Job 42
Reading through this last chapter of Job there seems to me to be six lessons we can take away from it:
Am I and are you a gossip?
Do we love sharing information about other people's private and personal business, perhaps unintentionally elaborating, speculating and giving our opinion about it?
Perhaps we are not like the true definition of a gossip who maliciously spreads news, but are we conscious that we maybe talk a bit too much about other people?
Well, let us look at this example here in the last chapter of Job of how God deals with our personal affairs.
God has been speaking to Job from a whirlwind, asking question after question.
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We saw how this affected Job - his confession of sin and recognition of God's greatness. But we don't specifically read whether Job's friends heard what God was saying to Job or whether they saw the effect on Job.
We know that Job's friends had been talking with him so one would think that they might have heard, but then the LORD tells them to 'go' to Job as if they were at some distance and perhaps didn't hear what he had said to Job.
It may have been that this awesome interaction between God and Job was totally private - that his friends did not witness Job humble and condemning himself before God.
It might have been like with Peter, the Lord Jesus' disciple.
Peter had denied knowing or being one of Jesus' disciples 3 times when Jesus was arrested - and this was just after claiming he would die for him.
After Jesus had been crucified, buried and risen from the grave we do not read of what the Lord said to Peter when he first met with him - we only know that he did because of 1 Corinthians 15:5 which tells us that he was seen of Peter and then of the other disciples - the gospels don't appear to record this meeting - it has been kept private from us all.
We can only imagine Peter's utter shame and grief before his Saviour. We are not allowed to know the intimate details.
And so, in this record of Job, it may be that God did not allow Job's friends to know what he was saying to Job, and he certainly did not then discuss with them what has happened to Job, or in any way agree with them regarding Job's sins of self-righteousness.
We also notice that God didn't commiserate with Job. He didn't offer explanations for his circumstances, or agree that Job's friends had been totally unsupportive to him, showing lack of understanding and unkindness.
We can imagine how we might be in talking about Job:
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'...have you heard...? All of Job's children suddenly died while they were celebrating a birthday...and then all his businesses failed and now he has got such an awful illness he looks like he is going to die! I wonder why this has happened to him, he must have done something terrible and God is punishing him!'
Or alternatively we can imagine how we might talk about his friends:
'...did your hear about poor Job and how all his friends just said unkind things about him - yes, not one of them could say anything nice, the poor man, they all just fired up at him as if he had done the most wicked things - and that Eliphaz, he was the worst of all, really malicious'.
What does God say here?
I am a little bit reminded of our Royal Family and their traditional way of 'never complain, never explain'!
God does not complain about Job to his friends or about Job's friends to Job. He doesn't explain to any of them why Job has been through these experiences. It emphasises to us God's sovereign right to do as he will, his authority, his autonomy - that he isn't answerable to anyone.
Instead, after speaking with Job God speaks to Job's friends and tells them four times that Job is his servant (meaning that Job honours God in the way he lives, and that he follows God's ways); twice God says that Job's friends haven't spoken rightly of God like Job did and also, says he would accept Job's prayers for them but not their own.
It is as if God is showing us that he addresses our sins and circumstances individually.
As when our parents received a school report about us.
It was an account of our achievements and progress, or need for improvement. It was about me - or about you. It did not discuss the person we sat next to, or our best friend or the troublemaker in the class.
It was personal. Individual.
It reminds me of Jesus' words to Peter when he wanted to know about John's future life, and Jesus said, 'What is that to thee? follow thou me' (John 21:22).
God's example to us here, and his words to Peter tell us that what he allows to happen or brings to pass in other people's lives is not our concern - in the sense of gossiping about or maligning them.
It speaks to me of how we should instead concern ourselves with our own individual relationship with God.
Is my name - is your name written in the Book of Life?
Am I - are you - living our lives to serve and glorify God, living to use the talents he has given us, to do the 'works' he has prepared for us?
To be continued God Willing.
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