Advent: Join the Triumphনমুনা

The Scripture:

"There was a man who lived in the land of Uz. His name was Job. He was honest. He did what was right. He had respect for God and avoided evil" (Job 1:1, NIRV).

The Story:

Congratulations! You are 17 days into this devotional! Since it’s the 17th day, I decided I want to be honest with you. Our Scripture today comes from the Book of Job. Now Job is not pronounced like it is 99% of the time, like your parents have a job. It is pronounced like robe, globe, or earlobe, and my honest confession is Job is the hardest book in the Bible for me to understand. Here’s why: sometimes we lose even when it doesn’t make sense.

The Book of Job starts off with this amazing statement about Job. He’s honest, he does what’s right, respects God, and avoids evil. Sounds like Job is the example of what it means to be on the nice list. Yet the book of Job continues, and Job loses everything. Everything that can go wrong goes wrong, and he experiences tragedy after tragedy. But why? If Job is such a great guy and such a great follower of God, why would he suffer?

Suffering and tragedy are not about how good we are. It’s not like I hold the door five times so I get out of scraping my knee. That’s not how God works. Sometimes God allows suffering and tragedy because God wants to show us something.

I’ve had some hard times in my life and in those times I’ve turned to the Bible. And guess what? Even after those hard times, I stuck with the Bible. Without the bad, I would have never discovered I love the Bible. Maybe God wants to use your hard times to bring something amazing out of it.

Another way to think about it is, we are walking through life with a broken arm, but you don’t know it’s broken, I don’t know it’s broken, but God knows it. And what God does is, through hard times, He takes our arm and sets it back into place. Now it may hurt a lot in the moment, but in the end, we no longer have a broken arm.

The Good News of the Bible is that God loves us no matter what. God does everything for Love, for our Good, and for His Glory. When we know that Truth, we can face any hard time with peace.

The Triumph:

Jesus was born into hard times. He was born in a barn and immediately hunted down because people felt threatened by Him. He would be rejected and betrayed and die on the Cross. Yet all those hard times and all that suffering led to Jesus paying for sin. Because of Jesus, any of us – no matter what we’ve done – can accept Jesus’ sufferings and find healing. Christmas may be a hard season for you, but even in defeat, God wants to do a Greater Work and bring Victory.