Nothing builds COURAGE and WISDOM faster than integrity.
Integrity builds courage because it requires people to do things they find frightening. Integrity builds wisdom because the good decisions it requires draw a person out of darkness and into the light.
Both Job and his friends are men of integrity. (But only Job is a man of “perfect integrity.”) Job’s friends worship the true God, but when Job’s friends consider the absolute destruction of his life, they abandon whatever wisdom their own integrity might have given them and fall back on simplistic logic: God is just, so if you are suffering, you must have sinned.
Job’s integrity gives him a deeper wisdom, but who would listen to a ruined man? No one listens to life’s “losers.” Yet integrity requires Job to argue what he knows:
- Job has maintained his integrity and God expects that to continue, Job 7:20.
- Destruction like he experienced is not normal—he knows it is supernatural; God is behind this somehow. (“Surely the arrows of the Almighty have pierced me” 6:4.)
- The point of his experience is somehow connected to his integrity. (“Reconsider; my righteousness is still the issue” 6:29.)
- God is still on His throne but Job is in no position to take God to court and accuse Him—there is no one to mediate between the parties (a role Jesus would one day fill) 9:32-33.
- Finally, though he curses his own birth and begs for the relief of death, He KNOWS that God will deliver him in the future:
“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end, He will stand upon the earth, and, though my skin be destroyed, yet in my flesh I WILL see God. With my own eyes, I will see Him.” Job 19:25-27.
Job has lost EVERYTHING. Yet, integrity gives him the wisdom to perceive what is going on—and the courage to defend his position though he looks like the “loser” in this story.
God, give us the integrity of Job.
ΑΩ
Household Words: 