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The Best of Blessings Part 10 By Andrew Davies

after the evening service for a short time of prayer concerning the pastorate.
We turn to the last chapter of Job and verses 7 to 17, the conclusion of the book.
There are three reasons given to us in the book why God allows godly people to suffer.
The first is that they should confound Satan and glorify God's grace.
Second is that God desires to refine his people and to purify their faith.
Their sufferings therefore are not a sword in the hands of an enemy but a knife in the
hand of a surgeon.
The third reason is that God wishes to prepare his people for future blessing and the greatest
blessing of all is that we should encounter God himself and know him in grace.
Job experienced God's wisdom in creation, his justice in the government of the world
and his power over the great creatures.
He was brought face to face with God through those experiences and he came to know God
as a gracious God, as the covenant keeping God, Jehovah, the one whom he had heard of
by the hearing of the eye but now as he puts it, my eye sees you.
So that everything that happened to Job, much of it mysterious to him, was leading
up to this encounter with the Lord.
And the Lord wanted Job to know him in a new and in a more personal way.
And that really is the third shaft of light in the book upon the sufferings of the godly.
God wishes to prepare us for further blessing and the greatest blessing of all is that we
should know him coming to us in grace in the way that Job did.
Now we should examine this, I think, carefully.
God wants to bless his people.
Now when we think of that, when we use words like that, what do we mean?
God wants to bless his people.
What do we mean by blessing?
What do we mean by blessing when we think of God blessing the churches, our own church?
Usually we mean large congregations, the utilizing of spiritual gifts, money, activities.
All of that is perfectly true.
But as we've seen, God removed Job's outward prosperity and left him destitute.
So if blessing is to be seen only in those terms, then Job was no longer knowing and
experiencing God's blessing.
When we think of God blessing us as individuals, what do we mean?
Do we mean that he gives us health, wealth, popularity, influence?
Well, he may.
But if he should take those things from us, where then is his blessing?
The heart of what the Bible means by divine blessing is knowing God himself, knowing God
more deeply, more fully, more experimentally, knowing God in our hearts and knowing God
in our lives.
That is not to underestimate or undervalue outward blessings.
The Lord gave Job prosperity and health and influence at the beginning of the story.
And as we read earlier on, he restored family and friends and flocks and influence to him
at the end of the story, so that blessings are real and God does endow his people with
these outward manifestations of his love.
But the central thing, the really crucial thing, is the glory of God himself, the manifestation
of God's own character and presence in our lives, whether as churches or as individuals.
I'm reminded of the experience of Moses when he pleaded with God on behalf of his own people
after they had constructed the golden calf.
And he said to the Lord, if your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from
here.
The thing that mattered most to Moses was God's presence with them as God's people.
He said, please show me your glory.
He wanted to know the presence of God with them, and he also went further than that and
asked God to reveal his glory to them.
And the Lord, you remember, said that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and will
cover you with my hand while I pass by, and I will take away my hand and you shall see
my back, but my face shall not be seen.
The greatest blessing of all, therefore, is that kind of knowledge of God's presence
with us and even of the glory of God being made known to us in measure so that we reflect
something of his glory like Moses.
Our hymn writers, I think, give expression to this.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a most interesting man who lived in the 12th century.
If you've ever been to France and driven through France, you will drive past the huge
monastery in Clairvaux where Bernard himself lived.
And though he was in the Roman Catholic tradition and brought up in the medieval church, he
undoubtedly had a living experience of Christ as his savior.
And you remember how he wrote about that, Jesus?
The very thought of thee with sweetness fills my breast, but sweeter far thy face to see
and in thy presence rest, nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame, nor can the memory find
a sweeter sound than thy blessed name, O Savior of mankind.
O hope of every contrite heart, O joy of all the meek!
To those who fall, how kind thou art!
How good to those who seek!
But what to those who find?
Ah, this nor tongue nor pen can show the love of Jesus, what it is, none but his loved ones
know.
Jesus, our only joy be thou, our only prize wilt be.
Jesus, be thou our glory now and through eternity.
