Yesterday in cell, in discussing why God allows bad things to happen to people, Job came up and I thought it provided a nice contrast to the past post on Joseph. While Joseph was lifted up in one day, Job lost everything he had in one day.
When thinking about why bad things happen to good people, the story of Job provides a good example of how to respond to bad events in our lives. It is inevitable that we will go through rough times and be shaken at some point in our lives. For him, he was tested to see if he will still love God if God took every good thing from his life and for the most part he remained faithful to God. He believed that God is still good despite what he eyes, his wife, his friends were telling him. He trusted God and God was pleased with him and blessed him indeed.
Another test case is Abraham. After being promised to be blessed beyond measure, and told his offspring will be as numerous as the sands, God commanded Abraham to kill that son that was key to his promise. Consider what that can do to a man's heart. He had a choice to be despondent and moan and think things through but he chose to obey this unusual of commands. And God stopped him before he could murder his son and was pleased by his faith in God. God blessed him indeed.
I could talk of Daniel but you see a theme here. Someone said "who God uses mightily, he tests greatly" or something like that. The challenge for most of us, for me too, is staying faithful in the heat of these hard times. How do you keep your faith from wavering in the midst of the storm? How did they do it? I think trust comes through understanding. I believe these men understood who God was and they trusted him even when it was completely hopeless. So it's important to understand God or at least how he operates.
I believe God is good and cannot do any evil. I believe God is love and everything he does it out of love. I believe God is just and does not show favouritism to anyone. When you have the right idea of God, it helps change the way you think about things. From God's perspective, I believe that more than anything he wants our hearts. Usually when our hearts are far away he will use his means to get our attention and draw us nearer to him for fellowship. There is nothing more valuable than the soul of a man to God so it makes sense that he will do whatever it takes to preserve it. What we see as bad situations or events may just be God's way to get our attention. This is not always the case though.
So God tests us, just like Abraham or Job, but the devil sends temptations. Tests are made to uplift, they expose the true nature of our hearts. Temptations though are designed to make us fall. When Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, he was not tested, he was tempted. I think it's important to make a distinction between the two.
The things with hard times is that they help us develop 'spiritual muscles' and prepare us to be used in a greater way. The reward for passing the test is far greater than these men could imagine and whatever the lost in the process was restored more than they expected. And don't worry if you fail a test, sometimes you get to retake it.
-ONWARD!