Today's Quick Word
Today’s Quick Word
Job 20:1-3 Then Zophar the Naamathite replied: “My troubled thoughts prompt me to answer because I am greatly disturbed. I hear a rebuke that dishonours me, and my understanding inspires me to […]
Job 20:1-3 Then Zophar the Naamathite replied: “My troubled thoughts prompt me to answer because I am greatly disturbed. I hear a rebuke that dishonours me, and my understanding inspires me to reply.
Most of what Zophar says, following this self-justifying introduction, is basically sound – except on one very crucial point: his failure to see that God’s providence, and the outworking of his divine, sovereign will in the lives of men, is never meant to be arbitrated by Man with his very limited perspective. The Cross of Christ is the quintessential example of this!
The fact that Zophar and his two friends were, in the end, declared by a just God to be greatly in error (42:7) makes this clear. The reason Job’s answer ‘troubled’ and ‘greatly disturbed’ Zophar is that he (Zophar) was depending on his own righteousness for acceptance before God. His own health and wealth were, at the time, completely intact, so his theological perspective that ‘the wicked always suffer and the good always prosper’ suited him down to the ground.
Conversely, Job’s approach – that our actual circumstances are often inscrutable from a human viewpoint – was a ‘rebuke’ that ‘dishonoured’ and offended Zophar. Job had no explanation for his suffering that would satisfy his ‘friends’; when we are in a similar situation, and others judge us wrongly, may we, like Job, let God be God and accept the Providence of a loving heavenly Father who knows what he is doing, and why, even if we are completely perplexed and in the dark!
And let us “fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, …” (Hebrews 12:2). “Then learn to scorn the praise of men, and learn to lose with God; for Jesus won the world through shame and calls you to his road.” (Frederick William Faber) Zophar really needed to know some verses of William Cowper’s great hymn, ‘God Moves in a Mysterious Way’: “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense but trust him for his grace; behind a frowning providence he hides a smiling face. His purposes will ripen fast unfolding every hour; the bud may have a bitter taste but sweet will be the flower. Blind unbelief is sure to err and scan his work in vain; God is his own interpreter and he will make it plain.”
– Bruce Christian