Now that's blessing.
To know the Lord Jesus Christ in that way is what the Bible means by blessing.
And God was preparing Job for this, and when the vision came, Job was humbled.
I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.
He makes no claim, he claims no credit, he doesn't draw attention to himself, he doesn't
say what a great man he is to be privileged in such a way.
He humbles himself and repents in dust and ashes.
At the same time he is lifted up, he is blessed by the knowledge of God's will, and he is
filled with awe and with wonder and amazement.
That is what the Lord has been doing with Job.
That is where he's been bringing him, and he's brought him to this experience of his
grace by a very strange way.
There's a directness, there's an immediacy about Job's knowledge of the Lord at the end
of his experience described in the book that is critical in the whole matter of divine
blessing.
Now, are we looking for that?
God's gifts are very wonderful, but are we looking beyond God's gifts for God himself?
Are we looking for him?
And do we want to know him as the best, as the greatest of all blessings?
Well, that is, I think, what blessing really means.
The next thing that I think we need to say is that such a people who know God in this
way become a blessing to others.
Job, we are told, prayed for his friends, and his prayers were heard and answered.
The Lord was angry against his two friends.
He spoke to one of them, Eliphaz, and spoke about his anger.
You have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.
And he told them to take seven bulls and rams and go to his servant Job and offer for
yourselves a burnt offering, and my servant Job will pray for you.
And I will accept him, lest I deal with you according to your folly, because you have
not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has.
So Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar went and did as the Lord commanded them, for the Lord
had accepted Job.
Job therefore became an influence for good to his friends.
He became a blessing to them.
He offered prayer for them, and the Lord heard and accepted and answered his prayer.
The man has come to know the Lord in such an intimate way that he now becomes a blessing
to other people as he prays for them.
That is again part of what the Bible means by divine blessing.
People who are blessed become a blessing to others, and it's unselfconscious.
They don't need to tell you about their great experiences of God and how privileged they
are and how important they've become.
Indeed, if they were to do that, you would have immediate grounds for suspicion.
But their very way of living, their very character, their very prayerfulness, their very spirituality
becomes a kind of natural blessing to other people.
Such a people become a blessing to others.
And there's a third thing here too.
Such people are vindicated by the Lord.
The Lord vindicated Job as he says, and as he says quite explicitly.
He commends him as his servant.
Several times the Lord refers to my servant Job.
There's a warmth and a tenderness with which God speaks there.
He's commending Job to the three friends.
And those whom the Lord knows, and those who know the Lord, those who therefore become
a blessing to other people are vindicated by God.
There's no need for them to vindicate themselves.
There's no need for them to commend themselves and to talk about themselves and to tell you
how important they are and how blessed their lives have been and how many people have been
converted through their ministries and how they have an international reputation and
all the rest of it.
There's no need for people to commend themselves if they know the Lord and the Lord knows them.
God is the one who vindicates them and God prospers them and God blesses them when they
pray for their friends.
It's interesting, isn't it, that in verse 10 we are told that the Lord restored Job's
losses when he prayed for his friends.
It's as if now that Job has become concerned about the Lord's glory and other people, the
Lord can trust him with further blessing.
So the Lord begins to lavish gifts upon him once again and prospers him because he can
now trust his servant who is now concerned about the glory of God and the blessing of
other people rather than his own name and his own reputation.
So people like this who know encounters with the Lord and who are a blessing to other people
are vindicated by God himself.
And there's a fourth thing here as well that I think is worthy of our notice and our thought
and it's this.
The way God prepares us for such blessing.
How did God go about the process of preparing Job for this encounter with himself?
There are three stages as we've seen and the method is in a sense very surprising to us.
The first thing that the Lord did was to make things hard for his servant.
He took away the blessings, the outer prosperity.
He allowed him to be attacked by Satan.
Then he exposed him to some very cold and opinionated armchair theologians who thought
they knew it all and who gave him a broadside.
And then he allowed a prolonged period of intense darkness.
He made things difficult.
