Page 151 - Reading Job to Know God

from the world’s crude notions, why do you live as though you
belonged to this world? Why submit to rules such as, ‘You must not
handle,’ ‘You must not taste,’ ‘You must not touch,’ which refer to
things that perish with the using, in accordance with human rules
and teachings? Such practices have the outward expression of
wisdom, with their self-imposed devotions, their self-humiliations,
their torturings of the body, but they are of no value; they really
satisfy the lower nature.”

People tell themselves, “I am going to really trust the Lord through this
trial because then I will get double of everything I had before”. That is
not patience; that is covetousness. The Bible never teaches that. Blessed
results follow suffering, but they are not weighed in cattle, sheep, camels
or donkeys. These are spiritual blessings and, like God does all through
the Bible, He uses the physical to illustrate the spiritual. Job’s physical
prosperity is just a picture of the spiritual blessing. God visits us with the
blessing of intimacy after the trial. Pictures can be used by the Lord to
demonstrate or carry a truth to a certain degree but they always fall short
of the reality they represent. Again Paul sees this principle and the harm it
is producing in the Lord’s Body. Not just during the days of Paul but how
much it is hurting us today. Once again from Colossians 2:16-17,

“Stop letting anyone pass judgment on you in matters of eating and
drinking, or in the matter of annual or monthly feasts or sabbaths.
These were but the shadow (PICTURES) of what was coming; the
reality is found in Christ.”

Job’s true reward was a new hunger and capacity for intimate relationship
with his God. That changed everything on the inside for Job. In order to
show the world, the flesh and the Devil, Job’s new inside, the Lord
blessed his outside. His true reward was having God’s blessing and God’s
approval, not because of Job’s right standing, but because our God is a
Lover and Blesser. Four times God proudly says: “My servant Job”. The
principle may be stated like this. Why does God allow problems in my
life? In order to give me twice as much blessing in the knowing of Him
as I had before the problems began. That is what God always does.
I like to illustrate this first result of the “end of the Lord” with the closing
words of Job 42:17, “And Job died, an old man full of days.” Now take
that expression, “full of days.” Now I realize it means he lived a long
time. The fact is, if you look at verse 16 it says that Job lived a full one
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