WHEN CALAMITY COMES

WHEN TROUBLE COMES



                “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil.” Job 1:1



                Job is sort of a mystery man. It is said that he lived during a period of time between Noah’s flood and Abraham. So we find ourselves wondering how it was that Job knew God and worshipped Him the same way that Adam had worshipped Him after the fall… by building an altar to the Lord.



                Godless scholars would have us believe that there was no connection between Adam and Abraham and they will go on to claim that Moses also learned His religion from the Egyptians and from Summarian myths and such, but this is simply not true.



                There was a vital line of truth coming from Adam to all of God’s faithful patriarchs who lived before the flood and Noah and His sons held that knowledge in their hearts and carried it through the flood. Furthermore we are told in the book of Genesis that Noah was 600 years old when the flood came and that he lived to the age of 950 years, which means that he lived 350 years after the flood and Shem lived 502 years after the flood and died I believe when Isaac was about 50 years old.



                The bible doesn’t make the connection between Noah and Shem and Abraham, but the book of Jasher tells us that the young Abram went to the hill country to visit Noah and Shem and spent some time with them in the foothills of ARarat. Now we may balk at using the book of Jasher since it is not part of the Canon of Scripture, but Jasher is quoted twice in the Bible as an authentic source of information. See Joshua 10:13 and 2 Sam. 1:18



                So there was a connection in the seed line of faith that is unbroken going all the way back to Adam and Adam walked and talked with God and so did Enoch, who was 7 generations from Adam and so did Noah. We know that Noah heard and obeyed God both before the flood when He followed God’s instructions to build an ark and after the flood as well when he built an altar of thanksgiving unto the Lord and God made a covenant with him there and the sign of that covenant was the rainbow.



                There is a chance that the rainbow was a new phenomenon after the flood, for before the flood the earth was watered from below, but after the flood the earth was watered by rain. The entire global system had been changed by the flood and the rainbow became a reminder of a covenant between God and Noah that God would never flood the entire earth again.



                So while Job seems to be isolated from any connection with the patriarchs, He nevertheless knew the one true God and worshipped Him in the way of the Patriarchs. So the book of Job introduces several insights into God’s relationship with earth and men in the Patriarchal times. It also makes first mention of the sons of God and the divine council to which Satan invited himself when a certain contest was initiated between God and Satan.



                Here we see the invisible tug-of-war that goes on behind the scenes in the spiritual realm.  Satan had managed to largely lead the pre-flood people into destruction with their continual evil and he had wreaked destruction of the human race by introducing the fallen sons of God to human women thus corrupting the seed of men to the point where God had to destroy the earth or there would have been no uncorrupted DNA left from which to bring forth the Messiah.



                In the story of Israel, we see God isolating the children of Abraham from those forms of corruption that came after the flood as well. We wonder at the many laws that guided Israel and yet, these laws kept them from participating with corrupted humans in order to preserve the DNA of Jesus.



                Right now we are watching as a major hurricane surges toward Florida and so the age old questions come up when calamity strikes. Are these devastating storms judgments of God or the work of the devil, or are they man made or perhaps just nature doing what nature does to dispel the heat that builds up along the equator. We don’t know, but the insurance companies call these various events “acts of God”



                But according to the book of Job, God puts a hedge of protection around those that fear Him and obey Him. In effect we can see it as sort of a high pressure area that prevents storms from coming in and so when the high pressure area and blue skies give way to low pressure then the storms can come in. Likewise a nation that serves the Lord is protected by the Lord and allowed to prosper and be blessed, but when a nation turns from the Lord His hand of protections is withheld and Satan is allowed access to that nation to do whatever he wants to do with it.



                This was true with Israel and we see both blessing and calamity occurring in Israel depending on whether they were serving the Lord, or worshipping foreign gods. America is facing this same scenario today as faith in God is largely abandoned and an influx of foreign deities floods into our once faithful land. So God’s judgments are coming upon us, not so much as overt acts of God. but because we are choosing other gods that want us dead rather than alive.



