THE front page of our paper this week gives us a picture of Job and his friends. If you turn to the book of Job, and read there what God has written to us about him, and of His dealings with Job, you will learn many needful and important lessons.
There are only a few points in the history of Job that I will draw your attention to.
He was a man with a great many earthly blessings, and a very good man, but God saw that he thought a great deal of his goodness, and He wanted to teach him his own nothingness. So, God permitted Satan to take away from Job all the blessings He had given him. But Job remembered that God had a right to do that, if He saw fit; and he said “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job. 1:21. Then God allowed Satan to do still more. He smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown. But Job still honored God and when his wife wanted him to curse God, and die, he said “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” Job 2:10. Then his three friends came to visit him and mourn with him and comfort him. They sat beside him for seven days and never said a word but after that they spoke.
I won’t dwell here on what his friends said, nor what Job answered, but we will pass over from the second chapter to the thirty-eighth, and we see from there to the close of the forty-first chapter, that God speaks to Job. That gives Job to feel his own nothingness and in chapter 42:5 Job says: “I HAVE HEARD OF THEE BY THE HEARING OF THE EARN BUT NOW MINE EYE SEETH THEE. WHEREFORE I ABHOR MYSELF AND REPENT IN DUST AND ASHES.”
This shows how Job had learned himself in the presence of God, and from that on, God began to give him greater blessings than He had given him before.
So, dear children, we too must be brought to see ourselves in the sight of God, to see Him as the thrice holy God, and His greatness and power, and when we do, we can say like Job, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” God will then give all who do so, to know that He can justify them through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, for He it is who has paid the debt for our sins by going down into death, which is the wages of sin; and a proof that He was able for it, is, that He rose from the dead and God has accepted Him at His own right hand. So righteousness will be imputed to all who will “believe on Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead: Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” Rom. 4:24, 25.
ML 01/07/1906