Gnosticsm & the Proclamation of Christianity with special reference to John's Gospel (Cont)
Job as an Illustration of Faith Versus Reasoning
James 1: 5,6 (AV)
Job was a blameless and upright man, one who feared God, and turned away from evil. He was the greatest of all the people of the East, very successful in all that he did - a large family, a farmer on a large scale, who looked after his tenants and did not turn the poor away from his gates. He was also very rich.
"His creed was that God prospered and blessed the upright man who trusted in Him, and that the man who was not upright was not prospered. Then came calamity after calamity, everything Job believed about God was contradicted and his creed went to the winds. He lost sons and daughters, and all his possessions. Then he lost his health and we find him in despair, sitting among the ashes, covered in loathsome sores, scraping himself with a potsherd.
"And his wife said, 'Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.' And Job replied, 'Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?' This is the last reach of faith. Job's creed is gone; all he believed about God has been disproved by his own experiences, and his friends come and say, in effect, 'You are a hypocrite, Job, we can prove it from your own creed.'
"But Job sticks to it: 'I am not a hypocrite, I do not know what accounts for all that has happened, but I will hold to it that God is just and loving and honourable and I shall yet see Him vindicated in it all.'
"Job is up against the problem that things do not look as they should if God is the kind of God that his implicit belief constrains him to declare He ought to be.
"Things as they are make God appear indifferent and cruel and remote.
"If your sticking point is a particular creed or dogma, you end up with having to shut your eyes to facts or tell a lie to protect your dogma. Not one of Job's 'friends' can endure him; they believe he is desolate because God has left him so. According to their creed God rewards the righteous and rejects the wicked. Job must be a wicked hypocrite and this is why he has lost so much and is left bereft of hope, in constant pain, covered from head to foot with stinking running sores. His life has become a dragged out agony. Even his wife appeared to reject him.
"All his 'friends' can do is to offer him 'miserable comfort' [50] from their creeds. Yet Job knows that this is not the explanation." [51]
"The explanation is that there is something wrong at the basis of things. God appears refracted. "Things have been taught about this distorted view of God which are seen to be diabolical when viewed in the light of our Lord's revelation of Him." [52] This is where believing our beliefs instead of believing God, can lead us. [53] Extreme Calvinists make this mistake.
'Pseudo-evangelists, on the other hand, go wildly off the tracks by making out that salvation is a bag of tricks. Whereby if I believe certain shibboleths, (Joshua 12: 1-4), I am tricked out of Hell and made right for heaven - a travesty of the Gospel, which gives us the most tremendous revelation of the Redemption of the human race by Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Remain steadfastly true to the Lord Jesus Christ who reveals to us what God is like. When you have to suspend your judgement, say it is suspended. This was Job's attitude all through. [54]
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