The integrity of resolute faith
Job 2:7-10
So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes. Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Job 2:3 hears the Lord again commend Job before Satan, adding “He still holds fast his integrity.” In response to her husband’s second bout with trouble, Job’s wife can’t believe what she’s not hearing. “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Would it not be better for you to curse God and have Him end this debacle?”
“Thanks for the encouragement, dear!” Reading this, I find my own head shaking left-to-right-to-left. “What happened to ‘to love and to cherish…in sickness-and-in-health’?”
Don’t miss this. It’s the integrity of our faith that Satan is after. He is out to dismantle it by destroying us (if he can, cf. Job 2:3). “You (Satan) incited Me (God) against him to destroy him without reason.”
If we are set back by the graphic nature of the narrative and these descriptive phrases, perhaps we need rework our paradigm about what is really going on in the world in which we live and walk with God. Years ago, in a chapel message to Dallas Seminary students, an aging Dr. John Walvoord said it plainly, “Satan hates us. He would destroy us if he could.” Words that I’ve never been able to forget.
To our relief, the Spirit of God boldly posits this reassuring reality. “The devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). We may indeed be exposed to the fury of our spiritual enemy, but his furor fades when our faith in God — no matter what — remains resolute. Impressively, Job sins neither in his heart nor with his lips, to the glory of God.