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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 378. The Problem of Job
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Why hast thou set me as a mark for thee, so that I am a burden to myself?- Job_7:20.
The name of Job, with some portion of the story recorded in the book that bears his name, has been a household possession of mankind for centuries. Proverb after proverb has grown out of that story. It is not in our own tongue only that the “patience of Job,” the “poverty of Job,” the “comforters of Job,” have become familiar phrases. The image of the patriarch seated amidst his ashes, with a saintly glory round his head, has adorned alike the walls of cottages and the storied windows of stately churches. Passages of matchless beauty, or pathos, or majesty, have passed into the poetry of many languages. Words from our own older version breathe the hope and comfort which Christians welcome as they follow their departed dear ones to their graves. Yet in spite of this, it is not too much to say that the real contents, the essential teaching, of the book appear to have been almost or quite lost for ages. Its fate has resembled that of some ancient picture, a portion of which still stands out bright and clear; the rest has been overlaid by layer after layer of the accumulation of generations, yet with the colours and original design still preserved, untouched and secure for the first age that should be content to seek for and recover them.1 [Note: Dean Bradley.]
1. The problem of suffering is the great enigma vitœ, the solution of which, for ever attempted, may for ever baffle the human mind. Why our planet has been invaded by physical and moral evil; why a God of infinite love and power has ordained or permitted the sufferings of sentient beings; why His “whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now”; why, in particular, the operation of pain is apparently so indiscriminate that the innocent suffer with the guilty-these questions are asked in bewilderment to-day, and the facts which evoke them have troubled the spirit of man ever since it began to grope for meaning and purpose in life. This is the sphinx-riddle of existence; this is the crux of theism. Every age endeavours to throw some fresh glimmer of light on the perennial problem, which ordinarily presents itself to the plain man not as an intellectual puzzle, but as a heart-piercing sorrow or a haunting fear.
The problem concerns the relation in which the great fact of suffering in the world, and especially in the life of good men, stands to the government of the world by an omnipotent and all-wise God, and to a moral order, conceived to exist therein. It has to be carefully noted that here we have no merely speculative or metaphysical discussion on what has been correctly called “the vain and interminable controversy as to the origin of evil in the world.” Nothing is so fruitless as an inquiry into the matter of origins. We have to deal with the great facts of life, as the experience of things shows them to be. We have to deal with what is, and try to understand it, not concerning ourselves with what might have been, or contemplating the possibility of a world altogether different from our own. In the work before us, the writer deals with what is real, and with what is human. The great facts of life are looked at most earnestly, and in their acutest and most pressing form, and an effort is made, if not to state or set forth a full and complete theory to meet the facts, at least to seek for some better and more adequate explanation of these facts than had as yet been reached.
Our own age, which brings to the solution of old problems the new light of evolution-the struggle for life, the survival of the fittest, the solidarity of human existence with that of the creation at large-is profoundly conscious of the anomalies of the world regarded as a moral order. Increasing culture has increased its capacity for pain-its sensitiveness, its sympathy, its perplexity in the presence of the mystery of evil. It is an age in which the thoughts of many hearts are revealed, and its spirit is frankly critical of the constitution under which we are obliged to live. Logic states its clear, simple, and apparently irrefragable case: “If the maker of the world can all that he will, he wills misery, and there is no escape from the conclusion.” Philosophy regards it as a “depressing and revolting belief that the destinies of the universe are at the mercy of a being who, with the resources of omnipotence at his disposal, decided to make a universe no better than this.” Science asks “why among the endless possibilities open to omnipotence-that of sinless happy existence among the rest-the actuality in which sin and misery abound should be selected.” Poetry is constrained to ask:
Wherefore should any evil hap to man-
From ache of flesh to agony of soul-
Since God's All-mercy mates All-potency?
Nay, why permits He evil to Himself-
Man's sin, accounted such? Suppose a world
Purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant-
Man pure of evil in thought, word, and deed-
Were it not well? Then, wherefore otherwise?1 [Note: J. Strahan, The Book of Job Interpreted, 1.]
