By the fourth chapter Job is devoid of all four of the things (Finances, Family, Fitness and Friends) that humanity so often places before the only Person that can bring comfort, security, and identity! Job in 3:1 “opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.” Oh he did not take his brides advice and curse God and die but he did curse his life and wished his death. He has now lost even the sense of the intimacy of God, gone is the sense that God is in control, and what is left is only two things:
•The sense of God
•The sense of self
Job wishes that the very day of his birth be stricken from the calendar. He asks in 3:11“Why did I not die at birth, why did I not perish when I came from the womb?” Again notice Job’s confession as to the place that Finances, Family, Fitness, and Friends played in his life now that they had been stripped as he says in 3:25“For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me.”
Even though Job had lost his wealth, lost his children, lost his fitness and his friends he needed to realize that the sum total of his being was more than all four of those things. Job was more than what he possessed and more than the intimate relationships that he had so enjoyed, more then fitness and even the children he so loved.
Martyred missionary Jim Elliot said it this way, “He is no fool who gives up what he can never keep gaining what he can never lose!” As wonderful as Finances, Family, Fitness and Friends are they will never be the ONE thing that can never be taken from us. And what is that ONE thing? Listen to what the author of Hebrews in 13:5 tells us as we are told that “He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Oh, dear ones the answer is not in the explanation of WHY but rather in the revelation of WHO!
Oh that we could say as Job did in 23:10 after such a time as this that “He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.”