The Culture of Hope Founded on Faith
It Started With a Broken Arm
When “bad” things happen to Christians, we frequently wonder what they have done in the past to deserve it. The Bible is clear that tribulation and suffering are not necessarily deserved or earned. Reasons for trials in a Christian’s life include God’s training by testing, God’s glory, the spread of the gospel, Satan’s sieve, or the consequences of unconfessed sin. Satan’s Sieve is the topic of this week’s devotional.
For Dan and me, it started with a broken arm. On September 4, 2017, I fell and broke my arm. Later that month, we received the diagnosis of Dan’s Metastatic Melanoma. October was spent in doctor’s offices and medical technology facilities for testing and refining treatment options. In November Dan began immunotherapy infusions every other week. Six months later they were stopped because he had developed serious side-effects, but we were still seeing medical personnel for him every two weeks. Treatments for the side effects had their own side effects so that Dan continued being ill and in pain, suffering insomnia and the effects of that throughout the summer. Here it is November and he is still affected, slowly regaining some stamina again.
In the meantime, I was preparing for a minor surgery scheduled for June. During pre-surgical testing I had an abnormal EKG with subsequent testing and a monitor for a week. Then I had post-surgery physical therapy twice weekly ninety-plus miles from home for the rest of the summer. In August in the middle of both our recoveries, we were involved in a head-on collision which totaled our vehicle and left us with sternum fractures. We’re still recovering from that.
As I surveyed the wreck of our car and the injured and dying people from the other affected vehicles being cared for, I suddenly put the whole year together in my mind and asked God, “What are you doing, Lord? What is all the pain and losses from this year about?”
He answered, “Job.”
The Bible records Satan requesting permission from God to test two individuals. One was Job and the other was Peter. Chapter 5 of The Gift of Seeing Angels and Demons: A Handbook for Discerners of Spirits (Susan Merritt, PhD, PTLB, 2016) discusses the spiritual ramifications of these two biblical occurrences:
“The story of Job is examined in Spiritual Warfare in a Believer’s Life (Charles Spurgeon, Robert Hall editor, 1993, 57-68), again with the conclusion that Satan is powerless to harm the righteous without God’s permission, unless, as discussed in chapter 4, there is unconfessed sin in a believer’s life. Both Job and Peter are examples of righteous people who were “put through the sieve,” as it were, with God’s permission.
After describing His Kingdom in contrasting terms to the kingdoms of the world, Jesus tells Peter that Satan has asked to “sift you as wheat” (Luke 22:31). Reassuringly He adds, “But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:32). Here is an example of God’s use of Satan to accomplish Divine purposes. The outcome would clearly be to God’s glory in that the event would make Peter stronger than he was before and better able to strengthen and encourage other believers. Since the conversation between God and Satan about Peter is not recorded, we don’t know who started it, God or Satan. However, it was God who started the conversation about Job (Job 1-2).
As seen in Job, Satan considers God’s people in the following ways:
He looks on with astonishment at the believer’s faithfulness to God and His truth.
He seeks to find a shortcoming with which to console himself.
He sees believers as obstacles to his own agenda.
He looks for ways to ruin them with sin to make them unfit for God’s purposes.
He looks for individual weaknesses, states of mind, and attitudes with which to undermine their sense of security in Christ.
He examines our relationships, objects of affection, and condition in the world to discover the slightest breach through which to injure us (Spurgeon, 60-63).
In turn, God considers:
How far He will allow Satan to go.
How He would uphold His children for the duration of the ordeal.
How He would keep His servants blameless.
Job earned a better reward through his trial. In fact, the story of his patience and worship in the midst of incredible hardship have brought comfort and instruction to millions of Christians since. At the same time, Satan’s work has been thoroughly discredited as a result of it.
Using the everyday analogy of pottery from Scripture, Spurgeon says of Job’s trials “…had the vessel not been burned in the furnace, the bright colors had not been so fixed and abiding” (Spurgeon, 116).
Jim Logan (Reclaiming Surrendered Ground: Protecting Your Family From Spiritual Attacks, Moody Press, 1995) describes the circumstances surrounding Job’s trials in the following terms, “… God did not remove His hedge of protection from around Job. He allowed Satan to fire his flaming missiles at Job and his family, to be sure. And those missiles hit home with destructive force. But the early chapters of Job illustrate a crucial principle of spiritual warfare that we all need to grasp as believers: When the flaming missiles of Satan pass through God’s hedge of protection, they cease to be Satan’s destructive missiles and become instead the refining fire of God” (Logan, 123). Mr. Logan further points out that Job gave no credit to the devil but worshiped God instead, saying, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord,” (Job 1:21).
Like Logan, Spurgeon refers to the analogy of spiritual hostility as having the opposite effect by becoming a tool in God’s hand. Using the analogy of a gardener’s work, Spurgeon cites Satan’s attempt to deface the tree with the ax as rendering him a pruning tool in God’s hands cutting off the unproductive parts to enhance the health and fruitfulness of the tree (i.e. the Christian). Satan’s attempts to uproot by digging the tree up by the roots only serves to aerate the roots so that they can grow deeper and more solidly stabilize the tree. God’s answer to satanic interference in the believer’s life is to acquire wisdom and the weapons of spiritual warfare through the Scriptures so that we will be strong in the Lord and know how to resist the attacks of our enemy (pp 72-73).”
