Some Lessons from Job – Discussion starters
- Lesson 14. Indeed we count them blessed who endure. We don’t normally have fourteen weeks in a section of the Sabbath School calendar, but this time we do. Why not consider this 14-week time period as an opportunity to learn the virtues of endurance? Of persevering? Of sticking it out? Job did, and his faithful life has been a witness through thousands of years to God’s enduring love for us.
- By Faith and Not by Sight. Are we ever tempted to esteem highly our awareness
of the creative power of God and to revel in the knowledge we possess of how God’s earth was formed and continues to work? Have you ever been engaged in a conversation with a fellow believer who seemed to think he (or she) knew just about everything? Could it be that Job’s final revelation to us is to recognize how little we know? Is the message of Job for us to stumble as we must in considering what God has made and what He has done for us? - Evil Being. A secular news magazine recently listed evil as one of the most powerful forces in society today. I was surprised to see this, since so many people today deny the existence of Satan. Did you notice, and if you did were you surprised to notice, that Satan seems to play a minor role in the drama of Job? Who then gets the blame for all the evil that falls on poor Job? But in the final analysis, what role did Satan play in the tragic yeas of most of Job’s life?
- With Friends Like These. Did Job need friends to correct his theology? They accused Job of sin and told him he lacked integrity, but did he? Looking ahead in the Bible to the story of the woman whose accusers caught her in the act of adultery, what is the difference between those accusers and Job’s? Should we try to be careful not to sympathize too much for God’s children who “shoulda and coulda but didna” turn from sin? Or is God asking us to identify with them and bring them along with us to full repentance and spiritual restoration?
- More Than Thorns and Thistles. Perhaps you have lived a life loaded with blessings, or maybe you haven’t. Either way, are our problems and the suffering that goes with them nothing but retribution by God for our sinful ways? What is the meaning of life without a “transcendent reality?” How can we muster the faith to believe in God’s goodness when we’re so blinded by the consequences of living in a sinful world?
- Job and Jesus. As distressing as Job’s problems were to him, how do they compare with the trials our Lord Jesus suffered during His life on earth? Does the book of Job answer all the important questions about why we suffer and the way the plan of salvation can rescue us from sin and its consequences? In your devotional life this year, why not spend a little time thinking about Job’s hardships and suffering, his friends and their “advice,” and compare them with the sin and sorrow you will surely endure, never forgetting the everlasting joy and comfort that can be yours?
Amen, Job Is a powerful teacher for us who are living on the Devil’s ground. The earth Is not Our home, we’re here as pilgrims so let us “hold Fast” the promisses of Our Lord, as He restored Job, He’s ready to do so for You an’ for me. The good news Is that “the One who dead for us Is now coming an’ taking us with Him at ours, the Heaven of rest”. Let’s help one another on the road until we meet with Our Lord, we’ll get a price of being “good friends” to Our road’s compagnons. Be blessed dear Griffith.
Amen…..Amen…..Amen!!
Can I really be like Job and could God say, “I have my man Ssegawa in Uganda who is trustwothy?
Let us pray for each other.