“…on behalf of a man, [my intercessor] pleads with God as one pleads with a friend.” (Job 16:21, NIV)
Somewhere there is help for your game. In fact, you probably don’t have to search too far. The assistance you need is likely as close as your local pro shop.
You can turn to a friend, of course, or a magazine. You might stand in front of a full-length mirror and do your best to replicate the swing of your favorite tour professional. Or maybe you buy one of those infomercial miracle products for your game. So many options.
The same is true when we come face-to-face with the conditions of our living. Any number of possible “solutions” are available to us. And many of these fix the surface problem, like a patch of stucco on a crumbling façade. But as with old buildings, what’s beneath the surface of our life may need full-scale restoration. Our foundations are compromised.
Then comes the earthquake.
The writer of Hebrews understood the reality of shaking. God’s voice thunders and what happens next reveals the condition of a person. What is unshakeable remains; what is weak falls and is removed (see Hebrews 12:26-29).
Certainly it was an earthquake that shook Job’s personal world. His house was destroyed, his flocks escaped, his children were lost to catastrophe. Only his faithless wife and his aching boils remained. And his friends—who, though they came in mercy, turned to unhelpful critique.
Where could Job turn? Who could not only hear his cry but meet him in his innocent suffering?
The quick answer is “God.” But Job’s reflections in chapter 16 of the book that bears his name dig deeper, finding their landing point in the mix of the Trinity, in the Savior more ancient than Job himself, whom commentators contemporize with Abraham.
“My intercessor is my friend,” he declared, “as I pour out my tears to God.” The man whose world was so severely shaken responded with much pained emotion. But who was this intercessor Job knew to hear his cry? He was not God the Father, for it was to God that this intercessor pled the case of the hurting man. It could only be the standing Redeemer of Job’s later exultation; it was the one we call Christ, the Messiah, our Savior. Fittingly, in Daniel’s look to the future, this is the one he called the “Ancient of Days.”
Ancient is this one, yet ready here and now to meet you as he met Job, with interceding mercy. Job had no definitive expectation that suffering would be lifted, but he had this: the one who knew the extent of that suffering and bore its weight with him before the Creator of all.
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Jeff Hopper
May 11, 2015
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.