This seems a strange way for the Lord to work in a person's life, but that's what he did.
And having made things difficult for Job, he then in the second place went on to test
his faith.
God was still at work in his life, but he was doing what Martin Luther called his strange
work, his alien work.
He wanted to prove the faith that this man had, that it was real and genuine.
He wanted to try to expose it, as it were, to the crucible, to the fire, just as persecution
in the early church did that.
In this, wrote the Apostle Peter, to some of the early Christians, in this salvation
you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while, if need be, you have been grieved by
various trials.
James wrote to other believers and told them to count it all joy when they fell into various
trials knowing that the testing of their faith produced patience, and patience was to be
allowed its perfect work that they might be perfect and complete lacking nothing.
God tests our faith.
He's looking for faith, real faith, not notional faith, not mere assent to a series of intellectual
propositions or ideas, although that is involved in real faith, but it's something that demonic
powers can assent to quite willingly and quite freely.
He's not talking about notional, cerebral concepts in the mind merely.
He's looking for that, but he's also looking for the vital element of trust, this trusting
spirit, this dependency upon himself, so that when we lose the blessings, when we are hurt
by the cold and critical and clinical theologians, when God hides his face from us and we can't
see him, we go to him, we trust in him, we cast ourselves upon his mercy and grace, and
when darkness seems to veil his face, we rest on his unchanging grace.
That's the second thing that God did by way of preparing Job for blessing.
He first of all made things difficult, and then secondly, he tested his faith.
Would Job trust him in the midst of and through all these dark afflictions?
And then, of course, the third stage in the preparation of his servant for the blessing
that he had in store for him was to purify his heart.
Although Job was a godly man, he was not perfect, and the Lord told him that.
You asked, who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?
Job therefore has to admit, I have added things that I did not understand, things too wonderful
for me which I did not know.
I will question you and you shall answer me, the Lord had said to Job.
And now Job responds by saying, I abhor myself and repent in ashes and in dust.
So Job had spoken without knowledge, though he was a good man, a godly man, he had spoken
without knowledge about God, and the Lord told him so.
He had justified himself before God, so the Lord wanted to purge him of those elements
of self-righteousness that remained within him.
He wanted to purify him.
He wanted to strip from him those elements of imperfection that remained upon his character.
And so he sent a preacher, Elihu, who spoke in a very homely way, in a very direct way
to Job.
Through a man like him, Job heard the words of God, and it was a humbling thing for him
to have to listen to a young man like Elihu speaking to him things which, in a sense,
he felt only God should say to him.
That was one way in which the Lord dealt with him in this way by purifying his heart.
He sent him a preacher.
God does that.
He sends preachers, ordinary men, tickled men, frail and fragile men, but men nevertheless,
and he decides that he will work through them and speak through them.
That's very humbling to people who are proud and arrogant, but the Lord does that.
And then he spoke himself.
He came in a direct encounter with his servant and reminded Job of who he was and who he
is.
So he was purifying Job's heart, stripping him of those elements of self-righteousness
and ignorance, which he eventually acknowledges.
Now those are the things I think we need to think about when we are looking at this third
reason for the godly person being allowed to suffer.
God is preparing us for blessing.
What is the blessing?
It is encounter with the Lord himself.
Such people are a blessing to others.
Such people are vindicated by God.
But such people are prepared for blessing by the Lord making things difficult, testing
their faith, and purifying their hearts.
That's the way the Lord very often works.
And we need to take it on board.
We need to reflect upon it.
We need to realize that he may well be dealing with us like this.
Let's apply this to our own lives as individuals.
God's purpose is to bless us.
Why has he called us?
Well, he's called us into heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
He's made us to sit there with Christ in heavenly places, the region where Christ is exalted
and where every believer is exalted in Christ.
So that living with Christ and sitting with Christ in heavenly places, it is God's intention
and purpose that we should come to know Christ better, that we should know his presence and
even his glory if he should disclose some of his glory to us.
That's what he wants us to know.
That's what blessing means.
But he may allow us to suffer.
He may remove the blessings.
