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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 394. Job
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Job
But Job does not always plead for himself alone; he comes to regard his own case as typical of what is happening in the world generally. He looks around and sees that human life is not organized on the simple principle of rewards and punishments, which his friends bid him acknowledge. He sees the righteous often oppressed and the wicked often flourishing. “From out of the populous city men groan, and the soul of the wounded crieth out: Yet God imputeth it not for folly:” i.e., God does not punish the oppressors. “The earth is given into the hand of the wicked: he covereth the faces of the judges thereof; if it be not he, who then is it?” “Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, wax mighty in power?… Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them.” In short, Job seems to find that moral distinctions do not explain the fortunes of men, and he even suggests that happiness and misery are apportioned indiscriminately. “One dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet: … And another dieth in bitterness of soul, and never tasteth of good. They lie down alike in the dust, and the worm covereth them.” The evils that have come upon Job, therefore, have not merely caused him intense pain; they have, as it were, emptied the earth of God. “Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.” “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.”
Men have dealt hardly with Job's demeanour under the assaults of his friends, more harshly far than Jehovah Himself, as indeed this is men's wont, as for example in the case of Thomas, on whom divines pass a deeply more grievous censure than the Lord Himself. Humanity is not perfect. The heart has its rights, and the utterances of anguish are not to be rigidly measured by the square of dogmatic truth; and we cannot attach to Job the same blame as we should, were his sentiments given out calmly, nor can we attach to the sentiments the same weight as if they were the deliberate convictions of the understanding. The words are mere momentary fragments of passion flung out scorching hot from that deep volcanic heart of his. The Divine poet, with a holy stroke of art, bares the man's breast, and we look within and see the struggling thoughts and passions and regrets battling with each other, and rising fiery and violent as the sparks fly upwards. But these apparently blasphemous words are: (1) either immediate antagonistic positions to those of the friends, and so the direct expressions of a passion self-forgetful for the moment; or (2) they are words spoken in monologue or to God immediately after conflict with the friends; for the poor sufferer, after throwing down his human antagonists, had to stumble forward covered with the dust and blood, and heated with the fury of this combat, to meet his more terrible Divine adversary; and (3) it is the intention of the sacred writer to make Job utter what other men only dare to think; but there is not a word of Job's complaints which even yet good men under strong affliction will not equal and even surpass. And could we wish Job less open? Is it not for our sakes that this simple heart pours out its awful case in the ear of man and God? There may be a greatness in reticence. It is magnificent to seize the serpent that is twining itself around the heart and struggle silently with it and alone till death or victory. Those are great, if dark, beings, who cover up their thoughts and grapple with them in the midnight of doubt, and, when all eyes are shut, gain their triumph, and, as they looked calm before, look calm after. And perhaps such conflicts must be fought alone; friends, even when near, cannot enter into the strife. Yet Job was not of such sort. His was the open, simple soul, longing for sympathy, living in the light of men's eye, crushed to death by suspicion or desertion, stung to the quick even by the laughter of children. And hence he pours out all that is in his heart, and appeals to men against God, and to God against men, tossed about from earth to heaven in search of sympathy. And this was not weakness, for a greater than he, suffering too under the malice of Satan, went not alone into the conflict, but appealed to His three friends for countenance and help. Job doubtless sinned, and he suffered deeply for his sin, and confessed it and humbled himself; and let us not think how greatly Job failed, but how much more grievously we should have failed under like sore temptation.1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, Commentary on Job, i. p. xxii.]
1. Job's Patience.-There is one important difficulty which readers of the Book of Job at first feel with respect to it; the difficulty, viz., how that holy man acquired his proverbial reputation for the virtue connected with his name. The patriarch Job is held up in the Bible as the great example of patience-“Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord.” We therefore not unnaturally come to the Book of Job with the expectation of finding there an uninterrupted expression of acquiescence in the justice and propriety of the providential visitation under which he is suffering. But it is unnecessary to say that these expectations are not fulfilled.
The idea of the character of Job conveyed by that popular and traditional phrase, “the patience of Job,” is one not only inadequate, but almost the very opposite of that which we find set before us from the moment that we open the chapters that follow the short and touching narrative with which we are so familiar. As we read these later and central chapters, we find that we have before us one who, if he had bowed with entire submission to the greatest of losses and the sharpest of sufferings, yet could lay aside the attitude of the patient sufferer, to assume that of the indignant and restless questioner. It is hardly too much to say that the most striking feature in the book is, not the patience, but the impatience-not the submission, but the uprising, almost the rebellion-of him whom from age to age men of all classes, not only those who have given shape to the superficial impressions of the untaught, but Fathers of the Church, great divines, great teachers, have agreed in calling the Patriarch of Patience. We watch, no doubt, his tender and dutiful resignation; but we listen no less to his bitter cries, his feverish questionings, to his challenges to his Maker, to his agony of despair.
But we see also something more than this. We see how and where he at last found peace and calm and quiet. We restore to him the title of “patient,” which for a time we have denied him. But we understand by “the patience of Job,” no longer the mere sweet submissiveness which we have hitherto connected with his name. We see in the word something more, something other, than that which we have hitherto understood by it. And we recognize in the patriarch another Job than the Job of our traditions.
Why do we speak of Job's patience? He has borne bravely three calamities-the three sent from God; why has he sunk before the one sent by man? He has accepted penury, bereavement, sickness; why has he cried out at the mere suggestion that these are penalties; and why, in spite of that vociferation, has his name been handed down as a synonym for patience? He has stood the hurricane and the tempest; but he has been made to cry out by the lashing of a single wave! Does not the fact of being fretted by so weak a foe deprive him of all right to be the representative of those who wait for God?
