Grace That Makes Us Hope in Grace

Would He contend with me in His great power?
No! But He would take note of me.
There the upright could reason with Him,
And I would be delivered forever from my Judge.
Job 23:6–7

It is amazing that, even at this point in his ordeal, Job continues to hope in grace. This continuing hope in grace is itself a work of God's grace.

Yes. It IS a Pleasure to the Almighty When We Are Righteous

Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that you are righteous?
Or is it gain to Him that you make your ways blameless?
Job 22:3

Eliphaz is in error because he has no concept of God's grace. This puts him in a category with the devil. It is true that we cannot profit God at all, but one of the wonders of the gospel is that when we are righteous, it is by His grace. It is by His own righteousness. And He is genuinely delighted with our righteousness, because He Himself is our righteousness. Read the Song of Songs, and other passages like Zeph 3:17. It is one of the glories of the gospel that the Lord does genuinely delight in His people. While the friends say many true things about right and wrong, and blessing and curse, their view of God is abbreviated, their view of blessing is abbreviated, and their view of grace is abbreviated.

When Not to Talk

Therefore my anxious thoughts make me answer,
Because of the turmoil within me.
Job 20:2

These are very poor reasons to open our mouths. If we are full of anxiety and inner turmoil, it is not the time for opening our mouths but keeping them shut.

How God Treats His Enemies

How many are my iniquities and sins?
Make me know my transgression and my sin.
Why do You hide Your face,
And regard me as Your enemy?
Job 13:23–24

Almost certainly, v15 is more well-known, from this chapter, than v23–24. But, here we have important insight into "how God treats His friends" (to borrow from the title of an excellent little commentary on Job by Bob Fyall). 

When God makes you to know your iniquities, sins, and transgressions, He is treating you as friends. (And Hebrews 12 would remind us that it is when He afflicts us for them, in service of bringing us to repentance, that He treats us as sons!)

But, when God allows you to feel justified in your own eyes—when He permits you to continue in blindness to particular sins—that He is treating you as an enemy.

Job was distressed that he was being treated according to unmediated justice, rather than according to grace in the Mediator. He had confessed what he knew of, and repented of it, but still affliction was coming. He was learning more about how God treats His friends. But he was worried that he was being treated as an enemy: that the Lord was permitting him to be hardened in his sins by blindness to them.

So I wonder, gentle reader, if this is one of your and my great desires of the Lord: that He would not hide His face from us as an enemy, but that, as a Friend and Father, He would make us know our transgression and sin.

The Deceitfulness of Riches

The tents of robbers prosper,
And those who provoke God are secure—
In what God provides by His hand.
Job 12:6

Job's friends are in the midst of saying that he must have some secret, unconfessed sin, and if he would just confess it and repent of it, his affliction would be eliminated.

But, here, Job makes an important observation: it is dangerous to assess one's spiritual condition by his prosperity and security in this world. God, in His common grace, often gives prosperity and security to those who truly love neither their neighbor, nor the Lord.

But this is a pitfall into which we may easily fall: feeling like things are well with us spiritually, so long as they seem well to us temporally. But just because things are well with me temporally does not mean that I am justified in my treatment of men, nor that I am not provoking God. 

So, riches may deceitfully promise blessing in this world, but they perpetrate a more subtle and dangerous deception: they may deceive us that we are spiritually well, when we are currently provoking God.

You Have Heard of Perseverance, and Compassion, and Mercy!

James 5:11 (NKJV)

     ¹¹ Indeed we count them blessed who endure. You have heard of the perseverance of Job and seen the end intended by the Lord—that the Lord is very compassionate and merciful.

Genesis 50:20 (NKJV) 

     ²⁰ But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.

Neither Job nor Joseph knew, in the midst of their trials, the purpose of their trials. But the Lord recorded them so that we might “hear” of them. In them, we hear the primary message: “the Lord is very compassionate and merciful.” And in them, we learn to look to God for the same thing that He produced in them “perseverance.” May the Lord give us the perseverance of Job! 

2018.01.18 Devotional Gleanings

Now when they saw him afar off, even before he came near them, they conspired against him to kill him. Then they said to one another, “Look, this dreamer is coming! Come therefore, let us now kill him and cast him into some pit; and we shall say, ‘Some wild beast has devoured him.’ We shall see what will become of his dreams!”
Genesis 37:18-20

The precious doctrine of God's all-sovereign will is the biblical answer to the problem of evil. Here we have where they meant it for evil, but the testimony of 50:20 is that God meant this for good. Even through the wickedness that the wicked do, the good God is always doing good. And the final piece of that goodness will be to punish the wickedness of the wicked!

