Born to Trouble

Transcript

Hello, my friend… so glad you're with me today. This is By God's Call — day 147, Born to Trouble.

"But man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." Job 5:7.

Before anything else, I need to tell you who is speaking here. It is not God. It is not Job. It is Eliphaz — the first of Job's friends to open his mouth after seven days of silent grief sitting beside him in the middle of devastation. And it matters to know that, because the book of Job is full of speeches that sound wise but aren't always right about the situation. Eliphaz speaks with good intentions. But he's using this true, general observation to imply something specific and unfair: that Job, somehow, deserved what he was suffering.

But let's separate the pieces. The line itself — "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward" — carries a truth that runs through the whole of human experience. Picture the image: sparks rise because it is the nature of fire. No one has to teach a spark to rise. It simply rises, because that's the physics of heat. And Eliphaz is saying: in the same way, trouble is native to human life. No one escapes it. It isn't a rare exception on the road — it is a constant part of the road itself.

That part, my friend, is true. No life crosses through this world without stumbling, without loss, without hard nights. If you are facing difficulty today, you are not an anomaly. You haven't fallen outside the expected pattern of human existence. You are living exactly what every person, at some point, also lives through.

But here is Eliphaz's mistake — and it's one we make often too: he takes this general truth and uses it to judge Job specifically. His logic was simple and seductive: if you're suffering this much, you must have done something wrong. There must be a hidden sin, a fault God is correcting. And the entire book of Job — from beginning to end — disproves that logic. God Himself, at the end of the book, rebukes Eliphaz and his friends for speaking wrongly about Him. Suffering is not proof of sin. Trouble is not a verdict on your character.

So how do we live with both of these truths at once? The first: trouble is normal, part of the human condition, no one escapes it. The second: the trouble you're facing is not God's judgment on who you are.

That changes how you carry what you're facing today. You can say, "this is hard, and it is human for it to be hard" — without having to constantly ask yourself, "what did I do wrong to deserve this?" Sometimes there is no answer to the why. Sometimes trouble is simply part of living in a broken world, and God is with you inside of it, not standing at a distance judging from outside.

So today, before breakfast, name the trouble you're facing. Name it without blaming yourself for it. And then, in prayer, ask God for strength to get through it — not a verdict on why it's happening. Sparks rise because it is the nature of fire. And trouble comes because it is the nature of this world. But you are not alone inside of it.

Stay close to God. Face it — then trust His presence. I'll see you tomorrow, my friend.