A Man of Heroic Endurance

Part 1

.....Job loved and feared God, and disciplined his life according to that belief. This bible study of Job will show God's faithful and sovereign hand over us today.

.....God tests us but never disgraces us. He strengthens us and matures us through the trials and tribulations He allows in our life. His plans for our life are never cruel or dishonest. He always has our best interest at heart, though the journey to get us there is sometimes shockingly surprising.

.....Life is difficult for a lot of us today. Some would even say it is unfair, or intolerable. Our drive for justice today overrides our patience in pain. This is why the Bible is so relevant for us today.

.....Job is important to us not only because he suffered, but because he suffered in the same ways that we all suffer today. That would be in the vital areas of family, personal health, and material things. It is just not the suffering as such that troubles us, it is the undeserved suffering.

.....Let me explain further. When we have done wrong, we get punished, a sense of justice. We experience discipline connected with wrong doing. An example of this would be like when we disobeyed our parents when we were young.

.....Through life though, there is no correlation with the amount of wrong we commit and with the amount of pain we experience.

.....Very often it is the opposite. We do right and get knocked down. We do the best we are capable of doing, and just as we are reaching out to receive our reward, we are hit from the blind side and sent reeling. This is exactly what happened to Job. Life became unfair.

.....Job was a man well deserved of prosperity. A good, priestly and rich man, trusting in God and caring for others. He was a fine husband and faithful father. Blameless in the eyes of God and did not compromise with moral evil. He handled business with integrity, was respected by those around him, upright, fearing God, and turning away from evil.

.....But in a quick and brutal sweep of calamities, he is reduced to a twisted mass of brokenness and grief. The extraordinary accumulation of back to back disasters which would have been enough to finish off any one of us. Job is left penniless, homeless, helpless, and childless. Insult and injury are also added to his experience.

.....He was a man tried not because of his unrighteousness, but in spite of his righteousness. A trial to establish his righteousness, and to give him a deeper insight into his relationship with God. Also a greater understanding of his own nature, Job 1:8.

.... Job had 3 friends arrive and sit and stare at him for 7 days. At first, they don't recognize him, and when they spoke, they had nothing but blame for him. They basically said, "You are getting what you deserve," which would have been bad enough, but misery turned to mystery with God's silence. However long that took, even if it were for just a few months, would have been unbearable. Words from friends can be hard to listen to, but the silence from God would been truly intolerable. Imagine, nothing coming to him by way of comfort, from God or man, and he had done nothing to deserve such pain.
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