Job’s Dialogue with Three Friends – Job 3:1 to Job 31:40, which makes up the major portion of this book, consists of a dialogue between Job and his three friends. In this dialogue, Job’s friends engage in three rounds of accusations against Job, with him offering three defenses of his righteousness. Thus, Job and his friends are able to confirm each of their views with three speeches, since the Scriptures tell us that a matter is confirmed in the mouth of two or three witnesses (2Co 13:1). The underlying theme of this lengthy dialogue is man’s attempt to explain how a person is justified before God. Job will express his intense grief (Job 3:1-26), in which his three friends will answer by finding fault with Job. He will eventually respond to this condemnation in a declaration of faith that God Himself will provide a redeemer, who shall stand on earth in the latter days (Job 19:25-27). This is generally understood as a reference to the coming of Jesus Christ to redeem mankind from their sins.

Job’s declaration of his redeemer in Job 19:23-29, which would be recorded for ever, certainly moved the heart of God. This is perhaps the most popular passage in the book of Job, and reflects the depth of Job’s suffering and plea to God for redemption. God certainly answered his prayer by recording Job’s story in the eternal Word of God and by allowing Job to meet His Redeemer in Heaven. I can imagine God being moved by this prayer of Job and moving upon earth to provide someone to record Job’s testimony, and moving in the life of a man, such as Abraham, to prepare for the Coming of Christ. Perhaps it is this prayer that moved God to call Abraham out of the East and into the Promised Land.

The order in which these three friends deliver their speeches probably reflects their age of seniority, or their position in society.

Scene 1 First Round of Speeches Job 3:1 to Job 14:22

Scene 2 Second Round of Speeches Job 15:1 to Job 21:34

Scene 3 Third Round of Speeches Job 22:1 to Job 31:40

Fuente: Everett’s Study Notes on the Holy Scriptures

A Complaint over Life’s Troubles

v. 1. Man that is born of a woman, feeble, frail mortal that he is, is of few days and full of trouble, Psa 90:10.

v. 2. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down, coming up quickly, maturing rapidly, and withering as soon; he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not, as the shadow of a cloud hastens over the landscape in a moment of time. The entire first verse is really the subject of the second, the clauses showing man’s frailty, his mortality, and his natural affliction modifying the subject “man. ”

v. 3. And dost Thou open Thine eyes upon such an one, watching him only for the sake of punishing him, feeble and frail as he is, and bringest me into judgment with Thee? Job, who considered himself a particularly wretched example of the human race, was placed before the tribunal of God’s justice, where he knew that it was impossible for him to maintain his cause.

v. 4. Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one. It is a deep cry of misery over the universal sinfulness of the human race, which caused the unpitying severity of God to strike them all, and Job in particular. The human race having once been contaminated by sin, not one pure person will ever come forth in the natural line of development; the wrath and punishment of God rests on all mortals.

v. 5. Seeing his days are determined, cut off, sharply bounded, the number of his months are with Thee, also established beforehand by God; Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass, the term of his earthly life is set, and he cannot change it; this being so, then

v. 6. turn from him that he may rest, have surcease from sorrow and misery, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day, that he at least, while this life lasts, may enjoy it, as a day-laborer finds pleasure in his day, namely, in the rest which the shadow of evening brings after the day’s task is finished.

v. 7. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, the stump sending up a new shoot, and that the tender branch thereof, the suckling which is thus growing up, will not cease. The date-palm of the Orient is especially noted for its great vitality in this respect.

v. 8. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, apparently yielding to decay, and the stock thereof die in the ground, the trunk decaying down to the roots,

v. 9. yet through the scent of water it will bud, it will sprout with new life as soon as the rainy season brings the vigor of water, and bring forth boughs like a plant, just like a sapling but recently planted.

v. 10. But man dieth and wasteth away, lying there prostrate; yea, man giveth up the ghost, expiring miserably, without the hope of rejuvenation, and where is he? What becomes of him, of his proud body? Cf Ecc 3:21.

v. 11. As the waters fail from the sea, literally, “the waters roll off,” disappear, out of the sea, and the flood, a stream, decayeth and drieth up, the evaporating of even large bodies of water during the dry season being no uncommon phenomenon in the torrid regions of the Orient,

v. 12. so man lieth down and riseth not, there will be no return for him to this earthly life, till the heavens be no more; they shall not awake nor be raised out of their sleep, they sleep the long sleep of death, which will be terminated only by the great catastrophe at the end of the world. For the ordinary person there is only the dark night of the grave ahead, a poor improvement upon the miserable present. Only the believer has something more and better to hope for.

Fuente: The Popular Commentary on the Bible by Kretzmann

EXPOSITION

Job 14:1-22

This chapter, in which Job concludes the fourth of his addresses, is characterized by a tone of mild and gentle expostulation, which contrasts with the comparative vehemence and passion of the two preceding chapters. It would seem that the patriarch, having vented his feelings, experiences a certain relief, an interval of calm, in which, his own woes pressing less heavily upon him, he is content to moralize on the general condition of humanity.

Job 14:1

Man that is born of a woman. In this fact Job sees the origin of man’s inherent weakness. He is “born of a woman,” who is “the weaker vessel” (1Pe 3:7). He is conceived by her in uncleanness (Psa 51:5; comp. below, Psa 51:4), brought forth in sorrow and pain (Gen 3:16) suckled at her breasts, placed for years under her guidance. No wonder that he shares the weakness of which she is a sort of type. Is of few days; literally, short of days. Length and shortness of days are, no doubt, relative; and it is difficult to say what term of life would not have seemed short to men as they looked back upon it. To Jacob, at the age of a hundred and thirty, it appeared that “few and evil had the days of the years of his life been” (Gen 47:9). Methuselah, perhaps, thought the same. We all, as we come towards old age, and death draws manifestly near, feel as if we had only just begun to live, as if, at any rate, we had not done half our work, and were about to be cut off before our time. But would the case be seriously different if our tale of years were doubled? And fall of trouble (comp. Job 5:7).

Job 14:2

He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down. Few similes are more frequently used in Scripture (comp. Psa 103:15; Isa 28:1, Isa 28:4; Isa 40:6, Isa 40:7; Jas 1:10, Jas 1:11; 1Pe 1:24), and certainly none could have more poetic beauty. Eastern flowers do not often last much more than a day. He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not (comp. Job 7:2; Job 8:9; 1Ch 29:15; Psa 102:11; Psa 109:23; Ecc 6:12, etc.). Shadows are always changing; but the shadows which flee away the fastest, and which Job has probably in his mind, are those of clouds, or other moving objects, which seem to chase each other over the earth, and never to continue for a single minute in one stay.

