Page 155 - Job

God. He is God’s object lesson. The two results that are in 42:7-17
will follow, without exception, in every life that suffers in the will of
God.
The first blessed result of the outcome of the Lord’s dealings can be
summarized in these words “enlarged blessing” for the sufferer. Look at
verse 10, “The LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for
his friends, and the LORD increased all that Job had twofold.” Now I
believe that this physical return, this restoring of the fortunes, this
doubling of everything Job had, is just God’s visible object lesson to
illustrate the spiritual blessing.
It is wrong to think, I will be patient, I will bear calamity, I will fast, pray
and obey in order to reap material benefits. That is wrong; the Bible
does not teach that. The Church is full of shallow believers who are
practicing all kinds of religious pieties in order to get material blessing. I
am amazed they stumble so easily over what the Apostle Paul wrote 2,000
years ago dealing with the same philosophy in Colossians 2:20-23,
“If once through fellowship with Christ you died and were separated
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.

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