Job’s experience of God’s consuming and stripping in the Old Testament was far behind that of Paul in the New Testament. First, God stripped Job of his possessions (Job 1:13-19), and then God consumed him by his suffering of the plague on his body (Job 2:7). In the New Testament God’s consuming and stripping become pleasant things. From the day he was converted, Paul was a person under God’s consuming and God’s stripping (2 Cor. 4:8-18; Phil. 3:7-8). However, when Paul was suffering distresses for the sake of Christ, he was well pleased (2 Cor. 12:10), and he even rejoiced in the Lord for his experiences (Col. 1:24; Phil. 4:4). In contrast, Job did not rejoice but was constantly vexed.

In his experience of God’s consuming and stripping, Paul was not constricted by the pressures on every side and did not perish despite his being cast down (2 Cor. 4:8-9). He did not lose heart, but he expected to be put to death that he might manifest Christ’s life, and to be consumed day by day that he might be renewed and, through the momentary lightness of his affliction, add to the eternal weight of glory that he would share in the ages to come (2 Cor. 4:10-12, 16-17; cf. Rom. 8:18). Unlike Job, Paul did not curse the day of his birth, and he did not say that he preferred to die rather than to live. On the contrary, after much consideration Paul said that he still preferred to live, not to die, because to him to live was Christ (Phil. 1:21-25). Paul’s living Christ was for him to magnify Christ, whether through life or through death, by the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ (Phil. 1:19-20). He did not care for life or death; he cared only to live Christ for His magnification. When God created man, this is the kind of life He wanted man to live.

Job was disturbed, perplexed, and entangled to the uttermost by his suffering of the disasters that befell his possessions and his children and the plague on his body, in spite of his perfection, uprightness, and integrity. When Job cursed the day of his birth, equivalent to cursing his mother, he surely was not perfect and upright, nor did he hold his integrity. Rather, he became bankrupt in integrity.

God’s intention with Job was to consume him and to strip him of his attainments, his achievements, in the highest standard of ethics in perfection and uprightness (Job 1:1). God’s intention was also to tear down the natural Job in his perfection and uprightness that He might build up a renewed Job in God’s nature and attributes. God’s intention was not to have a Job in the line of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but a Job in the line of the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). Eventually, God’s intention was to make Job a man of God (1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 3:17), filled with Christ, the embodiment of God, to be the fullness of God for the expression of God in Christ (Eph. 3:14-21). Such a man of God, constituted with God according to His economy, would never be entangled by any troubles and problems so that he would curse his birth and prefer to die rather than to live. See note Job 3:11¹.