“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Matt. 22:37) The measure with which we are to love God is to be immeasurable.
Love prompted Job to say first, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21) And then soon after that to say, “Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.” (Job 2:10)
Love, trust, abiding faith, assurance, call it what you will, they are all the same word in essence. If your faith in Jesus Christ is not because of your love for Him, it is not faith, if you don’t trust Him, you do not love Him fully, without love, there can be no assurance.
The Most High is the only One who knows everything, it is impossible for us to understand that before He laid the foundation of the earth, He was already there, it is a contradiction in terms, yet before He thought of creating the earth, He had already done it. We cannot comprehend God, and we will never be able to. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD.” (Isaiah 55:8) For us to think that our love done through obedience in some way, shape or form can alter the Almighty in any way is ludicrous, neither can the disbelief of those specks of dust that deny Him alter Him in any way. We serve that which we cannot express in words, and yet many who profess Jesus Christ as Lord seem to think that their actions can change the way of God. “For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.” (Malachi 3:6)
James 5:16 has always in a way perplexed me, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” This states that the man of God whose prayers focus on the glory of God can indeed cause an effect, in the strictest sense, those prayers, for lack of a better word, cause God to do something. I do not mean to step into the boundaries of what some consider a theater, that the Lord has set the world in order, preordained all that is happening to happen, and has in a sense gone on vacation until the final curtain call, but the verse bears contemplation for two reasons. Either our prayers affect God to act in such a way that He was not going to act, yet now will because of those fervent prayers, or we have, again for lack of a better description, been pre-programmed to offer those prayers at a predisposed time in history that has been ordained to happen.
One could begin to become quite pseudoscientific here and state that there are an infinite amount of variable timelines, and in accordance to the prayers of the saints, that is the one the Lord chooses. What does all this have to do with love and those verses from Job? “Thy will be done,” I will not offer a Scripture verse here, for I would run out of ink directing you to them all. God does as He wills, always for His glory, we are dust, we need to learn to accept that what He does is what we need to submit to.
Our hope in part lies in Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” We love those who have proven themselves trustworthy to us, but every human, saved, lost and wicked will always have a seed of doubt, no matter how small it is, it is still there. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Cor. 13:12)
I fear that many on their day of accounting before they are glorified will learn much about themselves, and it will not be new to them, they will have already understood these things, they just decided not to admit them to themselves. Who we say we are to ourselves is rarely who we truly are, and rarely if ever do we show that part to anyone else, they may never trust us again, they may lose their faith in us, their assurance may dwindle dramatically. Who God says He is, is who He is, and every little bit more of Himself that He reveals to us only serves to deepen our love for Him.
