The Devotional - 35

The Devotional

Comment:

Certainly over time, all of us have observed this that in the barn or a garage sits an aging set of bedroom furniture. At some point in the past someone painted the chair, vanity, dresser and bed boards white. Now over the last ten or fifteen years, dirt, oil and weather has added another crusty burden. As you inspect these items you notice the large paint chip on the dresser and there it is; the original beauty of this forgotten furniture is in full view. It is time you say in your heart to do some striping away of years of abuse, so you begin; but the task is somewhat larger than you expected. Someone also painted the furniture, green, another time it was painted red. Instead of being discouraged you kept going and after removing four layers of paint the beauty of the original wood begins to appear and you say in your heart. This trip back in time and the basics has been well worth it. Even the wood seems to say “thank you” for this breath of freshness.

Challenge: Job 11:1-20

Again Job is face to face with the audacity of human good and religion, while the things that Zophar has to say are religiously true for all people (even of our current day in which we live) the subjects Zophar discusses are not necessarily a condition of why Job is suffering. Human good and religion assumes guilt before guilt is proven. This is not hard to do since all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God, Romans 3:23. It is the mindset of judging, wrongly!

In order to counsel someone the LORD has said in other portions of scripture; “first remove the 2 X 4 from your eye, before you seek to remove the tooth pick from your brother’s eye, Matthew 7:1-6 the LORD speaks more clearly! Now every one of us should consider what the plank in the eye might be. As the years pass, our soul is painted over and marred with human good and personal sin, even if forgiven, the circumstance (dirt, oil and weather) of believing in self is still very large.

Zophar as being the youngest of the bunch (we believe) has picked up on all of the conversation thus far and it seems that he has learned a lot from Job and the other two, Eliphaz and Bildad. All of the information he condenses is expressed from the mind of contempt, not mercy. Also his narration is shorter than the others.