The Meaning of Job's Suffering ~ Part B
Do not look down on your brother in the day of his misfortune. (Obadiah 12)
The book of Job recounts and records the human condition, mans' response to suffering. Suffering is viewed through a crystal clear pane.
Men at comfort will assail men in misfortune.
Job is a despairing man wrestling with his friends on the outside, while he wrestles with himself and God on the inside. Job describes his judgemental friends as:
miserable comforters whose lips bring no relief.
Job is a righteous man of both spiritual understanding and faith. Yet, he is not understood by his acerbic friends.
Bildad, Eliphaz and Zophar apportion blame with ease and a crushing persistence to Job. They hold the errant belief (fuelled by their proud and blind grasp of Job's circumstances) that such judgemental knowledge is a salve to his tortured body and soul. But:
Rash judgement is the enemy of tenderness and compassion. ~ Brennan Manning
Through extended times of suffering sympathizers can become accusers, and the sufferer then returns the favor towards God. Job is direct, he accuses God of overcoming him.
Job extracts from his pains a deliberate fatalism towards mankind's misery. He sees it as the natural order to life. Troubles will miss no man, and avoidance is impossible.
A man is born to trouble as sure as sparks fly upward. 5:7
Men judge suffering and Heaven by what they can see. There is much foolishness and culpability here. In accusing both Heaven and their brothers they pass an ignorant judgement on what they are blind to.
The wise don't despise others in their hardships, lest it also happen to them. They permit mercy to triumph over judgement.
Suffering is very often the time that arrives for all men when:
intellect needs to capitulate to faith.
Today's Soul Snippet:
'Knowledge does not draw us to purity, but pride'. ~ Michael Cartwright
ENJOY too ... The Meaning of Job's Suffering ~ Part A
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