ANOTHER difficult passage. Here is a good time for me to get up on my soapbox a bit. I think one of the reasons these recent lessons have been so hard to hear is that God has not changed – society has.
In old times people would say, “I will see you next week, God willing”. They meant: you never know what God will do and it would be presumptuous of us to plan our lives without taking Him into account. The sense of entitlement was not as great as it is today. There was a better understanding of our smallness.
I had a conversation recently with an older man who had been badly inured at a young age (over 30 years ago). “I never got over the fact that God allowed my job to be taken from me when He knew how much I loved it. How could He do that to me?” he asked. While I sympathize with that feeling of loss – the greater tragedy was the lack of understanding (for over 30 years) of God’s purpose in our lives. God is determined that His will for us, and for this world, be done.
His perspective is eternal while ours is temporal. We cannot make sense of it, nor are we meant to – this is some of the mystery of God – He doesn’t answer to us (it is the other way around) and He doesn’t seek first to please us. Real faith comes in when He takes us from our intended path and into the wilderness. In a way, you could say He is ruthless: He will stop at nothing to accomplish His purpose in our lives.
With that in mind, my take-home message from the lesson today was this: God places a hedge of protection around those who are faithful to Him. Periodically, when it suits His purpose, He allows Satan to cross the hedge and inflict injury in that person’s life. God is always in control in these situations and He allows these things to happen for His glory and for a specific period of time. Then God resumes His hedge against evil. We must be faithful during the good and the bad times. We must remember something I tell my little peeps at home, “when we are NOT glorifying God by our words, thoughts and actions, who are we glorifying? Remember glorify means to reflect like a mirror and to give others a accurate representation of HIM.
Tell me, how would you explain the story of all that happens to Job, to your children?
JustaGirl…just like you
I have and still do wrestle with this part of God. Last year I miscarried and in that I could not and still do not know of a purpose. What I do know and trust in is the relationship I developed over time with God. I have seen and felt his amazing character which allows me to trust him when the hedge has been penetrated. It is important that we study this part of GOD, but I think it is easier to wrestle with this name of God when we know intimately the other names of God.