Good Job

Been thinking about Job today; not sure why, but I have. This blameless and upright God-fearer lost just about everything he had - children, sheep, servants, home, and finally his health. He didn't lose his wife, though, and she approached him as he sat there in the ash heap, scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery, and said, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!" So much for spousal support.

Job didn't curse God and die. There are forty-two chapters in the O.T. that tell the story of what he did and didn't do. The bottom line is that he stayed faithful and "the LORD blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first."

Those two options, cursing God or staying faithful, seem to be the extreme choices when satan is granted permission to release hell in our lives. Some folks immediately curse God. There's not much love lost between them anyway and it's essentially driving the last nail in the coffin. And then some folks stay faithful. They persevere alongside bitter spouses, have daily conversations with well-meaning-but-just-plum-stupid friends, and they live to see the blessings.

But the rest of the folks, and this is the larger of all the numbers, don't curse God and they don't stay faithful. They become indifferent and keep on living. Better said, we become indifferent and keep on living.

We tell God that evidently nothing we do or say has any bearing on His divine perogatives. We'll just keep getting up and doing the doo and trying to muddle through somehow and when He calls our number, we'll pass on over into whatever's next and face it just the way we faced things while here on earth - alone. It's as if He twists our arms so far back that we give in, cry "UNCLE" and spend the rest of our days a shell of a man or woman, living a life of quiet desperation. Oh, we're not mad or vengeful or bitter or sad or anything of those words. What we are is numb. And we may have been better off cursing God and dying. At least it would have been a blooded response.

In the overall scheme of things, it seems like God would much rather have a stay-faithful person or a curse-God person over a whatever,You're-going-to-do-what-You-want-anyway person. He'd be so much more pleased with a teach-Sunday-school-to-teenagers-your-whole-life person or the I'll-never-step-foot-in-this-place-again person instead of the person who sits in the pew every Sunday, smiling at the ceiling while the choir sings, dropping the tithe in the bucket when it's passed, all the while thinking, "These poor nice suckers." You see, you can stay faithful and die like Job - "old and full of years" - or you can resign your life completely and live for a long time - "old and full of crap."

If you can't pull off the Jobian-stay-faithful thing, it might not be such a bad idea to curse God and die. I'm quite certain God can handle it. And what if I said I really don't think you'd be cursing God, but your image of God? And once that's cursed or dies, then you can move into who or what God really is? Or at least a little more than you had before? But it takes great courage to curse your image of God and let it die. And your spouse and friends and sheep and servants are rarely supportive.