Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Kingdom
- Kingdom: We live
in God’s creation, but it is fallen. We do not yet live in the
fullness of God’s Kingdom. But we do know that the Kingdom of
God is drawing near. We do get to see glimpses of the kingdom
each and every time that God works in us and through us as He tries to
demonstrate Himself to the world.
I always
wrestle with the words of Job’s friends.
I find them often to be quite misleading. Look at what Eliphaz says here about the life
of the righteous and the wicked.
Eliphaz
tells us that the righteous live lives of goodness. He makes it sound like the righteous don’t
ever have struggles. He makes it sound
like the righteous just coast through life with life working out for them. I hate to say it, but if having an easy life
is a true gauge of being righteous, I’m doing something pretty horribly
wrong. But I believe the truth is far
from that. God’s kingdom isn’t about the
ease of this life. God’s kingdom isn’t
about this life working out successfully and smoothly.
On the
other hand, Eliphaz also tells us that the unrighteous live in a horrible
life. He indicates that the unrighteous know
that their life is horrible. He says
that they are prevailed upon. He says
that they live in darkness. He says that
the wicked writhe in pain all of their days.
The truth is that I don’t believe this, either. In my experience, the wicked actually tend to
get along in this life better than the righteous. Those who think only of themselves tend to go
through life getting what they want more often than others.
Again, I
don’t think that we can summarize righteousness by looking at who is leading a
more stress-free life of ease. I don’t
think that the absence of pain in this life is an indicator of how far we are
in the kingdom of God. After all, when
Jesus brought the kingdom of heaven to this earth, He was crucified for
it. Many of His disciples lost their
lives because of it. If we want to be in
the kingdom, we should do anything except take Eliphaz’s advice here in this
passage! Evaluate the kingdom based on
faithfulness and relationship to God, not ease of life and freedom from pain
and misery!
<><
No comments:
Post a Comment