Impossible Until Now

11.03.12

Job 25.4 4 “How then can a man be just with God? Or how can he be clean who is born of woman? (NASB)  - Bildad the Shuhite

Job’s ‘friends’ asked some questions that are not easy to answer. All three of them: Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Naamathite, and Eliphaz the Temanite, had a perspective that is hard to wrestle with. Many people today are just like them: God is hard to understand and so they hold a view of God that puts Him in a place where they land at the conclusion that God is God and man is, well: “How much less man, that maggot, and the son of man, that worm!” (Job 25.6 NASB) Cynicism’ll do that to you: when you measure man by man, he’s pretty pathetic.

Today, I walked into a local Starbucks to get some coffee and wifi, and on the door of the coffee shop were these words: Impossible Until Now. Bildad could not think of one reason (much less an example) of why anyone on earth would be considered by God the way Job held that the righteous were considered by God. To Bildad, it was just unthinkable. Impossible. Bildad knew how evil men were to one another. Bildad had seen the injustice and the inhumanity of man to man. All Bildad knew was the no matter who God was, men were only wicked and evil maggots.

To Bildad, that man got anything other than God’s judgment, was just foolish talk. Bildad viewed God as the Ultimate Bad Attitude toward this creation that man had screwed up. All Bildad could see was, wipe the thing clean (after he was gone of course) and start all over again. The enemy of God holds that same view: God You failed miserably with these humans!

What Bildad didn’t know was that man is justified by faith. One doesn’t have to subscribe to a list of rules to find favor with the Almighty, one simply has to believe that He is (and one is not.) But the sin of man and the guilt of man get in the way of his reasoning that God could or would ever accept him “just as he is”. Impossible until now.

Job was probably way different in many ways than we are – he probably appeared religious. He seemed to be righteous and blameless to his fellow man, he routinely offered the sacrfices of atonement for his shortcomings; but more than anything, he believed in God. God was important to him. So important, that he tried to live his life in a manner that honored God. God can do a lot with a non-Hebraic heart like that. Forgive my cynicism, but God got more out of Job the Uzite, a Gentile, than He did from most of His Own Chosen People.

Yesterday, I spent some time considering my limitations. I arrived at the conclusion that as long as I believe I am limited then I am. But as I consider the limitless God in Whom I believe then my limitations only serve as reminders of how limitless He is, and He is mine and I am His. How can I lose – unless I don’t believe?

Impossible until now was the stark reminder that when I factor God out of the equation, life is indeed, pretty pathetic (with a few precious moments, and a beautiful sunset or sunrise or two thrown in for color.) When things get way less impossible is when I look to God, with Whom all things are possible. The difference is what I do with my mind and what I keep in my heart.

I can do all things through Him who gives me strength. (Philippians 4.13)