Have You Considered My Son?

I have often wondered why God ordained that the story of Job be placed in the scripture.  The story of Job seems to stimulate more questions than answers.  My mind tends to go into loops of circular thinking when I consider how the God of love appears to conspire with Satan to bring down one of God's creation from earthly success to the depths of despair--to prove a point? to win a wager? Job is surrounded by "friends" who not only are wrong, but disagree among themselves in expressing their erroneous theories about his downfall.

In the end, Job is privileged to be both praised and challenged by the God of the Universe--"Have you considered my servant, Job?" God asks as He speaks near the end of the book.  After He has dispensed with Job's friends and their misguided interpretation of Job's life's tragedies, He proceeds to challenge Job's protest that he has any right to self-determination based on self-righteousness or a short-sighted human sense of fairness.  In the end, He restores Job to his former prominence materially and socially, even more so than before--with one vast difference--Job now has a much fuller understanding of life and His relationship to his God.

Jesus's story seems to have many parallels to Job's.  He was wealthy beyond our imagination before coming to earth--the King of all creation, worshiped by angels, feared by the evil one and his minions, who knew their eternal fate.  All of that wealth and joy and comfort came tumbling down to a manger filled with straw, surrounded by barn yard animals, with a blue collar daddy and a teenager mother who conceived out of wedlock.  Raised in a backwater town hours from Jerusalem, living under the dangerous circumstances that brutal Roman rule and local rebellions produced, His child hood was disrupted by a sudden departure to a foreign country to escape the murderous hand of Herod.  As we become aware of Him as an adult we find He has lost His earthly father; His mother places expectations upon Him that He is reluctant to meet; His brothers, lost as to who He is and what He is about, treat Him unkindly.

Like Job, He is surrounded by men whose resume's would not impress and whose wisdom is lacking; the best educated and most formally religious of the lot eventually betrays Jesus in an effort to manipulate his own earthly political purposes.  Jesus' efforts to redirect the misguided religious leaders of the day results in rejection followed by persecution and ultimately the most horrific execution imaginable in that era of history or any other.  Surely, after His death many must have decided, like Job's friends, that He got what He deserved--isn't that how life works, then and now?

Once again God has taken a prosperous life, that of His own Son, and allowed its devastation.  The greatest injustice in all of history--the perfect man murdered--and God stood by and let it happen.  But Jesus is restored--resurrected.  Quietly He goes about making Himself known to a few hundred people and then ascends to be with the Father who allowed Him to be cruelly murdered.  His restoration is complete with the  knowledge that He has provided a way for us to be with Him.

Periodically, to a lesser or greater extent, we are Job.  We may experience the seemingly premature death of loved ones like Job; the loss of property pales in comparison, but we also experience those kinds of downturns.  We may be like Issac--every time he digs a well someone else claims his work for their own--ever done work and had someone else take the credit?  Like Paul, we may have been on the non-Christian end of persecution, dishing it out at some point in our life, and now suffering under the same persecution. Though not physically exiled, we could be on our own Island of Patmos emotionally, isolated from former friends, family, or coworkers who no longer have anything to do with us.  And we are asked to be like Jesus--to act in faith that allows us to go beyond our circumstances and trust the One who is risen, who overcame.

We are not entitled to an answer or an outcome or to feel sorry for ourselves. We are shown the Cross and told that His grace is sufficient. I think God, upon hearing our grumbling over our circumstances, would say:  "Have you considered my Son, Jesus?" Nothing we have experienced or can ever experience can go beyond what Christ suffered for us.

Thanks be to God the Father that He knew the end before He began, that Jesus' death and resurrection was known to be coming before the creation of the universe, and that His love for His creation, for us, would be so great that He would allow His beloved Son to go through torment because He knew how it would all turn out. He asks us to stay the course but only in the light of His Son and His life and His suffering, and His redemptive acts.  The promise of restoration is ours, perhaps in this life-perhaps not; but the greater promise is eternal restoration and life on the New Earth with Jesus.

Thank you, Jesus, for what You did.  Thank you, Father, for being God and for your patience when we question your omniscience and omnipotence.  Help us to experience our resurrection in Jesus, to know restoration as Job did, whether here on earth or in the New Earth to come.  Amen.