Life Bible Study: Four Reasons Why Bad Things Happen to Good People #1
To Expand Our Perspective of God
From the desk of Rev Zheng
“I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted… My ears had heard of you 6 but now my eyes have seen you.” (Jon 42: 2,5,6)
We need to constantly expand our perspective of God so that we may enjoy God. Because God is perfectly good and beautiful, every added inch in the depth of the knowledge of God would increase our love for Him and enjoyment of serving Him. This is how great men of faith in history flinched not from suffering for God. The larger is our perspective of God, the more we will be convicted of the truth: as enjoying God is the fundamental purpose of our being, the greatest treasure for a man is to have God.
The book of Job offers a classic lesson on the theology of suffering. Job spent a long time in his suffering, at total of 36 chapters, defending his righteousness to his friends and begging God for an explanation why He allowed such great mishap to happen to him. But God kept silent until chapter 38. But God did not answer Job. Instead, God took him for a tour in the creation and asked him a series of rhetorical questions. God wanted Job to see the immeasurable gulf between the creation and the transcendent and unlimited God, which liberated Job from his pain. Job’s enlightenment of the great truth can be summarised in three points.
First, God is under no obligation to give us explanations. God is self-existent. He enthrones at the highest place and rules over all. To think that God owes us explanations for his acts is to think that we could pull Him down to our level; how absurd and arrogant we are! That was why Job responded to God, saying, “6I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”
Second, a God we can comprehend completely is no God at all! We should be grateful for this truth because it proves that the God we worship, serve, and trust in the midst of suffering and crisis is bigger than we can understand! No doubt, God is big enough to see us through and for us to trust even in a mysterious crisis such as Job.
Third, God knows what it is to suffer! 2000 years ago, God stepped out of paradise to experience our pain – not to understand what it is but to assure us that: God saw our pain, tasted it, wore it, lived it and died as a result of it. We can be sure that only God is aware of what is best for us and will bring glory, happiness, and good things out of our suffering. In God alone we trust. Amen.
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