God's Convenient Agent

The book of Job in the Bible has been a controversial book. Since the Bible is the inspired Word of God, we are to learn from every part of it. But what is Job to teach us? You have probably heard the expression: “the patience of Job”. People think that Job had to have extreme patience to endure all that he did. And this is true. But is this the real message? Others say that the book is a lesson in self-centeredness. It may seem that Job loved and served God in every area through Job’s pride and self-interest. And God had to take him down a peg and show him who was the real boss.

The book of Job may well be the earliest written book of the Bible. We do not know who the human author was as we do most of the other books of the Bible. The technical context seems to indicate a different author than Moses, Ezra, David, Solomon or the prophets.

In the first two chapters of Job, we find God dealing with Satan. And in the rest of the book, we find Satan dealing with Job. But I believe that the real purpose that God had in mind through the book of Job was to show us how God allows Satan to deal with converted people who have Christ living in them and having the righteousness of Christ.

In chapter 1:1, we see that Job was a righteous man. But we know that a man can only be righteous when he contains the righteousness of God. Under the New Covenant, this happens when we repent and accept the righteousness of Christ into us. Righteousness is a quality only of God. We do not know how Job came to contain God’s righteousness, but it seems to be by faith as did Moses, Abraham, David and others.

The most controversial section of the book is when God and Satan communicate in the first two chapters. Just as a review, we know from other parts of the Bible that Satan was a high level created angelic life form who separated himself from God and was sentenced along with other angel followers to the confines of the planet earth. You may wonder why God would place Satan here where He intended to create Sons out of human beings. Why not sentence him to a prison where he would be out of contact with God’s potential children? Why allow him to try to influence humans? I believe the Book of Job shows us some of the thinking of God about how He would bring about growth in His converted children.

Instead of banishing Satan away, God uses Satan as His “convenient agent” on the earth to bring His children into total understanding within their soul of their total dependence on God to live their life. Even with the righteousness of God within us by our spirit union with Christ, we must grow on a day to day basis within our soul (our minds, will and emotions) to always accept and acknowledge the fact of our union even when our physical senses seem to contradict it.

We must come to see God’s perfect wisdom in the birth and growth of His children, and in having a convenient opposite, the wrong one, the evil one, through whom God would bring his vast family of sons to maturity. To have true sons, they must find themselves in their freedom. They must discover that to be a person is to be conscious that there are alternatives and make their free choice; and ultimately their right choice through having first made the wrong one, and tasted the consequences.

God is always in ultimate control of Satan. Satan can only do what God allows him to do since all the power in the universe is ultimately in the hands of God. There is no battle going on between God and Satan just as there can be no battle between the convicted criminal and the judge. The judge has the power over the criminal and the criminal must do the will of the judge. And carrying our justice system analogy even further, on occasion a judge may temporarily “use” a convicted criminal by releasing him from his confinement away from society and allow him to use his criminal expertise to help the court catch another person of more importance. And I believe that this is why there is an active Satan.

In Job 1:6-12 and 2:1-6, we see Satan, as it were, reporting back to the judge about the status of someone of more importance. Satan’s “Mission Impossible” is to remove the righteousness of God from Job. And this is an example of how God deals with all converted people. Every Christian because of Jesus living in them is considered righteous by the Father because of Jesus’ righteousness, not their human good works. But every Christian is at a different stage of maturity in their soul, in their understanding of their total right standing with God. So God allows His agent, Satan, to externally influence us negatively in order to drive us to the positive point of total reliance on the life of God through Christ in us.

I Corinthians 10:13 says that God knows exactly where we are in this maturity of soul. And that He will not allow Satan to influence you in any way beyond what your level of maturity can handle. God says that He will always “make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it”. So we, as a converted person, have nothing at all to fear from Satan. God will only allow him to drive us closer in our soul to total understanding of our union relationship with Christ. When we slip up and sin, it hurts us! We see the negative effects of it in our life and it hurts! No one likes to hurt! We see that the cause of our hurting is that we tried to exert control with our own human power and we failed. Every sin that hurts brings us closer to total maturity of mind and understanding that life is meant to be lived by a total union of our spirit (Christ‘s direction) and our soul (our mind’s acceptance of Christ’s direction) and our body following with it.

I see Job as any converted person who contains the righteousness of God. God deals with Job, through Satan, on the level of Job’s maturity. And at the end of the book in 42:1-6, Job shows that Satan’s influence has actually helped him toward greater maturity. Because he says, “I see that no thought of purpose of God can be hindered... My eye (my soul) really sees God as He is. [that a human being is meant to live in a union with God receiving God’s total control over his life] I hate myself and repent.” [Job came to understand that there was no independent self in Job to run his life in his own power. And he hated that false understanding. He repented into a recognition and acceptance of total union.]

