How important it is to “learn God” – to get to know Him, to understand how He thinks and works and feels! Over and over again during Job’s suffering, Job rejects his friends’ words, refuting them with truth. Yet his friends’ arguments sound so correct. They are mixed with enough truth that only the truly discerning can see something has gone wrong with the theology.
My husband worked in a bank before he went into full-time Christian work. He was chief assistant to the chief inspector. The job of the inspection team was to find and catch the bank employees who were getting the bank’s money mixed up with their own. His training included sitting for hours and hours in a dusty vault, counting thousands of bank notes, among which had been hidden a handful of counterfeit ones. The idea was, if you were so thoroughly cognizant of the real thing, the counterfeit would be easy to spot.
There is no greater argument in my mind for getting to know God than the anticipation of suffering! Learning to know Him in the good times prepares us for what will be said to us in the bad times! In fact, the more solid and grounded we can be before a “miserable Monday” arrives, the better we will fare spiritually. Jesus said in John 10:27 that His “sheep” know His voice and will listen to Him. If His voice becomes familiar to us, we will more readily detect the counterfeit when we hear it.
What often happens when humans try to make sense of life is that they rely on the little human knowledge they have. We have our human systems, often quite logical to us, into which we try to fit the things that happen to us. Sometimes they fit, but often these events are just a bit too large for our understanding. It is in such situations that we must rely on God, whose understanding is big enough though ours is not.
