I’m going to try to make these QT posts a bit easier to follow without looking up each scipture reference. These always made sense to me as I wrote them, but looking back they are a bit like listening to one half of a phone call. I’d like these to be more readable, but I’m not sure I’ll succeed or not. Let me know how I’m doing, assuming I still have readers.
Job 1:1-5 – Job’s Character and Wealth
The Bible calls Job ‘blameless and upright’. Was originally going to say that might be what the world would say, but I remembered that later (verse 8) God describes Job in that way. Still, we know that no one is good, not even one as it says in Romans 3 (itself a reference to Psalm 14, Psalm 53 and Ecclesiastes 7), so we know that Job is not perfect. He was devoted to God to the point that God took notice.
Interesting to me that his sons, in these few sentences, are portrayed as partiers and not necessarily concerned with God. Hard to be dogmatic, but it says not that they followed God or sacrificed to HIm for their sins, but that Job himself would sacrifice on their behalf, sort of just in case they had sinned.
Job 1:6-22 – Satan’s attack
Satan and God meet and talk. The idea of Satan and God casually meeting and talking about the happenings on Earth is sobering and disturbing. I tend to think of God in a bit too much of a Deist way. He set the Earth in motion and is watching from afar, but not too active in it. I then apply the same to Satan, minimizing his work in the Earth to the point that it doesn’t matter.
The picture we see here is that both are intimately familiar with the details of what happens here. God pointed Job out as an example of one committed to him, a bit like a Father bragging on his son. Satan knows exactly who he is and you can almost hear how ticked off he is that he hasn’t been able to lay a hand on Job.
The interesting, and encouraging, thing here is that Satan is limited by what God allows him to do. Job was protected, and not until God gave Satan (limited) permission to attack him. God is in control, nothing happens that He is not aware of and approved of. God is pictured here as calm and secure while Satan is anxious and frustrated, eager to act but limited. Satan is frustrated because of the limits God as placed in front of him, but God isn’t frustrated or anxious at all. Even when God gives Satan permission to attack Job, you don’t see a bit of anxiety on God’s part. He knows Job’s faith and you get the impression here that this is to teach Satan a lesson more than Job.
But notice how swift and complete Satan’s actions are. Immediately, Job is confronted,one after another with calamity. his oxen, his donkeys, his sheep, his camels, nearly all his servants (Satan conveniently left one alive from each tragedy so Job would get the message) and even his children, all killed.
Job’s famous response – “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” – shows what God already knew – that Job had his priorities on straight. His stuff, even his family, was not the most important. God was.
Do I have such a priority? Am I easily flummoxed by the minor calamities in my life, or do I rest in God, mo matter what may come?
Yes you still have readers 🙂
It was very well laid out thank you. I was able to follow without having to dig into each Scripture.
Thank you for sharing.
I have trouble with the suggestion that God was willing to let family and servants be killed in order to prove that Job was committed to Him! Were none of them committed to the Lord? Sorry, I can’t get my head around that.
I understand, it doesn’t make sense to us, does it? I remind myself that He is God and I am not and that His ways are higher than mine and not always clear to us. If He allowed it and if I believe that He is just, that should settle it (although it isn’t always that easy.) We don’t see the full picture He sees nor could we necessarily appreciate the ramifications of it if we could.
I think that things like this and the question of suffering in the world show that God doesn’t consider our lives as sacred as we want Him to. That’s a bit unsettling, but if they were of prime importance, would believers get cancer or would children die of disease or accidents or would here be tyrants or genocide? Obviously God is concerned with something higher and things that are tragic to us aren’t to Him. When we want God to be like us, that’s infuriating, but when we are pursuing becoming like Him it actually can become comforting. After all, if God loves me (and the cross settles that one) and He’s OK with this, then I can be too.
If you think about it, individual lives are not always at the top of man’s priorities either. If they were, would we send men in to battle, knowing many would be lost, to secure a larger victory? If the individual’s life was of first importance, we would not have fought WWI or WWII or any of the wars we’ve entered. In all these cases, the cause was of greater value than the individual lives of those fighting for it. To say so is uncomfortable, but it’s true.
God obviously loved Job, for He protected him from Satan. And God’s confidence and trust in Job’s love is comforting as well, at least to me. God is not acting with fear or with uncertainty, he knows what’s going to happen and what the outcome will be. In that confidence I find hope to trust that God knew what he was doing with those others as well.