Job 13:10

Would He not rebuke you,

   If you were partial to either side?

 

Three months ‘behind’. Wow.

As you might be aware, one of our former presidents is embroiled in a number of legal battles. The costs of those legal battles are enormous according to reports. But if you thought really highly of yourself, would you not be willing to spend to have the highest profile lawyers too? The question in many of these battles is whether this person crossed some legal lines in his past behavior.

My first response when trying to work this verse was to come back and try again later. Not really inspiring. It’s later, so I tried again, and in essence I changed one word, but I am still not confident in my conclusion.

‘Would’ was also ‘will’, ‘shall’, and ‘is to’. ‘Rebuke’ was also ‘reprove’, ‘reprimand’, ‘dispute with’, and oddly enough ‘declare you to be right’. The odd part came from my favorite source, so it makes me question the word choices of the others.

‘Secretly’ was in each version except my favorite and one that used ‘in your heart’. This time I went with my favorite in that I do not believe ‘in your heart’ was necessary to the intent.

My expectation is that when God judges the behavior of our president, He will find it partial to himself and judge it as sin. An old phrase I keep in my head is something like ‘You cannot legislate religious behavior.’ I take this to mean that we cannot force others to follow our religious beliefs over their own just based on laws made up by the majority, and that just because we see ‘it’ as sin, the world may not agree whatever ‘it’ is.

My youngest keeps asking me if whatever new news event gets reported means that we are going to have another World War. I do not have an answer. If the world did not have nuclear weapons, I am convinced we would be in a global conflict. I am not sure we are not already at war and our leaders are simply trying to hide it to avoid the hysterical fear of nuclear attacks. With war in Ukraine, war in Israel, banning of Tik Tok, and everything going on in the South China Sea, it certainly feels like global conflict between ‘us’ and ‘them’. But as long as China keeps sending us the things we cannot do without, World War 3 is still in the future.

The basic premise of the verse to me is that the friends have twisted the intent of God and Job is calling them out for it. To me it is like the news saying that the man’s lying on his loan applications is okay because all the banks got their money back. The issue is all the risk the banks took on and the loans that they could not make to others because they made them to him. Its not about the outcome for this man and the banks, but for all the others impacted by it. My gut tells me all the other legal battles he is fighting are similar in that he did something for himself and got caught and wants to get away with it anyway.

This is no different from any of us. We sin to appease our sinful nature, and we want to get to heaven anyway. We cry that it is not fair that we have to accept that someone other than ourselves is the center of the universe. Like a baby crying that it got put down or my cat crying that I won’t give it more treats. Until we submit ourselves to the Lordship of Christ, we will continue to be partial to ourselves and might as well be in the midst of a world war.

Written 4/22/24, Posted 7/25/24, Job 295