Nearly everyone has heard of the biblical character, Job. He’s the guy who loved God through pain, loss, betrayal, sickness, a nagging wife and, oh, we wouldn’t want to forget those hideous, rotten to the core, ingrate , so-called “friends” of his either, would we?
Yeah, what about those three bone-heads? Not much is ever preached about those guys—other than what I just said—that they are muffin-heads! But I wanted to take another look at them. As I recently read Job again these guys struck me a little different than they had in the past—although they never seemed quite as bad as they’d been made out to be by some.
Anyhow, part one is probably ancient history to most of you by now so go HERE if you need a refresher. If not—let’s do this!
If you did like I suggested and read part one of this blog series than you see several things Job’s friends did that actually put them (as far as I am concerned) in the ‘super-friends’ category. These guys weren’t wimpy friends by any standard! So what gives? Well, most simply blow right by the sacrifices in travel and time spent with Job, silent grieving by his side, and taking care of him these guys invest and move right in for the kill according to their ridiculous (as hindsight would have it) philosophies as to why all these bad things were happening to Job. But we need to understand something. Up until that point no one had ever considered any other reason for bad things happening to people than the ones these men spoke of—PERIOD! It’s not like this was the ninth heavenly wager God had allowed Satan to make in the heavenlies! And it’s the first that is ever reveled to mankind. AND, that revelation isn’t until the very end of the book! What would you and I have done?! Wouldn’t we have tried to help our friend make sense of it all and when we did and our friend kept saying they were virtually perfect, wouldn’t we have cautioned him to rethink that?
Sure we would. Truth is, there aren’t many people running around today with the character of Job.
Now, I know some of you are shaking your head right now saying, “I wouldn’t of done this. I mean, I’ve read the book.” We know now that God sometimes allows pain and suffering for totally different reasons than what they knew back then. And that’s my point exactly. We have the luxury of hindsight—a luxury they did not have. Nearly all the ancients believed that pain and suffering were the result of sin in one’s life. This was still the prevailing theory in Jesus’ day—even His disciples stubbornly clung to this notion. Check out their response to seeing a man who had been born blind in John 9:1-2,
“1 As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Clearly they had one category for pain and suffering—it meant someone sinned—somewhere. But God had an entirely different idea. Check out Jesus’ response to them in the very next verse,
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
And there you have the main thing about God that we so often miss and Job’s friends completely missed—that sometimes things happened “so that God might be glorified in ways we do not yet understand.” The bottom-line is that God’s ways are higher than our own. And we often drift into sin when we play “fill-in-the-blank psychologist” with each other’s pain and suffering.
- It’s Karma
- They had that one coming!
- Well they don’t always treat others very nice (who is perfect in this area?)
- I guess there’s things about hem we just didn’t know.
And on and on we theorize about why people are going through the things they are going through.
Aren’t we better off just being a friend to those who are suffering. Is kindness ever a bad idea?
Listen, I’m not saying we ‘enable’ people with addictions—maybe we get them help or direct them to celebrate recovery–but that we do it without judging.
That’s what true friends are for. Eventually, even Job’s friends got the message. Hopefully we will too.