job - my thoughts and lessons learnt

I finally finished Job - YAY! Hehe.. Took me a while eh. I thought it was a pretty interesting read over all. I have to admit, that I didn't really know what was going on initially because I was reading it without a commentary, so I was a bit lost for a while - but I will write about what I learnt after I give you all my basic summary of the book of Job. Here goes...

1. Well firstly, Job has it good (life was abundant and full of blessings).
2. Job loses everything
3. Job's friends try to comfort him by saying he has done something wrong (what kind of friends were they eh? Hmmm.. well on reflection, I guess we can be like those friends sometimes when we try to comfort our people who are hurting. We try to help by saying the right thing, but we just make things worse!)
4. Job says back 'what? no way man, I don't know why God is doing this to me, but I know He has a good reason for doing whatever He is doing'
5. Job's friends persist
6. Job insists that God is in control
7. Job's friends keep going (they take turns to have a go at poor ol' Job)
8. Job then says 'actually, God, what are You up to... really? I don't think I have done anything wrong, so why all of this?'
9. Job has another friend, Elihu, who seems to make some pretty good points about who God really is and why He does the things He does.
10. And then finally God answers Job by asking him some rhetorical questions about creation (all the dinosaur references are found here in chapters 40, behemoth, and 41, leviathan)
11. Job says, 'my bad, God, I shouldn't have questioned You'
12. God says, 'that's cool Job, your friends are pretty dodgy tho - I think you should pray for them - don't worry, I'm listening to your prayers'
13. And then God blesses Job all over again (twice as much as before), they have a big party, Job has 10 more kids, and everything is hunky dory once again.

So that's Job in a nutshell. Don't comment about me missing out stuff because that's what I remember (it's got lots of holes in it I know - that's expected with MY memory).

But what are the lessons in Job? Well as I mentioned before, I was a bit lost so I asked my brother, Adrian, if he had any idea and this was his take on the whole Job thing:

Job is like the 'controlling farmer' that Jim Berg talks about in the last chapter of Changed Into His Image (sermon can be found here). The controlling farmer likes to have everything in his / her control and therefore expects things to always go in the way that was planned, and when this doesn't happen, they question why and either get angry or discouraged.

I think that interpretation makes sense. When things didn't go as expected, Job kinda got sad. I think his friends were controlling farmers too in a way because they said that Job must have committed some kind of sin because there must have been a crime if there was a punishment.

When I did this study at Regen, I didn't think I was a controlling farmer at first because I have always thought that if anything, I am more of a lazy 'gambling' farmer who does the minimum and expects a harvest. But after some reflection (doing this quite a bit), I have realised that I can be a controlling farmer at times too - when things don't go as expected it's really easy for me to (and I usually do) fall into discouragement. I need God's help to teach me to trust in Him fully while still being diligent in learning more about Him too. Consistency is the key I reckon.

If you haven't listened to the sermon or read the book, give it a listen or a read because it is really a very good lesson to learn. OK I'm outta here - Rowena's getting very sleepy :)