Job 42:1-6

After the Storm

Job 42:1-6

What does it all come to? We have been much excited by the process, what is its consummation? Is the end worthy of the beginning? Is the literary structure well put together, and does it end in domes and pinnacles worthy of its magnitude and original purpose? Or is this a lame and impotent conclusion? Let us deal frankly with the facts as they are before us.

It is difficult to avoid the feeling of some disappointment as we come to the conclusion of the Book of Job. On first reading, the last chapter seems to be the poorest in all the work. If the writer was a dramatist, he seems to have lost his cunning towards the close. This chapter appears, when first looked at, to have been written by a wearied hand. The writer seems to be saying, I would I had never begun this drama of Job: parts of it were interesting enough to me, but now I have come to sum it all up I find a want of glory; I have not light enough to set above the whole tragedy; I thought to have ended amid the glory of noontide, and I find myself writing indistinctly and feebly in the cool and uncertain twilight. Should any man so express himself he must vindicate his position by the chapter as it stands at the close of the Book of Job. Is Job alive? Did we not expect him to go down under the cataract of questions which we had been considering? Does he not lie a dead drowned man under the tremendous torrent? To what shall we liken the course of Job? Shall we say, A ship at sea? Then verily it was a ship that never knew anything but storms: every wind of heaven had a quarrel with it; the whole sky clouded into a frown when looking upon that vessel; the sea was troubled with it as with a burden it could not carry, and the lightnings made that poor ship their sport. Did the ship ever come into port? or was it lost in the great flood? Shall we compare Job to a traveller? Then he seems to have travelled always in great jungles. Quiet, broad, sunny, flowery roads there were none in all the way that Job pursued: he is entangled, he is in darkness, the air is rent by roars and cries of wild beasts and birds of prey. It was a sad, sad journey. Is there anything left of Job? The very weakness of the man's voice in this last chapter is the crowning perfection of art. If Job had stood straight up and spoken in an unruffled and unhindered voice, his doing so would have been out of harmony with all that has gone before. It was an inspiration to make him whisper at the last; it was inspired genius that said, The hero of this tale must be barely heard when he speaks at last; there must be no mistake about the articulation, every word must be distinct, but the whole must be uttered as it would be by a man who had been deafened by all the tempests of the air and affrighted by all the visions of the lower world. So even the weakness is not imbecility; it is the natural weakness that ought to come after such a pressure. Old age has its peculiar and sweet characteristic. It would be out of place in youth. There is a dignity of feebleness; there is a weakness that indicates the progress and establishment of a moral education. Job, then, is not weak in any senile or contemptible sense; he is weak in a natural and proper degree.

Let us hear every word of his speech. What a deep conviction he has of God's infinite majesty "I know that thou canst do every thing." These words might be read as if they were the expression of intellectual feebleness. They are the words of a shattered mind, or of undeveloped intellect; they are more like a repetition than an original or well-reasoned conviction. "I know that thou canst do every thing," words which a child might say. Yet they are the very words that ought to be said under the peculiar circumstances of the case. There must be no attempt to match God's eloquence; that thunder must roll in its own heavens, and no man must attempt to set his voice against that shock of eloquence. Better that Job should speak in a stifled voice, with head fallen on his breast, saying, "I know that thou canst do every thing." He said much saying little. He paid God, so to say, the highest tribute by not answering him in the same rhetoric, but by contrasting his muffled tone with the imperious demands that seemed to shatter the air in which they were spoken. Who can be religious who does not feel that he has to deal with omnipotence? Who can be frivolous in the presence of almightiness in the presence of him whose breath may be turned towards the destruction of the universe, the lifting up of whose hand makes all things tremble. Without veneration here is no religion. That veneration may be turned into superstition is no argument against this contention. Not what may be done by perverting genius, but what is natural and congruous is the question now before the mind. There should be a place, therefore, for silence in the church: "The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him." We may not stare with audacity. If we catch any hint of the light of his garment, it must be by furtive glances. See, then, Job overpowered, convinced at least of omnipotence, assured that he has to deal with almightiness. That assurance will determine all that he says afterwards. But omnipotence is, so to say, objective; it is outside of us, beyond us, something to be looked at, perhaps admired, perhaps appealed to in servile tones.

