Job 30:1-15 - Homiletics

Job's second parable: 2. A lamentation over fallen greatness.

I. THE CHARACTER OF JOB 'S DERIDERS .

1 . Juniors in respect of age. (Verse 1.) These were not the young princes of the city ( Job 29:8 ), by whom he had formerly been held in reverential regard, but "the young good-for-nothing vagabonds of a miserable class of men" (Delitzsch) dwelling in the neighbourhood. Job's inferiors in point of years, they should have treated him with honour and respect (Le 19:32), especially when they beheld his intense wretchedness and misery. That they failed to accord him such veneration as was due to seniority in age, and much more that they made him the butt of their contemptuous derision, was not only an express violation of the dictates of nature and religion, but a special mark of depravity in themselves, as well as a certain index to the social and moral degradation of the race to which they belonged. The good qualities of an advancing and the bad qualities of a retrograding people, infallibly discover themselves in the moral characteristics of the youthful portion of the community.

2 . Base in respect of ancestry. (Verses 1, 8.) The foregoing inference from the ribald behaviour of the younger men Job confirms by describing them as "children of fools, yea, children of base men," literally, "of men without a name," and as men "whose sires" he "would have disdained to set with the dogs of his flock." It is doubtful if Job does not in this and other expressions of this passage (verses 1-8) repay the contempt of his scornful assailants with fourfold liberality, thereby failing to evince that meekness in resenting injuries which good men should study to display, and perpetrating the same offence which he imputes to others, as well as talking about his fellow-men (God's creatures and God's children no less than himself) in a way that was scarcely excusable even in a patriarchal sage. Nevertheless, what he purposes to convey through the medium of his heated, if also poetic, language is that his revilers were the offspring of a vile, worthless, degraded, brutalized race, who had well-nigh sunk to the level of the beasts that perish.

3 . Worthless in respect of service . (Verse 2.) Like their fathers whom Job would have disdained to rank with the dogs of his flock, i.e. whom he regarded as not worthy of being compared to these wise and faithful animals who watched his sheep, they ( i.e. these younger vagabonds) were idle and effeminate triflers, lazy, worthless rascals, as little able to work as willing, the ethnic deterioration they were undergoing revealing itself in enervated physical constitutions no less than in depraved moral dispositions. The truth here enunciated with regard to nations and communities is also true of individuals, that sin, vice, immorality, has a tendency to impair the bodily strength, mental vigour, and moral power of such as yield to its fatal fascinations.

4 . Furnished in respect of food. (Verses 3, 4.) Strangely blending pity with scorn, Job informs us that in great part the feebleness of those wretched creatures, who "could bring nothing to perfection" (Cox), and were not worth employing to do the work of a shepherd's dog, was due to the difficulty they had in finding nourishment. Lean and haggard, benumbed from want and hunger, they literally gnawed the desert, picking up such scanty sustenance as the barren steppe afforded, plucking mallows in the thicket, i.e. "the salt-wort from off the stalk" (Fry), the salt-wort, or sea-purslain,- being a tall shrubby, plant which thrives in the desert as well as on the coast, "the buds and young leaves of which" also "are gathered and eaten by the poor" (Delitzsch); and taking the roots of broom for their bread, the broom abounding in the deserts and sandy places of Egypt and Arabia, and growing to a height sufficient to afford shelter to a person sitting down. A melancholy picture of destitution, which has its counterpart not only among expiring races, effete desert tribes, and wretched Troglodytes, but also in many a centre of modern civilization. It is hardly questionable that in the lower strata of society in our large cities there are thousands for whom the physical conditions of life are as severe as those just depicted by the Poet.

5 . Outcasts in respect of society. (Verse 5.) In consequence of their pilfering and marauding habits, they were banished forth from the pale of the organized community Nay, when it happened that they ventured near the precincts of civilized life, they at once became the objects of a hue and cry, men hallooing after them as they did after a thief, and chasing them away to their own miserable haunts of poverty and vice. It is clear they were the criminal classes of patriarchal times, and were regarded with much the same abhorrence as the pariahs of modern society, who wage war against all constituted authority, prey upon the industry of the virtuous and law-abiding, and as a consequence live in a perpetual state of social ostracism.

6 . Troglodytes in respect of habitation. (Verse 6.) Driven beyond the pale of civilized society, they were compelled "to dwell in the cliffs of the valleys," literally, "in the horror of glens," i.e. in dismal and gloomy gorges, like the Horites (or cave-men) of Mount Seir ( Genesis 14:6 ), betaking themselves for shelter to the caves of the earth and the holes in the rocks. According to modern scientific theory, they would exemplify man in the earliest or lowest stage of his development; according to the testimony of revelation, the Troglodytes would attest man's degeneracy from a primeval standard of perfection. And so persistent is this downward tendency in man apart from Divine grace, that almost every civilized community has its social and moral Troglodytes, who dwell in dismal valleys—its wretched outcasts, children of sin and shame, whose lurking-places are dens of infamy and haunts of vice.

