Where wast thou?

I just finished the Book of Job. What a powerful book of the Bible that was! Rugged, but amazing at the same time. I have been trying to remember to say a little prayer asking the Lord to speak to me while I read His word. I almost wished I hadn't when I got to Job 38:4. "Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"

Oof.

I mentioned in some of my earlier posts about how during my worst times I raised my fist up to God in anger and demanded that He help me make sense of how my life had gotten so messed up. Job 38:4 really hit me between the eyes. Where wast thou? Indeed.

Needless to say I had a little "Come to Jesus" meeting in my prayers that evening. If Job was rebuked as a righteous man for questioning God, how much worse was I as a man who had stopped walking a righteous path to question Him? Job is certainly rebuked as having no standing to question the Almighty God and I felt some of that myself when I realized I had done the same thing under far less terrible situations than Job had found himself bearing.

The message I learned here is that we are never promised a life without problems. We are never promised that things will be perfect for us until we are transformed by Jesus into eternal life. Life will happen. As Mark Lowry is fond of saying, our favorite verse should be, "And it came to pass." Is life going good right now? It will pass. Is life going badly? It will pass.

What we need to do is to trust God implicitly and not question His great plan for our lives and for this world. He is the Almighty. As His soliloquy in Job attests, He is the sovereign God who created heaven and earth. We are not to question. We are only to follow.

I always find it amazing when Jesus called Simon (Peter) and Andrew. He simply said, "Follow me." And they did. There were no questions. There was no hesitation. We are not to question. We are only to follow.

My one problem that I am still working out after all these years as a Christian is that I do not know how to hear God. I pray and then don't know how to understand how I am to know His answers. Even my desire to have things made clear to me like it was to the Disciples and others in the Bible is "pulling a Job." God does not communicate to all his children the same way. He is not going to appear to me in a burning bush and tell me what to do.

In that light, how do I know how to glean the answers? I have to study that further and ponder so I know to what purpose I have with this second chance God has given me to walk for Him.

Thank God for his grace to forgive me when I questioned Him just the way He forgave Job for questioning God and demanding answers. Thank God that His love for me sees only the blood of Jesus as I repent and ask forgiveness for my foolishness in questioning Him.

We serve a mighty God and he has no need to explain Himself to us. We just need to follow and understand that we will "see through a glass darkly" at times.

"Trust and obey, for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey."