Can we humans do something to help God that is more than mere child’s play?
The Lord staked the honor and stability of His throne on that one man, Job; in the great cosmic controversy between Christ and Satan, the Evil One challenged God: Your people who serve You are all doing it for selfish, acquisitive reasons, and therefore they rightfully belong on my side! “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Take away Your blessings, “‘and he will surely curse you to Your face’”(1:8-11). It wouldn’t do for God merely to contradict Satan; He had to prove that He had at least one human who was devoted in the genuine God-like motivation of agape-love—and that one man was Job.
The afflicted man didn’t understand what was going on, but he did the best he could in his innocence. He was half right and half wrong: “‘The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away” (1:21). True, God had given; but it was Satan who “took away.”
Job’s agape-loyalty saved God from terrible embarrassment before the universe. Yes, and ruin; if God should win by force of arms, He would have become the Islamic Allah. Job prepared the way for Christ to come.
All through the incarnation of the Son of God, the Father entrusted Him to the care of humans. Rightly read, the story does not say that angels miraculously protected Him; they impressed humans what to do to protect Him. An angel warned Joseph of King Herod’s plot to kill Him; the angel didn’t whisk the Baby off to Egypt, Joseph took Him there.
When Jesus was tired, hot, and hungry at Jacob’s well in Samaria, humans cared for him; true, “the woman at the well” forgot to give Him His drink, but the disciples went to the Sychar market and bought a tasty safari-feast for Him and “prayed Him, saying, Master, eat!” (John 4:31, KJV). That was the “backward prayer,” backward because our prayers are almost always the opposite, childish, Old Covenant, “Master, I’m hungry! Please feed me!” Be sure you save me and my loved ones!
Well and good; that’s a proper prayer to pray. But in this cosmic Day of Atonement, when the heavenly sanctuary is to be “cleansed,” can His people “grow up” out of their infancy to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13), to “comprehend” the mind and soul-stretching “width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God”? (3:18, 19). Can we prepare for translation at Christ’s coming? Yes, yes! He will have a small but very real number—“144,000.” And they not He, will judge the unbelieving billions of earth.
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