Page 156 - Job

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
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

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