Is there no attribute of God which corresponds with this but looks in the other direction? Job has discovered that attribute, for he adds "and that no thought can be withholden from thee." The God of Job's conception, then, was first clothed with omnipotence, and secondly invested with omniscience. Job is now upon solid ground. He is no dreaming theologian. He has laid hold of the ideal God in a way which will certainly and most substantially assist him. If omnipotence were the only attribute of God, we should feel a sense of security, because we could exclude him from the sanctuary of our being; we could keep him at bay; we could do with him as we could do with our nearest and dearest friend, we could look loyalty and think blasphemy. Who can not smile, and yet in his heart feel all the cruelty of murder? But here is a God who can search thought, and try the reins of the children of men; from whose eye nothing is hidden, but who sees the thought before it is a thought, when it is rising as a mist from the mind to shape itself into an imagining, a dream or a purpose. There is not a word upon my tongue, there is not a thought in my heart, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether. God is a searcher of hearts. God uses this word "search" again and again in talking to Job: Hast thou searched the depths of the sea, the treasures of the hail, the hiding-place of wisdom? hast thou penetrated it, taken away fold after fold, and probed the infinite secret to its core? A wonderful revelation of God is this, which invests him with the attribute of searching, piercing to the dividing asunder of the joints and marrow. There is nothing hidden from the eye of God. "All things," we read in this book, "are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." God is all secret: to God secret is impossible. The thing we have hidden in our hearts lies under the blaze of noonday burning light Is it nothing to have come to this conclusion on practical grounds as Job has done? We may come into religious conceptions in one of two ways: we may be instructed in them, they may be communicated to us by the friendly voice of father or teacher or pastor, and we may hold them with some realisation of their sacredness; or we may be scourged into them, driven into our religious persuasions and conclusions; we may be caused to flee into them by some pursuing tempest: when that is the case, our religion cannot be uprooted, for it is not something we hold lightly or secure by the hand; it is part of our very souls, it is involved in our identity. So there is a difference between intellectual religion and experimental religion; there is a difference between the Christianity of the young heart and the Christianity of the old heart: in the first instance there must be more or. less of high imagination, ardent desire, perhaps a touch of speculation, perfectly innocent and often most useful; but in the case of the experienced Christian all history stamps the heart with its impress; the man has tested the world, and has written "lie and vanity" on its fairest words; he knows that there is something beyond appearances, he has been afflicted into his religion, and he is now as wrought iron that cannot be bent or broken; the whole process has been completed within himself, so that suggestion and fact, conjecture and experience, joy and sorrow, high strength and all-humbling affliction, have co-operated in the working out of a result which is full of sacred trust, and which is not without a certain stimulus to pure joy.

So what was supposed to be weakness was in reality strength. The subduing of Job as to his mere attitude and voice, is the elevation of Job as to his highest conceptions and experiences. What a thorough conviction he had of his finite condition! "Things too wonderful for me, which I knew not" It is something to know that there are some spaces we cannot reach. The eye can do more than the hand. The hand would sometimes follow the eye, but it follows it at an immeasurable distance. The eye sees the fair blue arch of summer, but the spoiling hand cannot stain that fair disclosure of God's almightiness. The mind is the better for knowing that it is pursued by a law of trespass. Imagination is none the worse, but all the better, for seeing written here and there all round the horizon: No thoroughfare No road Private. What if we could see everything, handle everything, explain everything? Who would not soon tire of the intolerable monotony? It is the surprise, the flash of unexpected light, the hearing of a going in the tops of the trees, the shaking of the arras, that makes one feel that things are larger than we had once imagined, and by their largeness they allure us into broader study, into more importunate prayer. "Things too wonderful for me" in providence, in the whole management of human history, in the handling of the universe that easy, masterly handling by which all things are kept in attitude and at duty, that secret handling, for who can see the hand that arranges and sustains all nature? Yet there nature stands, in all security and harmony and beneficence, to attest that behind it there is a government living, loving, personal, paternal. Is it not something to know, then, that we are not infinite? It is easy to admit that in words. Nothing is gained, however, by these easy admissions of great propositions in metaphysics and theology. We must here again, as in the former instance, be driven into them, so that when we utter them we may speak with the consent and force of a united life. We accept the position of creaturedom, and must not attempt to seize the crown of creatorship.

