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when things get worse

Job 2:1-13 (JDV)

Job 2:1 One day the sons of God came again to present themselves before Yahveh, and Satan also came with them to present himself before Yahveh.
Job 2:2 Yahveh asked Satan, “Where have you come from?” “From roaming through the land,” Satan answered him, “and walking around on it.”
Job 2:3 Then Yahveh said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? No one else on the land is like him, a man of perfect integrity, who fears God and turns away from evil. He still retains his integrity, even though you incited me against him, to destroy him for no good reason.”
Job 2:4 “Skin for skin!” Satan answered Yahveh. “A man will give up everything he owns in exchange for his throat.
Job 2:5 But send out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
Job 2:6 “Very well,” Yahveh told Satan, “He is in your power; only spare his throat.”
Job 2:7 So Satan left Yahveh’s presence and infected Job with terrible boils from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.
Job 2:8 Then Job took a piece of broken pottery to scrape himself while he sat among the ashes.
Job 2:9 His wife said to him, “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!”
Job 2:10 “You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her. “Should we accept only good from God and not adversity?” Throughout all this Job did not sin in what he said.
Job 2:11 Now when Job’s three friends– Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite– heard about all this adversity that had happened to him, each of them came from his home. They met together to go and sympathize with him and comfort him.
Job 2:12 When they looked from a distance, they could barely recognize him. They wept aloud, and each man tore his robe and threw dust into the air and on his head.
Job 2:13 Then they sat on the ground with him seven days and nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw that his suffering was very intense.

when things get worse

Job’s victory over his circumstances (and the devil behind them) is seen in the fact that God still boasts of his integrity as he did before calamity struck. So, Satan pleads for more control. The LORD gives him authority to touch Job’s body with painful sores. That was only part of the strategy. The other part is the reaction that Job would have to endure of his wife and his “friends.” Most of the story is a description of the reactions of people around Job to the unfairness of Job’s problems compared to his apparent sinlessness. Their conclusion was that Job must have secretly done something to cause his problems. We know, however, that it was not like that.

The seven days of mourning in silence and the dust on the heads are both signs that Job’s friends expected him to die (return to the dust). Anyone who has ever sat with a friend who is dying of a terminal illness knows how they felt. It is a difficult and painful thing to see a friend deteriorate before your eyes. Job was not the only one being tested.

When things went from bad to worse for Job, it was because Satan was losing. Job was a hero of faith because he refused to accept what everybody else believed. He clung to his relationship with God as an anchor.

LORD, help us to forge such a deep relationship with you that though the world turn against us, we can stay true.