What is the point of life, the purpose? Suffering, unrelenting pain and misery will
cause you to ask such questions. Job's
pain is particularly acute but is it entirely due to his physical
situation? I would say that it is the
combination of losing his wealth, his children, his health, and also, at a
spiritual/emotional level, his wife. Everything
has been taken away from him, everything familiar, everything that has filled
his life. Loss is painful in and of
itself. Job has only one solution for
this situation, "I wish I had never been born." We can tolerate almost anything if we believe
there is a purpose to the pain, and Job can find no purpose for life, no reason
to go on. There is a little bit of
Ecclesiastes in here, everything under the sun has been taken away, now what is
there to live for.
Yesterday they were prepared to make Him king, now they are
remembering that He is nothing more than Joseph's boy, who does He think He is
saying He is the bread of heaven? The people
asked the same of Moses when he tried to identify with them, "Who made you
ruler and judge over us?" Jesus,
though, has surely authenticated Himself through the healings and the feeding
miracle, but they aren't looking for the Kingdom of God, they are still looking
for earthly things. Jesus draws the
correlation between the manna God provided through Moses and Himself and says
essentially what He said to the Samaritan woman at the well who took pride in
the well because it was given by their father Jacob. He offered her even better water and here He
offers better food and begins to point towards His sacrifice. All they have to do is believe. Do they want what He offers enough to let go
of what they know?
Paul is an amazing man.
He was able to let go, to come to faith, but it required this Damascus
Road experience, a blinding of the eyes that had betrayed him that he might no
longer walk by sight but by faith. His eyes
were then opened with the laying on of hands of Ananais in baptism. God
took away everything Paul had lived for and yet didn't leave him without anything
to live for. He took away whatever
future Paul had in mind for himself, whatever position he longed for, and gave
him something much better, a place in the eternal kingdom. He no longer cared about the things that had
dominated his life and his ambitions again.
That is true conversion.
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