Job 14:3

And dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one? Is it compatible with God’s greatness, unchangeableness, and majesty to take any notice of so poor, weak, and unstable a creature as mortal man? The question has been often asked, and answered by many in the negative, as by the Epicureans of old. Job does not really entertain any doubt upon the point; but only intends to express his wonder that it should be so (comp. Psa 8:4, and above, Job 7:17). And bringest me into judgment with thee? Especially astonishing is it, Job says, that God should condescend to try, pass judgment on, and punish so weak, worthless, and transitory a creature as himself.

Job 14:4

Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one. It is scarcely true to say that “the fact of original sin is thus distinctly recognized”. Original uncleanness and infirmity are recognized; but the uncleanness is material, and removable by material expiation (Le Job 12:2-8). It is rather man’s weakness than his sinfulness that is here under discussion.

Job 14:5

Seeing his days are determined. Job here returns to the consideration of the shortness of man’s life. “His days are determined;” i.e. they are a limited period, known to and fixed beforehand by God. They are not like God’s days, which “endure throughout all generations” (Psa 102:24). The number of his months are with thee. “With thee” means here “known to thee,” “laid up in thy counsels.” Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass. “His bounds” are “the limit of his lifetime.” The three clauses are pleonastic. One idea pervades them all.

Job 14:6

Turn from him, that he may rest; literally, look away from him; i.e. “Cease to watch him and search him out so continually” (comp. Job 7:17, Job 7:18). “Then he will be able to have a breathing-time, an interval of peace and rest, before his departure from the earth.” What Job had previously desired for himself (Job 10:20) he now asks for all humanity. Till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. Hired labourers are glad when their day’s work is over. So man rejoices when life comes to an end.

Job 14:7

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down. God’s vegetable creation is better off, in respect of length of days, than man. Let a tree be cut down, it is not therefore of necessity destroyed. There is yet hope for it. The bare dry stump will sometimes put forth tender branches, which will grow and flourish, and renew the old life. Or, if the stump be quite dead, suckers may spring up from the root and grow into new trees as vigorous as the one that they replace (comp. Isa 11:1). Herodotus considered that all trees had this recuperative power, except the , a species of fir (Herod; 6.37), and the traveller Shaw says that when a palm tree dies there is always a sucker ready to take its place. Pliny also observes of the laurel, “Viva-cissima est radix, ita ut, si truncus ina-ruerit, recisa arbor mox laetius frutificet” (‘Hist. Nat.,’ 1.15. 30). That it will sprout again. That is, from the spool or stump. Some trees, as the Spanish chest. nut, if cut down flush with the ground, throw up shoots from the entire circle of the stomp, often as many as fifteen or twenty. And that the tender branch thereof will not cease. The vigour of such shoots is very great. In a few years they grow to the height of the parent tree. If they are then removed they are quickly replaced by a fresh growth.

Job 14:8, Job 14:9

Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. After the stump is actually dead, suckers may be thrown up from the roots, if sufficient water be supplied to them; and these will put forth branches luxuriantly.

Job 14:10

But man dieth. “Man” is here , “the brave, strong man,” not or , and the meaning is that man, however brave and’ strong, perishes. And wasteth away; i.e. “comes to nought, remains no strength or vitality.” Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? “Where is he?” Job could not answer this question. He might say, “In Sheol.” But where was Sheol, and what was Sheol? There was no written revelation on this subject, and no traditional knowledge on which dependence could be placed. The Hebrew notions on the subject were very vague and indeterminate; Job’s notions are likely to have been still vaguer. There is no reason to believe that he had any exact acquaintance with the tenets of the Egyptians. He may have known the Chaldean teaching, but it would not have carried him very far. Doubt and perplexity beset him whenever he turned his attention to the problem of man’s condition after death, and, excepting when carried away by a burst of enthusiasm, he seems to have regarded it as the highest wisdom, in matters of this kind, “to knew that he knew nothing.” The question, “Where is he?” is an acknowledgment of this profound ignorance.

Job 14:11

As the waters fail from the sea. The allusion seems to be to the actual desiccation of seas and rivers. Job, apparently, had known instances of both. A formation of new land in the place, of sea is always going on at the head of the Persian Gulf, through the deposits of the Tigris and Euphrates; and this formation was very rapid in ancient times, when the head of the gulf was narrower. The desiccation of river-courses is common in Mesopotamia, where arms thrown out by the Tigris and Euphrates get blocked, and then silted up. And the flood decayeth and drieth up; rather, and the river decayeth‘ etc. (see the comment on the preceding clause).

Job 14:12

So man lieth down, and riseth not. This is not an absolute denial of a final resurrection, since Job is speaking of the world as it lies before him, not of eventualities. Just as he sees the land encroach upon the sea, and remain land, and the river-courses, once dried up, remain dry, so he sees men descend into the grave and remain there, without rising up again. This is the established order of nature as it exists before his eyes. Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake. This order of things, Job believes, rightly enough, will continue as long as the heavens and the earth endure. What will happen afterwards he does not so much as inquire. It is remarked, ingeniously, that Job’s words, though not intended in this sense, exactly “coincide with the declarations of the New Testament, which make the resurrection simultaneous with the breaking up of the visible universe” (Canon Cook). Nor be raised out of their sleep. If “the glimmer of a hope” of the resurrection appears anywhere in verses 10-12, it is in the comparison of death to a sleep, which is inseparably connected in our minds with an awakening.

Job 14:13

Oh that thou wouldest hide me in the grave! literally, in Sheol, which here does not so much mean “the grave,” as the place of departed spirits, described in Job 10:21, Job 10:22. Job desires to have God’s protection in that” land of darkness,” and to be “hidden” there by him until his wrath be past. It has been generally supposed that he means after his death; but Schultens thinks his desire was to descend to Sheol alive, and there remain, while his punishment continued, hidden from the eyes of men. That thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past. Job assumes that, if he is being punished for his youthful sins (Job 13:26), his punishment will not be for longat any rate, not for ever; God’s anger will at last be satisfied and cease. That thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! How long he may have to suffer be does not greatly care. Only let it be “a set time”a fixed, definite periodand at the end of it, let God “remember” him.