He may disturb us with very cold and critical theologians who trouble us and worry us.
He may even hide his face from us.
He's doing something with us.
He's preparing us, but he's doing it in his own way.
And then he tests our faith.
He wants us to know that he's there and he wants us to trust him even though we can't
see him.
So he tests our faith.
He purifies the vital element of trust in our believing.
And then he purges our souls.
He gets rid of things that are wrong in us and he uses the preaching of people like Elihu
to do that.
And then he makes himself known to us directly so that the Lord is dealing with us, but he's
dealing with us in his own way.
That really is the way in which Job was prepared for blessing.
And it's very often the way the Lord prepares us.
And we know why he's preparing us.
Something's going on.
He can break in at any moment.
It was he who decided the moment to begin to speak to Job directly.
He first of all sent along Elihu and then he came himself.
He prepared Job for it by humbling him through Job having to listen to a sermon from a man
who was like him but much younger.
And then the Lord came himself.
And in his own way and at his own time, he broke in upon Job.
And when he did that, Job was changed.
He was humbled.
He was awed.
He was exalted.
He was filled with wonder and amazement.
And he became much more useful than he'd ever been before.
So he prays for his friends.
And as a result, he is vindicated and the blessings follow and the prosperity with them.
Now the Lord may deal with us like that.
So though we may go through a hard time of it and though the way may seem very strange,
the Lord is really preparing us.
We mustn't measure everything by what is happening now.
We need this sense of God dealing with us.
We need to know something of the whole story of our Lord's love for us and of our lives.
And the Lord here was all the time, even though Job didn't appreciate it, making him ready
for this encounter with himself that completely filled him with love and amazement and made
him a most useful.
And in the end, a most blessed person.
So go on trusting him.
Go on believing.
Go on faithfully responding to his will and his word, because the Lord is actually doing
something that is a preparation for something wonderful and gracious.
And in the end, of course, heaven itself.
This is something that applies to a local church, I think.
Local churches can go through difficult times.
The Lord may remove blessings.
He may even in the life of a local church do what happened with Job.
He may expose his own people to comforters like Job's comforters who seem to know it
all, but there's something wrong about them.
There's a coldness about them.
There's a critical spirit about them.
There's something supercilious about them.
They're very correct.
They're very orthodox, but they have no warmth.
They have no love.
They have no concern for the man.
Sometimes churches can be afflicted in that way, and then God seems to hide his face from
his people so that they're left, as it were, on their own, and they wonder what's going
on and where the Lord is leading them.
Well, you see, what the Lord is doing is preparing his people.
He's doing what he was doing with Job.
He tests our faith.
He purges our souls of pride and self-righteousness and conceit and murmuring, and he does it
through the faithful preaching of his word, as he did with Job through Elihu.
Why does he do this?
Well, he does it because he wants to bless us, and he can intervene at any moment in
the life of a local church, and he can change things and grant that church a touch of his
presence and blessing and make that church more useful and then begin to add the blessings
that follow the blessing.
And what happens is that the people of God in that local community become more useful,
more prayerful.
They bring the grace of God to other people, as Job did, and God vindicates them.
He does that himself, and they don't need to do it.
And the blessings follow as they are dispatched from heaven and poured out by God's grace.
So a local church can go through a Job-like experience, but it's part of God preparing
his people for himself and for something that is to come that may astonish his people
and overwhelm them and make them even more useful than they've ever been before.
And if we can apply it to the individual and to the local church, I think there's a sense
in which this same message applies to the church.
I mean by that the Lord's church in the world.
How often it's been the case that God has blessed his church.
He has prospered her, added to her number, made her influential, enabled her through
money given to become a great missionary, outgoing, evangelistic unit in his hand.
How often that has happened.
How often in history we've seen this happen.
There was the early church period with all the blessings that flowed from the hand of
God.
And then there was that decline and barrenness and what we call the dark ages in which for
centuries the gospel was almost obscured from sight and the church became a monolithic institution
without spiritual life or vitality.