I answer, No. I am convinced that, in the view of the artist, the patience of Job is never so conspicuous as in his outcry. Not in spite of, but by reason of, that outcry has he earned his right to a place among those who wait for God. Why did Job cry out? Was it not in the interest of patience? Was it not patience that made him cry out? His friends wanted to rob him of his patience-to take away his power to wait without a reason. Is not that just the definition of intellectual patience-the power to trust when there is no light, the ability to possess one's soul in the absence of all explanation of that which afflicts it? Unless we grasp this thought, the personality of Job is meaningless-he is simply an impatient child. But if his impatience springs from the fact that his friends wish to rob him of his patience, if his outcry is caused by his desire to be allowed to wait for God, then, religiously and artistically, the whole portrait is illuminated, and the claim of Job to his traditional virtue receives triumphant vindication.1 [Note: G. Matheson.]
2. Job's Trust.-The purpose of the Book of Job is something far higher than to refute any definite theory or to teach any definite doctrine. It is the history of a soul in its struggle after God. Here is a man who, by his losses, his bereavements, his horrible disease, and, above all, by the ill-advised conversation of his friends, is driven to the very verge of madness. He had been a good man-the best of men. He had not merely been pious and devout in outward conduct, but had lived, as he thought, in filial communion with God. Now, however, it was as if the great Father were dead. Surely He would not otherwise be deaf to such passionate entreaties. Perhaps, after all, he had been but worshipping a phantom of his own imagination; or worse, perhaps the powerful Being in whom he had believed as a loving God was but a malignant fiend who took pleasure in insulting him-who had once made him glad only to increase his present anguish. But no! when he remembers his past experience, there was something too real, too beautiful, in it to admit of this supposition. He will still trust. Perchance the old blessedness may return. And yet, and yet-and so he goes through all transitions of despair and hope; “now praying and trusting; now utterly cast down; now quiet and submissive; now violent, and ready even to blaspheme; and at last rising suddenly to a height of rapture in which everything disappears in a beatific vision of God.”
When we read this book we find that Job is guilty of many wild and unjustifiable utterances with regard to God. He confessed himself that his words were wild, and to his friends they seemed like blasphemy. He was no traitor; he could not weigh his words; he was not like the friends sitting at their ease discussing a question that was not theirs, able to trim their words and keep everything proper and correct. He could not do that, and he did transgress the limits of propriety in speaking about God. But when you come to the end of the book you find this remarkable fact, that, in spite of all the vehemence of his language, Job has from God this testimony-that he had spoken concerning God the thing that was right, as his friends had not. Is it not a marvellous thing that God should so completely disown those men who had tried to speak smooth things to Him, and commend His servant Job, who had said many wild and unwarrantable things concerning Him? But the reason of it was just this, that Job had spoken what he felt, and, in spite of all the hard things he had spoken, he had dared to believe in God, dared to trust Him, dared to speak of Him as upon his side, because he knew that he was faithful to Him. He had blamed God for his own doings, but there was that in his heart which had gained God's approval.
It is easily seen that this storm of passion and doubt into which Job has been worked is one that rages, like all storms in deep waters, merely on the surface; deep down (always when he forgets himself) his faith and fundamental conceptions of God are calm and undisturbed. The very deeps of darkness into which he sinks but give him clearer glimpses of heavenly light, as when one descends between engulfing waves, one sees the stars invisible to those on calmer waters. And out of the extremity of human woe Job rises to the extremity of human hope. Because the perfect conception of misery-concentrated sin and wrath and speedy dissolution-overbalances itself, the mind, from its nature and inherent conceptions of man and God, immediately swings itself aloft, and from the shortness and the miserable abandonment by God of this life, finds and utters the necessity of an endless and blessed life with Him anew. A man with such firm foothold on the past, and such occasional convulsive grasps of the future, is not one readily to fall into Atheism.
We see before us Job's mind and his difficulties, and his prolonged struggle and conflict in accommodating them to each other; we see the soul at each particular stage, not consciously satisfied, yet not consciously subdued so as to renounce God, but progressively and finally victorious over its temptation, even amidst deepest darkness and confusion; and we see precisely what was the hold which it still convulsively retained, and thus by what means, even amidst perfect ignorance and blindness, a man may still stand true; and all this exhibition rises from the beginning onward and upward into the proclamation of one great truth-The just shall live by his faith. And this for us is the highest moral of the whole book, because taught by every section of the book, and by the whole, and especially so emphatically by the Divine words and appearance; for it was this last that calmed all Job's perturbations, not by solving his problem and explaining his sorrows, for his problem and sorrows being ultimately the problem of sin, is insoluble, but by superseding and making unnecessary its solution. A man cannot know here, and he need not know; faith in God is sufficient to carry him through all troubles, and nothing but such faith is sufficient; this supersedes the necessity of knowing.
It would be well for us if we could learn to trust God as we trust those of our fellow-creatures whom we really believe to be good and loving. We could all name individuals, alive or dead, in whose love for us we had such confidence that we should feel satisfied that our eternal interests would be quite safe in their hands, if they had only wisdom and power enough. If we believed that they had the requisite wisdom and power, we should receive every appointment, painful or otherwise, with perfect acquiescence, knowing that it must be for our true good. My daily endeavour is to learn this same lesson in relation to God. I am sure He created me and all men to be partakers in His own eternal life. This I believe is contained in the truth that He created us in Christ. Now this purpose of God I believe to be unchangeable, and that He will follow it on, until it be accomplished. The Shepherd goes after the lost sheep until He finds it. I am persuaded that this is an eternal truth, and the only foundation on which a man who feels himself a sinner-self-destroyed-can lay himself down all his length in absolute trust.1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 121.]