs to temptation and 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 anyway). [Given the trends, I was keeping this option open.] Here is a brief account of that season. I bother telling it because suffering is something we will all (at least eventually) 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, family relationships (almost all of them), a failing business, a collapsed vision of life and ministry and huge question marks surrounding the future. When I lay down, I could not sleep. I was haunted at the living nightmare my life had become (while following jesus!). 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 just 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.  In other words, there was a point to all this.) I was to take comfort in the Romans 8:28 truth that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love Him. The strain of all these converging pressures was crushing me though. 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 for me too. I met them face to face, on the radio and in the books offering me all their patented 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 so intimately in your life so that you can at least salvage His 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 friends of this sort.  Christians were driving me crazy!

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 disrupted 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 the Romans 8:28 revelation. It is a pressing temptation but in light of God’s economy, 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 was holding out as the pat answers to the circumstances I was facing. It was just trusting in who God is and what He is like, as a good Father; that He was in those storms 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. It was messy to say the least. I believe it was simply normal Christianity.

We are to comfort one another with the comfort with which we have been comforted. If my story has had any comfort-value to you, it should be that our greatest blessing is currently disguised as our biggest obstacle or heartache. The problems or crisis’ we entrust to Him are the places we will one day look back upon as the places where our faith grew most dramatically. They are the places 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. Through perseverance we become equipped as authentic representatives of sozo-sized salvation. (If you want to have your salvation sozo-sized, read yesterdays post on 2 Corinthians 5:11-6:2.)

Yesterday, I wrote about emotional honesty as a foundational aspect of walking in relationship with God. Job got this. Here is a man of God revealing an indispensable aspect of his relationship with God. In his pain, he said,

Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

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.