Page 152 - Reading Job to Know God

hundred and forty years after this trial.
Now we don’t know how old he was when the trial started. He could have
been around two hundred when he died. “He was old and full of days.”
But there is another way to look at that expression. The Bible teaches
that Job was very blessed of the Lord. He was full when he started. He
was a righteous man and he was walking with God. And then God
brought him through emptiness. When it was all over he was full again,
but he was full in a way that he was not full before. It was deeper. It was
richer in the reality of God and so more complete at the end. This truth we
find in seed form in the oldest Book in the Bible is seen in fully developed
truth and is revealed by the Apostle Paul who wrote in Philippians 3:7-10
“But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea
doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the
knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered
the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win
Christ, and be found in him, not having mine own righteousness,
which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of
Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may
know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of
his sufferings”

I like to put it this way and say: God deepens our fullness by bringing us
to emptiness. Well, that is the paradox. Didn’t our Lord Jesus Christ tell
us in Matthew 19:30, Mark 10:31 and Luke 13:30 “But many that are
first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”
Or in Luke 9:24,
“For whoever chooses to save his lower life will lose his higher life, but
whoever gives up his lower life for my sake will save his higher life.”
That is the truth of God. God will often increase your capacity for
spiritual blessing through suffering and affliction. Over and over again the
Bible demonstrates how God brings us to emptiness in order to increase
our fullness. That is what Naomi said. She said, “I went away full, but
God has brought me back empty.” And then through that emptiness she
became the relative of the one who would marry Boaz and bring Christ
and redemption to the world. That is the message of Job. You are only
one verse into the Book and it says:
“There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that
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