Job 14:14

If a man die, shall he live again? The question is clearly intended to be answered in the negative. It is not a dispassionate inquiry, but an expression of hopelessness. Let a man once die, and of course he cannot live again. Were it otherwise, then, Job says, all the days of my appointed time will I wait; or, rather (as in the Revised Version), all the days of my warfare would I wait; i.e. I would patiently endure any sufferings in the larger hope that would then be open to me. I would wait till my change (rather, my renewal) come. The exact nature of the ‘renewal” which Job seems here to expect is obscure. Perhaps he is pursuing the idea, broached in verse 13, of his being conveyed alive to Hades, and looks forward to a furthur renewed life after he is released from that “land of darkness.”

Job 14:15

Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee; rather, thou shouldest call, and I would answer thee (see the Revised Version). In that case, when I quitted Hades, and renewed my life, thou wouldst assuredly summon me to thee, and I would respond to the summons. There would be sweet colloquy between us; for thou wilt (or, rather, wouldest) have a desire to the work of thine hands (comp. Job 10:8-11). Job assumes that God must love whatever he has created, and be drawn towards it by a secret, strong desire.

Job 14:16

For now thou numberest my steps; rather, but now. Job, at this point, proceeds to contrast his actual condition with the ideal one which (in verses 13-15) his imagination has conjured up. God’s actual attitude towards him he regards as one, not of protecting love, but of jealous hostility. His “steps” are observed, countedevery divergence from the right path is noteda false step, if he makes one, is at once punished. Dost thou not watch over my sin? (comp. Job 10:14). Job’s sins, he thinks, are watched for, spied out, taken note of, and remembered against him.

Job 14:17

My transgression is sealed up in a bag (comp. Deu 32:34); i.e. God keeps account of all my transgressions. It is as if he put them all into a bag (compare “Put my tears into thy bottle,” Psa 56:8), whence they can be taken out and brought against me at any moment. They are “sealed up” in the bag for greater security. And thou sewest up mine iniquity. (So Ewald, Dillmaun, Canon Cook, and the Revised Version.) Others think the meaning to be, “Thou addest to my iniquity [continually];” i.e. by placing fresh sins to my account. (So Schultens and Rosenmuller.)

Job 14:18

And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought. Job here resumes the lament ‘over human infirmity, with which the chapter opens (verses 1-12); but he has, perhaps, in this passage, his own case mote distinctly presented to his consciousness. With the wealth of metaphor which characterizes his utterances, he compares the ruin of a prosperous man

(1) to the sudden collapse of a mountain;

(2) to the removal of a rock out of its place;

(3) to the wearing away of stones by the constant flow of streams; and

(4) to the destruction of alluvial tracts by floods.

Mountains collapse, either by volcanic agency, which is quite as much shown in the subsidence as in the elevation of the soil, or by landslips, which are most usually the results of heavy rains. And the rock is removed out of his place. Rocks are sometimes split by frost, and topple over when a thaw comes; at other times, heavy floods remove them from their accustomed place; occasionally earthquakes overturn them, and cause them to fall with a crash. There is also a removal of rocks to much greeter distances, by means of glaciers and icebergs; but of these Job is not likely to have known.

Job 14:19

The waters wear the stones. The power of the soft element of water, by continual washing or dripping, to wear away the hardest stone, has often been noticed, and is a frequent topic in poetry. Deep ravines have been worn in course of time, through broad and lofty mountain ranges by rivers, the stone yielding little by little to the action of the water, until at last a broad chasm is made. So the continual wearing action of calamity often lays low the prosperous. Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; rather, as in the Revised Version, the overflowings thereof wash away the dust of the earth; i.e. “overflows of water, inundations, floods, not only make a way through rocks, but often carry off great tracts of rich soil, hurrying the alluvium down to the sea, and leaving in its place a marsh or a waste.” And thou destroyest the hope of man. Even thus from time to time does God ruin and destroy the hopes of a prosperous man.

Job 14:20

Thou prevailset for ever against him, and he passsth; rather, thou puttest forth thy power against him perpetually; i.e. thou art continually oppressing him, and crushing him by afflictions; and the consequence is that “he passes;” i.e. “he passes away, disappears, ceases to be.” Thou changest his countenance. “Alterest,” i.e, “its expression from cheerfulness to sadness, and its complexion from the hue of health to the sickly pallor of disease; settest the stamp of death upon it, and further dis-figurest it in the dreadful process of decay.” And sendest him away. That is to say, “Thou removest him from the earth, dismissest him to Sheol, where thenceforth he remains?’

Job 14:21

His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not. The meaning seems to be, “If his sons come to honour, it is of no advantage to him; in the remote and wholly separate region of Sheol he will not be aware of it.” The view is more dismal than that of Aristotle, who argues that the fate of those whom they have loved and left on earth will be sure to penetrate, in course of time ( )’ to the departed, and cause them a certain amount of joy or sorrow (‘Eth. Nic.,’ 1.11). And they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them. Equally, in the opposite case, if his sons are brought low, he is ignorant of it, and unaffected by their fate.

Job 14:22

But his flesh upon him shall have pain. The best rendering is probably that which is placed in the margin of the Revised Version, only for himself his flesh hath pain, and for himself his soul mourneth. Nothing more is intended than to negative the idea that the future condition of his children will seriously affect a man who is suffering under God’s afflicting hand, either in this life or afterwards. He cannot but be occupied solely with himself. His own sufferings, whether of body or mind, win absorb all his attention.

HOMILETICS

Job 14:1-6

Job to God: 2. The death-wail of humanity.

I. THE WAIL OF HUMANITY IN THE EAR OF GOD.

1. The constitutional frailty of man. Moses, in the Book of Genesis (Gen 1:26; Gen 2:7), sets forth the dignity of man (Adam) as the crown of creation (Psa 8:6), as the handiwork of God (Job 10:8; Psa 100:3; Isa 15:1-9 :12), as the image of his Maker (Gen 9:6; Act 17:29; 1Co 11:7). Job here supplies the companion picture of the misery of man by representing him as:

(1) Descended from woman, who was not only taken out of weak man, but is expressly declared to be the weaker vessel (1Pe 3:7), and is the subject of a special doom of weakness in herself and offspring in consequence of having been first in the transgression (Gen 3:16; 1Ti 2:14)all which may be said to entail on the human race, as it were by a threefold necessity, the pitiable heritage of frailty.