                In the case of Job, we see Satan accusing God of putting a hedge of protection around Job. So in the middle of Satan’s fallen kingdom there was a righteous man and God was blessing him. But Satan claimed that if God withdrew His blessings Job would curse Him and abandon his faith in God and so the contest begins.



                Calamity after calamity fell upon Job and his family and his property and his riches, but it says that Job did not sin and he did not lose his faith… and even though his “friends” taunted him with many an intellectual argument, Jobs faith remained intact at the end of the day. Job and God won the contest simply because Job never gave up, he never quit believing and trusting in God and so when the contest was over, God doubled his blessings and so Job was twice as rich as beforeand a new family was restored to him.



                “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends and the Lord increased all that Job had twofold. Then all his brothers and all his sisters and all who had known him before, came to him and they ate bread with him in his house; and they consoled him and they comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought on him. And each one gave him one piece of money and each a ring of gold. And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning and he had 14,000 sheep and 6,000 camels and 1000 yoke of oxen and 1000 female donkeys and he had seven sons and three daughters.”



                One might ask where his brothers and sisters were when Job was suffering the calamities that Satan brought on and notice if you will that his brothers and sisters attributed these calamities to the Lord rather than to Satan.



                Ultimately the Lord takes credit for all things whether good or bad because Satan can do nothing unless God allows it. God loves the whole world and so His ultimate protection came when He sent His only begotten Son to walk the dusty streets of old and to die at our hands. God’s infinite gift was more than adequate to save the whole world, but like Abraham, we must enter into covenant with Him. We live in Satan’s territory and so salvation from Satan’s control is enacted by covenant. We belong to Satan by legitimate legal means. We sold ourselves and our planet to Him and so he is the rightful owner.



                If then we are to escape from this prison system that Satan has set up, we must come into agreement with God. We must come by faith into the covenant that Jesus signed in His own blood.



                The Law of God defines the sins that control us in the kingdom of Satan. These laws condemn us to death simply because all of us sin and in our sin nature we are unable to even keep the Law. It is more than ten rules. It rather points to our fallen condition and how we have fallen short of the glory of God once bestowed upon Adam. We sometimes think that all we have to do is to keep the Law and we will reverse the curse, but in truth fallen flesh cannot even begin to reverse the curse. That curse is much bigger than all of us and it is one that we cannot climb out of with fallen flesh no matter how ardently we strive to keep the Law.



                But Jesus brought something better than the Law. He brought us His own Spirit… that Spirit which Adam had lost in the fall, and by placing His Spirit within us, Jesus is transforming us from the inside to love like He loves and to obey in the same way He obeyed. We are adopted into His kingdom when we accept Jesus and the covenant of blood that He made with us and it is that blood that covers us even as His Holy Spirit transforms us into His image.



                The Gospel is really the theme of all scripture and books like the book of Job, offer insights behind the scenes of the great contest between Christ and Satan over the souls of men. We have a part to play in this great contest and that is to come into agreement with Jesus by covenant even as Abraham did. We enter this covenant by faith like Abraham did and like Job did, only our advantage today is that we now have the indwelling Holy Spirit of Christ empowering us to fulfill the law in ways largely unknown to the Patriarchs.



                The book of Job provides a big picture view of the plans and purposes of God. The big picture is what I would call a prophetic view. It looks beyond our daily trials to the greater purposes of God into which those trials fit. We are in the middle of a great contest between Christ and Satan and once we have chosen which side we will be on, then we go into training… to overcome by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony. WE are learning the ways of the Kingdom of Christ.



                Satan’s kingdom is rapidly coming to an end. It may not look like it right now because He seems to be gaining power over the whole world, but in fact, God is giving him just enough rope to hang himself. Evil is not sustainable over the long run and so the more powerful and the more pervasive evil becomes the closer it is to collapse. And we are living in the last days when Satan’s kingdom will reach its climax and the kingdom of Christ will come down and grind all of Satan’s nations into power and then fill the entire earth.



                To this end, we pray. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”