I’ve never really had to suffer. Oh, I’ve had my injuries, but physical pain soon passes, and doesn’t bother me as much as some people anyway. I’ve been spared so far the griefs of broken relationships and lost loved ones, of financial ruin, of loss of health or home. I’ve never been persecuted, for my faith or any other reason.
I understand in an intellectual way that those things can happen to good people too, that they aren’t judgment from God. But I know that my belief in God’s providence also requires me to believe that somehow God has a hand in suffering too, at least inasmuch as he withholds his blessing.
Job put the finger directly on God. In Job 17:6-8 he said, "God has made me a byword to everyone, a man in whose face people spit. My eyes have grown dim with grief; my whole frame is but a shadow. The upright are appalled at this; the innocent are aroused against the ungodly.”
It’s a good thing I have faith in God. It’s a good thing that I believe all his promises, because when those hard things happen to me or to my Christian brothers and sisters, it doesn’t shake my faith, or at least it hasn’t so far. I wonder sometimes what God is doing, but I always trust that He is doing good.
Job did too. In Job 19:25-27 he ends with this: “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes —I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”
After everything, God was still the object of Job’s longing. That shames me. In my life of ease and comfort, I have many objects of longing. May God increasingly be the greatest, and eventually the only.
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