And then it was as if the Lord was preparing the church, the church, for the arrival of
people like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Tranmer and others whom he raised up and
made powerful instruments in his hand who themselves became useful in his service.
And so the Lord added further blessings to his people and the church became influential
and powerful again and people were converted and nations were touched by the gospel in
ways that were quite astonishing.
And then you have a decline again and then a revival again and the Lord very often allows
his church to go through such periods.
So the former blessings are removed and then you get the period of the cold and the orthodox
theologians who know all the right answers but don't seem to know God and then God seems
to hide his face from his people.
And he's testing the face of his people.
Will his church continue to hold the gospel?
Will it continue to preach the gospel?
He may purge his church, he may get rid of people, he may get rid of attitudes and concepts
and influences from his people that aren't alien and that are harmful.
And then he begins to send people along like Elihu to begin to preach the gospel and to
do it in a way that humbles his people.
And then he comes himself and he blesses his people and he pours out his spirit and
his grace in reformation and revival.
And so his church becomes influential and useful and God grants blessings in addition
to the great blessing of his presence.
Well this is the pattern of church history.
And a people like this become useful to him and to society and are vindicated by God and
the blessings of his grace and of his bounty follow.
In other words, very often this is the Lord's way of blessing.
And our way of understanding blessing is frequently wrong or at least faulty and inadequate.
But the Lord knows what he's doing and the Lord knew what he was doing with Job.
And Job not only confounded Satan by shouting the omnipotence of God's grace, Job not only
realized that the Lord was purifying him and purging him and making him a better man, but
he also began to realize that the Lord, throughout the darkness of the day, had been preparing
him for this wonderful final encounter with himself that filled him with love and humility
and joy and amazement and then made him into a much better and a more useful man than he'd
ever been before.
Such is God's way.
And because it's God's way, it's a good way and it's a gracious way.
And Job died, we're told, old and full of days.
Ultimately, our whole life is a preparation for eternity.
Ultimately, this life is a short life, it's a very uncertain life.
But God is dealing with us in grace throughout our lives.
He privileges us with blessings, but he may remove them.
He may allow us to be afflicted by difficult people who don't really help us at all even
though they're well-meaning, but he may humble us and he may give us an encounter with preachers
preaching that further humble us, but then he wants us to know him.
He wants us to experience his love and his grace in new ways so that we would become
healthier and more wholesome people, be better balanced, better poised, better rounded as
individuals and as churches so that we may be more influential as we become humbler and
more Christ-dependent.
And in the end, that is what happens and that is what matters.
We need, I think, to appreciate sometimes the way the Lord works, and this book of Job
is a wonderful description of some of the mysteries of God's dealings with his people.
So what do we do in the midst of our afflictions and our trials?
Well, we go on trusting our blessed Savior.
We go on listening to the armchair theologians, but we maintain our integrity if we know they're
wrong and there's a sense in which there's nothing wrong with that.
At the same time, we admit that there are things we don't understand and there may have
been things that we've done that we shouldn't and are sad that we shouldn't.
But the Lord has not abandoned us and the Lord doesn't wipe us off.
It's a wonderful thing that he's like that.
I've just been reading this last week the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and in the book
of Nehemiah, there's a long, long chapter, chapter nine, in which the prophet confesses
the sins of the people and the people confess their sins.
And you remember that over and over again in that great chapter, the Lord is told about
his dealings with his people and he's told that you are the Lord.
You are the Lord who chose Abraham and found his heart faithful before you and made a covenant
with him.
And you gave the land to our descendants and you saw the affliction of our fathers in Egypt
and heard their cry and showed your signs and wonders against Pharaoh and divided the
sea and led them with a cloudy pillar by day and a pillar of fire by night.
You came down on Sinai and spoke with them.
You gave them good, just, true ordinances, including your holy Sabbath.
You gave them bread and water, but they and our fathers acted proudly, hardened their
necks and did not obey your commands.
They refused to obey.
They were not mindful of your wonders that you did among them.
They hardened their necks.
They appointed a leader to return to their bondage.
But you are God, ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, even when they
made a molded calf and said, this is your God.
