Target

“What have I done to You, O watcher of men?  Why have You set me as Your target,”  Job 7:20

Target – Have you ever felt like God’s bull’s eye? Right in the center of His aim?  God draws back the bow and lets the arrow fly and “Whap!” it penetrates right into the center of the miphga, your life!

“God, why don’t you just leave me alone?  I’m so tired of these trials.  My days are filled with dread and confusion.  If you are so compassionate, why have you left me to fend for myself?  Why have you brought these struggles into my life?  Wouldn’t it be more merciful if you just walked away and stopped squeezing my life in your winepress?”

Job may have had reason for his complaint.  Even God acknowledged that Job was completely devoted, a man of truth.  Not me.  If God wants to shoot arrows into my life, He has plenty of justification.  But I still feel the agony of Job.  His story isn’t in the Bible so that we can hear about the trials of a righteous man.  His story is there because even if we don’t deserve anything but correction from God, we still feel the same pain that Job felt.  Everyone seems to have a day when they say, “Wouldn’t it have been better if I were never born?”

Job’s story leaves plenty of unanswered difficulties.  I’m not so sure that it was meant to give us answers we can easily accept.  But I am sure of this:  even in Job’s suffering and complaints, only One person really matters to Job.  Job’s perspective always begins from God’s point of view.  When Job cries out in his torment, he never doubts that God is there.  When Job rebuffs his friends, he assumes God’s sovereign authority.  When Job finally questions the morality of his situation, he presupposes that God has the answer.  There is never a single point of the story where Job denies God’s presence.  Perhaps that’s enough.  To know that God is in the midst no matter what.  To know that my complaint and my distress can be voiced to God.  To know that somehow, someway God is in control of it all. 

Man might indeed be borne to trouble.  God may in fact punish the unrighteous.  But God is still there.  He doesn’t walk off and leave me.  Even though there are times when I do not understand Him at all, I know that He is “the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving-kindness and truth” (Exodus 34:6).