(2) Sprung from the dust, out of which man emerged, and still emerges, like a flower (Psa 103:15; Isa 40:6; Jas 1:10), and to which again, like the flower, he shall in due course return (Gen 3:19); in the meanwhile, as he hovers between the cradle and the grave, his birthplace and his place of sepulture, being like the flower, a structure of exquisite loveliness and of admirable symmetry (Psa 139:14), but after all delicate and tender as a flower, being, like it, only a handful of dexterously fashioned and beautifully painted dust.

(3) Insubstantial as a shadow, which is not so much a thing as the image and reflection of a thing, the projection on the ground of an opaque body whose dark form intercepts the light of heaven, a metaphor applied already by Bildad to man’s days (Job 8:9; cf. Psa 102:11; Psa 144:4), but here with greater bohtness appropriated to depict the utter insignificance of man himself.

2. The extreme brevity of human life. The period of man’s continuance on earth is sorrowfully exhibited as:

(1) Of definite extension (verse 5; cf. Job 7:1, Job 7:2). Uncertain in the eye of man himself (Ecc 9:11, Ecc 9:12), the hour of each one’s departure from this sublunary scene is accurately known by God (Jer 28:16), in whose hands are not only the souls of all living things and the breath of all mankind (Job 12:10), but their times as well (Psa 31:15), to whose all-seeing eye the number of their months is as well known as the number of their hairs (Luk 12:7), who hath not only appointed the bounds of their habitation (Act 17:26), but also determined their days, setting a bound to their goings on the face of the earth as effectually as he does to the waves of the sea (Job 38:11). And this doctrine of each man on earth having a predestined career is as philosophical as it is scriptural, the foreordination of the Almighty not interfering with the operation of natural laws and secondary causes. Nor is it contradicted by those texts of Scripture which seem to teach that the limit of man’s pilgrimage is determined by purely accidental circumstances (Job 15:32; Job 22:16; Psa 55:23; Ecc 7:17).

(2) Of short duration (verses 1, 2, 5, 6). Whether the expression, “of few days,” literally, “curtailed as to days,” contains an allusion to the fact that human life was shorter than it would have been had man continued innocent, or that in Job’s time it was shorter than it had been i, the world’s infancy, it is certain that an exceedingly impressive picture is presented by the phrases and images here employed, human life at the Longest being characterized as “months,” then “days,” and these only “few,” and after that as “a day,” as the brief season during which a flower blooms, as the short time during which the shadow runs. Contrasted with the age of the race, the duration of the earth, the lifetime of God, yea, contrasted with itself in prospective anticipation, the life of man, especially in the retrospect, is “but a handbreadth” (Psa 39:5).

(3) Of quick transition. Coming forth like a flower, man has scarcely begun to bloom when he is cut down (cf. ‘ Henry VIII.,’ act 3. sc. 2). The few days that God allots him to live refuse to linger, but hurry on, like the shadow on the dial, never hasting, never resting, but ever moving, moving, moving on.

“Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;
And after one hour more, ’twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour. we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot.’

(‘As You Like It,’ act 2. sc. 5.)

3. The intense severity of human sorrow. Besides being of few days, woman-born man is full of trouble, literally, “full of unrest,” of inward commotion and of outward motion, its inevitable sequence and result. Though perhaps it is not true of any that their existence on earth is so completely “satiated with sorrow,” that no interludes of joy remain, it is yet true of most that affliction forms a principal ingredient in their cup (Job 5:7), while of all it may be said that a considerable portion of their troubles springs from the spirit of unrest with which they are surcharged, and of which the primal cause is sin. “A few seem favourites of fate, in pleasure’s lap caressed,” though even these are not “likewise truly blest” in the highest sense of the expression.

“But oh! what crowds in every land
Are wretched and forlorn,”

through bodily disease, mental anxiety, domestic sorrow, through “man’s inhumanity to man,” through the fierce raging of inward passion, through the terrible cankerworm of sin!

4. The inherited corruption of man‘s moral nature. “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one?” (verse 4). Read as a wish, “Oh that a pure one could come from an impure!” (Delitzsch), the idea is the same, that purity is impossible to man because of his origin. Descended from woman, he brings with him into life a legacy of physical frailty, and, what is worse, of uncleanness. The language may perhaps be regarded as giving enunciation to the doctrine of original sin‘ i.e. of the hereditary corruption of human naturea doctrine pervading Scripture (Gen 5:3; Gen 6:5; Gen 8:21; Psa 51:5; 1Co 15:22; Rom 5:12-20; Eph 2:3); involved in the universal prevalence of sin (Job 11:12; Psa 58:3; Rev 22:15); presupposed in the necessity of regeneration (Joh 3:6); confirmed by the experience of God’s people (Job 40:4; Psa 51:5; Isa 6:5; Rom 7:14); and harmonizing with the all-pervading law of nature that like begets like.

II. THE APPEAL OF HUMANITY TO THE HEART OF GOD.

1. Deprecating judgment. “And dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one, and bringest me into judgment with thee?” (verse 3). A favourite idea with Job that the very frailty and sinfulness of man should have been his protection against the Divine inspection and judicial visitation, that it was scarcely worthy of the Divine Majesty to set a watch upon a creature so insignificant and feeble as man, or consistent with equity to arraign at his bar a being whose weakness was constitutional and hereditary. But that original sin or hereditary weakness does not destroy the consciousness of individual responsibility, is proclaimed by Scripture (Gen 4:7; Exo 32:33; Job 31:3; Eze 18:4), attested by conscience, and believed by society. And, though man is frail, he is neither powerless for evil, nor unimportant as a factor in the history of earth. Hence he cannot safely be overlooked. Neither is he unjustly brought into judgment. Still God allows himself to be moved to compassionate forbearance by both a contemplation of man’s frailty (Psa 103:14), and a consideration of his inherited corruption (Gen 6:3, Gen 6:5).

2. Supplicating mercy. “Turn from him [literally, ‘look away from him’], that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day” (verse 6). Considering that man has only a short day to live, Job entreats that that day may be mercifully exempted from such special sufferings as spring from a Divine marking and punishing of sin, in order that man, the poor hireling, may be able to perform his appointed task. On human life as a term of hard service, and man as a miserable hired drudge, see Job 7:1 (homiletics). The prayer tells us that no man can adequately execute the tasks assigned him by God on earth whose body is racked by pain and whose mind is tormented by spiritual fear. The soul that cannot look on God as a Friend, or upon whom God seems to look as an enemy, can never be at perfect rest (Isa 57:21). But he from whom God averts his face in the sense of not marking iniquity (Psa 32:1), and much more upon whom God makes his face to shine in loving favour (Job 33:26; Psa 89:15; Joh 16:22; Act 2:28), possesses the true secret of happiness, and the noblest inspiration for Christian work In Christ the face of God is turned mercifully away from human sin, and compassionately towards human sorrow.

