16“Indeed He would have brought you out of dire distress,
Into a broad place where there is no restraint;
And what is set on your table would be full of richness.
17 But you are filled with the judgment due the wicked;
Judgment and justice take hold of you.
18 Because there is wrath, beware lest He take you away with one blow”
Job 36:16-18
I have been reading through the book of Job these past few weeks. When my bible reading program brought me to this book, I sighed, because I knew I was in for some rough reading. The book of Job is long and is mostly dialog, which can make for tough reading. But I purposed to get everything out of it that I could.
Now the book of Job is about a guy named Job who arguably has the worst misfortune out of anyone in the world, past and present. He loses all his money, his businesses, his children, and more in one day. And then, while surely he is pondering his loss, he is struck with a terribly painful disease that causes huge boils on his skin. So he sits down with a piece of pottery to scratch himself and begins to wish he was never born. Three of his friends come to visit him. When they see how terrible the situation is, they all sit down with him and nobody says a word for three days!
But after three days the talking begins. Everybody says a lot of things, but the essence of the conversations is this: Job’s friends say that he must have sinned, that is why all these terrible things happened. But Job says he has done nothing wrong. He basically says, “what’s the point in serving God and sacrificing for others when bad stuff happens to me and wicked people seem to have it good!?”
I’ve seen many people leave the Way because something bad happened to them and they can’t understand why God let it happen.
The book of Job is the answer to this and this brings me to the scripture that I put at the beginning:
“Indeed He would have brought you out of dire distress… But you are filled with the judgment due the wicked…”
After those bad things happen to Job, he put himself through it a lot longer then was needful. See the scripture says, “He would have brought you out of dire distress…” Job was still in that distress when he didn’t have to be. He kept himself there because he didn’t respond to the situation correctly, but sinned in his response to God by saying, “It profits a man nothing that he should delight himself with God.” Job 34:9
So what’s the correct why to respond when all Hell has broken out against you and things have happened to you that you don’t understand? Well, you need to read the whole book of Job, but this is the basics:
1 – Know that God is righteous.
– That means that God is always fair and under no condition has he or will he do or not do something that gives us a right to blame Him for anything that happens to us or somebody else.
2 – Accept the fact that you don’t and won’t understand everything and may never know the reason for something that has happened.
– That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t seek to understand as much as possible, but it does mean that as for some things in life, you might never understand why. You need to learn to trust God with the ‘why’ and know that He is righteous.
Why should you follow these points? Because it will help you to get out of that situation rather than stay in it longer than you need to, like Job did.
Hal Chaffee 