Job 31:1-40

Job 31:0

1. I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid? [Some think that Job's wife was now dead.]

2. For what portion of God is there [would be] from above? and what inheritance of the Almighty from on high?

3. Is not destruction to the wicked? and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?

4. Doth not he [emphatic, meaning God] see my ways, and count all my steps?

5. If I have walked with vanity [inward falsehood], or if my foot hath hasted to deceit;

6. Let me be weighed in an even balance [in a balance of righteousness], that God may know [will know] mine integrity.

7. If my step hath turned out of the way [the narrow way of righteousness], and mine heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands,

8. Then let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out.

9. If mine heart have been deceived [befooled] by a woman, or if I have laid wait at my neighbour's door;

10. Then let my wife grind unto another [perform all menial offices like a slave], and let others bow down upon her.

11. For this is an heinous crime; yea, it is an iniquity to be punished by the judges.

12. For it is a fire that consumeth to destruction [the same thought in Deuteronomy 32:22 , Deu 32:25 ], and would root out all mine increase.

13. If I did despise [an answer to chap. Deu 22:5 ] the cause of my manservant or of my maidservant, when they contended with me [so slaves had rights, which honest men recognised];

14. What then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer him?

15. Did not he that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb?

16. If I have withheld the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail;

17. Or have eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless hath not eaten thereof;

18. (For from my youth he [the fatherless] was brought up with me, as with a father, and I have guided her from my mother's womb;)

19. If I have seen any perish for want of clothing [any wanderer without clothing], or any poor without covering;

20. If his loins have not blessed me, and if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep;

21. If I have lifted up [waved] my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate [in the court of justice]:

22. Then let mine arm fall from my shoulder-blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone [the charnel-bone].

23. For destruction from God was a terror to me, and by reason of his highness I could not endure [I was unable to act thus].

24. If I have made gold my hope [referring to the admonition of Eliphaz, chap. Deu 22:23-24 ], or have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence;

25. If I rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much;

26. If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness [Job seems to have known only one kind of idolatry];

27. And my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand:

28. This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge [probably, my judge, meaning God]: for I should have denied the God that is above [star-worship was a legal offence].

29. If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him:

30. Neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul.

31. If the men of my tabernacle said not, Oh that we had of his flesh! we cannot be satisfied.

32. The stranger did not lodge in the street: but I opened my doors to the traveller [the wayfarer. Compare Genesis 19:2-3 ; Jdg 19:20-21 ].

33. If I covered my transgressions as Adam [as man], by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom:

34. Did I fear a great multitude, or did the contempt of families terrify me, that I kept silence, and went not out of the door?

35. Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book.

36. Surely I would take it upon my shoulder, and bind it as a crown to me.

37. I would declare [I would readily give an account of all my actions, and meet him with alacrity and perfect confidence] unto him the number of my steps; as a prince [conscious of inward and inalienable dignity] would I go near unto him.

38. If my land cry against me, or that the furrows likewise thereof complain [a strong impersonation to express the consequences of oppression and wrong-doing];

39. If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life:

40. Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley. The words of Job are ended.

Job's Retrospect and Protest

Job is now winding up his wonderful parable, and is about to retire from the fray of words. It will be curious to notice how the great sufferer closes his review. Will it be as dark at the end as it was at the beginning? Can mere controversy ever illuminate the providence of God, or must God himself always dissolve the cloud which hides his love? Looking over the whole ground which we have traversed, it cannot be said that the case has been imperfectly stated: eloquence was never sublimer, frankness was never more explicit, consciousness of integrity was never more stoutly maintained. What then, can man do with any divine riddle; or how can he settle the tumult and uproar of human life? Verily man can do nothing, and this is the lesson he is meant to learn. He will not learn it by mere exhortation; he must fight his way to it. Every man must, as it were though that is a hard word to use eat of the forbidden tree for himself, and die in his own person. To have begun with the exhortation, "Man can know nothing as it really is, and must wait for all divine solutions," would have been to mistake human nature, and to waste patience and time. Men will not believe. Experience goes for next to nothing with most of us. We always think that we ourselves could do better. We see a thousand men fall, and yet we criticise them and say, If we had made the attempt certainly we should not have fallen. So we go boldly to the front, and fall down dead just as they did, and all the generations come on after us dying, always dying. History is thus lost upon us, as we have had occasion many times to remark. We learn nothing by what happened in our neighbour's house. We have seen what has come of ill-assorted marriage or partnership, or adventurous speculation; yet we have gone and repeated the very thing, with our minds full of knowledge, and our hearts warned with ghostly advice. What, then, will the end of the review be? Simply silent despair or silent waiting.

