Page 31 - Job

not faith at all. Faith rests in fact. When your soul is as dead as midnight,
when God seems a million miles away, then you know by cold blooded
faith that He is still there. He said He is going to be there whether you feel
it or not, whether you sense it or not. Faith rests on the fact of His
presence, not on the sense of His presence. Feeling abandoned by the
Lord is the deepest most primal fear we have. All other fears are just
symptoms of the fear that He is not there or He does not care. We can be
deceived by becoming over- dependent on the felt presence of God. Many
become depressed and many have left the faith because they couldn’t feel
what they thought they felt at some time in their spiritual journey. As we
see with the eyes of faith, and become intimately familiar with His nature,
demonstrated by His Son the Lord Jesus Chris, we can accept periods
were our soul and flesh feel empty of sensation. There is a knowing that
goes deeper than the mind which assures us that if He cannot be felt right
now, it is for our spiritual benefit.
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

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