«　WEEK 5　DAY 1　»

　　Gen. 1:26 And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…

　　Job 2:3 …Have you considered My servant Job?…He still holds fast his integrity…

　　1 John 3:2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been manifested what we will be. We know that if He is manifested, we will be like Him because we will see Him even as He is.

　　Job 1:1 says, “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and this man was perfect and upright, and he feared God and turned away from evil.” Being perfect is related to our inner man, and being upright is related to our outer man. Furthermore, to be upright means that we are not crooked or biased. In addition to being perfect inwardly and upright outwardly, Job feared God positively and turned away from evil negatively. However,…God did not create man merely to fear Him without doing anything wrong. The Bible tells us that God created man in His own image and after His likeness that man may express Him (Gen. 1:26). This is the most positive thing among all positive things….The most positive thing is to express God. To express God is higher than fearing God and turning away from evil. (Life-study of Job, p. 9)

　　Another word used in relation to Job the man is integrity. In Job 2:3 Jehovah tells Satan that Job “still holds fast his integrity.” In verse 9 Job’s wife asks him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity?” In 27:5 Job says to his friends, “Until I die, I will not put away my integrity from me.” Finally, in 31:6 Job declares, “Let God know my integrity.”… Integrity is the totality of being perfect and being upright; it is the totality of perfection plus uprightness. With respect to Job, integrity is the total expression of what he is. In character he is perfect and upright, and in his ethics he has a high standard of integrity.

　　It was not easy for God to gain a person like Job who feared God and turned away from evil. Yet what Job had attained was altogether vanity. It did not fulfill God’s purpose, and it did not satisfy God’s desire. Thus, God was lovingly concerned for Job. Ethically speaking, Job was very good. According to human eyes, there was no problem with Job. God even boasted to Satan regarding how good Job was (v. 8; 2:3). Only God knew that Job had a need, that he was short of God.

　　Eventually, God’s intention was to make Job a man of God (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 3:17), filled with Christ, the embodiment of God, to be the fullness of God for the expression of God in Christ, not a man of the high standard of ethics in Job’s natural perfection, natural uprightness, and natural integrity, which Job attempted to maintain and hold (Job 2:3, 9a). Such a person, constituted with God according to His economy, would never be entangled by any troubles and problems so that he would curse his birth and prefer to die rather than to live.

　　In His economy God’s intention is to dispense Himself into us to be our life and our nature that we may be the same as He is in life and nature in order to express Him….God’s stripping and God’s consuming are to tear us down. We are fallen and natural men. As such men, we need to be torn down…. Then God can have a base, a way, to build us up again.

　　In His economy God’s intention is not to make fallen man whole. Rather, God’s intention is to tear us down and rebuild us with Himself as our life and our nature that we may be persons who are absolutely one with Him.

　　God’s stripping and consuming were exercised over Job to tear Job down that God might have a base and a way to rebuild him with God Himself that he might become a God-man. (Life-study of Job, pp. 9-10, 17, 10-11, 29, 34-35)

　　Further Reading: Life-study of Job, msgs. 5, 23; CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “Living a Life according to the High Peak of God’s Revelation,” ch. 5