It is really a very sobering thing to realize that the tests that come into our life are aimed at getting us to curse God to His face, to tell Him that He is wrong, that He does not keep His promises, that He is not the kind of God that we have been told He is. If you take note of your own life, you will recognize that, when under pressure, the thing you want more than anything else is to cry out in protest to God that He is not keeping His promises. That is where Satan always aims. He has the same philosophy and the same objective today: he wants us to curse God, as he wanted Job to curse God.
But God's protecting hand has been over us. If we can sit here with any degree of peace and enjoyment it is because the hand of God has been like a hedge about us, protecting us and giving us great and wonderful things. Therefore, the attitude of every human heart ought to be, "Thank God for what I've got. Thank God for where I am now. What the future may hold, only He knows. And if it holds some kind of testing like this, it is only because, as St. Paul reminded us in First Corinthians, "God will not test you above what you are able to bear." (1Cor 10:13).
God knows what we can bear, and He will not put us to the test so severe it must destroy our faith. But there are implications in every test that go far beyond the superficial aspects of the situation. That is what we need to remember. And as the remarkable book of Job unfolds, we see some of the things that God brought to the attention of Job.
That is why we have the book of Job, to show us that there are reasons and purposes in our trials and sufferings that we do not see. Job could not see what was going on behind the scenes, and neither can we. And yet God knows, and God is working out an object. He has a purpose for it, and it is a proper and right purpose that will end up manifesting more fully the love and compassion of His heart. The test of every trial is always to this end.
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