DEVOTIONAL
The book of Job, an inspired letter by the Holy Spirit, is a wonderful book that teaches us about the sovereignty of God. Job was a blameless, upright, God-fearing man. His conviction concerning sin was so great that he turned from everything evil. His love for His children was birthed out of his love for God. Therefore, he would rise early in the morning and offer up burnt offerings for his children in fear they had sinned. The Lord Himself said he was the greatest man in all the east.
Now the adversary was roaming throughout the whole earth, and he came along with the angels of heaven and presented himself before The Lord. After engaging in a conversation, the Lord allowed the adversary to test the character of Job to see if Jobs love for the Lord was genuine or only based upon the provisions the Lord had allowed him to have. After the testing was over, Job lost everything, and even his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die!” But he said back to her concerning The Lord’s sovereign nature, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Now Eliphaz and two other friends heard of Job’s devastation, how he had lost his children, his servants, his livestock, and how his body was afflicted with boils. They gathered together with great concern and came to sympathize. The scriptures tell us, “They sat down on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.” After the seven days and seven nights of silence, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth saying, “Let the day perish on which I was to be born.” Though Job’s three friends proved to be miserable comforters in the midst of his affliction, Eliphaz pins a very true statement. He said in response to Job’s suffering, “For man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” The scriptures also tell us, “Through many tribulations, we must enter the kingdom of God.”
Though Job didn’t truly understand the nature of his sufferings while he was going through them, he never lost hope in the fact that God was in control and sovereign over all his circumstances. Job’s unwavering faith in the one true God, The One who sustains the universe by the breath of His word, proves that his heart was truly given to The God whom He loved. Job replies to his friends concerning his afflictions, “As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh, I shall see God; Whom I shall behold, and whom my eyes will see and not another.” The book of Job was not penned in a holy writ for us to glorify Job’s endurance, but to demonstrate God’s sovereign election in subduing man’s heart, showing His Majesty over all of creation. No man could suffer the catastrophic loss of Job and remain faithful unless the Lord had orchestrated it. John Calvin penned many years ago, “We can do nothing unless by a supernatural grace of God, it is God Who gives the will, It is God who gives the power.”
“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, And at the last He will take His stand on the earth. Even after my skin is destroyed, Yet from my flesh I shall see God;” Job 19:25-26 NASB