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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 137>Now I had the answer to the real question behind my thoughts on laughter: “Would I ever be able to laugh again?”
What was Job’s “potential disobedience?” It was that he could become so attached to blessings that he would seek to control God in order to gain them. This is the sin that showed itself when he suffered. We see him act almost as if he hoped to shame the Judge of the universe into doing what seemed fair. He wanted to accomplish through self-justification and complaining what he couldn’t through faith.
If I knew where on earth to find him, I'd go straight to him. I'd lay my case before him face-to-face, give him all my arguments firsthand. I'd find out exactly what he's thinking, discover what's going on in his head. Do you think he'd dismiss me or bully me? No, he'd take me seriously. He'd see a straight-living man standing before him; my Judge would acquit me for good of all charges.
(Job 23:3-7, The Message)
Job reacted to his suffering by convincing himself that if he could face God in a courtroom, he would win his case. This reaction isn’t totally surprising. Job was famous in heaven for his fear of the Lord (Job 1:8), and his healthy caution caused him to seek a beneficial outcome from the courtroom of heaven. That is a good thing, but it is also the sort of virtue that can easily warp into religious selfishness. A healthy fear is only a few steps away from an unhealthy attempt to earn God’s blessings. Human hearts often turn from, “God, I trust you no matter what happens” to “God I trust you; just make sure you do Your job of rewarding my trust!”
This shift can be so subtle that we can miss it. In Job’s case, there was no external clue that it was happening, even in seed form. In fact, when he first suffered, his words seemed to say just the opposite: “GOD gives, GOD takes. God's name be ever blessed. Not once through all this did Job sin…” (Job 1:21-22, The Message). Job refused to put his children, his earthly treasures, or his comfort ahead of sincere devotion. He sacrificed his feelings for what he knew to be true.
It was only the stress of ongoing pain that weakened Job’s determination and brought his potential disobedience into his actions. In time, everyone could see what no one but God could have known was beneath the surface – Job’s trust, given the right circumstances, was capable of subtly shifting to manipulation.
Where could this “potential disobedience” have led if it had not been exposed in such a dramatic fashion? We can see by looking at what the Bible says about those who have nurtured this sin in secret. A prime example is the leaders of Israel during Jesus’ earthly ministry.
<page 138>Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called 'Doctor' and 'Reverend.'
(Matthew 23:4-7, The Message)
The Jewish leaders knew the Scriptures. They knew that honor was promised to those who embraced wisdom (Proverbs 4:8), but something had gone wrong with their practice of this truth. Their attempts to receive honor had mixed with pride and selfish religion, causing them to put on a show for the sake of praise and prosperity. They twisted what looked like loving devotion into self-service, creating a religious system based on earthly rewards and punishments.
What happened when Jesus came? His ministry threatened what was perceived to be one of the most precious rewards for obedience, the ability to prosper in the land of Israel, and the religious leaders sought to protect that reward.
If we let him go on, pretty soon everyone will be believing in him and the Romans will come and remove what little power and privilege we still have.
(John 11:48, The Message)
The Pharisees and priests saw Jesus as a threat to everything they had worked so hard to achieve. They reacted to Him out of a faith that had been warped by years of self-justified compromise. In the name of caring for God and His people, they tried to protect the land of Israel by killing His Son!
Then one of them — it was Caiaphas, the designated Chief Priest that year — spoke up, "Don't you know anything? Can't you see that it's to our advantage that one man dies for the people rather than the whole nation be destroyed?"
(John 11:49-50, The Message)
Selfish religion leads us to use the promises of God as an excuse to grab for control. It taints service with a poison. On the outside, we seem to be walking by faith, but underneath we are trying to manipulate circumstances, people, and God. We follow Him to the extent that we believe doing so will gain us our desires.
Before we join the “down with the hypocrites” bandwagon, we need to consider what protects any of us from this fault. Can we simply decide by the power of our will that we will not fall to it? Doing so ignores the deceptiveness of our hearts. Human nature apart from the grace of God will pervert even the best of intentions. We may start with love, but without His sustaining work in our lives, we can easily fall into the worst sorts of hypocrisy.
Don't be so naïve and self-confident. You're not exempt. You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else. Forget about self-confidence; it's useless…
(1 Corinthians 10:12, The Message)
<page 139>If that is true for us who live in the New Covenant, how much more would it be true for Job? There was no New Testament in which he could read about humility and mercy. There was no sacrificial death of Christ, no poured out Holy Spirit, no body of Christ for support. It isn’t even clear whether the Law of Moses had been written yet.
Job had little to protect him from the weaknesses of his heart. Is it difficult to believe that had his “potential disobedience” been allowed to grow in the shadows, it would have morphed into the same sort of selfish religion we see later in the Pharisees? Wouldn’t it have taken a significant miracle for that not to have happened?
