Are you interested in the Job Bible story? I had a really big insight from Job that is beginning to be life changing. I had always considered that the main message of Job was about suffering and that this was a unique event that didn’t happen to many people. However, I missed something much more fundamental and this makes Job relevant to us all. Job is wisdom literature and all these books point to the essence of walking with the Lord.
Three fundamental questions
In the Job Bible story, God asks of Job three questions that are fundamental to Him:
Firstly, would he still love the Father without his material possessions, family and his health?
Secondly, would he still love the Father without any ongoing experience of intimacy with the Father (Job 29:4-5)?
Thirdly, would he still love the Father when all turned against him (30:1,9-10)? Even his wife told him to curse God and die!
They are tests that show that the Father wants to know the real love of His people above all else and will at times remove things we depend on to reveal this.
Why? Because showing true love for Him is THE most important choice we can make for eternity. The heart can be so deceitful. What we think is friendship with God, can be more because of His blessings than because we truly love Him for His own sake and independent of circumstances.
Some indicators
How do we know if we truly love God? One indicator is how we react when something goes wrong in life. Do we blame God or become more distant from Him or spend all our time asking Him to change our circumstances? Or do we continue to spend time with Him just out of love? Another indicator is how much quality time we really spend with God just because we love Him and not out of concern for our needs or out of religious duty?
Earthly choices are eternal
I do believe that the choices that we make on earth will affect how we relate to God in heaven. Although our friendship with God in heaven will be so much more glorious than on earth, the degree of our friendship with God in heaven will be determined by what it was on earth. That is one of the reasons why some will sit closer to Jesus than others (Mk 10:40).
So where are we truly with the Lord in our hearts?
I completely agree. I have recently been looking at at the countless scriptures about suffering with Christ (there are many of them). Not suffering for suffering’s sake but accepting suffering as part of what the Lord may use to enable us to die to ourself and therefore lean on and know more of Christ. We tend to gloss over scriptures such as “counting everything else loss accept knowing Christ and the fellowship of his sufferings” how about the fact that the scriptures ensure us that all who seek to live a Godly life will be persecuted (in one for or another) but through it and in it all Christ says he will be with us and never leave us and that there is a special annointing on the other side involving a “harvest of righteousness” for those who’ve allowed themselves to be trained in the Father’s Holy ways. When we are in pain and need we have little option but to call upon the Lord and scripture ensures us He will surely answer.
If Job had known that God would have restored to him more than he had in the first place, would he have questioned Him at all? God rewards Job for his faithfulness and his endurance through such suffering. This story has an incredible ending.