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| The "trashformation" birdhouse made for my daughter and the artist's studio. These are made from found and discarded objects. |
My Lessons and Applications from Today's Readings
Job Responds to Wicked Counselor/"Friend"and to the Tragedy - 1) Miserable comforters are you all! 2) Shall words of wind have an end? 3) What provokes you that you answer? 4) If your soul were in my soul's place, I could heap up words against you, and shake my head at you; BUT I would STRENGTHEN you with my mouth, and the COMFORT of my lips would RELIEVE your grief. Listening to this lying counsel causes Job to spiral further downward in despondency : 1) Neither speaking nor being silent gives me ease or relief, 2) God tears me in His wrath and hates me, 3) He gnashes me with His teeth, 4) my adversary sharpens His gaze on me, 5) they gape at me...strike me ...gather together against me, 8) God has delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over to the hands of the wicked...shattered me...shaken me to pieces...set me for His target...pierced my heart without pity...breaks me wound upon wound...9) I have humbled myself, cried out..."although no violence is in my hands, and my prayer is pure...surely even now my witness is in heaven, and my evidence is on high. My friends scorn me; my eyes pour out tears to God. Oh, that one might plead for a man with God."
A Psalm that Speaks to Job's Dilemma and to Us When Falsely Accused - Psalm 94 (Today's Reading 20-23) - 1) Shall the throne of iniquity...which devises evil by law(!) have fellowship with You? 2) They gather together against the life of the righteous 3) and shed innocent blood. 4) But the LORD has been my defense, my God the rock of my refuge. 4) He has brought on them their own iniquity 5) and shall cut them off in their own wickedness. 5) The LORD our God shall cut them off.
My Lessons and Applications - 1) When I am in close fellowship with God - in prayer, in meditative study on His Word, following the leading of the Holy Spirit - I must reject counsel of man that goes contrary to what I have learned in my time alone with God. Notice that Job, after listening to counsel he knows is wrong, nonetheless now begins to feel that God hates him, is angry with him - when it is just the opposite. (Jacob made the same mistake, "All is against me"-Gen. 42:29 -, when all God was doing was for him.) God loves Job and is using him to show Satan what a truly faithful man Job is - not faith based on the blessings God has given him but because of his love for God. But man is taking Job into wrong thinking - man disguised as friends, as men who know God themselves. 2) When in deep distress and anguish, when sin and iniquity have been humbly confessed before God, I must pull away from those who are speaking contrary to God's will. I must get alone with God - away from external influences - into God's Word, into communion with Him - alone - until God directs me further. 3) We now have the Mediator in heaven between us and God that Job longed for; we also have the Holy Spirit within us that speaks to God and to us. (Romans 8:26-27) 3) As we see below in the NT reading for today, we will not always know why certain things happen in our lives, what way they are part of God's Plan and Purpose, but we can know God and trust Him - "though He slay me, yet I will trust Him; the LORD giveth, and the LORD taketh away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.
Our Judeo-Christian Faith - Romans 11:19-36 - Paul continues to speak of the grafting in of Gentile believers following the rejection of Christ by the elected Jewish people, but he emphasizes that the root of our faith is still in the Abrahamic, Mosaic and Davidic covenants - the cultivated olive tree. The branches of unbelievers were broken off, but "they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again...for as you were once disobedient to God, yet have now obtained mercy through their disobedience, even so these also have now been disobedient, that through the mercy shown you they also may obtain mercy. For God has committed them all to disobedience, that He might have mercy on all. Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! For OF HIM, THROUGH HIM and TO HIM are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.
I endure
all things for the sake of God’s own people; so that they also may obtain
salvation…and with it eternal glory” (2 Tim. 2:10, Weymouth).
If Job could have known as he sat there in the ashes, bruising
his heart on this problem of Providence–that in the trouble that had come upon
him he was doing what one man may do to work out the problem for the world, he
might again have taken courage. No man lives to himself. Job’s life is but your
life and mine written in larger text….So, then, though we may not know what
trials wait on any of us, we can believe that, as the days in which Job
wrestled with his dark maladies are the only days that make him worth
remembrance, and but for which his name had never been written in the book of
life, so the days through which we struggle, finding no way, but never losing
the light, will be the most significant we are called to live. –Robert Collyer
(From Streams in the Desert, L.B. Cowman)
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