In Ephesians 2 it is written, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8-9). We owe everything to the sovereign grace of God, even the faith that enables us to lay hold on the blessing held out to us in the Gospel. For His own pleasure and design God often puts His saints through various trials, as the Apostle Peter tells us in his First Epistle (1 Peter 1:6-7), and we can ever rest assured that God means every trial to bring rich and abiding blessing to His own. Whatever way the trial may come, we should realise that it comes, even if not directly, from our God and Father, “who will not suffer…(us) to be tempted above that” we are able to bear (1 Cor. 10:13).
The Trial of Abraham
When God called Abram from Ur of the Chaldees, the divine call implanted the faith that enabled the patriarch to respond to it. Without divinely given faith, Abram would have been unable to follow the path to which the Lord called him. It was a path contrary to nature, and for which utter reliance on God was necessary. Only God had title to make the demands He made, and only God could supply the grace and strength required to answer to His demands. having come into the land to which God had called him, “the Lord appeared unto Abram…and there builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him” (Gen. 12:7). On his journey in the land, Abram pitched his tent between Bethel and Hai, “and there he builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the Name of the Lord” (verse 8).
Journeying on towards the south, Abram finds a famine in the land, and he went down to Egypt to sojourn there. The patriarch had left the place of his altars, and he is no longer calling upon the Name of the Lord, hence his leaving the land in the time of famine. No doubt the famine came from God to test His servant, and like ourselves when communion with God is not maintained, Abram relied on his own judgment instead of seeking the help of God. He went down to Egypt, that is a type of the world, to be sustained there, instead of counting on the support of the God who had called him to Canaan, and who had sustained him hitherto. God’s servant seems to have acquired riches in Egypt (Gen. 13:1), but he also had shame there in denying his wife, and he got Hagar there who brought trouble into his home, and no doubt the riches of Egypt accounted for the strife that separated Lot and Abram. God allowed the failure of His servant Abram as a lesson for us, that we might rely constantly on him and not on the resources of this present world.
A famine in the land may have been a severe trial for Abraham, but it was not to be compared with the severity of the test for his faith when God said to him, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” (Gen. 22:2). The famine had to do with the needs of the body, but now it was the tenderest affections of the patriarch that were touched, and God showed Abraham that He was aware of this when He spoke of “thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.” Abraham was now called upon to give up the son of his love in whom all his hopes were centred for the fulfilment of the promises of God.
If there was failure at the time of the famine, there is not the slightest evidence of anything but unquestioning faith in God at this far, far greater test that demanded from him that which was nearest and dearest to his heart. There was not request from Abraham to God to modify His demands, or even to delay the time for the carrying out the sacrifice, but instead there was instant obedience, for “Abraham rose up early in the morning” to take his journey with Isaac to the place of sacrifice. How very blessed to see the simple obedience of God’s servant, who had learned in his experiences with God that He was worthy of his unbounded trust in Him.
We cannot tell all that passed through the heart of the loving father, but there must have been thoughts of deepest sorrow at the prospect of having to relinquish the son of his love, on whom his affections specially rested. This we do know however, that as he pondered the implications of his great sacrifice, he was assured “that God was able to raise him (Isaac), even from the dead” (Heb. 11:19). He did not know if God would raise Isaac from the dead, but he knew that God was able to do this if it was in His plan, and his faith rested on the knowledge of the goodness of God and the perfection of His ways. God has promised that all His blessings were to be fulfilled through Isaac, and Abraham’s faith rested quietly and confidently in this while passing through the trial that reached to the very depths of his being.
God allowed the trial to proceed to the very utmost, for Abraham built the altar, laid the wood in order, bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. Already the fire was seen in his hand, and all had proceeded in an orderly way to the critical moment when the knife must be raised to kill Isaac, and no hesitation takes place, for Abraham “stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.” It was just then that the voice from heaven called “Abraham, Abraham.” How it must have delighted the heart of God to witness the obedience of His servant that was prepared to sacrifice the tenderest object of his love to please him.
The very scene that evinced the faith and confidence of Abraham in the God whose goodness he had learned, brings further witness to the wondrous grace of God in sparing Isaac. Moreover, God condescends to bind Himself with an oath to accomplish the promises He had given to His faithful servant regarding the blessing of his seed. In this great trial, which tested Abraham and his faith in God, we can also surely see that God was testing His own workmanship in His servant, manifesting the precious character of His work, and what it is able to endure.
The Trial of Job
Who ever would have thought that the terrible afflictions that Job passed through were from the hand of God? Yet it was so, even if Satan was the instrument that God allowed to bring such grievous losses on one of His saints, for the trial commenced with God saying to Satan, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that fears God, and eschews evil?” (Job 1:8). Satan did not know that God was about to give effect to a plan He had devised for the greatest good of His servant, and for the defeat of the one who had such wrong thoughts of the man who feared God, not because of what he had received from the hand of God, but because he had learned to trust God whatever his circumstances might be.
