Every time I read the challenging book of Job, I am struck by the way the book ends. Job starts out as the "the greatest of all the men of the east" (Job 1:3), is brought low as God and Satan contend for his faith, swings between bitterly attacking God for His seeming unfairness and humbly accepting God as being above human judgment, and ends up being not only restored, but having twice as much as he had before (Job 42:10, 12).

It seems that God doesn't mind being doubted and questioned, even angrily ... Job maintains his integrity, yet many times rails against what he sees as the unfairness of God. It would seem that on the face of it, God should wipe him off the face of the earth. Yet on the contrary, he blesses his end more than his beginning, and gives him double restoration.

What is the key? What can we learn from this?

The Mystery Of Grace

I personally believe the key to understanding the mystery of Job is to understand the mystery of grace. God's grace was sufficient to overlook all of Job's anger and rebellion, because in the end, Job's grace was sufficient to forgive his friends. "And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses" (Mark 11:25).

During the book, his four friends doubt him, attack him, ridicule him—their basic message is that Job wouldn't be suffering if he didn't deserve it. When finally God steps in, He doesn't blast Job for all his angry and bitter words, but actually says to the friends: "Ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath ... My servant Job shall pray for you; for him will I accept" (Job 42:7, 8).

Job was faced with the overwhelming challenge of forgiving his friends, and actually praying for them. God did not tell Job to pray for himself, but instead, to pray for his four fair-weather friends. That cannot have been easy, but Job's integrity and grace were sufficient. This was the real test Job faced, and passed with flying colors!

Because, as Job prayed for his friends, God brought miraculous restoration and gave him twice as much as he had started out with. It was Job's trustful obedience to God's word that saw the miracle take place.

And there is an important lesson here for all of us today—no matter what we are going through personally, if we can rise above that in integrity and forgiveness, and put other people before ourselves, it opens up God's miracle power of restoration and multiplication in our lives.

I know a man who experienced this in an amazingly powerful way. He had a much-loved teen-age daughter who had become rebellious and run away from home. The grieving and worried parents could only imagine what their daughter was doing—they had no idea of where she was or who she was with. She had cut herself off from them completely.

After some two years, the father was speaking at a large Christian men's fellowship, and felt led to pray for other fathers who were having trouble with rebellious children. Sadly, most of the men in the room came forward for prayer!

The next day, the father received a phone call from his prodigal daughter: "Daddy, can you ever forgive me? I want to come home." What had changed?

The key to this "miracle" was that the father prayed for other men going through the same thing, and then his daughter was restored to him.

Grace In Time Of Need

I personally experienced something similar a year or so ago. I was speaking at the City Harvest Church Business Breakthrough Group in Singapore, and afterwards an elderly man came up to me for prayer for a business issue. As I prayed for him, I sensed there was something else, and when I asked him, he said he was partially deaf.

I laid hand on his ears and prayed for him. He thanked me, and that is the last I saw of him. I don't know if he was healed or not.

But the next day, my mother in Brisbane, who is totally deaf in one ear, rang me and said she had had a miracle overnight. She said she woke up in the middle of the night with a loud "click" in her dead ear, and as she came fully awake, she realized that the hearing in her dead ear had been totally restored.

She told me that a specialist in Brisbane had told her that the condition she had was permanent, and that she would never hear out of that ear. Yet, as I prayed for a man in Singapore for his hearing to be restored, my mother's hearing was restored thousands of miles away in Australia!

A coincidence? Well, you could argue that of course, but it's a long stretch for it to happen the VERY night of the day I prayed for a deaf ear to open in Singapore. I choose to believe that it was God doing for me what He did for Job. As I prayed for someone else, he moved in my family through healing and restoration.

In the case of Job, it must have been even harder to pray for his friends; they had been cruel and unfeeling to him, and yet he had the "amazing grace" to forgive them and pray for them. And when Job found the grace to do that in trust and obedience to God, God's grace, as always, was more than sufficient to bless and restore him "good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over" (Luke 6:38).

In an internet article I read recently, a rather wise person had this to say on the subject: "The best test of whether you've really forgiven someone who has wronged you is to pray for them. Pray that God will bless them richly, with His highest of Blessings. If you can do that, without having your words bounce off the ceiling and fall back on your head, you've crossed over the line and have really forgiven. Only then can the process of healing and restoration begin. Look at verse 42:10: "The LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends, and the LORD increased all that Job had twofold." It was not until AFTER Job forgave his friends who had wronged him that God began to restore what Job had lost. I'm thoroughly convinced that, if he had refused to forgive his friends, Job would have just sat there for the rest of his days, a poor, bitter man in sackcloth and ashes, remembering the "good old days." When Job put Grace into action and forgave his friends, God's hand was loosed and Job was restored—with TWICE as much as he had lost!"

He giveth more grace when the burdens grow greater;
He sendeth more strength when the labors increase.
To added affliction He addeth His mercy;
To multiplied trials, His multiplied peace.

His love has no limit;
His grace has no measure.
His power has no boundary known unto men.
For out of His infinite riches in Jesus, He giveth and giveth and giveth again.