Choosing Faith in Loss
Our family was reading the story of Job recently. For those of you not familiar with this story, it is a Bible story and apparently, could be one of the oldest stories in there. This is not your typical every-day story, but it really shows the depth of character in a man who doesn’t know who he is battling with, but knows who his God is. What Job does not know, as he sees his possessions taken, his children die (10 of them!), his wife become angry at him, and his health destroyed, is that the enemy had a plan to destroy him.
God was allowing the devil to touch Job’s possessions, family and health.
This would be enough for the typical person to become cynical, angry and remove themselves from their dedication to serve God. The response seems legitimate, because why would you want to serve a God who is allowing you to hurt?
So often, this is our response.
I am hurting, I feel pain, and so we must find someone to blame. God seems like a good option. If he made us, then he must be making me suffer. Therefore, I will just leave him—he is clearly not with me. And suddenly, in the time you need him most, you leave—walking away from the perfect Father who loves and cares for you so deeply.
But, we have to recognize something: we are only seeing Job’s perspective. There is more to the story. And the Bible gives us a glimpse of a deeper happening, the “behind the scenes” look at what was really going on.
It’s so easy to jump too soon to conclusions that aren’t correct. We form our theology solely on our experience, when sometimes we need another perspective to rightly form the way we think.
I identify with Job.
I feel his pain losing his children. Losing family members feels like something was cut off. All of the potential just feels so broken suddenly. Life as you know it suddenly is not what you know. Your perspective has shifted.
I identify with Job and his health—I have also struggled through health issues. When one issue seemed a bit better, suddenly another one turned up. I was tired of being told “You’re fine,” when clearly, I wasn't. And some days I didn't think I had the strength to handle it. But life continues, and daily I choose my response. Do I choose to live in bitterness and regret, attacking God for the very life he gave me? It does seem like the natural response. Why would our daughter die, family members gone too soon, and even our health be so threatened….could it be something other than God?
Now, I think we are on to something. And this is the “other” side to the story.
What Job didn’t see was this: he had an enemy. The devil saw Job’s wisdom, success and his faithfulness to God and he wanted to destroy him. The devil actually came to God and mocked him, saying that if Job’s life was harder then he wouldn’t serve God. To which God responded: try him! And when Job was tried, at his lowest point—covered in sores, sitting in the dust, childless, and with a taunting wife--he said “I will still praise the Lord.”
Sometimes it can be easy to serve God when life is good, when everything falls into place. But when life doesn’t go as planned, when we lose friends and family, jobs, houses…when life is rough, can we still bless God?
It has been in the moments of so much personal pain that I feel God calling me to himself. It’s like a soft whisper, like a loving parent extending their arms to a fallen toddler. That is the Father’s heart. And in fact, He is not the one causing you harm, but he is the one that is saying “look at my son, Job, have you noticed him? He is the finest man in all the earth. He is blameless—a man of complete integrity. He fears God and stays away from evil” (Job 1:8)
If we could only catch that this is the Father’s heart for us, that he is looking on us with the pride and adoration that only a father could. The pride that a father feels as his son takes his first steps, as his daughter rides her bike for the first time. The kind of pride that a mother feels as her daughter is baptized, or her son comes back to tell the truth. This is God’s heart towards us. He has nothing but good plans for us. But, there is an enemy that we need to resist. We need to step back and see the big picture, to see the heavenly war for our souls.
As I continue to walk through my life, through the pain of losses and the depth of hurts, one thing I know is this, which I hear in the sing-songy voice of my little boy, “Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.”
I am loved unconditionally by the Father, and regardless of the pain in my life, that does not change. The devil cannot take away the Father’s love for us, or our love for the Father. Even though Satan has plans to “kill, steal and destroy,” and we feel the impacts of those plans, God’s plans for us are to give us abundant life (John 10:10).
It takes an element of faith to believe in hard times, but "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is how we walk into the depth of the Father's love for us, knowing he loves us through our circumstances.
P.S. The story of Job doesn’t end with him on the ground in pain. But I don’t want to give away the ending, so go read it yourself and be blown away by the faithfulness of God to his faithful servant Job!
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