Page 78 - Reading Job to Know God

a doubter and the other a believer. The first panel showed these fish
angrily debating back and forth. Then in frustration the believing goldfish
said to the doubting goldfish, “Okay, Smarty, if there is no God, who
changes our water every Tuesday?” Now as ridiculous as it is to think
that two fish can understand the great mysteries of life, it’s just as absurd
to think we humans could do any better. Little tiny fish and all they could
see is, somebody’s out there.
Just so, Job and his three friends were like four fish trying to understand
the ways of God. There is no way! And the best they could do is just
poke at the truth and try to touch it. Man has not advanced very far
beyond the reasoning of those fish. We look around and we think we
know something, but I will tell you, we don’t know anything. Shame on
us if we think we have begun to know God. God is infinite and we as
finite beings just don’t have the capacity. He is toooooo big. In Job 11:7,
Zophar said this: “Can you discover the depths of God? Can you
discover the limits of the Almighty?” Isn’t that a marvelous verse? And
Job said in chapter 26, verse 14 “Behold, these are the fringes of His
ways; And how faint a word we hear of Him! But His mighty
thunder, who can understand?” These are the fringes of His ways, just
the edges. We only see the hem of His garment. We have not begun to
know Him.

Let me show you what all three of Job’s friends had in common, beside
confusion. They all suffered from the same preconceived notion; God
always prospers the upright; God always punishes the perverse. It was, to
them, inconsistent that a holy God, a righteous God, an omnipotent God,
could allow men, good men, to be miserable in this life. Job’s friends
never did rise above that juvenile understanding of suffering. They never
saw the blessed side of suffering. They never saw its sanctifying and
purifying effects. They never saw the beauty and the dignity that shines
through broken vessels when Christ is displayed in their woundedness.
The wicked suffer. Job suffers. Job must be wicked. That was their
reasoning and the premise of all these debates.

This attitude toward suffering was challenged by the Lord Jesus in Luke
chapter 13:1–5 where we read about Pilates’s murder of some Galileans
while they were offering sacrifices. “He answered and said to them, ‘Do
you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than the other
Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no.” And then in
that same chapter, He tells about a tower that fell down and killed
eighteen men. Luke 13:4. Jesus said, “Or do you suppose that those
eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed, were worse

78