READING: Esther 6-10, Job 1
The words amaze me every time I read them. Job was a righteous man who feared God and turned from evil—an assessment I suspect we would want others to say about us. So faithful was he that today’s reading records him as “the greatest man among all the people of the east” (Job 1:3) . . . “No one else on earth is like him” (Job 1:8). He was a blessed man indeed, and surely there seemed little reason to expect otherwise.
Still, Job lost everything except his wife under the attack of the accuser. Like you and I likely would have done, he then expressed his grief through the cultural customs of tearing his robe and shaving his head. All that makes sense to us . . . but that’s not all Job did. Even amid his traumatic grief, he “fell to the ground and worshiped” (Job 1:20, emphasis added)—and that’s what’s amazing to me. He lost almost everything even after he had been following God faithfully, yet he worshiped God anyway after the losses. I can only pray that I, too, would do the same under great difficulty.
PERSONAL REFLECTION: Do you worship God anyway when the “bottom drops out”?
DAILY PRAYER: “Grant me that kind of trust in You, God.”
TOMORROW’S READING: Job 2-8
