Job brought no charges

As I was driving to a park to catch butterflies, I heard these words from the back seat:

"In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong" (Job 1:22).

The voice was my granddaughter's but the words were from the eponymous hero of a familiar Old Testament book, a man who bore much suffering and never did find out why.

My granddaughter was flipping through the cards with Bible verses clipped on the metal ring that I had brought back from a retreat in Chesapeake Bay. Indeed, it was I who had chosen the verses, and the creative women of the Elverson Church had gotten the idea to collect and laminate them for handy reference.

Out of the mouths of babes God has ordained perfect praise to silence the enemy, as we know from Psalm 8:2. Out of the mouths of babes also comes unlikely rebuke, as I now learned. And why not? He used a mule to chastise Balaam, how much more a 6-year-old to bring her grandmother up short.

My diminutive passenger didn't know what she was saying, but that's OK because God meant it for me. I had been "charging God with wrong," and the Lord wanted me to know it. I had an issue with Him about certain prayers not answered the way I wanted, and certain kinds of help not forthcoming in the way that I thought it should be.

It was a needful splash of water to the face to be reminded that the pot does not charge the Potter, that the finite doesn't charge the Infinite One, that it is just plain sin to be angry at God and to blame him.

When troubles hurl in, it's OK to charge the devil and it's OK to blame yourself. But God will not be charged with wrong. He makes no apologies for our trials. All that happens to us He intends for our spiritual good because He loves us. If we had no trials we would have no opportunity to prove the genuineness of our faith (1 Peter 1:7-8). In these trials we "by God's power are being guarded through faith" (1 Peter 1:5) not through unbelief or God-charging. And it helps very much to consider the end of the process:

"You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purposes of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful" (James 5:11).