Given here for your contemplation from Oswald Chambers first book, “Our Ultimate Refuge: Job and the Problem of Suffering,” presented God as not only the ultimate refuge, but our only refuge, adding that “we know nothing about redemption or forgiveness until we actually crave for it.”
Last Ten Paragraphs from Ch. One: The Unseen Universe
Man is not God but hath God’s end to serve,
A master to obey, a course to take,
Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become,
Grant this, then man must pass from old to new,
From vain to real, from mistake to fact,
From what seemed good, to what now proves best.
Robert Browning
“There is a difference between Satan and the devil which the Bible student should note. According to the Bible, man is responsible for the introduction of Satan: Satan is the result of a communication set up between man and the devil. (see Genesis 3:1-5). When Jesus Christ came face to face with Satan, He dealt with him as representing the attitude man takes up in organizing his life apart from any consideration of God. In the wilderness temptation the devil is seen in his undisguised character; only once did our Lord address the devil as “Satan” – “Then said Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan…” (Matthew 4:10). On another occasion Jesus said that self-pity was satanic – “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan…” (Matthew 16:23).
The devil is the satanic adversary of God in the rule of man and Satan is his representative. Because a thing is satanic does not necessarily mean that it is abdominal and immoral; our Lord said that “that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” Luke 16:15). Satan rules the world under the inspiration of the devil and men are peaceful, “when a strong man armed keeps his palace, his goods are in peace” (Luke 11:21), there is no breaking out into sin and wrong doing. One of the most cunning travesties is to represent Satan as the instigator of external sins. The satanically- managed man is often moral, upright, proud, and individual; he is absolutely self-governed and has no need of God.
Satan counterfeits the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit represents the working of God in a human life when it is at one with God through redemption; in other words, “Holy Spirit” is the heredity brought into human nature at regeneration. When a man is born from above, he has granted to him the disposition of Jesus, Holy Spirit, and if he obeys that disposition he will develop into the new manhood in Christ Jesus. If by deliberate refusal a man is not born again, he is liable to find himself developing more and more into the satanic, which will ultimately head up int the devil.
“Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?” (Job 1:9). Verses 9-12 might be paraphrased in this way: Satan is represented as saying to God, “You are infatuated with the idea that man loves You for Your own sake; he never has and never will. Job for instance, simply loves you because You bless and prosper him, but touch any one of his blessings and he will curse You to Your face and prove that no man on Earth loves You to Your face and prove that no man on earth loves You for Your own sake.”
It must be remembered what Job’s creed was. Job believed that God prospered and blessed the upright man who trusted in Him, and that the man who was not upright was not prospered. Then came calamity after calamity, everything Job believed about God was contradicted and his creed went to the winds. Satan’s sneer is the counterpart of the devil’s sneer in Genesis 3; there, the devil’s object is to sneer about man to God, here, Satan’s object is to sneer about man to God, he is the “accuser of our brethren” (Revelation12:10).
Today there is in our midst a crop of juvenile skeptics, (Merlin adding that “today both men and women are being deceived and kidnapped by these cultural wars, both in the church and the world, by unknowingly surrendering their identities in Christ to the wiles of Satan destroying both their witness & peace, their transformation & empowerment …”) men who up to the time of war had no tension in their lives, and as soon as turmoil embroiled them, they flung over their faith and became cheap and easy skeptics. The man who knows that there are problems and difficulties in life are not so easily discouraged. Most of us get touchy with God and desert Him when He does not back up our creed (see John 6:60, 66). Many a man through this war (WWI), has lost his form of belief in God and imagines that he has thereby lost God, when in reality, he is in the throes of a conflict which ought to give birth to a realization of God more fundamental than any statement of belief.
There are things in our heavenly Father’s dealings with us which have no immediate explanation. There are inexplicable providences which test us to the limit, and prove that rationalism is a mere mental pose. The Bible and our common sense agree that the basis of human life is tragic, not rational, and the whole problem is focused for us in this book of Job. Job 13:15 is the utterance of a man who has lost his explicit (fully and clearly expressed, leaving nothing implied) hold on God, but not his implicit (entangled, should be understood, though not directly expressed) hold, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” That is the last reach of the faith of a man. Job’s creed is gone; all he believed about God has been disproved by his own experiences, and his friends when they come, say in effect, “You are a hypocrite, Job, we can prove it from your own creed.” But Job sticks to it, “I am not a hypocrite, I do not know what accounts for all that has happened, but I will hold to it that God is just and that I shall see Him vindicated in it all.”
God never makes His way clear to Job. Job struggles with problem after problem, and providence brings more problems all the time, and in the end Job says, “… now mine eye sees thee” (Job 42:5): all he had hung on to in the darkness was true, and that God was all he had believed Him to be, loving and just, and honorable. The explanation of the whole thing lies in the fact that God and Satan had made a battleground of Job’s soul without Job’s permission. Without any warning, Job’s life is suddenly turned in desperate havoc and God keeps out of sight and never gives any sign whatever to Job that He is. The odds are desperately against God and it looks as if the sneer of Satan will prove to be true; but God wins in the end, and Job comes out triumphant in his faith in God, and Satan is completely vanquished.
Bottom Line: Will I trust the revelation of God by Jesus Christ when everything in my personal experience today flatly contradicts it? (merlin now: Perhaps, rather than once considered as possibilities, now these probable future losses will devastate Christ Followers far beyond those experienced by Job with his friends & family, wealth and health, encroaching now upon the benchmarks and foundations of our nation’s prior stability, of Constitutional Rights and inherent privilege afforded by a once functioning system of jurisprudence, etc., all couched in the cushy American all-inclusive phrase I first heard of during the sixties, that being “entitlements,” literally sweeping into and degrading all aspects of our culture, and perhaps being the most damming evidence of our descent from God’s intricate design, to rather, the best plans that man with his fact checking science can corral in his leaky cisterns being no better than sieves (Jeremiah 2:13), as we witness the biblical revelation end time texts unfold before our eyes. Such was confirmed again during the recent eclipse, by our misdirected worship of Creation, rather than of the Creator. As Ozzie stated in paragraph seven, “these are the times which ought to give birth to a realization of God more fundamental than any statement of belief.”
Next Up: Summary of Ch 11 in Michael Brown’s book, “Saving a Sick America: Saying Good-bye to Entitlement Mentality” I listened to this book 2 years ago and and just re-discovered the doc… A timely find & more relevant than ever. A packed quick easy read.