1. It is in his debate with God that the interest of Job's speeches is most intense. He charges God, sometimes in language of tremendous realism, with inflicting his intolerable pains. His are the poisoned arrows that have consumed his strength. It is God who assails him like a giant, and dashes him in pieces; God who cruelly persecutes him, breaks him with a tempest, and dissolves him in the storm. It is God's terrors that dismay him, His presence that troubles him, the horrible dreams which He sends that affright him. So with the Almighty for his enemy, he is driven to bay, and turns on God with the plain speech of the desperate:
“Therefore I will not refrain my mouth;
I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.
My soul is weary of my life;
I will give free course to my complaint;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak,
And let come on me what will.”
Yet the poet has wonderfully shown us the clashing currents in Job's breast by the strange incoherence of his language about God. He is torn between the bitter present and the happy memory, between the God who is torturing him and the God of whose goodness he had drunk so deeply in the past. And side by side with all his incisive complaints of God's cruelty, and scorn of His malignant pettiness, side by side even with the firm assertion of His immorality, stand other utterances which recognize His righteousness. He bases the confidence he expresses in one of his less gloomy moments on the conviction that a godless man shall not come before Him. He warns the friends that God will not suffer Himself to be flattered by lies. It is therefore natural that appeal should alternate with invective. The appeal is in some cases, indeed, rather remonstrance. Why had God suffered him to be born? Why does He contend with him, why hide His face? What are the sins God has to bring against him? Is it good for Him to despise His own work, or, when He has lavished so much care on fashioning His servant, wantonly to destroy him? But the tone of remonstrance is softened into the tone of pathetic appeal. Would that he knew where he might find Him, that he might lay bare his case or utter his supplication! From the injustice of man he turns to God, in the moving words: “My friends scorn me: but mine eye poureth out tears unto God.”
2. Again and again Job had challenged God to appear and defend His action. He had implored Him to fulfil two conditions, to suspend the persecution from which he is suffering and not to overwhelm him with the dread of His presence:
“Only do not two things unto me,
Then will I not hide myself from thy face:
Withdraw thine hand far from me;
And let not thy terror make me afraid.
Then call thou, and I will answer;
Or let me speak, and answer thou me.”
But God fulfils neither of Job's conditions. When He appears, He does not take His rod from the sufferer, and He speaks out of the whirlwind. Moreover, not only does He leave Job on the rack and appal him with the storm, but He deigns to give no reply to Job's questions, no defence of His own conduct. Rather He speaks roughly to the sufferer, pressing him with questions which convict him of his ignorance. The reader is at first distracted between his wonder at the poet's genius and his disappointment and even resentment at the character of Jehovah's reply. Surely, he thinks, God will now make clear the mystery, but no word is said to explain to Job why he suffers. There is no comfort offered him but what seems like a brutal mockery. Yet if we look more closely we shall see that the speeches of Jehovah are not mere irrelevant irony. Job has taken on himself to criticize the government of the universe. But has he ever realized what the universe is, or how complex the problem of its control? So God brings before him its wonderful phenomena in language of surpassing beauty. The mighty work of its creation, the curbing of the rebellious sea, the land of the dead, the home of light and of darkness, the ordered march of the constellations, the treasuries of snow and hail, which God has stored to overwhelm His enemies, the frost that binds the streams, or the rain that quenches the desert's thirst-all pass before Job's mind and all are too vast, too obscure, for him to comprehend. Then God sketches a series of swift pictures of His animal creation, of whose secrets Job is profoundly ignorant. Thus He brings home to him the limitation of his outlook; thus Job comes to learn the wide range of God's interests.
But it is not what is said about God or known about Him, but Himself as such, that converts and pacifies the heart. He does not solve by what He says, but offers Himself as solution of all life's enigmas. With the heart man believeth unto righteousness. The history and end of all doubt confirms this, in the New Testament and in the Old, and in modern society. Thomas, unless he put his finger into the print of the nails, would not believe. But when the personal Lord appeared such scrutiny was superseded; Jesus but spoke to elicit that sublimest cry of faith, My Lord and my God. So it was with Asaph in his despair and doubt over the inequalities of Providence and the prosperous wicked-“When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me; until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I their end.” The apparent difficulties to faith are rarely the real difficulties, but all difficulties melt and fuse before the fervency of personal life in God.
I have not a word to say of condemnation of that system of theology which endeavours to clear the relationship of Creator and creature of all difficulty, and justifies God to man by representing Him as exercising over us a sort of limited sovereignty which fully satisfies our ideas of perfect equity, such equity as subsists between a powerful monarch and his subjects. But I am quite unable to receive such a system of belief into myself. A controversialist who makes out that there are no difficulties in revelation seems to me to prove too much; for to say that a disclosure from an Infinite Mind to finite minds is all easy and straightforward is almost to say that there is no such disclosure or that the one claiming to be so received is not Divine. It is indeed an act of love of God, as well as of our neighbour, to make religious difficulties plain; but he is a bold controversialist who in an age of general intelligence denies the existence of difficulties altogether, or even under-estimates their force; and as the facts on man's side are too obvious to be glossed over, the temptation is almost irresistible to make free with God, and to strive to render Him more intelligible by lowering Him to human notions. In the long-run this method of controversy must lead to unbelief. Most men are more satisfied by an honest admission of their difficulty than by an answer to it; few answers are complete, and common sense will never receive a religion which is represented as having no difficulties. It forfeits its character of being Divine, by making such a claim.1 [Note: The Spirit of Father Faber (1914), 75.]
