It Is Not Always Health, Wealth and Prosperity

I don't know if you read the Book of Job very often let alone dwell on Job's speeches therein. 

I love his affirmation in 13:13 where he says to his supposed friends, "Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what will."  I cannot count the times along life's pathway I have wanted to tell some companion, "Would you just shut up long enough to hear what I am saying" Like Job’s friends they are completely misreading what is going on. 

Job’s friends just keep insisting that all the calamities that have come upon him are the result of some sin in Job’s life. Their spiritual insight is limited to what their eyes of flesh see, and their flawed theology tells them. In their minds no one would suffer as Job has suffered unless they have done something terribly offensive to God.

But Job understands better than they that not all suffering is the result of sin and not all prosperity is the product of righteous living. Job knows his own heart and he has not forgotten his own behavior. Job would never say he has not sinned, but he would quickly tell you he has done nothing to offend God. He also knew that those same calamities were testing his faith in a big-time way.

His wife also knew he was a righteous man and had done nothing to warrant such sorrow. She just saw God as unfair and that Job should just curse God for the way He has allowed Job, and by extension her, suffer and just go ahead and die and be done with all this.

As an aside I want to point out that Job’s wife gets something of a bum rap for telling Job to curse God and die but we forget that she has suffered the same loses as has Job. Her world has crumbled . . . she too has lost everything and on top of all that she watched as her husband deteriorated. 

But back to Job. Job knew that there must be a reason for his condition besides his personal sin. Something else was going on and he was caught up in it. I know it is not a popular theme in our feel-good health and wealth religious culture but our suffering as God’s people is not always because of our sin. We miss understand our God when we say He wants His people to be “happy.”  What He wants I for His people to be faithful when they abound and also when they are abased. 

Sometimes we endure hardship, suffering and loss not because of sin but for the glory of God. Dear friends, it is true God wants us to live for him. But John Wesley hit on an eternal truth when he said of those early Methodist, “Our people die well.”  In prosperity or in poverty; in health or in sickness; through trial and tribulation what God wants is for His people to be faithful. He still really does expect us to die for Him.  

Job wanted God to explain what was going on. He was not judging God he was imploring Him. That’s why in verses fourteen and fifteen he announces to His friends that he will be responsible for his life and the way he has lived it and what is more he says he will not change anything about his life or his faith. He will not confess what he has not done, and he fully intends to keep on living as he has in the past. He knew better than they that God was not punishing him for some sinful way. He understood that whatever was going on it wasn’t happening because God was disappointed in him. Actually, he was where he was because he was faithful beyond reproach. He and his family were paying a high cost precisely because of Job’s faithfulness. 

“He also shall be my salvation: for a hypocrite shall not come before him.” Job never wavered in his faith or his faithfulness. He demonstrated to not only Satan but to everyone who knew of him that his faith was genuine. I suppose Job also learned a lot about himself in the process.

All of us go through difficult times that are not punishment for some sin. Mine was the rapid decline and loss of my wife of 54-1/2 years to pancreatic cancer. It seemed that one day we were laughing and enjoying our lives with so many plans for the future and the next we were plunged into pain, sorrow and suffering on a scale never before experienced by us. We struggled with the same issues with which Job grappled. 

I have friends whose whole life has been marked by suffering and pain both physically, emotionally and spiritually. They have faithfully served and sacrificially given to the Lord and yet life for them has been one step forwards and three steps backward. Their life has been marked by very few of the things we think of “the blessings of God.” There life has been as example of faithfulness to God; it has sparked genuine gratitude to God from those materially blessed; their life has had purpose . . . it has meaning beyond the physical.

Truth is that is all Susan and I wanted . . . . we wanted what we were enduring to have meaning to us and to others. That’s precisely what Job wanted . . . . God is not capricious . . . . everything He does is with purpose and has meaning. We must remember that we are not our own because we have been bought at a price, namely, the blood of Jesus. God has the right to use us in was of His own choosing. We must come to the place where we can say, “Nevertheless not my will but thine be done” and when we have come I come through the fire all I want hear is “well done thou good and faithful servant.

Like it or not sometimes people suffer for the glory of God. “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.”