Job 16:11

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked," Job 16:11

This is not the speech of ignorance; nor is this a mere ebullition of fretful-ness or peevishness: the man who speaks is a wise man, whose character God himself has recognised and commended as good, even supremely good. Nor is this speech an exaggeration. This is precisely what God has done. The patriarch now seems to realise the simple truth of the situation. As a matter of fact God had delivered Job to the ungodly, and turned him over into the hands of the wicked. But God had done more, and it is that additional something which is so often forgotten in our surveys and estimates of Divine Providence. God had pledged his word that Job would be constant in the hour of trial, and that all the fire of hell would not burn him when he passed through the furnace. Where God has made such a pledge he will supply the needful grace. The battle was really not between Job and the devil, but between God himself and Satan: Job was, so to say, but the battlefield, on which the great combatants stood face to face. If Job failed, God failed. It is so now, that good men are handed over to be tried, tempted, and put to every test to which virtue can be subjected. Godly men are not taken out of the world: they are still left in its atmosphere, and in immediate touch with all its customs and principles. To be in the world is to be in temptation; to live is to do battle with evil. It is unprofitable to disguise from ourselves the reality of our spiritual position. It is foolish to appear to be in the world, and yet to be independent of it; we are not to hide ourselves from its appeals or temptations, or from any part of its manifold discipline: we are called upon to show that how severe soever may be our trial, he who is with us is more than all that can be against us. The consolatory thought which every Christian should apply to himself is, that temptation is but for a moment; it is not the evil that can endure for ever. The Son of man had to work today and tomorrow, and on the third clay he was perfected. We have to follow his example. We are trained to strength by daily conflicts. The spirit of wisdom is wrought in us by being exercised in discerning good and evil, and determining to follow that which is right, not only in preference to that which is wrong, but in absolute abhorrence of everything that is unlike the holiness of God. Let the suffering Christian be cheered and animated by the reflection, that no temptation hath happened unto him but such as is common to man.