Job 8:1-10:22
It’s like I’ve got a tiger in my bathroom. This big, fierce thing has taken up residence in my washing space and, no matter how I feel about it, I know that I can never clean my teeth in the same way again. And so, you get the sense that Job may not particularly want to have God up close at this point - his agonising grief and disfigured flesh have seen to that. But he cannot shake the knowledge that God is big, is the judge and that his very breath is continually rolling across his sore-infested skin. Strangely enough there seems to be more intimacy and understanding of God wrapped up in these few words of Job than in whole swathes of Christian literature. For me, this is the anvil of the faith where our character and our understanding is formed, not in the intellectual positing and positioning of Bildad et al, but in the deep, and at times bitter, sparring with the Shaker of the Earth. We come back to that recurrent theme; that the pursuit of God is about so much more than the escape of trauma; that beyond hardship and beyond self-doubt is the troubling and yet overwhelmingly free-ing place known as “the fear of the Lord”. It’s a bit like living with a tiger in your bathroom.
Matthew 19:16-30
Fortunately, this is one of Jesus’ sayings that appears a bit more straight-forward for us to understand; that the more the scales are tilted towards us in this life the harder it is for us to believe that our stuff could be out-balanced by the riches of the heavenly realm. Those of us who are rich (all of us??) have to see that much more of Jesus before we are convinced that the regard-it-all-as-naught equation makes sense. And yet, Jesus has to reassure even his closest friends that the correct way to look at these scales is not with eyes fixated on immediate gains, but that the things of the Kingdom, which often look so meagre at first glance, are actually only representative of things bearing 100 times their weight and value. This pierces the heart of my desire to see big results and to see them now; Jesus rarely seems to work that way. His eyes seem to apprehend the things of the future as if they are present here now and he lives in the full knowledge that these light and momentary troubles are as nothing compared to the great and glorious riches that will be received in Christ Jesus at the coming of the end of the age.
Proverbs 3:11-20
You certainly could never accuse Solomon, or whoever it was that wrote the proverbs, of underselling the benefits of a vibrant faith in God. “Nothing you desire can compare with (developing an understanding of God)”. The sheer audacity of it - to say to all and sundry that whoever they are and no matter how big their imagination, they could think of nothing that would be as good as knowing God as Lord! And yet, if it was Solomon who wrote it, I guess he should know; he who had unmatched power, wealth and 1000 concubines(!) should be well placed to speak of desire and satisfaction, or lack thereof!
