Page 30 - Reading Job to Know God

Before I leave this section, let me make one other observation. The events
that we have described, like the onslaught of Satan and the persistent
condemning and judging of his three friends, were designed to break Job’s
shell. Someone might ask, “Well, how can God call Job perfect, upright,
fearing God, if he was harboring the sin of self-righteousness in his heart?
That would make God a liar. God said he is a perfect man”. Job was
walking in the light that he had. You see, Job did not know he was self-
righteous. That issue was way down deep. He was open to all God’s will,
and he was walking in what he knew God’s will to be. It took the kind of
an earthquake that Job went through to show him he was self-righteous.
But as soon as he saw it, he repented. So he lived up to the light that he
had.
Perfect in the biblical sense does not mean without flaw, unless we are
speaking of God. The Greek word for perfect “telios” has been the ruin of
many an honest seeker of the Lord. The word actually means to come
into the fullness or maturity, to bring to fulfillment what the Lord has but
inside you. When the Lord looks at you it’s as if He looks at an acorn and
speaks to the oak tree. We live in the potential of all that He put in us.
People seek something they call “faith”, thinking they can get it through
strenuous believing or fact finding. But Paul tells us in Ephesians 2:8
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that not
of yourself, it is the gift of God lest any man should boast”.
And in Romans 12:3 “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to
every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly
than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath
dealt to every man the measure of faith”. The Lord sees His perfect
seed of faith in you and knows what that seed will become in it’s
maturity. He calls for that which He put in you, the potential to have
union with His spirit and become a Son/Daughter of God. Check out
Romans 7:4 (How we bear fruit)
Here is a second thing I get from all of this. Do not think that because a
man is stripped, whether it is of health, of possessions, of family, of
paycheck, whatever, that he is broken. That is entirely a different thing.
It looks like Job was broken in chapter 1, when all of these waves came in
one after another. He stands there saying: “Naked I came from my
mother’s womb. And naked I shall return there. God gave and God
took away. Blessed be the name of God.” It looks like he was broken
then, but he was not.

A SUFFERING CHRISTIAN OR A BROKEN CHRISTIAN?
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