by Mitchell Dillon 3/7/2021
“A few thoughts on Job: It has been said that not everyone believes in Jesus, but everyone believes in Job. And yet, have you ever noticed that nobody names their child Job? If they did, I don’t imagine the other parents would want their kid anywhere near him! While Job is one of the most admired figures in all of Scripture, his name is synonymous with the worst kind of trouble, and no one wants to get too close to that.
But getting closer is exactly what we must do if we are to get past the horror of Job’s circumstances and discover the timeless lessons that lay at the heart of his story. Job’s sufferings merely served as a dark backdrop, providing contrast to a deeper story, one that draws our attention to the most important questions we will ever be called upon to answer.
Questions like will we believe in the promise of God’s unconditional love, no matter what happens to us during the course of our life? And equally important, are we willing to love God back, in that same unconditional manner? These questions are best answered not when life is going according to plan, but by how we respond in adversity.
This brings us back to the dark backdrop of Job’s story. If it is difficult to feel secure in God’s love through the normal ups and downs of life, try to imagine how difficult it must have been for Job in his dire circumstances. He lost everything he owned and all of his children in just one day! Yet, remarkably, throughout his entire ordeal, Job’s confidence in God’s love never faltered.
The explanation for Job’s incredible resolve is found in his very developed and detailed understanding of grace. Job took comfort in a redeemer who he believed served as his personal advocate in heaven. He described this mediator as one who pleaded for him, as one would plead for a friend. And he was absolutely certain that he would one day stand face-to-face with his advocate, redeemer, and friend, after the resurrection (Job 19:25-27).
Further, Job argued that God governed the world not by the principle of justice but by the principle of grace; he believed in the priesthood of the believer, and he knew what it meant to be declared blameless before God. Even though Job lived two thousand years before Christ, the ancient patriarch possessed an intimate knowledge not only of grace but of Jesus, who is the source of grace.
If Job’s mature understanding of the practical implications of grace seems out of place in history, it really baffled his friends. At one point, Eliphaz was so mystified by Job’s take on things that, in exasperation, he turned to him and asked, “What do you know that we do not know? What insights do you have that we do not have?” (Job 15:9).
While most Christians today would claim to believe that God’s love is unconditional, few grasp its real-world implications as well as Job. We see this most powerfully in Job’s unshakable confidence in his good standing before God. In light of the severity of his trials, this totally astonished his friends. How could Job be so confident that he was accepted by God when God had allowed all hell to break loose against him?
What Job’s friends did not understand was that Job knew that what had happened to him could not be divine punishment, otherwise, God’s love could not be unconditional. Job was confident in the midst of his suffering not because he was perfect but because he believed that God’s love for him was perfect. Job’s steadfast refusal to budge on this one point was so remarkable that it garnered him a prominent place in the annals of biblical history.
Rather than shake his fist toward heaven, Job bowed his head in humility and said, “Though He slay me, yet will I praise Him” (Job 13:15). When we read these words in Scripture, we witness grace in full bloom. In this poignant moment, Job demanded nothing of God in exchange for his devotion, just as God had required nothing of him. He put forth no list of demands and made no attempts to renegotiate the terms of his relationship with God.
Instead, he sat on an ash heap, in the middle of the town dump, in anticipation of his last breath, and pledged that he would use that last breath to praise God. It’s hard to imagine a devotion more pure or selfless or free of stipulations than what Job expressed to his Creator atop that pile of ash.
There is no greater expert on how humans respond to temptation than the Accuser, who predicted that when things got ugly enough, Job would “curse” God to His “face” (Job 1:11, 2:5). Satan tested what he thought was one kind of a man, only to find out that he was dealing with an entirely different kind of man. As Job’s response to his trials proved, his devotion to God was not motivated by the prosperity that God had bestowed on him but by the unconditional love that God had bestowed on him.
Yes, everyone believes in Job. But the most amazing thing about Job’s story was that instead of believing in himself, Job believed in Jesus.”
Mitchell Dillon