When I was a young Christian, I enjoyed condemning the Pharisees and priests. They were the stereotypical, hardhearted, status quo establishment – the evil villains who stood out in contrast to loving, freeing Jesus. I have now been around for far too long to continue to enjoy condemning them. Instead, my heart goes out to them.
Their entire nation had been enslaved and taken to Babylon many hundreds of years before Jesus showed up. Even after the people had been restored to their land, they suffered under domination from the Medes and Persians, the Greeks, and then the Romans. When this sort of loss of control happens to a group of people, they tend to feel unprotected. Unless they find God’s grace to handle their situation, a subtle paranoia can eat away at their souls.
There are many ways to handle that subtle paranoia. Some turn to alcohol, partying, and wild living – numbing their pain with addiction. Others become terrorists – killing randomly in an attempt to bring down the existing evil order. Still others choose to imitate their conquerors so they can be rewarded for fitting in. In Israel, we see all three approaches. The drunkards and prostitutes turned to wild living, the zealots turned to terrorism, and the tax collectors turned to working the Roman system.
The Pharisees and priests chose what appeared to be a far better course. They didn’t react in ways that we would normally consider sinful. Instead, they recommitted themselves to God with incredible zeal. They became fanatics about religious service and sought to encourage others to do so as well. They constructed an elaborate system of traditions and rituals designed to hold people to God’s best.
Place yourself in their shoes. If you wanted to serve God and cared about your nation, and if you had read in the Torah that your nation had been judged because of disobeying God’s Law, wouldn’t you consider putting in place a religious system that enforced obedience? After you had done so, wouldn’t you feel a certain pride and develop a desire to be rewarded for your accomplishments?
Along with that, how would you feel about those who were less dedicated than you? In the mind of a sincere Jew at that time, the drunkards, prostitutes, zealots, and tax collectors were risking everyone’s future by their actions. They were setting the stage for a new round of painful judgments on the entire nation. It is quite understandable why the Jewish leaders ostracized them.
Do you remember the account of Achan’s sin (Joshua 7)? Israel was defeated in battle because of the sin of one individual. The Pharisees and priests knew this piece of their history. Centuries’ worth of pain had no doubt burned its message into their consciousness. They wanted blessings, <page 140>so they tried to stop those who would be like Achan, and when the “sinners” wouldn’t cooperate, they socially punished them and tried to force them to comply or leave.
All of this was understandable, yet it led to a disaster when Jesus came. The leaders had become too proud of their accomplishments to hear God speaking through His Son. So the tax collectors and prostitutes believed, while the seemingly sincere were blinded. In the end, the people who thought they were doing the most to protect Israel misled it into almost nineteen hundred years of exile.
This shows how subtle, deceptive, and dangerous selfish religion can be. We don’t see it coming. We feel we are dedicated to God, yet our hearts slowly switch from loving Him to attempting to control Him. Then when He tries to correct us, our self-righteous indignation blinds us to the reality of what He is saying.
Consider the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. He loved his father and did what was asked of him, but when his father celebrated over his rebellious younger brother, the older brother was offended. He had obeyed, in part, to secure his fair share of his father’s love, attention, and money. When he saw his younger brother getting an unfair share, his selfishness rose to the surface and blinded him to the joy he should have felt.
I only needed to look at my own life to see how this could happen. I had changed over the years. I had started out very much in favor of undeserved patience and mercy, but years of difficult obedience had drained me. The grueling pain of dying to myself and following Jesus while turning away from a fetish that sprang from so many different directions in my heart had caused something in me to shift. I felt I had paid the price for God’s best, and I needed an earthly return to keep me going. I had been injured by obeying, and He owed me blessings to medicate my wounds.
I knew the Bible too well to let myself blatantly express those sorts of feelings, however. God was God; “He gives; He takes” (Job 1:21, The Message). I should be ready to take up my cross and follow Him even to death. So I told myself that I couldn’t demand that He do what I wanted. He was in control, not me.
But every time I surrendered to Him without getting what I felt I needed, my wound grew deeper. I forced myself to endure the pain, but it was slowly tearing me apart. Finally, my growing “older brother nature” could barely bear what was happening. A selfish sense of fairness seemed to overwhelm me. In moments of weakness, I said in effect, “If this is how You treat the people who serve You, how can You claim to be loving or just!? It’s no wonder so few people follow You.”
Although I didn’t know it at the time, my Unprotected Heart Stronghold was coming to the surface. Amazingly, it had now taken an entirely different external form than when it had produced the fetish. Its goal was now to use blessings as the new medication that allowed me to avoid facing the issues within my soul. I wanted God to create a haven of safety for my family where we would be showered with goodness rather than the destruction and insanity around us.
<page 141>That was the only sort of world I felt I could handle. I obeyed, in part, in order to do everything I could to force it out of God, and when He didn’t do what I hoped He would, I worked harder. If He wasn’t going to do His part, I felt I had to make up for his “negligence” with my own efforts.