What dissatisfaction Job expresses with mere hearsay in religious inquiry! "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear." That is superficial. There is nothing in it that can profoundly and savingly affect the life. Who has not heard thousands of sermons, and forgotten them by the easy process of turning aside from their appeals and practically disobeying them? Yet, who has heard aright heard with his soul, heard with his unblunted and undivided attention, heard with the eagerness of men who must hear or die? Alas, there is but little such hearing. Even when the Scripture is read in the public assembly, who can hear all its music, who can reply to its sweet argument? Is there not much mere hearsay in religion? We may hear certain truths repeated so frequently that to hear anything to the contrary would amount to a species of infidelity. In reality, there may be no infidelity in the matter at all, for what we have been hearing may be all wrong as we shall presently have occasion to note. There is a mysterious, half-superstitious influence about repetition. Things may be said with a conciseness and a frequency which claim for the things said a species of revelation. Hence many false orthodoxies, and narrow constructions of human thought and human history, because other things do not balance with what we have always heard. But from whom have we heard these things? It may be that the fault lies in the speaker and in the hearer, and that the new voice is not a new voice in any sense amounting to mere novelty, but new because of our ignorance, new because we were not alive to our larger privileges.

"But now," Job continues, "mine eye seeth thee." "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear" is equal to, I have heard of thine omnipotence: "but now mine eye seeth thee" amounts to a balancing of the omniscient power of God. Man is allowed to see something of God, as God sees everything of man. The vision is reciprocal: whilst God looks we look, "mine eye seeth."

"Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." No man can imagine light. Looking upon the grey landscape before the sun has fully risen, a man says I can imagine what it will be when the sun shines upon it He is wrong. No man can imagine sunlight. He can do so in a little degree; he can imaginatively increase the light that is already shining, but when the sun, so to say, chooses to come out in all the wizardry of his power, touching and blessing what he will and as he will, he startles the most diligent devotee at his altar with new displays of unsuspected splendour. So it is, only in infinitely higher degree, with the living God. Could we but see him even in his goodness, it should be unto us like glory; were his glory to pass before us, we should never see it more, for we should be blinded by the excess of light.

Here, then, we find the patriarch once so eloquent abhorring himself in dust and ashes. That is a condition to which we must come before we can be right with God. Whilst we are mere controversialists, we can never be penitents; whilst we are "clever," we can never pray; whilst we think that there is one poor little rag upon our nakedness, God will not command the blessed ones to bring forth the white robe of adoption and restoration. We must be unmade before we can be re-made. We must be dead before we can live. Thou fool, that which thou sowest must die before it can bring forth fruit. That is the explanation of our want of real religion. We have never experienced real contrition for sin. We have never seen that we are sinners. If we could see that, all the other prayers of Scripture would gather themselves up in the one prayer God be merciful to me a sinner! So long as we can ask questions we are outside the whole idea of redemption; by these questions we mean merely intellectual inquiries, not the solemn moral inquiry, "What shall I do to be saved?" but the vain intellectual inquiry which assumes that the mind retains its integrity and is willing to converse with God upon equal terms. From the Pharisee God turns away with infinite contempt. We may know something of the full meaning of this by looking at it in its social relations. Take the case as it really stands in actual experience. A man has misunderstood you, robbed you; has acted proudly and self-sufficiently toward you; has been assured of one thing above all others, and that is that he himself is right whoever else may be wrong: he has pursued his course; that course has ended in failure, disappointment, mortification, poverty: he returns to you that he may ask favours, but he asks them with all the old pride, without a single hint that he has done anything wrong, or committed a single mistake. You cannot help that man; you may feed him, but he can never rise above the position of a mendicant, a pauper for whom there is no help of a permanent kind. He speaks to you as if he were conferring a favour upon you in asking for the bread he wants to eat. What must that man do before he can ever be a man again in any worthy sense? He must get rid of his pride, his self-sufficiency, his self-idolatry; he must come and say, if not in words yet in all the signification of spirit I am a fool, I have done wrong every day of my life; I have mistaken the bulk, proportion, colour, value of everything; I have been vain, self-sufficient, self-confident; I have duped myself: O pity me! Now you can begin, and now you can make solid work: the old man has been taken out of him; the sinning, the offending Adam has been whipped out of him, and he comes and says in effect, Help me now, for I am without self-excuse, self-defence; my vanity, my pride are not dead only, but buried, rotten, for ever gone. Now you may open your mind, open your heart, open your hand; now you may buy a ring for his fingers and shoes for his feet; now you may bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; now he begins to be a son. But without this there is no possible progress. If we go to God and say that we are men of great intellect, men even of genius, we can understand thee, show thyself to us; we are equal to the occasion; if we have made any mistakes, they are mere slips, they have not affected the integrity of our character or the pureness of our souls; we will climb the range of creation; we will demand to exercise the franchise of our uninjured manhood. Nothing will come of such high demand. The heavens will become as lead when such appeals are addressed to them. We must come in another tone, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner! Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? "A guilty, weak, and helpless worm, on thy kind arms I fall." Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make as one of thy hired servants. Now the house will be full of light, full of music; a house almost heaven.

