Mediator and Comforter

Job is always used today to speak of faith and of trusting in God through really hard times. Times where we just don’t understand what is going on.

Tonight in my daily reading I was in Job 9. Thinking about how hard it must have been for Job to have lost so much, to be surrounded by “friends” who were really only condemning him or speaking out of spiritual ignorance. Plus, he didn’t see behind the scenes like we do from the beginning of the Book of Job, he had no clue of the conversations between God and satan. Or even how “proud” God was of him.

So I’m reading this chapter and Job is responding to his second friend, talking about God.
He says in Job 9:32-33:

“For He is not a man, as I am,
That I may answer Him,
And that we should go to court together.
Nor is there any mediator between us,
Who may lay his hand on us both.”

And immediately it hit me…that even more than the trials he was going through, even more than the not knowing what was happening behind the scenes, more than his loss, more than the ignorance of those around him….he and God were separated. Not in the sense that God isn’t everywhere at all times. But in the sense that Job had no mediator. He had no comforter.

1 Timothy 2:5-6a says:

“For there is one God and one mediator
between God and mankind,
the man Christ Jesus,
who gave Himself as a ransom
for all people.”

We as Christians today HAVE a mediator. We are not left in situations ever where we are unable to approach a Holy God. Jesus became a man, lived a sinless life, then took on all the sins of mankind, died, was buried and rose again, so that HE could be our mediator. He alone is uniquely qualified to do so. No priest could ever fully be this. For there is no one who is both fully God and fully man, like Jesus is. Who better to be a mediator than the one who became flesh and walked among men, but who is also fully God from eternity past?

I can’t imagine life without Jesus. A life where I didn’t have Him there to pray to and talk to, to turn to. And as Romans 8:34b says, He is actually interceding on our behalf to the Father.

“It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen,
who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.”

So we have Jesus as our mediator, but we have even more than that. We have something else Job did not have. We have the Holy Spirit living in us!

“For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought,
but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us” (Romans 8:26b)

Not only is the Holy Spirit interceding for us, but He is our advocate and comforter.

John 14:16-17, Jesus says:

“And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter,
that He may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth;
whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him:
but ye know Him; for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.”

The word “Comforter” here in the Greek means:

“summoned, called to one's side, esp. called to one's aid, one who pleads another's cause before a judge, a pleader, counsel for defense, legal assistant, an advocate, one who pleads another's cause with one, an intercessor”

Pretty cool. Job was a godly man, full of faith. He was able to endure through horrible times, without Jesus as his mediator and without the comfort of the Holy Spirit in him. How much more should we as Christians today be victorious in all things!

What an awesome God we serve, that He sent us His Son and the Holy Spirit to comfort us and intercede for us!!

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