If I wash myself with snow water, and cleanse my hands with soap, yet You will plunge me into the pit, and my own clothes will abhor me. For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him, and that we should go to court together.
Job’s words were an expression of the Unprotected Heart Stronghold in his heart. God wasn’t caring for him in the way he felt he needed, and he was angry about it. I identified with his words intensely. I had hoped to wash or cleanse myself in some way that would force God to give me what I felt I needed. When I didn’t get it, I wanted to drag Him into court in order to compel Him to meet my expectations.
My desire to control God was so strong that I had become addicted to obedience. It was much harder to recognize than sexual addiction, because it looked like unending devotion. Nevertheless, it was based in an internal Child that had never found real security. The ten-year old boy who had cut himself with razor blades had never found an answer to the angst that drove him to those acts. He had tried all sorts of fixes over the years: a fetish, a drug-like approach to the presence of God, creativity, accomplishments …. Now as a middle-aged man, a successful Christian life had become my drug of choice. I was still grasping for some way to deal with a dysfunctional internal Parent that had failed to become an expression of our Heavenly Father’s love and wisdom.
Although I am not sure there is any way to know if the same sort of problem was beneath the surface in Job, I find it helpful to consider what it means if it was. It means that God saw the growing Unprotected Heart Stronghold in Job’s heart long before he did. While it was still hidden beneath obedience, God knew that it would eventually damage this child who gave Him so much delight. But how could God keep this slow cancer from harming a man who feared Him like no other? How could He uncover a problem for which the main symptoms were service and words of humility?
He chose to not wait for the cancer to become inoperable. Instead, he used the x-ray machine of Satan’s attacks to display it before the world. Though this was painful for everyone, including God, it was an act of mercy. He said, “I would rather have you sin and accuse me to my face than to lose you to something you will never see coming until it is too late.”
Could Job laugh before he suffered? Yes, I believe he could, but I also believe this was only because God exposed his unprotected heart before it had the chance to poison his spirit. Given enough time, selfishness would have grabbed him. His heart would have turned God into a system that he could manipulate for his own profit. At that point, true childlike laughter would have left him. His life would have become so preoccupied with making sure he “got what he deserved” that he could no longer find true enjoyment.
…Now I had the answer to the real question behind my thoughts on laughter: “Would I ever be able to laugh again?” After studying Job, I knew I would be able to. I also saw, for the first time, the stronghold that was hindering me, the Unprotected Heart Stronghold. I had never before <page 142>recognized it. In fact, it was so new to me that I didn’t know how it worked or what to call it. I just knew that there was something in me that desperately grasped for control.
The question of how God was going to tear it down was even more mystifying. How do you deal with a problem that has made you obsessive about obedience? You can’t just start disobeying. Still, I knew by faith that the stronghold’s days were now numbered – in fact, it was already falling. The Holy Spirit was showing me what I was facing; it only made sense that He would dismantle it in His time.
Along with this, I realized that God had actually used my sexual struggles through the years to protect me. It isn’t hard to imagine me falling to pride and selfish religion. I had been a compliant kid who gave my life to Jesus the first time I heard the gospel. I became radically committed even as a teenager growing up in a non-Christian family and society. I tended to dig into the Scriptures, analyze life, and put truth into practice. It would have been easy for those qualities to have morphed into self-righteousness and ambition.
The fetish was an attack from Satan that God had allowed to keep me from that. It was an x-ray machine that exposed my inner weakness for my good. Every time I felt I finally had my life together, the fetish reminded me of my need for more of Jesus.
The compliant kid had one area of noncompliance that undermined any tendency toward arrogance or complacency year after year. It pushed me beyond my human ability to endure and convinced me I had nothing good in myself. Apart from Jesus, I would make a mess of anything I touched. Nothing less than a real work of the Holy Spirit would produce anything truly worthwhile in me. I had to lay down my creativity, my intellect, my desire for peace, my reputation, and my willpower …. There was no room for demanding my view of how life should be. I had to follow Jesus day by day in order to find His view of life.
It was the Pain Drain that allowed me to see this. It gave me the ability to handle pain without fixing my circumstances or avoiding my wounds. I was able to experience my emotions without feeling the desperate need to force God to remove them. Instead, He spoke to me about them as I Grieved and Accepted my losses, which allowed me to stop grasping for control. I found myself able to face Satan’s worst attacks against me and rejoice in what God was doing instead of getting angry over what I didn’t see Him doing.
The Unprotected Heart Stronghold was beginning to crumble. I was forever protected even if I was hurt like Job. What could be safer than that? I was finding Jesus in the middle of the worst trials of my life. I was discovering Contentment as I learned to truly trust that what had been meant for evil, He meant for good.
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