Prayer

We bless thy name, thou loving One, for thinking of our need of rest. Thou knowest our frame, thou rememberest that we are dust; thou hast set among the days one whose name is Rest. This is the Sabbath of the Lord. We hear thy voice saying unto us, Rest awhile. Thou dost cause us to rest that we may gather strength; thou dost not lull us into stupor; thou dost in sleep make us again, yea, thou dost create us in thine own image and likeness, so that when we come back from the land of forgetfulness we are ready for duty, for service, for suffering, and we expend the Lord's rest in doing the Lord's work. We bless thee for the Sabbath day. It is a day of triumph, the grave was robbed of its victory by the rising Christ He is not in the grave, he is risen: we behold the place where the Lord lay, but he himself has gone forth free for ever. Teach us the meaning of death; show us that we must all die, but that being in Christ we die into greater life; we do not die into darkness and extinction, we die into light and immortality. Jesus Christ brought this great truth to light in the gospel: now we say, O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? We triumph in the Lord's victory, we rise again in the Lord's resurrection. Help us to understand more of our relation to Jesus Christ; enable us to feel it more vitally; may we be in him, rooted, stablished, built up, yea may we be made one with the Son of God. Then shall Christ's triumph be ours, and the peace of Christ shall be our peace, and because he is in heaven we shall be very near him there. Fill us with all the fulness of Christ. In him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily: may we partake of that fulness fulness of God, fulness of Christ, fulness of life, and light, and love; yea, may Christ: overflow in us, so that we may the more abundantly and earnestly desire him, knowing how rich is his grace, and how tender the touch of his love. We bless thee for all sense of new life; thou art writing the story of the resurrection upon the face of the whole earth; every opening flower preaches the good news of rising again, every green little bud upon hedge and tree tells us that God liveth, and he will bring up, from the winter of our sorrow and sin and overthrow, the spring immortal, the spring of celestial beauty. Every morning preaches the gospel of resurrection, every night the old enemy is overthrown and buried, and new-born light shines upon all the awakening and rejoicing earth. May we not be beguiled from our faith by aught that men can say of nature misread and misunderstood; may we rather read the parable of divine action in nature, and see in every dawn, in every spring, in every new opportunity, a hint of recreation, and a guarantee of immortality. Help us to bring the power of an endless life to bear upon the action of the present day; then shall little things be made great, and things of no account shall stand up invested with importance. Every word shall fall into the music of Thine own utterance, and every aspiration shall lift us nearer thy throne. Pity those who have no Sabbath day, who toil, and wear themselves, and fall as victims under crushing anxieties; pity those who have no Eastertide, no vernal springtide, no occasion of realized life, in which death flees away, and the grave, ashamed of its emptiness, seeks to fill itself with flowers. Look upon those who are dying, and tell them that death is overthrown; may there be joy in the chamber of affliction, may there be triumph in the house of bereavement, may they who sit in darkness see a great light, and say, Christ the Lord is risen today, and his name is great in Zion. Amen.