2. But the problem of the Book of Job is not concerned with the question of suffering only; it is concerned even more with that of injustice; Job's complaint is not so much that he is suffering as that he is suffering unjustly. He has lived a righteous life, but he is being treated by God as if he were unrighteous; his friends too are regarding him as a sinner; and he is sure that he is not; they are insisting that he ought to go to confession, and he is conscious of no sins that he ought to confess.
In early Israel attempts were made to account for the seeming contradiction between God's government of the world and the actual facts of life; thus the Psalmist says:
“For evil-doers shall be cut off:
But those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the land.
For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be:
Yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and he shall not be.
But the meek shall inherit the land;
And shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.”
(Psa_37:9-11.)
But it was seen that evil-doers were often not cut off, while those that waited upon the Lord by no means always inherited the land. Nevertheless, so strong was the conviction that all suffering and calamity must be the result of sin, that when the godly were seen to be in adversity or in sickness it was maintained that, righteous as they were now, they must, in time past, have committed some sin; and because the sin had been forgotten, and not atoned for, therefore its inevitable result was at last showing itself.
Job maintains that this visible system is irregular and unjust. Standing up for facts, and demanding their recognition whatever difficulties may ensue, he asserts this to be the fact-seen with his own eyes, in the whole state of the world around him, and brought specially home to him by his own adversity. He adheres resolutely to it, and will not allow truth to be tampered with and disguised. To this are owing all those justifications of himself, and assertions of his own righteousness, in which the book abounds, in answer to his friends, who try to persuade him that his calamities are judgments upon his sins. He makes these assertions, not on his own account simply, though firmly conscious of their truth, but for the sake of that argument which those assertions were the necessary medium of maintaining. Had he yielded to the persuasions of his friends, and confessed himself an offender, he would have allowed the conclusion they wanted; for his friends had simply inferred his guilt from his suffering, on the notion of the justice of this visible system. He therefore asserted his own righteousness; and from that fact, combined with that of his affliction, drew the very opposite conclusion to the favourite one which they maintained.
Such is the process by which the Book of Job opens at length upon that great question which has grieved, perplexed, and embittered men from the beginning of the world. We find ourselves upon popular ground, and listening to an old familiar line of thought. The sentiment against the course of things here is no strange one to human minds: it is, in fact, so popular, that it may be called hackneyed. It is one that has vented itself largely in poetry, in proverbs, in philosophy, in satire; and, in connexion with this book of Scripture, it demands some consideration.
So the book is a theodicy. The word “theodicy” comes from two Greek words which mean “to justify God,” and the design of every theodicy is admirably expressed in words which are engraven on the pedestal of the statue of Milton in front of St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate:
(to) assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men.1 [Note: J. T. Marshall, Job and his Comforters, 36.]
Job was assailed by no fiercer doubts than may come to us. At any time we may be overtaken by the most terrible calamity. And if not, unless we be very thoughtless, our spirits will sometimes be weighed down by an oppressive sense of the mystery of existence. The waste and cruelty so apparent throughout nature; the deadly regularity of law, going on its relentless course, in spite of the entreaties and groans of the myriads whom it tortures and prematurely slays; the necessity of believing, if we are to believe at all, not only without seeing, but even in opposition to what we seem to see; the consciousness that we have sought for God and found Him not, so that there is nothing for it but to say with Job, “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him”;-such feelings as these may at times weigh upon our spirits like a nightmare, and lead us to exclaim with the poet:
Who shall read us the riddle of life?
The continual sequence of pain,
The perpetual triumph of wrong,
The whole creation in travail to make
A victory for the strong?
How are we fettered and caged,
Within our dark prison-house here!
We are made to look for a loving plan;
We find everywhere sorrow and fear.
We look for the triumph of Good;
And from all the wide world around,
The lives that are spent cry upward to heaven
From the slaughter-house of the ground,
Till we feel that Evil is Lord.
And yet we are bound to believe,-
Because all our nature is so,-
In a Ruler touched by an infinite ruth
For all His creatures below.
Bound, though a mocking fiend point
To the waste and ruin and pain;
Bound, though our souls should be bowed in despair,
Bound, though wrong triumph again and again,
And we cannot answer a word.1 [Note: A. W. Momerie, Defects of Modern Christianity, 77.]