|
By Mike Mason
ONCE I met a man who, like Abraham, had moved his
entire household halfway around the world on the strength of a vision from
God.
When I asked him to tell me the story, he answered that
there were three versions of that story, and which one did I want to hear?
First, there was the version of the story he told to
Christians. Then, the version he told to non-Christians. Finally, there was
the truth.
Job is a book that tells things from the third point of
view. Probably, along with Ecclesiastes, it does this better than any other
book in the Bible.
Not that the other scriptures do not tell the truth.
But Job tells the truth in a way that makes it almost impossible to pervert
the truth into pious pablum.
A few years ago I went through a difficult time. Never
mind what the problem was. It was nothing compared to the trials of Job.
It was nothing at all compared to the sufferings of
many of my neighbours right there on the quiet street where I lived.
But pain is pain, and suffice it to say that my pain
was enough to drive me to my knees, totally defeated, half-crazy at times,
and crying out for relief.
Month after month the battles raged on, thick, dark,
agonizing. I prayed, but somehow prayer did not work.
Usually nothing at all worked, except gritting my teeth
– until, for reasons entirely obscure to me, the straight jacket of
oppression began to loosen a little at least enough for me to get on with
my life for another day or so before the screws tightened again. What else
could I do? How was I to fight this?
In retrospect, I can see that a large part of my
anguish was rooted in the fact that there really was nothing I could do to
control what was happening to me.
I was absolutely helpless, and it is this, perhaps,
that is the soul of suffering, this terrifying impotence.
It is a little taste of the final and most terrifying
impotence of all, which is death.
We Christians do not like to think about being
absolutely helpless in the hands of our God. With all of our faith, and
with all of his grace, we still prefer to maintain some semblance of
control over our lives.
When difficulties arise, we like to think there are
certain steps we can take, or attitudes we can adopt, to alleviate our
anguish and be happy.
Continue article >>
|
Sometimes there are. But anyone who has truly suffered
will know that when it comes to the real thing there is no help for it, no
human help whatsoever.
Simply put, when we are in a deep, dark hole, we cannot
think our way out; neither can we hope, sing, pray – or even love our
way out.
In fact, there is absolutely nothing we can do to
better our situation. We can have faith, yes; but in itself, faith will not
change anything.
Neither faith, nor any other good thing that a person
might have or do, can actually lift the cloud, move the mountain or bring
about an end to the problem.
Only the Lord himself can do that – and when he
does, as Exodus 6:6 puts it, “Then you will know that I am the Lord
your God, who brought you out from under the yoke.”
How will we know? Simply because nothing and no one
else could possibly have done it.
In this kind of crucible, therefore, we come to a new
understanding of what it means to be saved, what it means to be snatched
away from the brink of destruction.
Here, we get down to the bedrock of the gospel.
During my night of anguish, I turned to the Book of
Job, and there I began to make contact with the gospel in a way that
somehow I never had in studying the New Testament.
Reading Job, I found myself experiencing – in new
and astonishing depth – the reality of Jesus’ promise in John 8:
32: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you
free.”
Mike Mason is an award-winning local author. This
article is excerpted from his book, ‘The
Gospel According to Job’
July 2008
|