Since unconverted persons are “of their father, Satan”, their spirits are in a union with and directed by Satan’s nature. This is different than the way Satan dealt with Job.

We must face the fact also that positive circumstances of life can tempt us into the illusion of separation as readily as negative circumstances. Feelings of independence and separation from God seem to be quite natural during periods of success, health, and apparent “good”. So you see that good and health and victory can be imposters as much as evil and sickness and defeat.

The apostle Paul said that he had learned the secret of life. He was content in every situation because he had come to the awareness that we live in a One-power universe. He knew that Reality can elude us as readily in a circumstance of prosperity as in a circumstance of poverty. A quotation from Rudyard Kipling in his poem “If” hits this point: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat these two imposters the same ... yours is the earth and everything in it.”

Our growth in awareness is labelled by the apostle John as little children, young men and fathers. (I John 2:12-14) Another way to label this growth of consciousness is from relative to positive to universal.

As spiritual children we see everything on a relative basis - good or evil, right or wrong, health or sickness, positive or negative. We may see that because of our inheritance in Christ we have all things. But we wrongly assume that God epitomizes only the good, health, positive, and brings forth prosperity and the human victory. Our wrong assumption leads us to conclude that “another power” is responsible for the evil, sickness, and poverty, and that power is the epitome of negativism and defeatism. So we mistakenly involve ourselves with the God of good against a god of evil - the God of the positive versus a god of the negative - instead of seeing Satan as a God-used convenient agent.

The young men aspect begins to see God as only the Positive. This is because negative manifestations still spell defeat for us. For example, when a cancer is healed or arrested, we sense that God’s power is on us; but when the “victim” dies, we privately wonder who didn’t have enough faith or what secret “how to” must still be learned. But even this perspective ultimately brings frustration, because it is still a separated viewpoint. We must see that Positive swallows negative, not because of positive outward manifestations and appearances of change, but because we see God in action in negative appearances as well as in positive appearances. We see God in sickness as well as health. We capitalize Sickness, Poverty, and even Evil, as well as Health, Prosperity, and Good, because God’s use of the negative to show the positive is critical.

To go to the father stage of maturity requires a “universal” outlook toward God. In fact, a fixed union consciousness has only taken place when we see God as the all - God in action in all things. The key to the transition from relative, to positive to universal is simply acknowledgement of His presence in all things. It begins as we learn to praise Him in all situations, even those we cannot understand or rationally justify. Somehow most of us cannot initially handle the truth that God actually uses negative evil as well as positive good. Because our outlook is partially dualistic, we find it necessary to attribute the power of evil to an “evil power”. We tend to equate evil to our personal concept of what “hurts” us or what is “comfortable” for us.

What is the catalyst that finally brings us to that greater awareness and that fixes our consciousness as to His presence in ~ things? ADVERSITY! Man’s adversity has always been God’ s opportunity. As we come to see the redemptive purpose of all adversity, we are finally released to see that Satan is used of God. The evil which Satan influences in a converted person is allowed of God.

A Christian (one who is “in Christ”) will never face “punishment” for his sins. Notice that I said “punishment” and not “correction”.

PUNISHMENT is a penalty imposed on an offender for a crime or wrongdoing. It has retribution in view (paying someone back what he deserves). Punishment is looking backward to the offense, is impersonal and automatic, and its goal is the administration of justice.

CORRECTION or discipline, on the other hand, is totally different. Correction is training that develops self—control, character and ability. It is looking forward to a beneficial result, is very personal, and individually applied. Punishment and correction sometime “feel” the same to the one on the receiving end! But the sharp difference can be seen in both the attitude and the goal of the one doing it. Under the New Covenant, God never deals with His children on the basis of punishment. All of the punishment of God for our sins was fully received by our Savior Jesus Christ on the cross. Now that we are children in the Family of God, He deals with us only on the basis of correction.

Now can you see why Paul was a spiritual giant? In weakness he was made strong, but in strength he was also made weak. He had learned the secret of being filled and of going hungry. He knew God was in either appearance, but only to accentuate the positive of being filled. His perspective had matured from relative, to positive to universal. He was one with the Universal One in all things.

We too, as fellow Christians, have to learn to see Satan only as God's covenient agent and come to know that he serves God in a way that he himself doesn't understand.

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