Job 8:13-19; 38:1-7, Dealing with Grief (2)

Today’s passage from Job 8 reveals that Job realizes that without God, any help is at best feeble.  What about our God makes Him the true “God of all comfort?”

·                   Job’s God was an interceding God.

o   Grief over what to us is an irreversible loss can leave us with a sense of hopelessness.  Job experienced this.  It caused him to point out to his friends two things in 9:32-35: God is not a man who has experienced life on earth, and God has not provided a mediator, one who could stand between.  Without these, how can God sympathize with us, and what hope do we have of making our case before God.  Grief often brings us to this thought that we have no platform to stand on before God.  He doesn’t hear us.  He can’t know our need.

o   As we have pointed out in previous posts, this hopelessness is met head-on in the Incarnate Christ, our Mediator (1 Tim. 2:5f).  In 16:18-21 Job is convinced there is, in heaven, One who knows his need.  Thus, he pleads for an intercessor to come to God on his behalf. 

·                   Job’s God was a living God.

o   Job understood Paul’s statement in 1 Cor. 15:19: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.”  In Job 17:13-15 we see Job’s version of this thought.  In essence he says, “If, in my grief, I get comfortable with death, that in death I can be at rest, then where is the hope?”  What happens if we conclude that what we grieve over will never be regained in this life?  We are doomed to sadness if we do not believe there is Someone who is not bound by death, who is defined by life, who is the LIVING God.

o   David understood this in the Shepherd Psalm: God helps me now, even in the shadow of death; and then I will abide with Him forever (Ps. 23).  Asaph, in Ps. 73, understood this: “You will guide me with Your counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.  Whom have I in heaven but You?  And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You” (73:24-25).  Job believed in this God: “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God” (19:25-26).

·                   Job’s God was a sovereign God.

o   Job needed to know that God was in control of his situation.  When I say that, I feel I must add: Job needed to know this was actual truth, not just a theological statement.  Grieving people can be consumed in their grief when they meditate on the unanswerable questions they face, especially the questions that begin with the word “why”!  God’s first words to Job (38:1-7) reveal this issue.  The list of “unanswerable” questions is much longer than we can imagine in our grief.  We must be at peace with this.  The only way is to see God as Sovereign, and to leave the answers with Him.  As David said, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?  The LORD is in His holy temple, the LORD’s throne is in heaven; His eyes behold, His eyelids test the sons of men” (Ps. 11:3-4).  Job learned to worship the Sovereign LORD (42:1-6).