7 . Dehumanized in respect of nature. (Verse 7.) Having previously ( Job 24:5 ) described these evicted aborigines as leading a gregarious life, like wild asses roaming the desert under the guidance of a leader ( Job 39:5 ), Job recurs to the comparison to indicate, not the eager ferocity with which they scour the steppe for fodder, but how near to the brutes they have been brought by their misery, representing them as huddling themselves together under the bushes, and croaking out, in unintelligible jargon like the brayings of an ass, a doleful lamentation over their miserable condition. Herodotus compares the language of the Troglodyte Ethiopians to the screeching of bats. The speech of savage races is mostly composed of "growling gutturals and sharp clicks" (Cox). As a nation advances in civilization its tongue purifies and refines. Like the cave-men of Western Asia and Ethiopia, the moral Troglodytes of society have a jargon of their own; e.g. the language of thieves.

II. THE BEHAVIOUR OF JOB 'S DERIDERS .

1 . Mockery and contempt. (Verses 1, 9, 10.) Physically and morally degraded, this worthless rabble of marauders, half men and half beasts, having fallen in with Job in their wanderings, were so little touched by sympathy for his misfortunes, that they turned his miseries into merry jests, and made bywords of his groans. It is a special mark of depravity when youth mocks at age ( 2 Kings 2:3 ) and laughs at affliction. The experience of Job was reproduced in the eases of David ( Psalms 35:15 ; Psalms 69:12 ), Jeremiah ( Lamentations 3:14 , Lamentations 3:63 ), and Christ ( Matthew 27:43 ; Luke 23:35 ).

2 . Insult and outrage. (Verse 10.) They gave open and undisguised expression to the abhorrence with which they regarded him, by fleeing far from him, or standing at a distance, and making their remarks upon him. If they ventured to come near him it was either to spit in his presence, "the greatest insult to an Oriental" (Carey), or perhaps to spit in his face (cf. Numbers 12:14 ; Deuteronomy 25:9 ), thus carrying their contempt and scorn to the lowest depth of indignity. Job had fallen low indeed to be thus outraged by the vilest dregs of society; but not lower than did Christ, who was similarly treated by the rabble of Judaea ( Matthew 26:67 ; Matthew 27:30 ), as long before it bad been predicted that he should be ( Isaiah 1:6 ). No doubt in all this Job's sufferings were typical of Christ's.

3 . Hostility and violence. (Verses 12-15.) Not content with words and gestures, the young vagabonds proceeded to acts of open violence. Having found the poor fallen prince groaning in wretchedness and misery upon the ash-heap outside his house, they abstained not from direct hostility. Like a crowd of witnesses starting up on his right hand, they overwhelmed him with accusations; like an army of assailants thrusting his feet away, they disputed with him every inch of ground, compelling him to retire ever further and further back; pressing on like a tumultuous besieging host, they cast up their ways of destruction, i.e. their military causeways, against him, tearing down his path so as to render escape impossible, breaking in upon him as through a wide breach, and causing him to flee in terror before their irresistible approach, so that his nobility was dispersed like the wind, and his prosperity swept away like a cloud.

III. THE MOTIVE JOB 'S DERIDERS .

1 . Not Job ' s unkindness. It was true that these insolent vagabonds, with their fathers, had been summarily evicted from their pristine settlements—had been compelled, not without cruel oppression and intolerable hardship, to retire before the superior race who had dislodged them; it may also be that of that conquering Arab tribe Job was a conspicuous member, and might on that account be held responsible for the indignities and wrongs that had been heaped upon the wretched aborigines; but, in point of fact, Job disclaims having taken part in those ruthless acts of tyranny which caused the poor of the land to slink away and hide themselves, naked and shivering, in the dens and caves of the earth, in the holes and crevices of the rocks ( Job 24:4-8 ), and rather indicates that he regarded their sorrowful lot with compassion, even while, with disgust and aversion, he shrank from any contact with themselves. But:

2 . Their own wickedness. They simply saw that he, whom they once knew as a powerful prince, was overtaken by evil fortune, and they turned upon him accordingly. That they traced Job's calamities, as Job himself did, to the hand of God (verse 11), was unlikely. Yet the result was the same. God, according to Job—according to them, fate—had unloosed iris bow and sent a shaft through the heart of this imperious autocrat, or had loosened the cord which upheld the tent of his hitherto vigorous body, and had laid him prostrate beneath a loathsome and painful disease; and so they, casting off restraint, assailed him with unbridled arrogance, acting out, in these early times, the familiar story of the kicking ass and the dead lion,

"But yesterday the word of Caesar might

Have stood against the world; now lies he there,

And none so poor to do him reverence."

('Julius Caesar,' act 3. sc. 2.)

Learn:

1 . The certainty that man may decade himself beneath the level of the beasts.

2 . The right of society to protect itself against the lawless and depraved.

3 . The tendency of all wickedness to lead to misery even on earth.

4 . The infallibility with which moral depravity perpetuates itself.

5 . The instability which attends all human greatness.

6 . The length to which wicked men will go in persecuting and oppressing others when God grants permission.

7 . The inevitable approach of a nation's doom when its youth has become corrupt and depraved.