Last week we saw God calling His council together and how Satan also attended it. God challenged Satan to find a man who was better than His servant Job. Job was as righteous as a man could be, and he followed God with a perfect heart. Satan said to God, “Isn’t he following You for what he can get out of it? You protect him from everything bad, but if You let me get at him, he will curse You to Your face!” But God knew His man, and He gave Satan permission to do his worst to Job without touching Job’s person. This is how it happened…..
The next day, Job got up early as he usually did, and made the morning sacrifice for himself and his wife. Then he made another sacrifice to cover each of his children. As he did this, he prayed for each of them, as he did every day. “Lord”, he said, “Please help the boys to stand firm for you; help them to resist temptations, and always be helpful to their mother and sisters. I pray for the girls, Lord that they will not be vain with how they look, but that they will try their best to be beautiful with their minds and their speech.” Job knew that his eldest son was putting on a party that day for his brothers and sisters, and he hoped that everything would go well for them all. While he was sitting there after breakfast thinking about them, he saw one of his servants rushing up the path. He could tell something was wrong.
“What’s the matter?” he called out as the man got close enough to hear. “We were out in the field ploughing with the bullocks and the donkeys were there beside them when a marauding tribe from over the hill came and rounded them up, killing all the herdsmen, and I’m the only one who got away!” With that, he fell down on the ground panting with the run, and fright at what he had seen.
The man had hardly finished telling Job this when another servant came panting up. “Oh!,” he said, “There was a massive lightning storm over the paddock where the sheep were, and they have all been struck dead as well as the other servants there. I’m the only one who managed to get away to tell you!”
A third servant came panting in from another direction and said, “The Chaldeans made out three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have carried them away, yes, and killed the servants with swords; and I only am escaped alone to tell you.”
Job hardly had time to take all this in when another servant came rushing in from the direction of the oldest boy’s house. “Oh, oh,” he wailed when he saw Job, “Your sons and your daughters were eating their meal and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house when there was a terrific gust of wind rushing in from the desert like a tornado, and the roof was lifted off and the whole thing collapsed on everyone else in the house, and they are all dead! I’m the only one to escape and tell you!”
Job had been sitting down all this time, and now he stood up and tore his long robe off his shoulders. He went inside and shaved the hair all off his head to show how upset he was. His wife and servants wondered how he would cope with all this bad news and the disasters that had happened. But he didn’t curse or swear, or even complain. It didn’t even enter his head to ask God why this had all happened.
Instead, he got down on his knees and prayed in front of everyone left in his house, and said, ” I was born naked with nothing, and I will go back to God the same way, with nothing. The LORD gave me these things, and the LORD has taken them away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” In all these disasters Job didn’t sin or complain and blame God foolishly. He had truly shown a godly attitude to a disastrous situation, just as God had known he would.
What a lesson this is to us today! Here was a man who had just received bad news about his family and all his livestock and servants. All he could do was to say that God was blessed in all that He does! He didn’t blame God for these disasters that had befallen on him, he took it all on the chin as it were.
But that is not the end of the story of Job, and we will see next time what happened next to Job and why it came about.