Job - "Through the Storm"

This morning at ELEV8 we talked about my favorite Bible character...Job. The title of the discussion was "Through the Storm" and it may have inspired a series that I'm going to work on for later in the year. Anyway, I titled it "Through the Storm" because each of us in our lives face storms. Some days we have very sunny days which are pretty awesome...then we have some days which are rainy and just kid of "blah"...then we have days where we have storms and the storms often vary in intensity...you can have anything from a normal afternoon shower all the way up to a hurricane. The storms in your life are no different. You lose your job, your best friend gets sick, a relative dies, someone backs into your car and leaves the scene...all storms, but all different intensities.

If you haven't read the book of Job my brief synopsis of it won't do it justice..so cruise on over to http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+1&version=MSG and check out the Message version of it..easy to read...Good stuff!

So Job is this dude that is amazingly blessed by God. He's got 10 kids a ton of animals (7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 oxen, 500 donkeys and a ton of servants....this ain't your local petting zoo). He didn't just own these animals because he enjoyed smelling camel dung or wet sheep's wool, but these animals were his income. Think about it...it is back to school time and your kids have outgrown all of their robes...sheep's wool...aka...American Eagle. Your husband's office decides to move him to the other side of the desert...camels...aka U-haul...You get the picture...

To make a long story short God knows Job's heart and knows that his faith is in Him. He knows no matter what he is put through that he won't curse God for putting him through it. Job was chowing down on some dinner with his wife when a servant comes in and tells him that the property had been raided by vandals and all of the animals he owned had been slaughtered by the vandals. Another servant rushes in as soon as the first servant is finished and informs Job that his 10 children had met for dinner at the oldest son's house when a wicked storm (worse than our afternoon showers here in Central Florida) hit the house causing it to collapse, killing all 10 children in the house.

Job lost it all...but he stayed faithful to God. Then Satan tells God that if God took away his health then he would curse God...

God then allows Satan to strike Job's body with boils...from head to toe. I don't know much about boils and I'm not brave enough to google it to check out what it looks like, but it don't sound pretty. I imagine it appearing and feeling like it would feel if you went to the beach for an entire day and didn't put sunscreen on. Your skin would blister up and you could get some serious burnage going on. Your blisters would be oozing and it'd be impossible to sleep because you'd be laying on your blisters no matter how you laid.

Through all of this Job didn't curse God...

I said I was going to make a long story short and if I don't wrap it up then it won't exactly be short...

So Job's friends say that there must be some reason why God is punishing Job. They say he must have done something to upset God or that there is sin in Job's life that he need to repent of. These guys are classic "guys." We guys always seem to know the answer to everything and have a hard time admitting that we don't know. Job's friends are the same way, but Job stays faithful to God.

In the end Job ends up questioning God and asking him why he would put him through all of this. He curses the day he was born and the fact that he was born in the first place, but he never curses God. He doesn't understand why God would allow this and God allows Job to insert his foot into his mouth quite nicely before he speaks up in Job 38 and pretty much calls Job out. God asks Job where he was when the earth was created, who made the blueprints to design the earth and told the oceans where to stop..it was God...not Job that did all of this.

In our lives whenever things go wrong and we don't understand why God allows certain things to happen we feel as if something is wrong with God. God's perfect and He doesn't need to explain ourselves. God doesn't call each of us to understand why He does certain things or doesn't do certain things...butwe are called to simply obey Him.

"He's got the whole world, in his hands...."