How very surprised Satan must have been when he saw Job, after having lost all his substance and his sons, with his rent mantle and shaved head, worshipping before God and saying, “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). Instead of Job cursing God to His face as Satan had predicted, he is found subject to God in his calamities, and worshipping Him. What a triumph it was for God, and what a defeat for Satan. Instead of realising that he was defeated, and that any fresh overture against Job was bound to end in his complete defeat and in the vindication of God and His servant Job, Satan again sought to move God against Job “to destroy him without cause” (Job 2:3). Although Job does not rise to the same moral heights when his body was smitten, yet in all his affliction “did not Job sin with his lips” (Job 2:10), and Satan is heard of no more, having been thoroughly defeated, and God vindicated in all that He had spoken of His servant Job.
Little did Job know of what had taken place behind the scenes, and of how he had been the instrument used of God to defeat Satan, his accuser. Yet Job had to go through much more, not at the instigation of Satan, but at the hands of his friends. What Satan could not do, the friends of Job succeeded in doing. They told Job that God was punishing him for his sins, and in his righteous anger against them he spoke of God in a most unbecoming way. God allowed this testing at the hands of his friends to show that Job, righteous man though he was, that he had a good opinion of himself. He had not yet learned that in himself there dwelt no good thing. After Elihu spoke on God’s behalf, and God manifested His greatness to him, Job was brought to the end of himself in the presence of God, and this led to his latter end being better than the beginning through God’s blessing (Job 42:12).
This most severe trial manifested “the endurance of Job” (James 5:11), and that “the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” We also learn how God allows, yea directs, the testing of His own workmanship in His saints for His own triumph and glory, and for the furtherance of His own good work while blessing His own. For us there is so much precious instruction in the ways of God, and of His thoughts in His words to Job, and as seeing how the great religious thinkers of the world cannot enter into God’s ways when He is working with them and in them for their great blessing.
The Trial of Paul
When Saul of Tarsus was converted, the Lord said to Ananias in sending him to Saul, “Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me…for I will show him how great things he must suffer for my Name’s sake” (Acts 9:15-16). The trials of which Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 11, and those he suffered afterwards, bear witness to the fulfilment of what the Lord said to Ananias regarding the erstwhile persecutor of the church. Paul gloried in tribulation, rejoicing in his sufferings for the saints to “fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ…for His body’s sake, which is the church” (Col. 1:24).
One of the greatest trials for Paul was that which followed his wonderful privilege of being caught up into paradise (2 Cor. 12). Regarding this he wrote, “Lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure” (verse 7). Like us all, Paul had the flesh in him, and there was the danger of the flesh being puffed up in relation to the great revelations he received while in heaven, so the Lord, in His wisdom, gave him this thorn for his flesh, whatever it consisted in. It was a very severe trial for him to have this thorn digging into his flesh, and he thought it would prove a great hindrance to him in his service for the Lord. From this he had to learn that his thorn would make him more dependent on the grace of the Lord, which would be sufficient for him. The Lord in His wisdom knew what was best for His servant, not only grace for his ministry, but grace to deal with the thorn He had allowed Satan to send, for the grace of the Lord is greater than all Satan can send against us.
The Trials of the Saints
The Hebrew saints were passing through much trial, and they had to learn that God was using it for their blessing. First, the Spirit of God reminds them of “Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself,” who had “endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2-3). They no doubt had endured much, but they had not yet “resisted unto blood,” died as martyrs in the conflict of good against evil. This Christ had done, for He not only died for our sins, but died striving against sin. Moreover, they were God’s children, and were neither to despise God’s chastening, nor to faint under it. The divine chastening was directed by a Father’s loving heart, and was for their profit, that they might be partakers of His holiness.
Although Paul could glory in tribulation, this did not mean that it was a pleasant thing, as “no chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous”. It was not pleasant to have the feet fast in the stocks, and the back sore with stripes, but Paul had learned to take these things from the Lord, and this accounted for the singing in the jail that night. We too have to learn to take all our afflictions from the hand of the Lord, from a Father who is always seeking our good, and to produce from us “the peaceable fruit of righteousness.” It is by exercise before God that these precious fruits are borne, fruits that are for His glory, and that will be displayed in the day of Christ’s glory.
From what we have considered we can surely see that in times of trial God is testing His own work, so that His glory and our blessing might be secured. The obedience of faith that came out in Abraham, the endurance of faith that came out in Job, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that was ministered to Paul, the holiness of God and the peaceable fruits of righteousness that were to be produced in the Hebrews, are all results from the testing of God’s own work in His saints, not to speak of the triumph of God over Satan in all that he is permitted to bring against God’s people.
R. 11.12.70