March 4, 2023

Passage Read: Job 9-12
Meditation Verses: 10:12-17

Thought

This is oppressive, to live under such a concept, that God is good to you until you mess up, then He pounces and pours out all kinds of trouble on you. There is a faithful discipline that He gives to put the fear of Him into our hearts, that we would trust and obey Him. But this is beyond that, this is the idea that God is just waiting to hammer me for my sin. That God has no grace, that He is quick to punish wrong, in fact more quick to punish wrong than He is quick to reward good. Like He takes some pleasure in blasting wickedness. Job came soon after the flood, which destroyed all of mankind but Noah's family. The wisdom that he got from that was God punished sin dramatically, no mercy. But it was apparently forgotten that God put up with the sinfulness of mankind for almost fifteen hundred years! Talk about slow to anger! We all deserve death the first time we do anything He would never do, but He would rather we repent, and so He delays His judgment in hope that we will turn from our wickedness and inherit life.

Application

God is misunderstood because it's far easier to focus on His acts of judgment than to see His long-suffering. We would rather see His judgment as sudden and unexpected and over blown, than to recognize how long we've been doing wrong, how long ago He could have and should have rebuked us, but didn't. We so easily overlook how long He's been waiting for us to humble ourselves and admit we were wrong and have been in the wrong for so long. And because we put that off so long, and live in fear that one of these days He's going to blast us, it never occurs to us that He would actually be like the father of the prodigal, delighted to welcome us home if only we'd humble ourselves and confess our wrong and turn back to Him.