7-3-14. Job 10:1-22. Believe What You Know Is True About God –my devotional

Job 10:1-22                                                                                                                                               Kevin E. Jesmer

Key Verse: 10:12                                                                                                                                    7-3-14

“You gave me life and showed me kindness, and in your providence watched over my spirit.”

Dear Lord God…we thank you for this season to celebrate our nation’s independence and reflect on the meaning of our independence. We were forced to start a revolution because of taxation without representation, restrictions on manufacturing and restrictions on our freedoms, like freedom of religious expression. In your sovereignty you made us into a free nation, to chart our course and be a light on the hill for the rest of the world. Thank you for our freedoms. Thank you for allowing our nation to be so influential in the world. Help us now to use our freedoms, and our influence to shine the light of the Gospel to a world mired in darkness. This fourth, fill our hearts with joy and thanksgiving as we celebrate our freedoms with friends and family. But also help us to decide to use the freedoms we have been given for the glory of God, to love and serve our fellow human beings and tell the whole world about the love of Jesus found in the Gospel. May we show God’s love in all we do. Now I pray that your word may come and dwell in my heart this morning. I pray in the name of the King of Heaven, ..Jesus Christ.

Part 1: May Our Beliefs Agree With Our Observations About God (1-12)

This is a great passage for Christians who suffer from self condemnation and are slaves to tying to achieve and maintain “performance based” righteousness. Job 10:1-12 read, “I loathe my very life; therefore I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul. 2 I say to God: Do not declare me guilty, but tell me what charges you have against me. 3 Does it please you to oppress me, to spurn the work of your hands, while you smile on the plans of the wicked? 4 Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees? 5 Are your days like those of a mortal or your years like those of a strong man, 6 that you must search out my faults and probe after my sin—7 though you know that I am not guilty and that no one can rescue me from your hand? 8 “Your hands shaped me and made me. Will you now turn and destroy me? 9 Remember that you molded me like clay. Will you now turn me to dust again? 10 Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese, 11 clothe me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews? 12 You gave me life and showed me kindness, and in your providence watched over my spirit.”

Job is in great pain, pain which he cannot understand. He complains to God who made him. He does not doubt God’s sovereignty. He does not think of himself as an orphan in the universe. He knows that God personally created him and that God has watched over him. He believes that God also is well aware of his agony. It is confusing to Job, for he wonders why God doesn’t do something if he knows about his personal situation. This is why he complains to God. Job wonders if God smiles on the schemes of the wicked and is bent on oppressing him. He really needs to examine his thoughts and be set free in his soul by the truth of God.

First, Job has made some correct observations about God. He states that he is the work of God’s hands. (4) He knows that God can see his heart. (7) He knows that God created him and molded him like clay. (8) He knows that God gave him life and showed him kindness. (12a) God also watched over his spirit. (9b) Job knows all of this. If these things are true about God, then it makes no sense that God should take the time to create him and mold him, study him, and watch over him, and give him life and show him kindness, only to torture him and cause him to suffer and eventually take his life. The facts that Job observes about God are inconsistent with the conclusions that he makes about God.

Think about this. There are times when we think that God is criticizing us and rejecting us because of our sins. We condemn ourselves and we feel that God is condemning us. But we also know that God went out of his way to send Jesus into this world to die for our sins and make us holy. God made us holy and righteous and acceptable to him through the Gospel of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection. We are made white as snow, through faith in Christ. God accepts us. We are children of God. This is a fact. This fact about God and his unconditional love is inconsistent with statements by people of faith, thinking that God does not love them or accept them. If we don’t think that God accepts us, a believer, then we don’t believe in the finished work of Christ. Our being holy and not holy is totally up to God now. Our acceptability to God is dependant on God and not our self and it is made clear that the blood of Jesus is enough to cleanse us of all your sins. The fact that it does not depend on us is great news. This news should set us free from condemnation, both by self and the false notion that God is doing it. It should save us from “performance based” Christianity and striving to make ourselves holy. God has already done it through Jesus Christ. Thank you Jesus for the freedom of heart, mind and soul, that you give us through the Gospel.

