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for blessings in “plain, brown, ordinary packages”.
“Then Job said: ‘No doubt you are the wisest of
all people, and wisdom will die with you!’ (Job 12:1-2).
This verse made me laugh out loud today.
Context: Job had suffered so much, and his friends came to “comfort”
him. He gets a little annoyed with them (a little? He DOES have the patience of
Job!) and says, “when you die, wow, all of wisdom will leave the earth, since
you are sooo smart.”
But it’s not just his friends who think that they are all
that! Consider the pundits, the evolutionists who believe that LIFE came from
nothing.
Job 12 continues, “But now ask the beasts, and they will
teach you; and the birds of the air, and they will tell you; Or speak to the
earth, and it will teach you; and the fish of the sea will explain to you. Who
among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this, In
whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind?”
(Job 12:7-10)
Now obviously you can’t ask a bear or a bird or a big-mouthed
bass to teach you about the Creator, but just look at them and ask yourself, “Did
this just happen to happen?” Does life come from lifelessness? Look around you,
Job is saying, there is a God, and He is in charge. “What you know, I also know.
I am not inferior to you,” Job says in 13:2.
Most people who reject God give a reason for their unbelief.
Somehow, their view of God did not line up with what they thought God should be
or do, so they rejected Him.
Not Job. Life was certainly not turning out like he wanted
or how he planned things to go. He lost his job. He lost his 401K. He lost his
family. His wife tells him to drop dead.
In the middle of it all, Job still says, “Though He slay
me, yet will I trust Him,” (Job 13:15). He only asks two things: “don’t leave
me, and don’t let me be horribly afraid of You,” (13:22).
Anne Graham Lotz, who lost her father, her husband, and was
diagnosed with cancer in the space of two years, said at the Texas Governor’s Prayer
Breakfast to look for blessings in “plain, brown, ordinary packages”.
“For my birthday one year, my mother sent me a package wrapped in plain brown paper. When I opened it, there was a gaudy, multicolored straw basket inside, stuffed with tissue paper. I actually thought my mother had totally lost her good senses! I tossed out the tissue paper, wondered what in the world I was going to do with the basket, then called to thank her for her ‘gift.’ Mother laughed when I thanked her for the basket then asked what I thought about what was inside it. I told her that nothing was inside except tissue paper and I had thrown that out. She responded urgently, ‘Oh, no, Anne! INSIDE that tissue paper is your real birthday gift!’
“I ran outside, opened up the trashcan and went through the garbage piece by piece until I came up with the wad of tissue paper. Inside was a small gold ring with a lapis lazuli stone that had been taken from the flooring of the Shushan Palace where Queen Esther had lived with King Xerxes!“I had thrown out a priceless treasure simply because of the way it was wrapped!”
Can you trust God, even in horrible times? Job says yes, even if it is wrapped in the plain brown paper packaging of pain and suffering.