Yet in your manifold mercies, you did not forsake them in the wilderness and the pillar
of fire did not forsake them.
You gave your good spirit to instruct them.
You didn't withhold manner from them.
You sustained them in the wilderness and they lacked nothing.
You gave them kingdoms and nations.
They took possession of the land of Zion and Og and you multiplied their children as the
stars of heaven.
So they went in and possessed the land and you subdued before them the inhabitants of
the land.
You built strong cities and dug wells and made fruit trees in abundance and were filled
with fatness.
Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against you, cast your law behind their backs
and killed your prophets who testified against them to turn them to yourself.
So you delivered them into the hand of their enemies who oppressed them.
And in the time of their trouble, when they cried to you, you heard from heaven and according
to your abundant mercies, you gave them deliverers who saved them from the hand of their enemies.
But after that, they had rest for a while.
Again they did evil before you.
You left them in the hand of their enemies.
So they had dominion over them.
Yet when they returned and cried to you, you heard from heaven and many times you delivered
them according to your mercies and testified against them that you might bring them back
to your law.
Yet they acted proudly but sinned against your judgments.
Yet for many years you had patience with them and testified against them by your spirit,
by the prophets.
They would not listen.
You gave them into the hand of the peoples of the lands.
Nevertheless in your great mercy you did not utterly consume them nor forsake them, for
you are God, gracious and merciful.
Now therefore our God, the great, the mighty and awesome God who keeps covenant and mercy,
do not let all the troubles seem small before you that has come upon us.
You are just.
You have dealt faithfully.
We have done wickedly.
We have not kept your laws nor served you in the kingdom.
Here we are servants today and the land you gave to our fathers.
You have set over us kings because of our sins.
We are in great distress.
You see, Nehemiah is pleading God's infinite mercy, God's great compassion, God's tenderness
and love for his people, and that really is the message of the book of Job.
The Lord is very merciful.
The Lord is very kind, and if it were not for that we should have all been consumed.
If the Lord should have rewarded us according to our iniquities we should have all been
consumed, but there is forgiveness with him that he may be feared.
Thank God that he is so kind, so gracious.
Thank God that he is preparing us not just for earthly blessing but for everlasting blessing.
Thank God that he is preparing us for heaven, and if sometimes he leads us by way we do
not understand here on earth, then we shall understand when we get to heaven, and we shall
know as we are known, and we shall see as we are seen.
So in the meantime, may we trust him.
It was in that hymn we sang earlier on, O Christ in thee my soul hath found, and found
in thee alone the peace, the joy I sought so long, the bliss till now unknown.
And it is not so much the pleasures, but Christ himself that matters, and if we have him,
we have everything.
Well may the Lord make Christ more precious to us.
May it please him to reveal Christ to us more intimately than we have ever known him before,
so that we know, as our forefathers used to say, God dealing familiarly with us, God dealing
with us as our friend.
Last Sunday evening we sang that magnificent hymn about the awesome God, the mighty God,
the grand God.
Do you remember that at the end of that hymn, the hymn writer asked the question,
Will this mighty King of glory condescend?
Will he write his name, my Father and my Friend?
You know, that's just wonderful, that the mighty King of glory, the God who thunders
from heaven, is our Father and our Friend.
I love his word, I love his name, join all my powers to praise the Lord.
Well, God bless us, and God help us, and God reveal himself to us and make us more useful
than we've ever been before, so that we, praying for others, might see him blessing them, and
we, seeking to reach others for Christ, will see them with us, coming into his everlasting
kingdom and rejoicing in his sovereign grace.
We'll join and sing our closing hymn.
It reminds us of what is to come, and of the fact that we need to think about what lies
before us.
Three, six, two, forward be our watchword, steps and voices joined.
Seek the things before us, not a look behind burns the fiery pillar at our army's head.
Who shall dream of shrinking by our captain led?
Forward through the desert, through the toil and fight.
Jordan flows before us, Zion beams with light.
Three, six, two.
Now, may the grace of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and evermore.
Amen.
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