June 26, 2024
Today’s Reading: Job 38:1-11
Daily Lectionary: Joshua 1:1-18; Acts 8:1-25
Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. (Job 38:3)
In the Name + of Jesus. Amen. Let’s face it: Job has been through a lot.
However, God has heard enough. God Himself comes on the scene, so all must be well. Job’s problems are over. Not quite.
While God allows the suffering and attacks to come upon Job and his family, God will assure Job that He is the one who will deliver Job from this. It’s easy for us to blame God when life doesn’t go our way. Job certainly has much to complain about, but God has come to remind Him, a simple man, not to peer into the knowledge of God.
Now God is hiding Himself? How can I trust Him?! Yet, it is exactly in the God who hides Himself, veils Himself, rather, so that we can stand before Him and cry out to Him as Job does.
Job encounters God, hidden, hearing His majesty and power displayed in all that He has done and proclaimed, but it’s this awe-inspired, humbling debate Job has with God that puts it all in perspective. Job cannot deliver himself from his afflictions.
God works through your suffering to turn you to where He is revealed to you. This is not God showing only His good side, but God fully revealed to you. See God and His love for you, despite the sin, despite the fallenness of the world, revealed to you in Job’s redeemer, your redeemer, Jesus.
When your suffering seems great, and the world around you feels like it is collapsing. When you feel like God is far from you or punishing you. Don’t look to the world or inside yourself. Go to the Word that comforted Job—the same God of His word who delivers and preserves you. No suffering, no crisis, no outcome is too much for your God to deliver you from. Just as God has fulfilled His promises to Job and His people of old, His promises are all for you.
Your God, the one who created all things, laid its boundaries, and established the limits of the universe, cares for you. His Son, Jesus, the crucified one, who has suffered in every respect of his humanity as we have, is interceding for you at His Father’s right hand. He has not forgotten you, and He will not forsake you. In the Name + of Jesus. Amen.
Frail children of dust and feeble as frail, In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail. Thy mercies, how tender, how firm to the end, Our maker, defender, redeemer, and friend! (LSB 804:5)
– Vicar Justin Chester, Vicar at Shepherd of the City, Fort Wayne, IN
Audio Reflections Speaker: Pastor Jonathan Lackey is the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, Vine Grove, Ky.
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