“The Lord Gave, and the Lord Has Taken Away”
Fr. Scott Haynes
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: as it hath pleased the Lord so is it done: blessed be the name of the Lord.”— Job 1:21
There are words of faith that come easily when life is peaceful, when our prayers seem to be answered, when those whom we love remain close to us, and when the future appears secure. There are other words, however, that can be spoken only after the heart has been wounded and the soul has discovered that faith means trusting God not only when His blessings are abundant and visible, but also when His providence becomes mysterious and His purposes seem hidden from us.
Job’s words belong to this second kind of faith.
He had suffered losses almost beyond imagining, for his possessions had disappeared, his security had collapsed, and, most painfully of all, his children had died. The world that had once seemed stable suddenly crumbled around him, yet in the midst of his anguish Job did something extraordinary: he turned toward God and worshipped.
His worship did not mean that he felt no grief, because Scripture tells us that he tore his garments and fell upon the ground. Faith did not make Job incapable of sorrow, nor did trust in God turn his heart into stone; rather, his faith allowed him to grieve deeply while continuing to believe that the God whom he could no longer understand was still worthy of his trust.
We sometimes imagine that strong faith means reaching the point where suffering no longer hurts, but Scripture presents something far more profound. Faith does not necessarily say, “This does not hurt”; instead, faith says,
“This hurts more deeply than I can express, and yet I will continue to trust the Lord.”
Job begins his great act of surrender with the words,
“The Lord gave.”
Before he speaks about what has been taken away, he remembers that everything he possessed first came to him as a gift.
That is where gratitude begins, because our lives are filled with blessings that we did not create and could never truly possess as though they belonged to us absolutely. Our life itself is a gift, as are the people whom we love, the health we enjoy, the abilities we possess, the opportunities we receive, the friendships that sustain us, and even the ordinary days that pass so quietly that we scarcely recognize how precious they are until they are gone.
Because we live with these blessings every day, however, we gradually begin to think of them as permanent possessions. We speak of my health, my home, my family, my career, my plans, and my future, and without realizing it we can forget that everything entrusted to us in this world has been placed into our hands only for a time.
Then something changes. Someone we love dies, a relationship ends, health begins to fail, a carefully made plan collapses, or a future we had imagined suddenly disappears, and the words of Job cease to sound like something spoken thousands of years ago and become the prayer of our own wounded hearts:
“The Lord gave.”
There is something profoundly beautiful in those words because Job refuses to allow the pain of loss to erase the memory of the gift. When someone precious is taken from us, our sorrow does not cancel the blessing of having known and loved that person; indeed, the depth of our grief may itself reveal the greatness of the gift we once received.
Then Job continues with the far more difficult words,
“The Lord hath taken away.”
These words do not require us to believe that every tragedy can be easily explained as a direct act of God, nor do they require us to pretend that suffering is somehow good in itself. Job himself will question, lament, struggle, and cry out in anguish, yet beneath all his questions there remains a profound conviction that his life is still held within the providence of God, even when he cannot understand what God has permitted.
This is the moment when faith becomes costly, because it is relatively easy to bless God for what He places into our hands, while it is far more difficult to continue blessing Him when something precious has been removed from them. Most of us eventually encounter something that we would immediately change if the decision were ours, perhaps a loss we begged God to prevent, an illness we pleaded with Him to heal, a relationship we asked Him to preserve, or a prayer for which the answer seemed to be silence.
In such moments we may never receive an explanation that completely satisfies the heart, and therefore the deepest question is no longer simply, “Why did this happen?” but rather, “Can I trust God even when I do not understand God?”
Can I say, “Lord, I do not understand why You permitted this, but I still believe in Your goodness”? Can I trust that His wisdom reaches beyond what I presently see, and can I place into His hands the very thing that my own hands desperately want to keep?
Such an act is not resignation but surrender, because resignation merely acknowledges that we are powerless, whereas surrender deliberately entrusts our weakness, our grief, and our unanswered questions to the Father whose providence extends beyond the boundaries of what we can presently understand.
Having acknowledged both the gift and the loss, Job then reaches the summit of his prayer when he declares,
“Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
He does not say that the Lord should be blessed only when life unfolds according to his desires, nor does he reserve his worship for the days when God's generosity is obvious. Standing amid the ruins of the life he had known, Job continues to bless God, and in doing so he reveals the extraordinary difference between loving merely the gifts that come from God and loving God Himself.
Eventually every Christian must confront this distinction, because faith cannot remain forever dependent upon favorable circumstances. When God grants prosperity, we bless His name; when our prayers are answered as we hoped, we bless His name; when doors open before us, we bless His name. Yet mature faith learns, sometimes through tears, to continue that prayer when circumstances change, when the answer is not what we desired, when the door closes, or when someone whom we dearly love must be surrendered back into the hands of the God from whom every life first came.
This does not mean that we should stop asking God for what our hearts desire, because Christ Himself prayed in Gethsemane that the chalice might pass from Him. Yet His prayer did not end with the expression of His human desire, for He continued:
“Nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”(Matthew 26:39)
In this way Job's surrender points toward the perfect surrender of Christ, who on Calvary appears to lose everything as He is stripped of His garments, abandoned by many of His friends, mocked, wounded, and nailed to the Cross. Yet even in that terrible darkness He remains obedient to the Father and entrusts Himself completely into His hands.
For the Christian, therefore, the mystery expressed by Job does not end with loss, because it passes through Calvary and reaches the empty tomb. The things that we surrender to God are entrusted to the One who conquered death, which means that even our deepest losses must ultimately be viewed in the light of the Resurrection.
Perhaps, then, when something precious has been taken from us, our prayer can begin by thanking God for the time in which He allowed us to possess His gift, asking forgiveness for the occasions when we treated that gift as though it belonged to us absolutely, and begging for the grace to surrender what we can no longer keep. We can ask Him to preserve us from bitterness when His providence is difficult to understand, to strengthen our trust when His purposes remain hidden, and to teach us that praise offered through tears may sometimes be the purest praise we ever give Him.
Priestly Press
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