"When life is comfortable, it's easy to say that God is sovereign, God is wise, and God is good, but when the fires of affliction start burning away the surface layers of our faith to what lies beneath, in those moments, the sovereignty, the wisdom, and goodness of God may not be so easy to affirm.
It's easy to say that God is sovereign over all things, until your husband is killed in a car accident, or your wife succumbs to breast cancer, or your child goes missing.
It's easy to say that God is good until your life is turned upside down by a dark turn of providence. So in the experience of suffering, all those attributes of God that should be comforting to us may sometimes be hard to find comfort in, and that's exactly what we find in our passage today. Job rightly has a very high view of God, but in the furnace of affliction his exalted theology of God fails to bring him comfort and only highlights the frailness of his humanity and his inability to understand why God would allow these things to happen. Job needs help. He needs a mediator, and friends so do we. God is altogether infinite and exalted, we are altogether finite and frail, and we need a mediator – we need Jesus." |