Let us look at the kind of life Job says he lived, and in doing so let it be remarked that all the critics concur in saying that this chapter contains more jewels of illustration, of figure or metaphor, than probably any other chapter in the whole of the eloquent book. Job is, therefore, at his intellectual best. Let him tell us the kind of life he lived: whilst he boasts of it we may take warning by it; the very things he is clearest about may perhaps awaken our distrust.

Job had tried a mechanical life:

"I made a covenant with mine eyes" ( Job 31:1 ).

The meaning of "a mechanical life" is, a life of regulation, penance, dicipline; a life all marked out like a map; a kind of tabulated life, every hour having its duty, every day its peculiar form or expression of piety. Job smote himself; he set before his eyes a table of negations; he was not to do a hundred things. He kept himself well under control: when he burned with fire, he plunged into the snow; when his eyes wandered for a moment, he struck them both, and blinded himself in his pious indignation. He is claiming reward for this. Truly it would seem as if some reward were due. What can a man do more than write down upon plain paper what he will execute, or what he will forbear doing, during every day of the week? His first line tells what he will do, or not do, at the dawn; he will be up with the sun, and then he will perform such a duty, or crucify such and such a passion: he will live a kind of military life; he will be a very soldier. Is this the true way of living? or is there a more excellent way? Can we live from the outside? Can we live by chart, and map, and schedule, and printed regulation? Can the race be trained in its highest faculties and aspects within the shadow of mount Sinai? Or is the life to be regulated from within? Is it the conduct that is to be refined, or the motive that is to be sanctified and inspired? Is life a washing of the hands, or a cleansing of the heart? The time for the answer is not now, for we are dealing with an historical instance, and the man in immediate question says that he tried a scheduled life. He wrote or printed with his own hand what he would do, and what he would not do, and he kept to it; and though he kept to it, some invisible hand struck him in the face, and lightning never dealt a deadlier blow.

Job then says he tried to maintain a good reputation amongst men,

"If I have walked with vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity. If my step hath turned out of the way, and mine heart walked after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands; then let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out" ( Job 31:5-8 ).

That was a public challenge. There were witnesses; let them stand forth: there was a public record kept; let it be read aloud. This man asks for no quarter; he simply says, Read what I have done; let the enemy himself read it, for even the tongue of malice cannot pervert the record of honesty. Will not this bring a sunny providence? Will not this tempt condescending heaven to be kind and to give public coronation to so faithful a patron? Is there no peerage for a man who has done all this? Nay, is he to be displaced from the commonalty and thrust down that he may be a brother to dragons and a companion to owls? All this has he done, and yet he says "My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep." This is not what we have thought of Providence. We have said, Who lives best in the public eye will be by the public judgment most honourably and cordially esteemed: the public will take care of its servants; the public will stand up for the man who has done all he could in its interests; slave, man or woman, will spring to the master's rescue because of remembered kindnesses. Is Job quite sure of this? Certainly, or he would not have used such imprecations as flowed from his eloquent lips: If I have done thus, and so, then let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out: let my wife grind servilely unto another: let mine arm fall from my shoulder-blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone So then Job himself is speaking earnestly. Yet, he says, though I have done all this, I am cast into the mire, and I am become like dust and ashes: though I have done all this, God is cruel unto me, and he does not hear me: I stand up, and he regardeth me not: with his strong hand he opposeth himself against me: he has lifted me up to the wind, and he has driven me away with contempt: he has not given me time to swallow down my spittle: I, the model man of my day, have been crushed like a venomous beast. Job, therefore, does not modify the case against God. He misses nothing of the argument and withholds nothing of the tragic fact. He makes a long, minute, complete, and urgent statement. And this statement is found in the Bible! Actually found in a book which is meant to assert eternal providence and justify the ways of God to man! It is something that the Bible could hold within its limits the book of Job. It is like throwing one's arms around a furnace; it is as if a man should insist upon embracing some ravenous beast and accounting him as a member of the household. These charges against Providence are not found in a book written in the interests of what is called infidelity or unbelief; this impeachment is part of God's own book.

