Week of 28 February 2021
Job’s Experience of God’s Consuming and Stripping in the Old Testament Being Far Behind That of Paul in the New Testament
Job was disturbed, perplexed, and entangled to the uttermost by his suffering of the disasters that befell his possessions and his children and the plague on his body, in spite of his perfection, uprightness, and integrity. When Job cursed the day of his birth, he surely was not perfect and upright, nor did he hold his integrity; rather, he became bankrupt in integrity. God’s intention was to tear down the natural Job in his perfection and uprightness that He might build up a renewed Job in God’s nature and attributes in order to make Job a man of God, constituted with God according to His economy; such a man, like Paul, would never be entangled by any troubles and problems so that he would curse his birth and prefer to die rather than to live. Job was dwelling on his excellent past and sighing over his miserable present ; he held fast insistently to, and even boasted of, his uprightness, righteousness, integrity, and perfection ..
Through his eight times of speaking to his three friends, Job exposed himself as a person with self-righteous: acknowledging God in name but not in reality. Neither Job nor his friends knew the purpose of God’s dealing with him, as the apostle Paul did in declaring to the New Testament believers that the affliction the believers are suffering works out for them an eternal weight of glory, which is the God of glory to be their glorious portion for them to gain and enjoy unto eternity.
If Job and his friends had taken the time to seek God in a spirit of humility and by exercising their spirit in prayer, God could have shown them that a regenerated, transformed, and glorified saint in Christ has nothing to do with the natural man and does not need to build up himself with the natural virtues. This heavenly vision would have saved them from the time- wasting, pain-increasing, and vain debates in thirty-five chapters as a record of a group of blind persons groping in darkness; they talked about God and and also referred to their spirit (Job 32:8), but they exercised their mind in three rounds of long debates instead of exercising their life, light, andspiritual supply.
Job’s experience of God’s consuming and stripping in the Old Testament was far behind that of Paul in the New Testament. Day by day and hour by hour, Job was unhappily being consumed, but in the New Testament, God’s consuming and stripping become pleasant things; since the day he was converted, Paul was a person under God’s consuming and stripping as a prisoner in the Lord, but he was filled with joy and rejoicing. Paul was crucified with Christ; to be reborn through termination and germination is to be regenerated crucified; we, like Paul, were reborn crucified for the purpose that from that time it would be no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. Now in our Christian life we are dying to live; dying to live is the proper meaning of bearing the cross.
Job’s experience of God’s consuming and stripping in the Old Testament was far behind that of Paul in the New Testament. Day by day and hour by hour, Job was unhappily being consumed, but in the New Testament, God’s consuming and stripping become pleasant things; since the day he was converted, Paul was a person under God’s consuming and stripping as a prisoner in the Lord, but he was filled with joy and rejoicing. Paul was crucified with Christ; to be reborn through termination and germination is to be regenerated crucified; we, like Paul, were reborn crucified for the purpose that from that time it would be no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us. Now in our Christian life we are dying to live; dying to live is the proper meaning of bearing the cross.
Paul wanted to know Christ, the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings in order to be conformed to Christ’s death; he took Christ’s death as a mold for his life, and it was his great pleasure to be molded in the death of Christ. Paul magnified Christ by living Him, whether through life or through death, by the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ; when God created man, this was the kind of life He wanted man to live. Paul said that he was always bearing about in the body the putting to death, the killing, of Jesus and being delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake that the life of Jesus might be manifested in his mortal flesh; when we are under the killing of the Lord’s death, His resurrection life is imparted through us into others. In his experience of God’s consuming and stripping, Paul considered his affliction to be momentary and light; instead of caring about our affliction, we need to care for the increase of God as the weight of glory within us by our being transformed from one degree of glory to another; as long as we have more of God in us, this is what really matters.
(Source: https://www.churchintaipei.org/bibletruth/conferencetraining.html)
