Commentary on the Book of Job part four

                                       Job 1:6-22

Satan attacked God's best man at that time. Throughout the Bible, Satan usually reserved his severest attacks for God's best believer at the time. Satan knew that it would be useless to attack a weak believer because God would intervene and exert His supernatural power to defend His life and goodness that He put into that person. But if Satan attacked God's best man, then God would refrain from exerting any extra supernatural power to help that person since God had already invested most of His help in the superior faith of His best person. Satan could freely test the goodness and faith of God's best person knowing that God would exert no extra help for that person.

Jesus was God's absolutely perfect and sinless man when He was nailed to the cross. When Jesus cried out in the darkness that prevented Him from seeing His Father, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," He knew from that moment on He was on His own until His resurrection. He would get no extra help from His Father. The Devil must have laughed with glee when he heard that cry because he thought it meant Jesus had been defeated. Satan thought that all the powers of filth and darkness that covered Jesus would surely put that Light out. When Jesus died in the darkness, God completely separated from Himself because of the filth of sin and evil that engulfed the Lord. Luke 23:46; II Corinthians 5:21; Psalm 22:6. In a sense, only one third of God's power hung on that cross, and that person was dead.

God is Infinite, and the power of infinity is that every part equals the whole. Jesus retained the infinite power of God even though He was dead on the cross.

God possessed infinite power and yet was dead at the same time. That fact constitutes a paradoxical mystery that no human can ever hope to understand. But Jesus bore all the sin and spiritual deaths of all humanity on that cross, washed away the sin and spiritual deaths of those He would save by His grace with the blood and water that flowed from His body, and when His Spirit descended into hell He left behind all of the sins and spiritual deaths of the rest of humanity when He rose immaculate from the grave. Revelation 1:5; Ephesians 5:26-27; Hebrews 2:9. By His own spiritual death, Jesus separated the eternal spiritual deaths of all living humans not already saved by grace for Him to cast into the second death and preserved their living parts for Him to recreate to live on His new earth. Jesus washed all of the sin and spiritual deaths of all those saved by grace into the sea of forgetfulness and in the end eliminates that sea by forgetting that it ever existed. Micah 7:18-19; Hebrews 9:14; Revelation 21:1. After Jesus had accomplished this task, He rose from the dead triumphant over all sin and eternal spiritual death. I Corinthians 15:22; John 1:29; I John 3:8.

Job's faith did not fail as God knew it would not. Job 1:21-22. In a sense, Job's suffering symbolized the faithfulness of Christ on the cross, that His almighty power could endure suffering for the sins of all mankind and that He could rise from the dead to save all mankind from eternal death. Hebrews 2:9; I Corinthians 15:26.