Are you asking God questions or Just making statement?

  

February 15, 2014

 

Job 10:1-17

 

“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.   I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me.   Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands
and favor the designs of the wicked?   Have you eyes of flesh?  Do you see as man sees?  Are your days as the days of man, or your years as a man's years, that you seek out my iniquity and search for my sin,  although you know that I am not guilty, and there is none to deliver out of your hand?  Your hands fashioned and made me, and now you have destroyed me altogether.  Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust?  Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese?  You clothed me with skin and flesh and knit me together with bones and sinews.  You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit.  Yet these things you hid in your heart; I know that this was your purpose.  If I sin, you watch me and do not acquit me of my iniquity.  If I am guilty, woe to me!  If I am in the right, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look on my affliction.
 And were my head lifted up, you would hunt me like a lion and again work wonders against me.  You renew your witnesses against me and increase your vexation toward me; you bring fresh troops against me.”

 

Most of these seventeen verses are rhetorical in nature, Job is asking not to get an answer but to make a statement.  If you have been listening, Job has already given the answer to the questions he is asking.  Job wonders why God would be treating a righteous man in this way and not the wicked?  Job also knows that God knows he is not guilty, but wonders why he is being treated in this manner, is it because God has the power to do as He wishes?  (That’s Job’s thinking not mine.)

 

Now never forget that Job is sitting in the garbage with maggots eating on the boils that are all over his body, ask this question, what would I be doing by now?  Knowing the answer to all the question does not stop one’s mind from wondering, why has He not killed me?

 

At this time Job has lost all self-worth and would not look his friends in the eye, he just kept his head to the ground, he had no clue that he was but a pond in a power struggle of God and the devil.  He is wondering is God stacking the deck against me, is he dealing with me as a righteous judge?

 

From the Back Porch,

 

Bob Rice