Scripture Daily

Context No. 597 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 1:6-11: in context

6Now on the day when God’s sons came to present themselves before the LORD, Satan also came among them. 7The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, “From going back and forth on the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” 8The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant, Job? For there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and an upright man, one who fears God, and turns away from evil.” 9Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10Haven’t you made a hedge around him, and around his house, and around all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. 11But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will renounce you to your face.”

The book of Job pulls back a curtain and shows us a scene in heaven that Job himself never sees. The heavenly beings present themselves before God, and Satan is among them, and God does something startling: he boasts about Job. Have you considered my servant Job, he asks, that there is no one like him on earth, blameless and upright, one who fears God and turns from evil? And Satan answers with a question that is really the engine of the whole book. Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a hedge around him and blessed everything he does? Stretch out your hand and take it all away, and he will curse you to your face. Satan's charge is that Job's devotion is a transaction: he serves God only because God pays well, and the moment the payments stop, the devotion will stop too.

That is a piercing question, and it hangs over every believer, not just Job. Does Job fear God for nothing, for God himself, or for the blessings, the hedge, the prosperity? Is his faith love, or is it a deal? Satan is betting it is a deal, that strip away the benefits and the worship evaporates, that no one really loves God for who he is, only for what he gives. The entire ordeal that follows exists to test which it is, whether there is such a thing as devotion to God that does not depend on being paid for it.

That question turns on me with uncomfortable force. So much of my relationship with God can be quietly transactional, an arrangement in which I serve and obey and expect, in return, that he will keep the hedge up, bless my work, and keep the good things coming. And the honest test is the one Satan named: if the blessings were removed, if the hedge came down, would my faith survive, or would it turn out I was only ever in it for what I got? Do I fear God for nothing, for himself, or is my devotion a transaction that would collapse the moment he stopped paying?

Sources