Learn:

1. There is no room for pride of ancestry in man, since all alike are woman-born. 2 The lowly origin of man should impress the heart with humility.

3. Since man’s days are so full of trouble, it is a mercy they are few; and since they are so few, man should study to be patient under trouble.

4. The swift approach of death should stimulate to diligence and promote heavenly-mindedness.

5. The heart of God can be touched with a feeling of our infirmities.

6. God will never open his eyes to judge their sins who first open their eyes to behold his mercy.

7. One special reason of our requiring mercy is our inherited corruption, since it proves that we are, root and branch, depraved.

Job 14:2

Man as a flower.

I. IN HIS ORIGIN. He springeth from the ground.

II. IN HIS CONSTITUTION. He is composed of dust.

III. IN HIS STRUCTURE. His physical organism is as beautiful and delicate as that of a flower.

IV. IN HIS FRAILTY. He is as easily destroyed as a flower.

V. IN HIS EVANESCENCE. He is as short-lived as a flower.

VI. IN HIS END. Like a flower, he returns to the dust.

LESSONS.

1. Lowly thoughts of self.

2. Care of the body.

3. Preparation for the end.

Job 14:7-15

Job to God: 3. A glimpse into the life beyond.

I. “IF A MAN DIE, SHALL HE LIVE AGAIN?” No!

1. The voice of nature is against it. “For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,” etc. (verses 7-9). But nothing like this occurs in the case of man, of whom rather the cheerless proverb holds that, as the tree falls, so shall it lie (Ecc 11:3). Hewn down by the axe of death, or laid prostrate by age beneath the sod, there is in his decaying body no vital germ which can send forth tender sprouts. The earth contains no revivifying principle for him as for trees. The fine manly fellow, rejoicing in his vigorous health, begins to droop and to die; he gives up the ghost, or expires, and where is he? (verse 10). There is no subsequent resuscitation for him. No! Man’s appropriate emblem is not the trees, but the streams and the lakes. When man dies, he disappears completely from the present scene, like the dried-up waters of a lake, or of a mountain torrent that have forsaken their accustomed bed.

2. The testimony of experience is against it. A phenomenon so stupendous as the return of a dead and buried man to life has never once been witnessed. With a terrible uniformity of sadness, each age has followed its predecessor to the tomb. And there are those who affirm that this dreary monotony has never been interrupted; that the sum of human experience is the same to-day as it was in Job’s time; that “man lieth down, and riseth not” (verse 12); and that there is no reason to anticipate that it ever will be different, but much cause to conclude that for evermore it will continue the same (Ecc 1:9). But

(1) uniformity of past experience cannot with absolute finality determine future events in a world governed by Omniscient Wisdom and Infinite Power;

(2) in numerous instances already the principle of reckoning from past uniformity has been found to be unsafe, as e.g. the successive appearance of new species of living creatures on earth, according to either geological science or biblical revelation, the occurrence of the Deluge, the manifestation of Christ;

(3) in particular the uniformity of experience referred to, viz. of the non-return of men from their graves, has, on the evidence of human testimony, been broken at least once by the resurrection of Christ; and

(4) even had it not been broken once, such uniformity of past experience cannot be regarded as valid against the doctrine of a resurrection such as Scripture teaches, viz. a return of mankind to the earth, not successively at different times and in divers parts and parcels, but simultaneously in one united body.

3. The verdict of silence is against it. Not of true science, but of arrogantly talking, much asserting, materialism. What Job uses as beautiful similitudes (verses 7, 11, 18, 19) modern sages employ as scientific truth. Man, according to their findings, is of a piece with the great material world by which he is surrounded, in which there is continually going on a resistless process of disintegration and dissolution, before which he sooner or later succumbs, like the trees and the rocks, the mountains and the streams. To expect, therefore, that a dead man shall return to his place on earth is as unscientific as to anticipate that the alluvial deposits of the plain shall replace themselves upon the mountain’s sides from which they have been taken, or that the shattered rock shall resume its station in the crevice out of which it has fallen, or that the water of a lake which has evaporated shall again cover its desiccated bed, or the fleecy cloud which has dissolved and been dispersed shall recombine itself upon the face of heaven.

II. “IF A MAN DIE, SHALL HE LIVE AGAIN?” YES!

1. The phenomena of nature suggest it. “There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again.” Why, then, should there not be hope of a man reviving from the bed of death? Why should not man have his springtime as well as the plants and flowers and roots? “Everything in nature is a sign of something higher and more living than itself, to follow in due course, and in turn announce a yet higher one; the mineral foretells the plant, the plant the animal, all things in their degree foretell mankind”. Again, “The presignificance of animal forms and economy by plants extends to the whole of their organic functions, to many of their organs, even to their spontaneous movements, their habits and qualities”. Many of the functions usually supposed to be characteristic of animals have a marvellous foreshadowing in vegetables, as e.g. the processes of eating and digesting food, the procreation and birth of offspring, the act of respiration and the repose of sleep. May it not, then, be maintained that the constantly recurring winter death, and spring revival of trees and plants and flowers, are prefigurements, not only of the sleeping and waking of animals generally, but also of the death and resurrection of man?

2. The instincts of humanity desire it. “Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol!” etc. (verse 13). Job had not, indeed, perfect certainty on the subject of his returning from Hades, but in the deepest yearnings of his soul, which here flashed up into momentary brightness, he longed for such a revival as is implied in the resurrection. And the argument derived from this is that the existence of such a hope in the human soul renders probable at least the doctrine of a resurrection. “Intuition is worth volumes of logic”. “Where in the plan of nature do we find instincts falsified? Where do we see an instance of a creature instinctively craving a certain kind of food in a place where no such food can be found? Are the swallows deceived by their instinct when they fly away from clouds and storms to seek a warmer country? Do they not find a milder climate beyond the water? When the may-flies and other aquatic insects leave their shells, expand their winos, and soar from the water into the air, do they not find an atmosphere fitted to sustain them in a new stage of life? Yes. The voice of nature does not utter false prophecies. It is the call, the invitation, of the Creator addressed to his creatures. And if this be true with regard to the impulses of the physical life, why should it not be true with regard to the superior instincts of the soul?”.

