Power With God # 7

Power With God # 7

Through Suffering To Glory, continued

satan has to come back again. "Well, what about it?" says the Lord. "What about Job?" "Very well, go and touch his body, but touch not his life." Yes, it is becoming very deep and terrible. You know what happens - the terrible physical affliction and then his wife saying, "Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? renounce God, and die, Put an end to it all." Oh, satan is behind all this so subtly. satan has been forbidden to touch Job's life, but he has come round in way as to try to get him to take his own life. It is the same thing. satan cannot take it, but he thinks he can get Job to take it. satan is after his life, but he does not get it, and Job goes through this terrible experience, this devastating time. We do not know how long it lasted, but it must have been a long time and been very drastic, but in the end satan has not proved his case. Through the very work of satan, through the very discipline, God has only changed the ground from one which could not ultimately stand up to Him - that of righteousness which is of works - to a ground which does stand up to God. It is a marvelous thing to see that the very ground that makes it possible for God to be glorified and justified and vindicated - the ground of righteousness which is according to faith - was the ground on to which satan forced Job. There is the sovereign hand of God. The Lord is - may I use the word? - very clever. satan thinks he is clever; the Lord can outwit him.

What we must get at this point. We see the spiritual history in the transition from the objective to the subjective, from the outward to the inward, from the hearing of the ear to the seeing of the eye - "I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth Thee" - from the righteousness which is of works, to the righteousness which is according to faith. We see that transition as an essential thing to give God His ground.

God Served Through Suffering

Now the point is that there is a service to God which lies in an altogether different realm from the realm of things earthly and temporal. "My servant Job." He is God's servant, but the real service of Job's life was fulfilled in a spiritual realm, out of sight. It was fulfilled through temporal things, it is true, but there is a background to all this. These were not just happenings in his life, the ordinary misfortunes which could overtake any man. Something is happening in the unseen, in another realm where, through all this, God is being served in a peculiar way. What is the object? What is the end in view? It is just this: God must eventually be vindicated in creation by having glorified humanity. When God undertook to create man, He undertook all the responsibility and all the liability of creating man, and it was a tremendous liability. You get down into the depths with Job and sometimes you will ask ultimate questions, "You created me, I am your responsibility, I lay the responsibility at your door." God says, "I accept that, and when I undertook responsibility for creating man, I did so with the unalterable determination to have man glorified at the last; a glorified humanity is the only thing that will vindicate Me." satan has done everything in his power to defeat God in that intention of a glorified humanity. The whole battle in the unseen has to do with that, and the very work of satan is being sovereignly used by God toward that end. Job's last state is only, of course, a figure, a suggestion, of man raised from the dead and exalted to a very high position and filled with Divine fullness - all through grace, all through the mercy of God acting sovereignly. That is the end in view.

Now, in the unseen something is going on in relation to that, and God is being served through the sufferings of His own people in this way, that He is being vindicated. What do we mean? We are the Lord's people and we have not only been saved in order to be saved, but, in that old, very hackneyed phrase, we have been "saved to serve." God knows that means a great deal more than most people thin when they talk about serving the Lord. Read the Book of Job and see what serving the Lord is. The very highest service that could be rendered to God was God's own vindication, the rights of God in man, God's vindication in creation. This was not a matter of running about, taking so many meetings, preaching all over the place and doing many things which are called service. Sometimes it means being stripped of everything and being put through a deep and terrible experience in which God can do something in us that makes possible the glorifying of humanity, investing man with glory so that, at the last, with a glorified humanity, God can say, "I am vindicated, I am justified in having created man. Does this not justify Me?"

While we, at the moment, cannot grasp all the eternal significance of it, we know this thing in principle. It is working out in principle in minute forms and ways with us. The Lord allows us to come into very deep and dark affliction and suffering where we are deprived and stripped of so much. We go down into the depths and satan seems to be having it all his own way, just riding over us. The Lord seems to be so far away and so hidden and yet, in His faithfulness, He is doing something in us. We do not know what it means. Our constant cry is, Why? Why this? We go through it and then we come out with measure, with spiritual wealth, with a new knowledge of the Lord; we come out with our souls purified into a new place with the Lord and as we look back on it we say, "Well, it was pretty bad, but it was worth it; it was terrible, but I have something which justifies it; I know today as I could not have known by any other way and really I justify God; I go down before the Lord, saying that He is right, He has effected something that would not have been effected in any other way and it is worth having. What is more, I am now in a position, like Job, to stand before God on behalf of others." There are others in desperate need and they are not going to get through. Job's friends could not get through with God and they would not have got through but for Job. He stood before God for them in a place of power and influence. God was right, after all, because of the outcome of that experience, the values that have come from it, the knowledge of the Lord, the spiritual strength, the ability to help others - that justifies God in His ways.

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(continued with # 8)