But do not interrupt Job; let him tell us more of the tale of his life. And next we shall find him claiming to have lived a deeply beneficent life. The proof is in Judges 19:13-22 :

"If I did despise the cause of my manservant or of my maidservant, when they contended with me; what then shall I do when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer him? Did not he that made me in the womb make him? and did not one fashion us in the womb? If I have withheld the poor from their desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail; or have eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless hath not eaten thereof; (for from my youth he was brought up with me, as with a father, and I have guided her from my mother's womb;) if I have seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering; if his loins have not blessed me, and if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep; if I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: then let mine arm fall from my shoulder-blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone."

So Job had not lived a luxurious life at the expense of the public comfort. Job kept a large table; his feast overflowed the bounds of his house, and took in a large outside space, and there the stranger, the fatherless, and the helpless were welcome. Judged by the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, this testimony would be a passport to heaven. Compare the passage now before us with the passage in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, which shows the ground on which heaven is apportioned, and you would say, Job must go in first; no man could compete with him; rivalry is out of the question here; Job did everything with a princely hand; there was not a mean thought in all his intellectual range; how to do good and to do it to the most undeserving seems to have been his supreme thought: stand back, and let Job go up to heaven first. Yet Job says there was nothing for him but shame and sorrow: he was abhorred; his cord was loosed; he was afflicted; upon his right hand youth rose up, and pushed away his feet, and his path was marred. This overturns all our conceptions of a beneficent Providence. What spoils this ointment? Who can name the dead fly that is in it? Was it self-consciousness? Had Job after all kept a record of what he had been doing? Did he put down in the twilight of evening all the good things he had done during the day? Was he self-congratulatory as well as self-condemnatory? Did he in effect write every day at the foot of the page in his diary, Behold, how good a man I am: when these words are read after my death all the world will be amazed at my munificence and philanthropy? Was this an investment? Was this a plume worn only upon ornamental occasions? Did Job say, I will have my horse ready, and if any challenge be made as to my reputation you will find me at the front, well-mounted, white-plumed, going right out at the head of the procession, challenging the loudest, meanest, most malignant critic to tell his tale, and I will devour him as he proceeds in his vicious accusation? The people in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew were surprised to hear how good they had been. Not a word did they say about themselves. They were told they had been beneficent, and they said, We have no recollection of it. Is it possible for men to be laying up good works, hardly knowing that they are doing so? Is there after all a papal doctrine of supererogation written in every heart? Is there a temptation which says, If you do double good today you may take fine holidays with the devil tomorrow? We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Do we ever go to the bank of our beneficence and draw upon it, that with its sacred wealth we may feast at the devil's table? We can but put these questions to ourselves, thrust them into ourselves like two-edged swords. Do we buy ourselves off for the week by going to church on Sunday? Do we make bargains with Fate? Do we whisper to that great Force whatever it be, God or Fate, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord and say, Take this, and allow me a little more liberty? No man may answer these questions, because no man can reply to them without cutting himself to pieces. Yet it is well to put them searchingly to the heart, to strike the heart dumb: well to take the hymn sometimes from our lip, to strike it speechless, that the mouth may learn to utter condemnation as well as praise. Still, there is the mystery. Do not try to lessen it, to modify it, to evade it. It stands before us as a fact, that men have prayed, and have been smitten down at the altar; men have done good, and have been left with an empty hand; saints have been tried by fire. All this must be cleared up, and no doubt all this will be elucidated; in the meantime we lose nothing by looking at the mystery in all its proportions, in all its darkness yea, in all its apparent cruelty. Who are the sick today? Do we find any real Christians amongst the poor? Are there honest souls that hardly know where to get the next mouthful of bread? Are there lives, that appear to be lived for others, by way of example, they having to endure all the excruciating pain, and to be lifted up, whilst others look, and wonder, and learn?

