If you live in Texas, then you know a thing or two about Texas
weather. Even as I’m typing this, the
temperatures have plummeted a good 30-40 degrees from yesterday and I’m clearly
not prepared in my short-sleeve shirt.
The bottom line – Texas weather is unpredictable.
Life seems to mirror Texas weather. It can change in an instant leaving us
unprepared and vulnerable. If we’re not
prepared, we are likely to capsize. If
we are certain that storms will come in life (which scripture makes clear if we
are obedient followers), shouldn’t we try and prepare.
When I think about storms in life, the first place I go in
scripture is to the book of Job. Yet in
a place where I traditionally focus in on suffering, as I was studying to teach
this go around, something about the text gripped me in a new way. The past week we camped out in chapters 1 and
2 of Job.
I’ve struggled with the text and why God let things go down
the way he did…but then it struck me.
Job’s response revealed to me the glory given to God in the fact that
Job would not curse him. First, he takes
away his possessions and his family.
These are things that surround his life.
Second, he takes away his health and wellness. These are the things he needed to carry on in
life.
I don’t know about you, but I’m sure I would have had a few
words for the big man upstairs. Job
doesn’t sin (1:22) and in a profound way accepts adversity (2:10). Accept adversity??? I’ll be honest; I’m not the best at
suffering. I seek my own personal
comfort. But there’s something so
powerful about accepting adversity. It
says we trust and value God and that our adversity is short-lived, like a
vapor.
Job sums it up like this…Naked I came and naked I’ll return
(1:20-21). He stands before God naked
and stripped of everything yet he lacks nothing. If
Job is as righteous as he appears, then Satan is wrong, in which case the
prosperity doesn’t matter anyway. If
righteousness is all that Job ultimately values, that cannot be taken away from
him.
The aim of Satan is to destroy Job’s joy in God. Putting Job on display, God gains an open
victory over Satan and is glorified. Job
loses everything, but responds in a profound way that makes us realize he lacks
nothing. The
most probing questions here really is this, “If you lost everything, would
Christ be enough?”
We don’t like
the story of Job because we fear we might be hit with what he was hit with and
that makes us question God and makes us a little bent out of shape…but God,
even more than Job, knows what deep loss really feels like.
The superior
worth of God becomes known in Job’s response.
We now become aware of what God was aiming for…the revelation of the value of God himself. This isn’t about downplaying the storms of
life. Job grieves his loss in a gut-wrenching
way. It’s about realizing that the only
way to survive the coming storms is placing supreme value in your relationship
with God.
WEATHERING the
storms of life really comes down to WHETHER
or not you value God the way you ought to.
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