3. The dignity of man demands it. “Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands” (verse 15). It was utterly inconceivable that God could be happy so long as man, the noblest specimen of his handiwork, whom his own hands had fashioned with tender care and infinite skill (Job 10:3, Job 10:9), upon whom, as it were, he had impressed the stamp of his own Divinity (Gen 1:26), and whom he had set at the very apex of creation (Psa 8:6), was lying mouldering in the dust; nay, by the very necessities of the case, God would yearn (grow pale with anxiety and wan with longing) after his absent creature and child, and, eventually breaking in upon the silence of the grave, would summon the unconscious sleeper to arise. “Do you suppose,” Job virtually asks, “that if I yearn after God as I do, God does not likewise yearn after me; that if it would add to my felicity to see God in the flesh, and to talk with him as a man talketh with his friend, it would not likewise intensify his blessedness to have me in my complete manhood by his side?” And in this idea of the essential dignity of man as God’s handiwork and God’s child, we are warranted to find, if not a certain demonstration, at least a strong presumption that man will yet attain to an embodied life be:. end the grave.

4. The witness of revelation proclaims it. Like other parts of the gospel scheme, the doctrine of a resurrection was only gradually unfolded. In antediluvian times it may have been suggested to thoughtful minds by the translation of Enoch. In the Abrahamic period the hope of a better country, even an heavenly, was strong in pious hearts; but it is not certain that this implied more than a belief in immortality, or in a continuous existence beyond the grave, though the case of Job clearly shows that even then men had begun to speculate about the probability of a return to the embodied state alter death, and the practice of embalming among the Egyptians has been held to prove that such a doctrine had even then become a popular belief. In the age of David the hope of a resurrection burned brighter and clearer (Psa 16:11; Psa 17:15). Isaiah spoke of a rising of Jehovah’s dead body, and of the earth casting forth her dead (Isa 26:19); Ezekiel, of an opening of the graves (Eze 38:9, Eze 38:18); Daniel, of an awaking out of sleep (Dan 12:2). But not until the times of the gospel was the doctrine fully declared. Christ affirmed it (Joh 5:28, Joh 5:29); St. Peter proved it (Act 2:25-32; Act 12:1-25 :34); St. Paul preached it (Act 17:31) and wrote concerning it (Rom 8:11,Rom 8:12; 1Co 15:12-20).

5. The resurrection of Christ secures it. “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that sleep” (1Co 15:20). The resurrection of Christ being as certain a fact of history as his death, the resurrection of his people at least is conclusively established (Joh 14:19; Rom 8:11; 1Th 4:14), and the question of Job finally answered.

LESSONS.

1. The importance of using life well, since no man returns to the present scene.

2. The strong consolation which the saint finds in the hope of a resurrection.

Job 14:16-22

Job to God: 4. Falling back into the darkness.

I. BROODING OVER HIS MISERY.

1. A sudden transition. Job’s anticipation of the future resurrection-life was a momentary inspiration; not a calm, clear, steady light, diffusing a cheerful radiance within his soul, and shining on his onward progress to the grave, but a bright meteoric flash shooting up before his mind’s eye, dazzling it for an instant by celestial splendours, and then plunging across the firmament of his soul into darkness. Like Moses on the summit of Mount Pisgah, looking out over Jordan towards the promised land; like Christ upon the snowy crown of Hermon, gazing far beyond the cross to the glory that was to follow, this great prophetic soul, with his vision clarified through suffering, having been set down by the grave’s mouth, looked across the dark Hadean world, and descried the resurrection-life beyond. But, alas! like the Pisgah-glimpse of Canaan and the transfiguration-glory of Mount Hermon, the beatific vision was not of long duration. It was a momentary parting of the veil before the undiscovered countrynothing more. It came, it paused not, it passed, it vanished. The old stream of sorrowful emotion, out of which Job had been lifted for a season, as St. Paul was caught up into the third heaven, resumed its course. He was once more in the full current of his misery. Such transitions are not infrequent in the Christian lifefrom light to darkness, from joy to sadness, from peace to trouble, from delightful anticipations of heaven to sorrowful forebodings of impending disaster.

2. An extraordinary misconception. Losing sight of the light from beyond the tomb, he is once more a wretched creature whose steps are watched, and whose sins are marked by an angry Judge. God appears to be dealing with him as a criminal, lying in wait, as it were, to detect his sins, preserving a careful enumeration of them, storing them up in a bundle as legal documents; or, better, in a purse as money or precious stones, and sealing it to ensure their production on the day of trialnay, for that purpose, sewing them up in a sort of interior scrip (Cox), or tying them up together (Fry, Good), or stitching on to them additional charges (Gesenius, Delitzsch). The experience through which Job here passes was not new to himself (Job 7:18; Job 13:27), and has sometimes been approximated to by believers under the Law (Psa 38:1-4; Psa 88:7, Psa 88:16), though, in the case of Christians, it should for ever be impossible, proceeding as it does upon a total misconception of the character of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Even under the Law such a picture as Job here sketches of the Divine treatment of a believing sinner should scarcely have been possible. As discovered to Moses, the character of Jehovah was “merciful and gracious” (Exo 34:7); as known to David, “ready to forgive” (Psa 86:5); as proclaimed by Micah, “delighting in mercy” (Mic 7:18) Much more as published by him who is the Image of the invisible God (Col 1:15), and who came to declare the Father (Joh 1:18), it it essentially love. The only being whom God ever treated as a criminal on account of sin was his own Son (Isa 53:6, Isa 53:10; Rom 4:25; 2Co 5:21). In view of Christ’s propitiatory work he dealt with men in a way of mercy even before the advent; since the sacrifice of Calvary God is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing unto men their trespasses (2Co 5:19). Yet the language of Job is true in the case of sinners who are wilfully impenitent. Their iniquities are all observed by God, remembered by God, and, unless repented of and forgiven, will eventually be produced by God for their condemnation.

3. A strange contradiction. A moment before exulting in the thought that God’s affection for him when dead would be so great as to require the resuscitation of his lifeless body (verse 15), Job now pictures the same God as a malignant Adversary and an angry Judge. The two conceptions will not hold together. A little calm logic would have enabled Job to see this; but men are seldom logical at the grave’s mouth or in the grasp of an awakened conscience. It were well for Christians, and for men generally, to be distrustful of those representations of the Divine character which are cast up before the mind’s eye by either the soul’s fears or fancies. Pictures of the Deity evolved from the inner consciousness, whether by philosophers or theologians, are seldom congruous with one another, but are as variable as the passing moods of the changeful spirit. In the face of Jesus Christ alone can God be either fully or clearly seen; and there he is “without variableness, or shadow of turning.”

