Job 40:8 (KJV)
Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?
I wonder if we have been too quick to read this as a rebuke of Job.
God does not say that Job has disannulled His judgment. He does not say that Job has condemned Him. He asks, “Wilt thou?”
For much of the book, Job’s friends have operated under what appears to be a false choice. God is righteous. Job is suffering. Therefore, Job must have done something to deserve his suffering. To defend the righteousness of God, they believed they had to condemn Job.
Job refused to accept their conclusion.
He knew he had not committed the sins they imagined. He would not confess to something merely because his circumstances seemed to demand an explanation. Yet neither did Job abandon his faith in God.
Perhaps that is the point of God’s question. “Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?”
Job did not have to.
There was never a necessity to choose between the righteousness of God and the integrity of Job. The friends had created that dilemma because they could not imagine another explanation for Job’s suffering. But their inability to explain something did not make their explanation true.
There is a lesson here worth remembering.
We can become so determined to explain what God is doing that we begin assigning guilt where God has not assigned it. We see trouble and assume chastening. We see suffering and search for sin. We see circumstances that do not fit our understanding of God and construct an explanation that makes everything fit neatly again.
But God does not need us to defend Him by falsely accusing another man.
Neither must we question the righteousness of God when we know an accusation against us is false.
There is another possibility. We may simply not know.
God can be righteous when I cannot explain what He is doing. A man can suffer without my knowing why he suffers. And I can trust the judgment of God without inventing an explanation for what God has not explained.
Faith does not require an answer for everything. It requires confidence that God is right even when I do not know the answer.
#TrustGod #BookOfJob #FaithWithoutAnswers #GodIsRight #BibleTruth
You’re Asking the Wrong Question About Suffering: Seeing What God Sees
What do you think Job 40:8 is really teaching? Is God rebuking Job, or showing him that he cannot see the whole picture? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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Job 40:8 (KJV) You’re Asking the Wrong Question About Suffering
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