Praising the God Who Takes Away
It’s easy to praise the God who gives you what you ask for. The God who opens doors of opportunity for you. The God who pours down blessings on you from the windows of heaven. The God who silences your enemies and builds a protective hedge around you and bears you up in the arms of angels lest you dash your foot against a stone.
But that’s not always what happens.
Sometimes, God takes away the things (and the people) we love. Sometimes He shuts doors. Sometimes He bars heaven from pouring out anything at all. Sometimes He lets our enemies win, allows disaster to trample the hedge, and does nothing to soften our landing.
Harder to praise that kind of a God.
Harder to tell Him, “I love You, I trust You, and I will obey You.”
I’m always amazed at Job’s capacity for that kind of praise.
In the span of less than a minute, four servants rush in and interrupt each other to tell Job that he has lost everything. His livestock, his servants, and his children—all destroyed in a nightmarish avalanche of supernatural destruction and human greed (Job 1:13-18).
He responds by tearing his clothes and shaving his head in an act of mourning, then he “fell to the ground and worshiped” (Job 1:20).
Worshiped.
At a moment in time when all the available evidence pointed to God as the culprit behind the tragedies, Job chooses to worship. And he says,
Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked shall I return there.
The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away;
Blessed be the name of the LORD.(Job 1:21)
Job didn’t know that Satan was the one gunning for him—trying to spiritually shatter him to prove a point. But he did know that God was at least allowing all this to happen.
Even when God gives Satan a longer leash and Job’s health is degraded to the point that his own friends don’t recognize him (Job 2:6-8, 12), with his own wife encouraging him to “curse God and die!” (Job 2:9), Job refuses to speak against his Creator.
“Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” (Job 2:10).
None of us have experienced the kind of crushing blow that felled Job to the ground. But all of us have had moments in our lives when God has allowed us to experience pain, suffering, and loss.
And like Job, we don’t always get to know the reason why. Sometimes we can’t even guess at the reason.
Sometimes all we have is the promise that God loves us and that He knows what He’s doing—and we have to trust that it will all make sense one day.
One day—when we can see what God sees and understand what God understands.
But not right now.
I have a lot of respect for Job—to be able to endure that kind of a loss, that kind of physical and emotional pain, and still offer God worship and praise?
There’s a lot more to Job’s story. A lot of important insights and lessons. But if the book had ended right here, two chapters in, we still would have been left with a powerful lesson—and a powerful example.
The man who praised the God who takes away.
Until next time,
Jeremy