II. DESPAIRING OF HIS LIFE. Job foresees nothing for him but the early extinction of that hope of life which has hitherto sustained him; and that for two reasons.

1. Decay appeared to be the universal law of nature. The most stable thinks on earth were incapable of resisting this inherent tendency to dissolution. Mountains. rocks, stones, the very soil, yielded to the well-nigh omnipotent forces of nature (verses 18, 19); how much less could weak and frail man overcome that all-pervading vim disintegrationis by which he was assailed, or escape that slow but inevitable destruction which engulfed all mundane things! “The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,” etc. (‘Tempest,’ act 4. so. 1).

2. God seemed to have decreed his destruction. The consideration of man’s frailty, which might have been expected to move God to pity, in Job’s estimation had rather stirred him to relentless severity. He had instituted laws against which even the most durable things of earth were unable to stand; “and,” as if these same laws were not sufficient of themselves to accomplish his destruction, “thou destroyest the hope of man” (verse 19). The hope of eluding death is a delusion (Heb 9:27). But it God destroys man’s hope of life, he mercifully supplants it, in the cause of believers, with a hope of immortality (1Pe 1:3).

III. ANTICIPATING HIS DEMISE. This Job expected would be:

1. Irresistible. “Thou prevailest for ever,” either overpowerest (Gesenius, Davidson, Carey) or seizest him (Delitzsch) “for ever” (verse 20). The struggle of life against death, represented as a contest of man with God, who always proves the Victor (Ecc 6:10), so that “no man hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit, neither hath he power in the day of death ‘ (Ecc 8:8), but from all men equally their breath is taken away, and they return to the dust (Psa 104:29).

2. Speedy. “And he passeth‘” literally, “he goeth‘” i.e. into the unseen world. Notwithstanding all man’s attempts to resist the decree of dissolution, not much is required to complete his subjugation. His removal is easily effected. Simply God speaks to him (Psa 90:3), or breathes upon him (Isa 40:7), and he moveth on, his valour overcome, his wisdom defeated, his strength paralyzed, his noble form prostrated in stillness and decay.

3. Humiliating. “Thou changest his countenance.” Time writes wrinkles on the brow, cute ploughs furrows on the cheek, affliction ages and enfeebles the most stalwart frame; but, O Death! for rudely marring and disfiguring the fair temple of the body, man accords thee the palm. Death, which is exaltation to the spirit, is degradation to the body. To the one the gateway of glory, it is also to the other, though only for a time, the door of dishonour.

4. Final. “Thou sendest him away,” as it were into perpetual banishment. If the language implies that man continues to preserve a conscious existence after departing from the earth, it as emphatically bars the way against any return to the present life.

IV. REALIZING THE DISEMBODIED STATIC.

1. A complete severance from mundane things. When man vanishes from this mortal scene, not only does the place which knows him now know him no more for ever (Job 7:10; Job 20:1-29. ‘9; Psa 103:16), but he himself has no more knowledge of the place. His connection with the world is completely at an end (Ecc 9:5). He returns no more to his house (Job 7:10), neither is he more concerned with the fortunes of his family (Verse 21). How far this correctly represents the Hadean world it is impossible to say. That disembodied spirits should retain the power of apprehending what transpires on earth is neither impossible nor inconceivable; and that they do may seem to derive countenance from Scripture (Luk 15:7; Luk 16:27; Heb 12:1). Still, it is doubtful if as many and potent arguments cannot be adduced against it; while it is certain that, even if departed souls are cognizant of mundane affairs, they will not be profoundly interested in such things as the temporal prosperity or adversity of their families.

2. An exclusive occupation with the interests of self. “But,” or only, “his flesh upon him,” or on account of himself, “shall have pain, and his soul within him,” or on account of itself, “shall mourn” (verse 22). The dead man’s body is regarded as a sentient creature suffering extreme physical tortures while undergoing the process of dissolution; the dead man’s soul is depicted as filled with inconsolable sorrow on account of its unhappy lot. Scarcely removed from the conceptions entertained by heathen writers, such a picture as Job here outlines of the realm of departed saints is only true of the impenitent who die unsaved, but is as widely astray as possible from the truth concerning the spirits of just men made perfect, who, if they are occupied exclusively with their own affairs, do not bemoan an undone eternity, but exult in an exceeding, even an eternal, weight of glory, and who, if they do grieve over their absent bodies, lament not the pains they are suffering, but long for their emancipation from the power of death”waiting for the adoption, even the redemption of the body” (Rom 8:23).

Learn:

1. To think of God’s mercy as beyond disputation.

2. To contemplate death’s approach as inevitable.

3. To reflect more upon the glory of heaven than upon the gloom of the grave.

4. To keep the soul as much as possible disengaged from the affairs of time.

5. To seek for ourselves and children that honour which cometh from above.

6. To realize that a saint leaves all pain and mourning behind him when he enters the unseen world.

7. To thank God for all the light which has been shed around the grave and upon the future world by the gospel of Christ’s resurrection.

Job 14:19

Blighted hopes.

I. A COMMON EXPERIENCE. It is not more true that man hopes, than it is that he sooner or later becomes acquainted with disappointment. Young and old, rich and poor, wise and unwise, have their unrealized expectations.

II. A DIVINE ARRANGEMENT. Blighted hopes are no more accidents than are buds that never fulfil their promise, They form part of the great world-plan which has been devised by Infinite Wisdom.

III. A SALUTARY DISCIPLINE. When God breaks a man’s earthly ideas, it is that he may find nobler ones in heaven; that, turning away his heart from mundane things, he may seek those things which are above.

LESSONS.

1. Thank God for earth’s disappointments.

2. Seek to be possessed of that hope which fadeth not away.

HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON

Job 14:1-12

1. Self-defence before God: 2. Plaint of the weakness and vanity of mankind.

Job’s troubles are typical of the common doom of mankindthe “subjection, to vanity.” And again (comp. Job 3:7; Job 7:1-5) he bursts forth into lamentation over the universal doom of sorrow.

I. HIS NATURAL WEAKNESS. (Verses 1-2.) His origin is in frailty; he is “born of woman.” His course is brief, and full of unrest. He sees himself mirrored in all natural things that fleet and pass:

(1) in the flower of the field, briefly blooming, doomed to the speedy scythe;

(2) in the shadow, like that of a cloud, resting for a moment on the ground, then vanishing with its substance. “Man is a bubble,” said the Greek proverb ( ). He is like a morning mushroom, soon thrusting up its head into the air, and as soon turning into dust and forgetfulness (Jeremy Taylor). Homer calls man a leaf; Pindar, the “dream of a shadow.”

