Faces - 4 - Job

We are continuing our series called “Faces” where we are looking at different characters from the Bible and seeing what we can learn from them. We have already looked at Daniel and Samson, this week we will be looking at Job.

Job lived around 2,000 years before Jesus in a place called Uz, and area in the middle of modern day Israel between Egypt and Jordan. He was a wealthy and successful man, and he is described in the Bible as being “blameless and upright, he feared God and shunned evil”.

Job was a model follower of God he was always faithful to God and lived his life exactly in the way that God intended. Nobody was able to find anything that he had done wrong. He was happy, rich and enjoying life.

In Heaven Job’s faithfulness had sparked a debate between God, some angels and Satan, which we can read in Job 1 : 6 - 12.

Here we see that Satan was arguing that Job wasn’t really being loyal to God, and that his loyalty was purely a result of his comfortable life, his wealth and his blessings from God. Essentially Satan was accusing God of bribing Job into loyalty and claimed that should his comfort and riches be taken away his loyalty to God would soon disappear as well.

We see here that God agrees to Satan’s challenge and allows him to take away his riches and his comfort, but not to harm Job himself. As a result, his children were killed and all of his camels, oxen, donkeys were killed or stolen.

How does this make you feel, knowing that God willingly allowed this sort of suffering to happen to Job, who we know that God loved?

As God expected Job remained loyal despite the attack that Satan inflicted on Job he remained loyal to God. So Satan pushed God again to be able to step up his attack, and really inflict some suffering on Job, Job 2 : 3 - 10.

Despite the agonising soars that erupted all over his body, and his wife telling him to give up on God he still chooses to continue to trust God and live in the way that was pleasing to him.

This isn’t to say that Job was happy, far from it! Many of the following chapters of Job’s book show his calling out to God and discussion with his friends speaking about his suffering, his hurt and his deep unhappiness.

However, amongst all of this he continues to praise God, worship him and acknowledge that he is in control and worthy of his praise, despite the bad situation that he now finds himself in, without his family, wealth and health.

We are going to play a game now to see how good you are at seeing the bigger picture.

Just like in the game when we do not see the whole picture it can be difficult for us to make sense of them. It is the same in life, we will never see the full picture for God’s plans for our lives. Sometimes bad or which we do not understand or can’t see how they fit into the picture of our lives.

However, we need to be like Job and to continue to trust that God always knows the bigger picture, and that his plans ultimately are to build us up both individually and together as God’s kingdom.

In pairs or small groups have a chat about if you have experienced any situation where something happened, but the outcome wasn’t what you expected and you found it hard to understand why. Then how you responded to that situation.

We all have, or will face situations which we find hard to understand. In these times, it might feel hard to be thankful to God, but like Job we need to remember that this is just as important then as when we are really happy and everything is going great.

As you might expect Job’s friends were concerned about him and came to comfort him when they heard what was happening to him. By the time they arrived he was so disfigured from the soars that they could hardly recognise him. So as good friends to they sat with him.

After some time, they started talking with him they started sharing their points of view of what was happening. They were thinking that God’s favour and punishment on Job must be down to how he has been behaving. So because of his situation he must have done something wrong.

Similarly, Satan thought that Job’s faith was dependant on receiving gifts from God, so that without them Job would have no faith.

Both of these views of God’s favour and what faith is are different from what the Bible tells us is really the case.

What do we think really influences God’s favour to us, and what should influence our faith in God.

God’s love is unconditional and is not given to us based on our performance. Equally our faith in God should not be dependent on our situation.

We are now going to go to the very end of Job’s book to see how his situation ended. God rewards Job for his ongoing loyalty though the good times and thought the seriously tough times in Job 42 : 10 - 17.

God blessed Job after his testing with far more than he had before. He restored his family and was able to see his children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren grow up and he lived a comfortable and happy life again until he was very old.

As we close we remember that the ultimate thing that Job has taught us is that faith has the power to overcome adversity, and continuing to trust in God allows us to be part of Gods ultimate plan for our lives.

Lord God,

We thank you for Job, and for is faith in you.

Please help to strengthen us all so that when we face times that are difficult, confusing or hard for us to understand give us the faith to know that you are in control and know the bigger picture that we cannot see.

We thank you that your bigger picture is one where we all thrive and have a purpose in your kingdom.

Amen.