This is the primary role of God’s remnant here on earth, to be His witness. In every age His remnant have suffered. They were and are a living witness to the underlying truth that suffering is a major part of our walk with Christ. Scripture does not say if we pass through the waters, but when. The passage assumes the trial. It establishes it as certain.

Job, of course, stands as the perfect example of a mere man. It is no surprise that his account is widely regarded as the earliest book of the Bible, written before Genesis itself. God was laying down markers from the very beginning. He was clearly showing that there is no vital connection between worldly blessing and relationship to Him. Job’s friends, like most modern day Christians, and certainly almost all within Charismatic circles, trying to “live their best lives now” could not and would not understand this mystery.

Yet when Job shaved his head and tore his robe over the loss of everything, and then fell to his knees in worship and blessed the name of God, we are given the model. There it is unveiled in raw humanity and holy reverence.

Suffering, and our reaction to it, becomes the great separator. It separates the legitimate from the illegitimate. The many from the few. And it has been this way down through the ages, right up to and including this present day.

When the great tribulation comes, when trials grow fierce beyond anything previously known, God will already have trained a remnant over the many decades of their lives in the ways of suffering, enduring, and overcoming. They will not be novices in the furnace. They will have fought many battles long before the great battle arrives.

They will know the Scripture well from Revelation 13 where the great enemy of our souls wages war against the saints and, in human terms, prevails.
And yet the question stands. How do we overcome when that time comes? The same way we overcome now.

By the Blood of the Lamb.
By the word of our testimony.
And by the fact that we do not cling to our lives on this earth, even unto death.

This power to wage war agsinst us, along with authority over all nations, is must be remembered has been “granted,” by God for a specific and limited time. It represents a divine allowance for testing, not an independent victory of the beast. As it was with Job. Its reach is measured. Its duration is bound. And even in its fiercest hour, it remains subject to the sovereign limits set by the throne of Heaven.

This is the one thing I do know. As long as He is with us, those of us who remain will pass through the waters and the fires. He knows us. He has redeemed us for this appointed time. He has called us by name. And He declares over us, You are Mine.

We fight not with carnal strength, but with proximity to Jesus. To bask in the glow of His presence is to walk in the beauty of holiness, to move in the overflow of His majesty and His glory. His grace will be sufficient, no matter how fierce the battle becomes.

I was saying to a brother only the other day, as long as I am granted breath enough to make a final speech to the baying crowd, to proclaim to them the glory of the God they have rejected, then I will be satisfied to say, let the blade fall.

And if not even that, then I shall declare that very same thing to the principalities and powers.
For their blade does not end my story.
It only propels me home.