OUR PRESENT SUFFERINGS

Perhaps right now you’re suffering an excruciating trial. Yet, you know the reason behind it isn’t that God is dealing with sin in your life. So you wonder why the Lord is allowing you to endure such awful pain.

It could be that the furnace of your affliction is meant to bring you into a life-changing revelation. This is exactly what happened with Job. In the midst of his suffering, Job made an incredible discovery: Despite his pure knowledge of God, he didn’t truly know the Lord. He confessed, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6).

At the time Job experienced this trial, he was at least seventy years old; he had known about God all his life. At some point, Job had erected an altar to the Lord, where he spent many reverent hours praising and worshiping God. For years, God had taught him about His ways and mysteries. Job had been taught about the Lord’s consolations, His holiness, His character, His nature, His wrath, and he had learned about the majesty of God’s power and wisdom.

Yet, when Job’s mind-boggling crisis came upon him, he wasn’t able to see the Lord at all. Instead, God became to him nothing more than a vague theological term. The Lord who had been so much a part of his everyday life now seemed absent from everything Job was going through. Suddenly, God seemed like only a series of sermons, a dead word, a knowledge without any power or life behind it.

I believe this is what the Lord wanted to bring to the surface in Job’s life all along. You see, our loving Father wants His children to know Him more deeply than we can merely through worship services, Bible study or prayer meetings. He wants us to know Him intimately, in every aspect of our lives—and that includes during our deepest trials and sufferings. Our Lord longs to be more than a God of some dead-letter theology; He wants us to know Him as a Father who is all-knowing, ever near to us, holding everything in total control, in the very hollow of His hand.

Our present sufferings produce one of two things in us: either hard-heartedness and a spirit of unbelief, or a glorious vision of God’s control over everything concerning us.