Job 36:5 “God is mighty, but does not despise men;
he is mighty, and firm in his purpose.”

My understanding is that a number of places in Job are very difficult to translate, and the second half of this verse might be one of those, considering the differences between the English and the Japanese. However, they agree very well on the first half, and that says something very important. Various mythologies, and even major religions, portray the gods, or even God, as essentially despising mankind. That’s certainly not the God of the Bible! As it tells us many times in many places, He is very aware of our weaknesses, but He loves us anyway. We are precious to Him, to the degree that He sent His Son to take the penalty for our sin, death, in order to make it possible for us to come to Him by faith. If God despised us, He would have squashed us long ago! However, the devil doesn’t want us to know that, because he is intensely jealous of the place we have in God’s heart, so he lies to us about God all the time. That’s why the first proclamation of the Gospel is to “repent and believe.” (Mark 1:15) We need to repent, that is, turn around and do something else, for having swallowed the devil’s lies about God, and then believe what God tells us about Himself. This statement that God never despises anyone is part of the truth God wants us to believe about Him.

Growing up in a strongly Christian family, I fortunately didn’t have a lot of misinformation about God to unlearn, but most of the people to whom I minister aren’t so blessed. A major difficulty for me in my ministry is that it often is hard for me to grasp how little my hearers know about God. Their heads are filled with misinformation, and I need to counter that with the truth, spoken in love. One trap the devil sets for me is for me to despise people in their ignorance, or even in their stubborn sin. I must not do that, because God never does. Rather, I am to pray that the Holy Spirit would open their hearts to receive the truth that I share with them, so that knowing the truth, they may be set free to believe and so receive eternal life.

Father, thank You for this reminder. Help me be increasingly effective as a messenger, a channel, of Your grace and love, so that many may come from darkness to light, for their salvation and Your glory. Thank You. Praise God!