Then Job says he was not only living a mechanical life and a beneficent life, and trying to maintain a good reputation amongst men, but he was constant in his religious fidelity.

"If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge" ( Job 31:26-28 ).

Job knew of only one kind of idolatry. He seems not to have been learned in the idolatrous corruptions of the time. It was a beautiful idolatry. What act could be so nearly religious as to fall down before the sun, and hail that majesty of light with hymn, and psalm, and praise, sometimes so intense as to be mute? If any man may be forgiven idolatry, surely he will be forgiven who saw in the sun a kind of deity. Or, Job said, If I have kissed my hand to the moon fair moon, leaf of purity, banner of heaven, most lovely of all the night-shining ones if I have done this, I am willing to be punished: but I have never played the Babylonian idolater, I have never followed sun or moon, I have been constant in my aspirations after the living God; and yet the men who have beheld the sun, and nightly kissed their hands to the moon, are rich and fat and strong, and I am a heap of corruption. Surely God has not been careful to maintain his supremacy by patronage of those who have believed in him! He has not supported his throne by always crowning those who acknowledged it and received their laws from it; that is to say, judging between given points of time, they in some cases seem to have been the despised and rejected of men. Yet let us repeat, for there is something of the nature of an argument in the admission all this is found in the Book of God! What a clearing-up there will be! When the sun does come he will shine in his strength. Meanwhile, the night is sevenfold in darkness; no candle of men's lighting can have any effect upon this gloom: surely some new sun must be created to dissolve this night and restore the dawn. But believing as we do in God, we have confidence in the end. "Hope thou in God; for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God." But who can tell how the light will come? Will a sun be sent, or will God come himself? Are there occasions in history in which preacher, minister, priest, officer, annotator, must all stand back, whilst God takes the case into his own hands, and speaks audibly to those who have been long waiting for the revelation of his law?

Job, however, reserves the severest point to the last; he calls God "his adversary." We never thought that he could have done that. He began by saying, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord "; but now he calls God his foe, his enemy, and he says, "My desire is that the Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book." How often is this text misapplied! How often is it made almost to point a jest? What does the suffering patriarch want? He wants the case written down that he might have it examined in some court of justice. He is dealing with anonymous charges. He says in effect, Would that God would state in plain terms what he has against me, for I do not know what he can have against his servant: I have never wandered from him, I have never worshipped sun, or moon; I have been kind to the poor, gracious to the friendless, my house has been an open house to every traveller who cared to come that way and take its bread; I have attended to my morals, I have been scrupulous about my conduct; I have written a law for my eyes, my hands, my feet: oh that mine adversary, accuser, judge, punisher, would write a book, would put down upon a scroll in plain letters that I could read what it is that has come between him and me! Yes, there we all sometimes stand. We cannot tell what it is that we have done. We go over our prayers and say, They were at least well meant if not well expressed. We review our Church relations, and say, We have been faithful to our bonds and obligations and promises; we have loved the house of God, and longed for the opening of its gates: and now, behold what a black procession comes into the house loss, pain, poverty, affliction many-coloured and many-shaped, and death: were the charge written in black ink upon white paper we could see it, and measure it, and answer it; but it is the air that accuses us, it is the darkening heaven that fills us with dismay; it is an anonymous contempt under which our soul withers. So we will not diminish the mystery one whit; we will read it as an infidel might read it in all the letters which are before us by way of historical statement We will not speak it as if it were some light thing, frivolous in its suggestions and easily borne as to its penalties. We will read it as an unbeliever might read it: we will read it with a vicious accent; we will exhaust our ingenuity of emphasis, in order to make out this mystery in all its bulk and blackness. Better it be so. The answer is not in diminishing the mystery, but in bringing to bear upon it such light as will banish it, drive it away like a shadow that seems to be afraid.