Page 43 - The Poetic Books - Student Text

4.4 Let’s Practice….

1. What creature was Behemoth? Leviathan?

2. If we doubt one of God’s characteristics, do we then doubt all the others?

3. What is the difference between “hearing” about God and “seeing God?

4. Did Job need more children and possessions to be satisfied?

4.5 Let’s Personalize this Lesson….

It would appear that suffering is necessary while we live in this world for us to have a
deeper understanding of God. We cannot get beyond our love of the world around us
with all its comforts without the occasional or long-lasting jolt of pain.

“[God] loves beauty so fully that anything that compromises His likeness must be
changed or destroyed. What most of us view as the brutal, harsh cuts of a mugger are
the sweet transforming trimmings of a Gardener who prunes away disease and dead
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limbs in order to enhance the beauty of the plant’s verdant, green glory.”

God is making us “homesick” for heaven and drawing “our attention to himself and away from the world
of merely physical things.”
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Perhaps a smaller picture of pain can begin to explain the larger realities of God’s appearance to Job.
Pain gets our attention. Hitting a thumb with a hammer, a toothache, or stomach flu makes us forget
everything else. We want relief. When relief comes, we rejoice.

My love/hate relationship with pain began, I suppose, in my childhood. Wherever we
went in the mountains of South India, my parents would take along a few pairs of dental
forceps, for they knew that toothache was one of the most persistent and overwhelming
pains. Their reputation for pulling teeth preceded them even in the most remote
mountain hamlets.

59 Dr. Dan b. Allender & Dr. Tremper Longman III, Bold Love (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1992), 80.
60 D. A. Carson, How Long, O Lord (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990), 130.
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