Job 8 - Perfect example of the sexiness of false doctrine. This idea that if you’re good your life will be rosy and you’ll always come out on top appeals to human narcissism and is not based in reality. I suppose if you extend things out beyond death and into eternity then it’s true doctrine. But normally, as here, the idea is that your temporal existence will be comfortable and you’ll prosper according to our measures of success and blessing if you’re good. It’s works based religion.
Prosperity gospel is based on it and appeals to our greed. It feels good to believe that our comfort or success is God’s preeminent concern, so we like to believe it. But it’s false. Jesus died a horrible death and lived in all sorts of rejection and opposition in his life and ministry And he said that we could expect more of the same as his followers. That proved to be true with all the Apostles, they followed him in persecution and matyrdom.
Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer if life ends up good in the end. He went into Nazi Germany as a missionary to preach against the Nazi party and its evil. As he hung from a rope on a Nazi gallow, body convulsing, his tongue bulging from his mouth, his eyes wide the point of bursting and his bowels emptying themselves I’m sure he wasn’t the picture of blessing, success, and comfort.
We put too much stock in this world. We put too much stock in physicality. Is it coincidence that the words “temporal” and “temporary” are so similar? Even though sometimes God does make life easier and he does give some people alot of stuff, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have any more favor than the guy who is struggling to make rent or loses his home or the kid in Africa who dies of starvation or the old lady in Mexico City who lives in a cardboard hut or the innocent girl sold by her parents and exists day to day in a drugged stupor in a Bangkok brothel?
And sometimes that blessing comes at a price. Even though Job got back more stuff than he had before, he didn’t get his old children back. They were still dead. Sure he got new ones. But his original family was still dead, God did not resurrect them. God used Job to prove a point, and Job paid the price of that object lesson for the rest of his life as he carried in his heart the memory of his dead children who died with the permission of a righteous God. That’s a heavy price. Perhaps worse than martyrdom.
True freedom and shalom is when we are free from the allure of stuff and the intoxication of reputation. True freedom is when we trust God.
