While the deadly coronavirus is racing through the world, many faithless Christians have developed the habit of blaming God with the question; why doesn’t God stop the coronavirus? This perceived logical argument has been used by the evil one to silence many Christians and has shaken the faith of believers today.
You might have heard of the suffering of Job in the Old Testament. According to biblical scholars, the Book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible. If you were to fit it chronologically, it should be placed in the early chapters of Genesis. What can we learn from the Book of Job? Is there an application for us believers today? Why does God allow suffering?
I’ve been a Christian for many years and I love the Lord. I have favorite verses, favorite books of the Bible. But to tell you the truth, every time I study the book of Job or hear a preacher’s sermon from the book, I picture many different scenes in my head. I’m like yeah, he is a faithful man. Or I see a guy get beat up bad by the devil. He has patience. I just had the wrong idea about the book. After reading this article, you will find out that there’s a lot of knowledge coming out of the book of Job about Job’s walk with God.
And as we’re going to talk about that, what the Holy Spirit said to me as I was pondering a sermon preached by Rev. Nolan Harkness, on his YouTube channel just recently, considering Job’s suffering. The Holy Spirit seems to speak to my heart. What did I say about Job in the book of Job?
“There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. He was without sin and upright, fearing God and keeping himself far from evil. And he had seven sons and three daughters.
And of cattle, he had seven thousand sheep and goats, and three thousand camels, and a thousand oxen, and five hundred she-asses, and a very great number of servants. And the man was greater than any of the sons of the east.
His sons regularly went to one another’s houses, and everyone on his day gave a feast: and at these times they sent for their three sisters to take part in their feasts with them.
And at the end of their days of feasting, Job sent and made them clean, getting up early in the morning and offering burned offerings for them all. For, Job said, It may be that my sons have done wrong and said evil of God in their hearts. And Job did this whenever the feasts came round.
And there was a day when the sons of the gods came together before the Lord, and the Satan came with them.
And the Lord said to Satan, where do you come from? And the Satan said in answer, From wandering this way and that on the earth and walking about on it.
And the Lord said to the Satan, have you taken note of my servant Job, for there is no one like him on the earth, a man without sin and upright, fearing God and keeping himself far from evil?
And the Satan said in answer to the Lord, Is it for nothing that Job is a god-fearing man?
Have you not put a wall around him and his house and all he has on every side, blessing the work of his hands, and increasing his cattle in the land?
But now, put out your hand against all he has, and he will be cursing you to your face.”
So, what was the Lord saying to me about Job? As we’ve all had superstars and we wanted to be like them when we were little kids because they had some national prominence in the athletic world or movie star or some other area. Job was God’s superstar from his perspective. He said there’s nobody like Job in all the Earth.
Are you with me? Other than Jesus Christ himself, you almost have to say that the kind of statement about Job probably represented all of the time. We got Moses, we have David, we have all the famous people in the Bible. And maybe that didn’t apply to any of them. Maybe it wasn’t like a statement God made concerning all of the time, maybe just for them. But still, you have this person called Job who God says there’s none like him at all here. And then lists his qualifications why he’s that way.
We know that he lost all his children, he lost all possession, all those kids died. Everything he loved, he lost. And he’s in the middle of that physical suffering, yet says I’ll trust Him. You know you get to the place in your Christian walk where you just determine in your heart and mind with God’s help. You’re going to trust God no matter what, no matter what happens. And that’s hard and difficult.
It would be God is good. But sometimes he doesn’t seem good all the time. And the reason is our lack of understanding. Through all of what Job said. Job complains and asks a lot of questions. Job even accuses God. But God straightens him out in the end and makes sure Job understands just who he is. But all that here’s what God says about Job. He said in all of this Job didn’t sin. Well, you will say if he was questioning why, if he was doubting God, if he was wrongly evaluating who God was, wasn’t that wrong? Well, you see, that’s where grace and mercy come in. Understanding is strange to human beings and we’re human beings. Right. That’s where God understands that we are weak and we’re lacking in understanding those things.
I want you to get this concept. I want you to understand that there will be times in your life where you’ll be going through things that won’t make sense to you. And God will seem not good to you. And it will cause you. It will cause you to stumble in your faith. You don’t have to stay there. Can you say, Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him from them all.? And so battles do come from the enemy. But always remember that God never comes as the devil, but the devil often comes disguised as God. The devil likes you to think that it’s God speaking to you. The devil would like you to say that is God beating you up.
The devil would like you to think that it’s God that destroying somebody’s marriage, drug addicts, God that’s causing somebody to go bankrupt or that is God causing this of.
And, when you pray throughout it and you get past that, you look back on and you can see where the enemy was in there causing the problem. The difficulty, he was the one attacking. And in the name of Jesus, you made it through. But the truth of the matter is that there are times when God does not seem good and Job’s great struggle throughout the book, as you read it, was that he knew God was good and he couldn’t figure out the cause. He knew that God was so good, why these things were happening to him.
I love it in here. It says that there’s not anything on the earth that God has not got control over. And that’s the way God tells you.
There is nothing on earth that God does not have control over. This debating that’s going on over Coronavirus. Where did it come from? Is it from the devil or it’s from God? And people said God sent it and others are also saying God didn’t send it. Well, whichever way it came. I’m not saying that he said it, but he allowed it. He did allow it. And there’s not anything on the earth that He does not have the power over. And He has the power over life. He has power over death. Job says “If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait, Till my change comes..” Job knew change was coming. He knew that God had a plan and that God was going to work it out. And when we’re in the midst of difficulty, that is what we. That’s what we must have hope for as well.
Is Job going through the worst suffering of anybody that we see anywhere in the Bible and in Christ or around the cross? But I mean, the time of the cross and as far as physical suffering and the loss of lives of children that he loved and the loss of all of his possessions and all of that. We didn’t see anyone suffer any more than Job. And yet Job’s example of continuing to trust God. We have to understand that God created the universe in six days with his words.
Does that sound like a mighty God to you? Does that sound like a lot of power to you? It does to me. I’ll tell you what. I get blessed when I start thinking about that. But when you start to understand that Job knew that God could do anything that he chose to do. But when God wants to do something, there is not a man on the earth that can stop him. When he wants to do something, he can do it because he’s God.
And Job knew of God like that. And we can have that confidence. We can have that confidence where we lay our head on our pillow at night that God is in control
Using Job’s experience as a reference, we have to keep it in mind that uncertainty may come, just as coronavirus is here and it is causing a lot of pain and suffering, we can still trust that God is in control over the virus. Strengthen your faith in the Lord just as Job did.
