The Emptying

By Andrea Garzon & Ole Henrik Skjelstad

How can God most effectively affirm that He is all in all in us? How can we get to know without a shadow of doubt that what He has given us really is from Him whether it is desires, dreams, faith, hope or whatever? Perhaps not surprisingly, it is the book of Job that provides us with the key to all those questions.

It was God who enticed Satan to test Job within the confines God had set. In the end all Job had was his life. Everything else was lost. Only one question mattered in his agony: Is God good? Against all appearances and in the midst of his severe afflictions Job remained steadfast in his conviction that God is good, and thus was found without sin the record states.

God’s ways are indeed mysterious. God took everything from Job and then gave it back to him multiplied. By doing so God not only assured Job that He was on his side, but also that everything Job had really came from Him – that God indeed was the One who blessed Job and that every good gift indeed comes from Him.

Our great problem is that we doubt our desires, our words of faith or whatever as if they merely origin in ourselves. By taking them away from us and then giving them back God confirms us beyond our wildest imaginations.

All of us are to expect an emptying now and then so that good may come out of it, and we learn both to know ourselves and God. An “emptying” is certainly of great value. It truly establishes us in the fact that everything in us is God. This ‘nakedness’ shows us how He fills it all, that He is ALL IN ALL.

Until we have learned the secret our human response to these seasons is one of fear dreading that God will leave us empty handed – that all our dreams and wants will go down the drain. We have a tendency to forget we started from ground zero, from dry bones. To be constantly emptied can be scary because it feels like God will take away from us even what we believe sustains our lives, BUT He always adds. Emptying is a very good thing, it reminds us that we are not our own. Someone else is running the show.