    “Why did I not die at birth?
    Why did I not perish when I came from the womb?
    Why did the knees receive me?
    Or why the breasts, that I should nurse?”
Job 3:11-12

Here are the first in a long series of questions that Job has throughout the book. God's answer? "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (38:4). Indeed, this is the foundational answer to any of us, whenever we question the providence of God.

Then the Pharisees and scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashed hands?” He answered and said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written:
    ‘This people honors Me with their lips,
    But their heart is far from Me.
    And in vain they worship Me,
    Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
For laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the tradition of men—the washing of pitchers and cups, and many other such things you do.”
Mark 7:5-8

What dangerous thing it is when a clever idea becomes a tradition. As the weightiness of the tradition increases, the importance to us of Scripture decreases, until we begin to lay aside God's commandments, and that dreadful sentence sounds in heaven, "Their heart is far from me, and in vain they worship me."

For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Romans 7:22-25

When God finally gives a man a right heart toward His law, it is evidence that he now has peace with God, but it brings him directly into a war with his sin. Battle is not pleasant, but victory is sure!

2018.01.17 Devotional Gleanings

But on this condition we will consent to you: If you will become as we are, if every male of you is circumcised, then we will give our daughters to you, and we will take your daughters to us; and we will dwell with you, and we will become one people. But if you will not heed us and be circumcised, then we will take our daughter and be gone.”
And their words pleased Hamor and Shechem, Hamor’s son. So the young man did not delay to do the thing, because he delighted in Jacob’s daughter. He was more honorable than all the household of his father.
Genesis 34:15-19

The abuse of covenant signs for false moral superiority and to wield as a tool against others is as old as covenant signs.

Then God said to Jacob, “Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there; and make an altar there to God, who appeared to you when you fled from the face of Esau your brother.”
And Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Put away the foreign gods that are among you, purify yourselves, and change your garments.
Genesis 35:1-2

How is it that foreign gods lasted so long in Jacob's house, with his knowledge? Many a sad tale can be told of the spiritual state of a man's household simply because he tolerated it. But how much more marvelous, then, is the patience of God who brings Jacob back to when he at first began to know God and invites him to worship. Let us put away all that is against the Lord, and come back to Bethel, where we first knew Him, and worship!

There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil.
Job 1:1

Let all prosperity gospel, material and spiritual, die here. God's own topic sentence for the book of Job is a quadruple statement of his godliness. Yet, he is plunged into the second-most terrible material pain and spiritual darkness in all the Bible. The most terrible? The only One in Scripture we know for sure to have been most godly, even our Lord Jesus Christ. Who is there who will take a brother in great distress and tie upon his back the burden of being of stronger faith or purer character than the man whom the Lord Himself introduces with a quadruple statement of godliness?! Let such a brother never think that he is being a 'friend'!

Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!”
But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Job 2:9-10

What a frightful thing is a spiritually unstable wife, who counsels her husband from passion rather than patience! She is unto him such a spiritual calamity that Satan attacked Job, in part, by leaving his wife alive!

So all the demons begged Him, saying, “Send us to the swine, that we may enter them.”
Mark 5:12

Even if the Lord should providentially assign unto us a messenger from Satan that He refuses to take away for a time (2Cor 12), let us remember that they can only do unto believers what Christ intends for our good. They are on their faces before Him as condemned beggars!

And when the Sabbath had come, He began to teach in the synagogue. And many hearing Him were astonished, saying, “Where did this Man get these things? And what wisdom is this which is given to Him, that such mighty works are performed by His hands! 3 Is this not the carpenter, the Son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And are not His sisters here with us?” So they were offended at Him.
Mark 6:2-3

Dear preachers, if a congregation, that has had Christ Himself directly deliver the sermon, can respond to what they themselves admit is the most powerful message they ever heard by taking offense at the preacher's person, do not be surprised when the same occurs with you!

Now King Herod heard of Him, for His name had become well known. And he said, “John the Baptist is risen from the dead, and therefore these powers are at work in him.” When his disciples heard of it, they came and took away his corpse and laid it in a tomb.
Mark 6:14, 29

Herod knew they had taken the body of John to bury and so perceived expectation of resurrection. Let us who hope for the resurrection of the dead take care what is done with our corpses!

For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
Romans 5:10

Let those who believe in Christ for forgiveness of sin marvel. They have not received merely a dead atonement, but a living Redeemer who, having once atoned for them, now works for them and in them forever and ever by His almighty power!