Job 5:3

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"I have seen the foolish taking root." Job 5:3

This calls us to the curious sights in human life. There are sights that are surprising, delightful, unexpected, overwhelming. The sight which most puzzles the good man is that the foolish take root, and that the vicious should prosper. A good man can make something of almost every other sight in the world, but this overwhelms him with dismay. It seems to be against the fitness of things; it seems to discourage all attempts at virtue; it seems to offer a premium to vice. This was the difficulty of Asaph; he says his feet had well-nigh gone when he beheld the prosperity of the foolish and listened to the revels of the wicked, for there were no bands in their death, they had more than heart could wish, their eyes stood out with fatness. This is not an enemy who is bearing witness against Providence, it is a good man who is setting down what he has seen as a simple matter of fact. He would not have been so surprised if he had seen the foolish flaming for a moment like a rocket, making a dash of display which perished in its own action; nor would he have complained perhaps if the foolish had made an occasional success in life: the thing which troubled him was that he had seen the foolish taking root, as if they were going to abide on the earth and come to maturity of power. We must not ignore the difficult facts of Providence, but we must not limit our view to facts as we see them, or as they lie upon the surface; though they may be all that we can see with our bodily eyes, yet we are to bring our religious reflection to bear upon the case. The world is old enough now to afford us a basis of reasoning and inference respecting all appearances, combinations, and phenomena generally. The root-idea of the Christian religion is that God is against all wickedness, and that in the long run he will overwhelm it and bring it to its appropriate punishment. Let us be well grounded in that fundamental principle. If we could for a moment doubt the reality of that principle our whole faith would be gone. We speak it reverently when we say that if God could cause any man to succeed simply because the man was wicked, his claim to human confidence would be destroyed. Here, then, lies the great basis-principle, that the eternal God is against evil, and is pledged to the extinction of wickedness. In view of this principle, what becomes of all apparent success and root-taking, and honour, and influence, and pomp? These things are but indications that the judgment will be of equal magnitude, and will come even more suddenly than the success is supposed to have come. Meanwhile the difficulty is a great one, and there are circumstances under which men need all their deepest religious convictions to sustain them in the presence of providences which seem to be dead against the assertion and progress of truth and justice. Sad is the case of heathen nations; sadder still is the condition of nations which are partially Christian, and which turn Christian civilisation itself into a means of extending their wickedness. Sometimes we wonder how God can sit in the heavens and behold it all; we are troubled that he does not awake, so to speak, and come down in judgment that cannot be mistaken, and rectify relations that are thrown out of course. Many a grief of this kind we have to hide in our own heart. Yet why should we hide our griefs in view of providences which we cannot understand? Let us go back to history. Let us be faithful to the interpretation of great breadths of human experience, and in all cases it will be seen that, however mysterious the process, God has in the end vindicated goodness and repelled from the throne of righteousness those who would overturn its pillars. Man of God, take heart; the trial is no doubt hard; things have happened in one day which in human wisdom would have happened exactly in the other way, and we are dismayed, confounded, and put to silence, when we see how great is the grief of honest souls. All we can do is to recur to history, to pray for the consolidation of our faith, for the increase of our spirit of patience and longsuffering: perhaps the longer God is in coming as a great light, the brighter will be the glory, the more blessed the vision, when it does arise to reward our weary waiting.

"He taketh the wise in their own craftiness." Job 5:13

No doubt there are men who call themselves wise who do not believe in God. Let us not consider them all fools in any merely intellectual sense. There is a craft which prides itself on its sagacity, depth, cleverness, agility, and boasts itself of the multitude of its resources. God often gives such craft room enough for its own display: he allows it to come to maturity that he may abase it the more effectually. God delights to throw down towers that were meant to reach unto heaven. Call no man wise until his plans have been thoroughly matured and carried out; they may look well in outline, they may begin very energetically, they may seem to carry within themselves all the elements of success; but God allows the man to go so far, until he can make an example of him. Where is the wickedness that has continued from age to age to prosper? Where is the counsel that has really thriven as against God? Where are the heathen opponents that have not been broken as with a rod of iron? There is no cleverness that can stand against true wisdom. The difference between cleverness and wisdom is a difference of depth and quality: they do not belong to the same lineage or line of things; the one is superficial, sparkling, dashing, claiming attention by its loud boastfulness, a sight to be gaped at and wondered about and forgotten; but wisdom is profound, far-reaching, calm, taking in a great range of view, moving by a long line, and justifying itself in the end by revelations which never came within the purview of mere intellectual cleverness. The cleverness of the world has never discovered any cure for the world's deepest diseases. We have had reforms enough, guesses, hypotheses, theories, speculations; but it never lay within the scope of mere cleverness to find a redemption that would meet all the necessities of sin and soothe all the accusations and agonies of conscience. The world by wisdom knew not God. The world by cleverness never invented a world-wide gospel, an all-time evangelisation; it lay with God alone to reveal a plan by which all human calculations were upset, all human cleverness abashed, and eternity accommodated to the narrow limits of time, and all heaven brought to supply what the earth needed in its supremest distresses. Let us beware of cleverness everywhere; there is nothing in it. Let us rather seek for wisdom, and cry for understanding; searching diligently for that which is more precious than silver and gold, and with which rabies are not to be compared. The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, nor can it stand in the day of final judgment. We are of yesterday, and know nothing; we see only parts and aspects of things: how, then, can we provide for a whole world, and for all the exigencies of time?