Part 2: Be Set Free From Despair To Celebrate Life In God (13-22)

Verses 13-22, “But this is what you concealed in your heart, and I know that this was in your mind: 14 If I sinned, you would be watching me and would not let my offense go unpunished. 15 If I am guilty—woe to me! Even if I am innocent, I cannot lift my head, for I am full of shame and drowned in my affliction. 16 If I hold my head high, you stalk me like a lion and again display your awesome power against me. 17 You bring new witnesses against me and increase your anger toward me; your forces come against me wave upon wave. 18 “Why then did you bring me out of the womb? I wish I had died before any eye saw me. 19 If only I had never come into being, or had been carried straight from the womb to the grave! 20 Are not my few days almost over? Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy 21 before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and utter darkness, 22 to the land of deepest night, of utter darkness and disorder, where even the light is like darkness.”

Job begins to think about the link between guilt and righteousness and what is the root of “holding your head up high.” Look at verses 13-16, ““But this is what you concealed in your heart, and I know that this was in your mind: 14 If I sinned, you would be watching me and would not let my offense go unpunished. 15 If I am guilty—woe to me! Even if I am innocent, I cannot lift my head, for I am full of shame and drowned in my affliction. 16 If I hold my head high, you stalk me like a lion and again display your awesome power against me.”  Job wonders if God is a celestial policeman, just waiting to catch him in some wrong. If he is guilty, he expects hard punishment; even if he is innocent, he is full of shame. If he tries to overcome his shame and holds his head high, he feels that God would stalk him once more. He asks God to forget about him for a moment. By asking God to turn away from him, he is looking for momentary relief rather than a solution to spiritual problem.

The ability to hold our heads up high is linked to our sense of innocence. We are guilty. The Bible says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Ro 3:23) Every person, if they knew the full gravity of their sin, could not hold their head high. Satan will always come to you and remind you of your past sins and why you are not qualified to be a child of God or a servant of God. His onslaught is relentless. It will really get you down if you let it. Keep in mind that it is not God reminding us of our sins, but it is Satan doing this job and we are allowing him to do it. This is actually a great problem of humanity. We need to know that we are innocent, not by our own good works or by our own good character. We are made righteousness by the grace of our Lord Jesus. Holding onto this grace, firmly, grants us the ability to hold our heads up high.

Job wonders why he is born in verses 18-19, “Why then did you bring me out of the womb? I wish I had died before any eye saw me. 19 If only I had never come into being, or had been carried straight from the womb to the grave!”  (NIV) A lot of people ask themselves this question, “Why was I born anyway?” or “I didn’t ask to be born.” Again, Job is looking for momentary relief from his suffering and not the eternal solution. We can’t blame him. He is in deep pain and despair. People say things when they are suffering. We need to just listen to them and quietly pray and if there is an opportunity to share the Gospel, then we can do so wisely and with deep empathy.

God wants to us to be born. Listen to what King David says about God creating him in Psalm 139:13-17, “For you created my inmost being;    you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts, God!”  King David was celebrating the day that he was made. He also made these declarations in the midst of his suffering.

We should celebrate the fact that we are born. God gives us an opportunity to enter into a wonderful, relationship with him. He wants us to have eternal life with him. He wants to work with us and through us to bring the light of God to the ends of the earth. He invites us on a great adventure with him. Praise God for the blessing to be born and live a life in God.

Job is spiritually blind, full of despair and hopelessness in verses 20-22, “20 Are not my few days almost over? Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy 21 before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and utter darkness, 22 to the land of deepest night, of utter darkness and disorder, where even the light is like darkness.” (NIV) He is longing for his days to end in this world. His only hope is a dark, gloomy hell. What a way to live! Today there are so many people living like this. They are longing for death to come. They are welcoming death with no hope other then to endure a moment of pain and then surrender themselves to a dark, gloomy eternity in nothingness. Without the hope of eternity with Jesus in the kingdom of God, that the Gospel brings.

I would also be living in that reality. Even as a Christian there have been times when I got depressed. In the recent past, there were times when I was hoping for the end to come. (But I still had a hope in the kingdom of God.) Christ has pulled me out of this dark dungeon by his grace and into the joy of living as a child of God. I pray for the millions upon millions of people who are waiting for the end to come with only a vague hope in a gloomy hell. May they turn their hearts to Jesus and place all of their hope in the kingdom of God. May they have God’s life in them and have it to the full. (John 10:10).

Prayer: Lord, help me to apply what I already know about you into my life, especially in the times of great suffering. May I not just seek momentary relief, but solutions in Christ.

One Word: Hold onto what God has already shown you. Rejoice in the day of your birth!