Job 10

"I will give full vent to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul....Let me know why You contend with me....According to Your knowledge I am indeed not guilty, yet there is no deliverance from Your hand...." (Job 10, NASB)

Notice the words, "complaint," and, "the bitterness of my soul."  Later in the chapter, as Job is expressing his confusion, he says something similar to what Jeremiah said, "Why then have You brought me out of the womb?  Would that I had died and no eye had seen me!.., carried from womb to tomb."  Modern charismata cannot handle this.

I find it interesting this time going through Job that Job laments his situation, his life, but at the end of the Book we know that The Blessed Trinity stills touts Job as a righteous man, that God rebukes his speculating "friends," yet not Job.  Jesus' response to Job's questions is only, "Where were You when I..."; perhaps an ancient version of, "You can't handle the truth."  I wonder if some of what we see in the Book of Job is akin to my analogy of the river and the banks of that river.  Is it okay to "pray" or wonder inwardly about one's life, one's trouble, a confusion about one's dilemmas?  Should we realize that the Lord Jesus Christ is the "banks" on/in our lives, and we are "swimming" in the currents, backwashes and eddies of history, and find ourselves in the reality of the Ecclesiastes statement, "all things come alike to all."  One more thought to consider: Could this reveal most powerfully what is central Biblical Theology that, as our Lord Jesus tells us, "out of the heart proceed..," that Job's friends hearts were "wrong," and Job's heart was right?

Much has been written about all of this throughout history.  But there is a certain truth that every life has a certain refrain in the song, "We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves, O, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves."  Now the "spirituals" will say that this is depressing melancholy, not a "faith statement."  Really?  Job's friends?  There is something I see in the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs which tells me that if Christendom does not consider the whole of the, "God-Breathed," Words, it will continue on its downward spiral.  For those who relegate this devotional to, "O, that's Old Testament," I say that you will find "echos" and similar teaching of the "Wisdom Literature" in the Gospels, that is, if we do not look at the Gospels with prejudiced eye glasses.

Ecclesiastes 9 tells us, "So I reflected on all this and concluded that the righteous and the wise and what they do are in God's hands....All share a common destiny-- the righteous and the wicked, the good and the bad, the clean and the unclean....As it is with the good, so with the sinful...."  I promise you that if church-goers do not at least take a prayerful consideration of this, their inward, secret life will be full of turmoil.  The difference between you and me and those who reject Jesus is Jesus Himself-------------- not that you will never get a cold.

Father, in Jesus' Name, I surrender anew today to You.  Amen.

When Peter, an 18 year old Norwegian, "heard the call to evangelize China, on that day he not only emptied his wallet into the collection plate, but included a small note with the words, 'and my life.'"

Hebrews 12:2