A Return to the Basics

The following is from Mike Mason’s book, The Gospel According to Job, pages 37-38:

Job knew one of the great secrets of faith: the believer in God has no worldly rights. The true believer is someone who has abdicated all rights, freely accepting the status of a slave and no longer laying claim to any earthly chattel, whether it be “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields” (Matthew 19:29). These are precisely the sort of things that Job has just lost, and yet his initial response to their loss is not bitter complaint, nor even mere acquiescence, but adoration.

The fact is Christians have abdicated one kingdom in favor of another. They have released their hold on this world’s elaborate system of amenities and expectations, in order to embrace something infinitely higher. In practice this letting go can be a delicate process, for as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven we certainly do have rights, but what we do not have is worldly rights.

For a Christian to insist on having worldly rights and comforts is, plain and simply, to be a grumbler. It is to be like the Israelites in the desert when they were continually murmuring against God. How often do we as believers waste precious time and energy trying to “claim” things that, as those whose lot in this life is nothing more than to share the cross of Christ, we have no right to claim? The tragedy is that meanwhile we neglect to claim the spiritual rights that are properly ours. In our pursuit of worldly contentment, we forfeit spiritual joy and peace.

We Christians are people who know in our bones that we never had any right to be created in the first place, let alone redeemed. We know we have no more inherent title to life and its goodness than a dead man has. For us the coffin lid has already been nailed shut on all the natural joys and privileges that earth can offer. Knowing this, we are set free to bless the Lord in all circumstances, whether we find ourselves clothed or naked.

When Adam discovered he was naked, he hid from the Lord. But when Job was faced with his nakedness he worshipped, and this is what sets fallen man apart from the redeemed man. Even Christ, after all, when He came into the world, came naked. And He died naked, too. The Gospels plainly state that soldiers divided Jesus’ garments among them at the foot of the cross, including His undergarment. The pictures do not usually show this; it is almost as though the sight of God’s nakedness would be somehow more appalling than His death. But in the full Biblical revelation it is clear that God became not only man, but man naked and helpless, and that both at the beginning and at the end of the Lord’s earthly life His bare flesh had to be wrapped in rags like that of any other poor wretch.

MY PERSPECTIVE: Maybe we need to return to the basics of Christianity and find ourselves, as naked children, simply relaxing in His incredible love, His measureless mercy, and His lavished grace.