Page 61 - Job

Is he blaming God? Chapter 30, verse 21
“You have become cruel to me; with the might of Your hand You
persecute me.”
Do you see my point? Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar had one theme they
kept pushing. You are suffering because you are wicked. Job says, no, I
am suffering because God is unjust, because God is unfair. God wanted
someone to pick on, and He chose me. God wanted a target, and He found
one in me. So these men were wrong, but so was Job. I will not develop it
now, but let me just say this. Those two errors have not disappeared in the
last six thousand years. Have you ever heard anyone say something like
this? I am suffering because God is punishing me for something in my
past. Did you ever hear anything like that? You have already been
punished for every sin in the Person of Jesus Christ your substitute. You
will never be punished again……. Ever! No matter what, you can’t be
punished again or God would be collecting for the same debt twice, and
that would make Him dishonest. Jesus took the wrath of God and was
punished, our mistakes now enter the laws of sowing and reaping and are
used for correction and maturation.
People still say “God is unfair”. Well, they might not come right out and
say He’s unfair. He set me up as His target, and He is shooting at me. Did
you ever hear expressions like these? Bad luck. Adverse circumstances.
Misfortune. Ill fate. Everything has befallen me. You see, the whole idea
is that there is no wisdom, there is no plan and there is no love. There is
no reason behind what is going on in my life. There is no real God who
cares and who loves me and who engineers every step. No person can
live under the weight of the lie, God is my enemy. Boy, if you really
believe that, it will lead you to despair and suicide. It would have to. That
unbiblical philosophy can only lead to nihilistic fatalism.

What do we read instead? Romans 8:31: “If God be for us, who can be
against us? He that spared not His own Son but gave Him up for us,
how will He not with Him freely give us all things” He has not set
me up as His target. God is for us. All right, that is the first thing I want to
point out in this section. The basic error of the three men, along with, the
basic error of Job.

Another observation I want to make about this section is that it is one of
the most negative sections in the whole Bible. It is a large section. It is
from chapter 3 all the way to chapter 31. One practical way to study
negative sections of the Bible is to take warnings from them. What I
would like to do is take all these chapters as a whole and give the great

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