Accessibility to God
Job’s reply today has very
little to do with Eliphaz and the last chapter.
It has everything to do with Job’s inability to feel like the throne of
God is accessible to him. Ultimately, I
am going to get to the error of Job’s thinking.
But before I do that I want to talk about the reality of Job’s thinking.
God can feel very
inaccessible from time to time. There
are days when I feel like my prayers are wafting up into space and may never
reach God. There are days when I feel
completely hopeless and lost. There are
days when I really do wonder if God hears me.
{Yes, I know He does. But that doesn’t mean in my human failing I
don’t ever wonder if He does.}
I’ve also wondered why
Jesus had to do the whole ascension/return thing. After all, I know why He had to die – without
the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins. The crucifixion explains why He had to
come. But once He came and once He died,
why did He have to ascend and hang out at the right hand of the Father? In other words, why did He have to go
away? Now that He has proven Himself to
humanity, to death, and to Satan why does He need to go to heaven and wait any
longer? If He has conquered death, why
not stick around and be in relationship with humanity? Why not just start up the kingdom right then
and there? Certainly God would be far
more accessible had Jesus stayed here and not ascended, right?
This is the same kind of
thinking that Job is doing in this chapter.
Job isn’t telling God that He is wrong.
Neither is Job expressing disbelief in God. Rather, Job is expressing that because he
cannot understand the mind of God, he is having trouble understanding why God
has chosen to work in the manner that He has.
It isn’t that Job is saying that God is wrong; it is that Job is saying
that God is hard to understand. That is
absolutely very true! God – and God’s
ways – can be very hard to understand from time to time. That doesn’t make God wrong. It just shows my own inability to truly feel
fully connected to the mind and the will of God.
Of course, that doesn’t
make Job right, either. Much like my
exploration of thought regarding the ascension a few paragraphs ago, Job is
complaining about feeling distant from God.
Job is feeling like life would be easier if we had a tangible place that
we could go and be in the presence of God.
There are days when I really feel like I need to concur with that
thought.
However, those thoughts
come about because of problem with humanity, not a problem with God. When Job says that he goes forward and God is
not there, is Job right? There’s no
denying that it accurately describes how Job feels. But is he right? No, Job is not right. The truth is that we actually cannot escape
God’s presence! Of course God is
there. The problem isn’t with God’s
presence; the problem is with our ability to perceive God!
Take my own paragraph of
question that I wrote above. Would
things really be much different had Jesus not ascended and stayed here
forever? In truth, I really doubt
it. Let me explain why.
We do have access to God
every moment through the Holy Spirit and through His Word. Do we utilize those things like we
should? I don’t know about you, but I
could stand to pay more attention to the Holy Spirit and to God’s Word. If I as a human being can find a way to not
pay attention to the things to which God has granted me access, why would I
think having access to the fleshly person of the resurrected Lord would really
make me behave any better? Would I be in
the presence of Christ every moment?
Even if I could, would I be able to keep my mind from wandering in
sin?
It turns out that the
problem isn’t that I need more personal access to God. My problem is that I am human and have an
innate desire to not really see what God is doing in life! I have an inability to see God because my
focus tends towards the temporal.
Like me, Job does realize
that the problem is within himself, not God.
That doesn’t make it any less frustrating from our perspective! In fact, it actually makes it more
frustrating to realize that the very problem we think we have with God is
actually a problem with us! But that is
the truth. Our problem lies in the fact
that when God is at work, we don’t see Him.
See Job 23:9.
I find this to be an
absolutely beautiful chapter of examining the human condition. We don’t see God, so we get angry with
God. But the truth of humanity rests in
the fact that we actually don’t see Him because we don’t look for Him rather
than because He isn’t there. He’s
there. He’s always there. The problem is me and my ability or desire to
see Him.
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