BudapestAlive

Reflections on Job

The book of Job is a treasure of wisdom to those who will, like Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, sit silent with Job, recognizing his suffering was great. To every person Job is a comforter. He is the empathetic forerunner of our troubles. Not because misery loves company, but because to suffer alone is salt upon an open wound. The sufferer knows they are not alone as they walk with Job.

It is a warning to all about the pride of man. For all of Job’s righteousness, even he could not keep his pride from swelling as the dichotomy of his service to God and his unexplained suffering pulled at the fabric of his desire to understand why.

It’s a warning that our greatest need in suffering is neither release nor understanding, but rather to remain steadfast with Yahweh. This is a terribly difficult and freeing truth. How reasonable it is to want to know why we suffer. How logical it is to cry out for release. But neither of those things are our ultimate good. They can be sought in a righteous way to be sure. But they can far more easily take us from faith and dependence on Yahweh to a false hope that release or knowledge will cure what ails us. Consider the stories of suffering among the saints and the resulting richness of their life in Christ. I know it to be true from own trials; that though I pray unceasingly for relief and am daily occasioned to wonder why, it is when I let go of those things and cast my life itself up the mercy and grace found only in Jesus Christ that peace and hope are mine. Once again that incomprehensible mystery of joy amidst suffering is proved true and my faith is used by the Lord in all the ways I grasp for when trials are far off.

Between Appearing

I typically use the word ‘epiphany’ to refer to a sudden insight. Something like, “I’ve had an epiphany about the word epiphany”. While that’s acceptable in current vernacular, something recently changed that word for me in a profound way. That something was Jesus.

More than two thousand years ago an older man sat down and wrote a letter to a younger man, you could call him an apprentice of sorts. People said some rather curious about the older man. As a boy he was given the most rigorous and devout education one could imagine. As a young man he was exemplary. Today he would be the sort who graduates high school a year early and tests out of most of their freshman year of college. He would also be the type whose academic excellence drove him to crush anyone in his way. But then something unexpected happen (which nearly always does) …he was interrupted. Not like call waiting, no, this interruption was more like a car crash or an unexpected fist fight. And the result was that he went from being one of the most highly educated and esteemed followers of Judaism to one of the most passionate and faithful disciples of Jesus. In fact, Jesus himself hand picked him to be the front-man for telling non-Jews about Him.

Back to the letter. This man wrote many letters, but to this one younger man in particular he wrote about Jesus coming to the earth, appearing. In the language of his day he wrote, “epiphaneia” …epiphany. In other words, Jesus coming as a man was His appearing, His epiphany.

It occurred to me that this is where we find ourselves, between appearings, between epiphanies of Jesus. He who is without beginning or end has come, and will come again. Yet, through each of us who by faith know Him as Messiah, He continues to show Himself to all who will see or listen. So it is for us. We are between appearings, by grace living out epiphanies of Jesus each day.