Job is lapsing over into Ecclesiastes. His argument becomes rooted in the
pointlessness of life if God should determine to punish us for our sins, if we
should have nothing but pain and judgment.
He fails to see why God should allow us to live if that is all there is
to this life. There is an utter
hopelessness to life that a man like Job never imagined existed until this disaster
befell him. In Job's favor, he is not
looking for the restoration of prosperity and the good life, what he wants is
to be recalled to service. He wants to
be useful for the kingdom of God. What he
wants is to be forgiven, his sins forgotten.
What he wants is what we have in Jesus.
We have forgiveness, our sins are sealed, we are called by name out of
hopelessness into service, we are given life now and life eternal in
Jesus. Job was longing for exactly what
God offers.
As Jesus has just said to them that they have rejected the
word of God and have proven themselves to be "not of God", their only
retort is, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a
demon?” That is the best you've
got? What a ridiculous response. Jesus actually
takes the issue of His having a demon seriously enough to answer to their
accusation but leaves alone the Samaritan issue. They have already noted He is a Galileean so
why bother with origins? His comment
that the one who keeps His word will never see death is a bridge too far, a
ludicrous statement if you accept the definition of death as the cessation of
life as we know it. Jesus is clearly not
redefining death but going back to Genesis 3 where it clearly means something
other than cessation of life as we know it.
Adam and Eve surely died but that death was separation from the source
of true life. If we don't know what
death is, do we know what life is?
These are three interesting little vignettes. First we see Herod ordering the guards who
were there the night the Lord sent an angel to set Peter free and we can only
assume these orders were carried out. Next,
Herod goes from Judea to Caesarea for a respite and there receives a delegation
from Tyre and Sidon with whom he had been feuding. Their mission was to ask for peace as their
food supply was dependent on his largesse and apparently he had embargoed it as
punishment. His response was to give an
oration for which the populace declared his voice to be a god and not a
man. They were particularly grateful
that he had apparently lifted the embargo.
He, like Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, took credit due to the
Lord and in his case it brought his swift demise. (Here is a site
about the death of Herod Agrippa.)
Finally, Paul and Barnabas return to the mission field after their trip
to Jerusalem, bringing back John Mark, who will be the source of their
contention later. We never know what a
day will bring do we? We may be set free
from something miraculously, die unexpectedly (there's your depressing thought
for the day), or we may find a new companion and partner in the Lord's work. Be always at His work.
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