Who was the greatest man who ever lived? Was it Socrates, Lincoln, Gandhi, Beethoven, Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci? These are all great men, but Jesus said number one was John the Baptist. He said that there was none born of woman who was greater than John. But he didn’t invent anything, or paint, or write astute plays. He did, however, stand against evil, and like Lincoln and Gandhi, he was murdered for what believed.
It seems strange that if John was the greatest, that God wouldn’t have allowed him to be cut off in his prime. He could have easily stayed the hand of the executioner, but He didn’t. He could have opened the prison doors as He did with Peter, but He didn’t. Why didn’t God do a miracle for his number one? One thing we do know is that we don’t know why. As far as from a human perspective, intervention was certainly warranted, but for some reason there wasn’t a peep from Heaven.
Perhaps coming in a close second on the list of greatness is a man of whom most of the world has never heard. His name was Job, and this man had a best-selling biography written about him, despite the fact that it’s a book about pain and suffering.
Even though we try and fortify ourselves against suffering, each of us eventually proves to be like an aged house in a heavy rainstorm of trials. The constant drips keep coming through no matter how much we try and patch things up.
Job’s ceiling caved in. Although few of us will suffer to the degree in which he suffered, his biography sets an example of how we can best handle it when our roof caves in because it gives us a perspective on God’s thinking.
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