February 23, 2011

Job 23
My youngest son and his friend love to play hide and seek in our house. I think that they are beginning to get close to the age where hide and seek indoors is not going to be much fun any longer. Their powers of observation are getting much better, and the time that it takes to find the hider is getting much shorter. I suspect that finding the hider will soon become so simple that it won’t be much fun anymore. Hide and seek can be fun when you are successful. It gets really frustrating if you are not successful or if there is no challenge.
Job feels like God is hiding from him. I should think that all of us feel like that at some time or another. In a very real sense God is playing hide and seek with us. Only, it is not necessarily a game. We are commanded often in Scripture to seek Him. We are given the promise that if we seek, we will find. But He puts one basic stipulation in our seeking. We must seek Him with all of our heart. For someone with a crooked deceitful heart like mine, that is very difficult to do. Often my heart does not want to be made well.
For someone Who is omnipresent, sometimes He is surely hard to find. If He is omnipresent, shouldn’t He be easily found? If His glory is the most important thing in the Universe, should not He be easily found? The mere fact that He is hard to find indicates that obviously the answer is no. That begs the question, “Why is He hard to find?” Maybe He uses the pursuit to change us. Perhaps without being changed, we end up being terrified in the hands of an angry God. Perhaps by being changed we end up being embraced in the arms of a loving Father. So it is all about seeking His glory, and in the process we are changed so that we may enjoy His glory more fully. Lord change my heart that I might find you and be ever delighting in Your own glory. Indeed we serve a glorious King! Speak His glory to someone today!
--Pastor john