Job 9 – 10
Job is answering Bildad’s accusation that something is wrong with Job’s relationship with God. He opens with an interesting question “how can man be in the right before God?” When you ponder that one, he is absolutely right. If you talk to even the most “righteous” of the people you know about sin, you find they have many problems just like everyone else. The only real difference between then and a jailed rapist is they arrested their thoughts before they became out of control.
Job continues to talk about how great God really is in comparison to man. Verses 6 & 7 give you a view on this:
6 who shakes the earth out of its place,
and its pillars tremble;
7 who commands the sun, and it does not rise;
who seals up the stars;
When you look at everything it’s amazing that God even notices our prayers and pleas! When you look beyond this world it becomes unimaginable the total scope of God and then his love towards little ‘ole you. So when you see God work in your life it becomes even more amazing that something like that happens on a daily basis. Most of the time we just ignore what God is doing or take it for granted, like Job describes in verse 11:
Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not;
he moves on, but I do not perceive him.
The key there is our perception of God. Most often we think of God as some large old guy in the heavens that comes to earth on occasion. Therefore when we expect to see God, we expect a physical being that can touch us and talk to us. God may manifest himself to some that way, but for the most part He has many different forms and planes of existence that we need to expand our view before we can really experience God.
The remainder of reading in chapter 10 is Job lamenting his existence. Sure like can suck and, like Job, we wish we had never been born. But more often than not, these periods are very short in the grand scheme of things. Sure sometimes we cannot control our problems or ever hope for a change, as with paralyzed people. Yes we can read stories in the Bible and have the hope of Jesus healing us and making us whole, but rarely does this happen. We must learn to accept the frailties of the body and hope for healing, but never once blame God if healing never comes.
We must live for God and realize God is not doing things to punish us, but this is just the way the world is designed. We could not have the beautiful seas if not for the storms. We could not have the “purple mountains majesty” without the earthquakes. The mountain lakes would not exist without the rains or the tropical islands without volcanoes. We are not superman, our bodies are very limited. So accept the problems of life more as design and not punishment from God, much like Job. Just don’t get so down in the dumps you wish you had never been born! You have a purpose that God created you for, learn to live it!