Job 17:1-8, “My spirit is broken, my days are extinguished, the grave is ready for me. Are not mockers with me? And does not my eye dwell on their provocation? Now put down a pledge for me with Yourself. Who is he who will shake hands with me? For you have hidden their heart from understanding; therefore You will not exalt them. He who speaks flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children will fail. But He has made me a byword of the people, and I have become one in whose face men spit. My eye has also grown dim because of sorrow, and all my members are like shadows. Upright men are astonished at this, and the innocent stirs himself up against the hypocrite.”
Contrary to what my eyes see, counter to what my senses
perceive, put down a pledge for me with Yourself, and I will be at peace. This
was Job’s attitude. Even though he confessed that his spirit was broken, his
days extinguished, and felt as though the grave was ready for him, Job still
clung to the sovereignty, omniscience, and omnipotence of the God he worshiped,
and now prayed to. This was his heart cry, and it was not directed toward men,
but to the God he’d served all his days. Fair-weather friends are useless to
me, but You I trust.
This is the essence of faith. This is what Job exhibited even
at his lowest point. It doesn’t matter what’s going on around me; it doesn’t
matter what I am currently enduring. If you put down a pledge for me with
Yourself, I will persevere, I will persist, I will endure, because I know you
will keep your word.
Job only needed one character witness, and it was God. He
admitted that his eye dwelt on the provocations of his friends, and that their
mockery was negatively impacting him, but even so, he clung to faith because it
was the only thing left for him to cling to. It’s what he knew, what he’d done
through the ups and downs of life, and faith had never once failed him.
Had he suffered loss? Most assuredly, perhaps more than most
in the history of mankind, but his faith remained intact due to the
faithfulness of the God he served. Job understood that God was reliable, unlike
his friends, acquaintances, and those who once broke bread with him. It is to
God that Job made his plea, understanding that only God had the power and
authority to intervene and affect his current lot.
Job saw in part, and understood in part, just as Paul would later
echo in his first letter to the Corinthians. Although Job had been kept from seeing
the whole picture, he had enough wisdom to realize that God had hidden his
friends’ hearts from understanding. He realized that his friends were not
judging him based on the evidence, but contrary to the evidence he had
presented regarding his innocence.
There is only One in the entire universe that can dispense true
justice, and that is God. We can’t count on justice from anyone else, including
friends, or family, never mind those of the world, because none of them possesses
complete knowledge the way God does. We’ve all seen instances where the justice
system itself was so perverted as to condemn the innocent and let the guilty go
free, but not so with God.
Since the Word tells us that one of His attributes is
omniscience, which is defined as all-knowing, when we stand before God, we are
fully assured that He knows every detail of our situation to the smallest, most
minute element, to the extent that nothing we can say will surprise Him, and
nothing is hidden from His eye.
Rather than repent before God when they know they’ve fallen
short, some tend to try to explain why they did so to He who knows all things.
Well, Lord, you see, you have to understand the situation. I have to make you
privy to the circumstances. If you’d been there, you’d get it. He was there. He
is everywhere. Omnipresence has its advantages, and one of those advantages is
that not one second of your life goes unobserved, and not one choice you make
is absent context to God.
It’s the reason Job asked God to put down a pledge for him
with Himself. If I’m going to hope for true justice, then I will appeal to the
only One who can dispense it. If I am to be judged, I prefer to be judged by
the righteous judge of the universe, and not my friends, or those who once knew
me in my glory days.
Job knew he had become a cautionary tale for those around him.
He had now become a byword among the people, being used as a negative example
of what can happen to someone who displeases God or falls out of favor with
Him. If you don’t live right, you’ll end up like Job. If you don’t bring alms
and burnt offerings, you’ll suffer Job’s fate. Little did they know he had done
all those things and more; he had been a virtuous, blameless, and upright man,
alone among his generation to have been singled out by God Himself.
It’s one thing to have never been someone of prominence, someone
who had garnered respect, someone who others looked up to, and quite another to
have been all those things, to have been the greatest of all the people of the
East, and fall so far as to have beggars pity you, and men of no acclaim spit
in your face.
If all one has ever known is poverty and lack, being poor and
destitute won’t affect them nearly as much as it will someone who, having once
enjoyed prominence and wealth, is brought low to the point of a handful of
ashes and a potsherd being his only possession. For those without the robust, all-encompassing
relationship Job had with God, the loss of their possessions is enough to make
them crumble and lose heart. It’s the reason Satan started his campaign to break
Job with the removal of the oxen, the donkeys, the camels, and the servants. He
understood human nature well enough to conclude that most of the time, that
would have been enough to break someone. When it didn’t work, he went on to decimate
Job’s family, then destroy his body, and when that didn’t work, he used his
wife and his friends to demoralize him and encourage him to curse God and die.
No comments:
Post a Comment