II. HIS MORAL WEAKNESS. (Verses 3, 4.) On the natural frailty is founded the moral. And this poor, weak being is made accountable, dragged before the tribunal of God. And yet, asks Job, how is it possible that purity should be exacted of him? How can the product be diverse from the cause; the stream be of purer quality than the source?

III. REASONING AND EXPOSTULATION FOUNDED ON THESE FACTS. (Verses 5, 6.) If man, then, is so weak, and his life determined by so narrow bounds, were it not the part of Divine compassion and justice to give him some release and respite until his brief day of toil and suffering be altogether spent (comp. Job 7:17; Job 10:20)? It seems to Job, in the confusion of his bewildered thought, that God is laying on him a special and extraordinary weight of suffering, which makes his lot worse than that of the common hireling.

IV. FURTHER IMAGES OF DESPONDENCY. (Verses 7-12.) Casting his eye upon the familiar scenes of nature, it seems that all things reflect the sad thought of the transiency and hopelessness of man’s fate, and even to exaggerate it.

1. Image of the tree The tree may be hewn down, but scions and suckers spring from its well-nourished root; an image used by the prophet to symbolize the spiritual Israel. The stump of the oak represents the remnant that survives the judgment, and this is the source whence the new Israel springs up after the destruction of the old (Isa 6:13). But when man is broken down and falls like the trunk of the tree, there is an end of him. This is undoubtedly a morbid perversion of the suggestion of nature. She by the sprouting scion teaches at least the great truth of the continuity and perpetual self-renewal of life, if she can tell no more.

2. Image of the dried-up waters. (Verse 11.) These forsake their wonted channels and flow in them no more (comp. Job 7:9). So, it seems to the eye of nature, man passes away in a mist from the earthly scene and leaves no trace behind.

3. Image of the abiding heavens. (Verse 12.) This is introduced, not in illustration of the transient life of man, but in contrast to it (comp. Psa 89:29, Psa 89:36, 87). The heavens appear eternally fixed, in contrast to the fluctuating scene below. They look calmly down, while man passes into the sleep of death, and into Sheol, whence there is no return. But when man rises into the full consciousness of his spiritual nature through the revelation of life and immortality, all seems passing compared with the life in God. The heavens shall vanish away like smoke, but God’s salvation shall not be abolished. He that doeth the will of God shall abide for ever.J.

Job 14:13-15

Self-defence before God: 3. Dawning of a new hope.

The thoughts of the sufferer now carry him beyond the confines of the present life. He has just been speaking of Sheol, or Hades, as his destined end, and now the reflection occursWhat may happen then? It is the nature of thought to travel on and on, to know no bounds that it will not seek to overleap. It is perpetually asking, when one goal has been reached, for the after, the beyond. And in some such way must human thought have travelled towards the light of immortality, before the truth dawned by revelation on the world. Job evidently sees a glimmer of the truth, though it soon fades out, for want of definite knowledge, into darkness.

I. LONGING FOR CONCEALMENT IN HADES FOR A SEASON. (Verse 13.) The intense desire, so frequently repeated, for a respite, marks the extremity of intolerable anguish. And if the source of it be God’s wrath, perhaps in time his heart will relent. Then let the appointed judgment be held, and the decision be made. At least may the wrath of God not pursue him into the darkness of the other world!

II. A FUTURE LIFE SUGGESTED. (Verse 14.) For if there is to be a future judgment, there must be a future life to be the subject of it. Perhaps this is the greatest question man can ask without the light of the gospel. But some preliminary answer is here suggested for a moment, though Job does not grasp it firmly, that the future life is guaranteed by the justice and the love of God. But it is observable how the very faintest thought of the possibility gives a new turn to feeling. Patience can only exist when there is hope. And Job feels he could patiently wait all the days of his earthly service were that hope assured. It awakens joy. A happy change must occur. The misunderstandings of the present will clear away. And with this is connected again the glimmering of

III. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF MAN‘S ETERNAL RELATION TO GOD. The heart is made for God. How gladly, when he appears from out the clouds and darkness that surround him, will the heart respond to his call! God yearns for man. Man is his creature, his handiwork, his offspring. He cannot but regard man with tenderness, with eternal interest. Here again we find at the bottom of the patriarch’s heart the germ of that faith which the bright rays of the gospel were to bring to flower (verse 15). The revolt of the heart from false views of God. The picture of One who numbers his steps, and has an eye only for his sins, is inconsistent with the filial consciousness of God (verse 16). Yet there may be insufficient knowledge or faith to overcome this prevailing mood of despair (comp. Job 10:8-12).J.

Job 14:17-22

Self-defence before God: 4. Relapse into despondent imaginations.

I. HE STILL ABOUNDS WITH VARIED FIGURES, THE VERY ELOQUENCE OF COMPLAINT. God has taken his sins and placed them as in a bag, sealed for safety of deposit, that they may be reproduced against him. He appears like an accuser who heaps up scandals and offences against the unhappy object of his wrath (Job 14:17).

II. IN THIS LIGHT OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE HE FURTHER CONTEMPLATES THE CONDITION OF MANKIND.

1. The impossibility of resistance to their doom. (Job 14:18, Job 14:19.) Mountains and rocks are dissolved, hard stones are gradually dislocated, by the continuous action of water; their fragments are carried away by the flood. Much more must the feeble body of man give way at last. And so his mind must surrender the kindled light of God, which God destroys!

2. The overmastering power of God. (Job 14:20-22.) The mighty warrior overcomes the feeble resistance of his foe, and releases him only when he has set him before his face and given him a proof of his pre-walling three So God only releases man in death when all his beauty has passeth away, and there remains but the hideous corpse. In the lower world consciousness fails him; he knows nothing of the things of earth, joyous or sad; can render no help to the dear ones who survive him. In the lower world the dead man, without activity or energy, endures his bodily and mental pain in dreary solitude and stillness. So ends again this address with the gloomiest, most despondent outlook as to the other world, relieved only toe a moment by the fugitive hope of the life to come.

LESSONS.

1. The heart has an instinct for immortality, derived from its revolt from extreme pain. Something within us tells us that we were not made to be eternally, irrecoverably miserable.

2. The truth of a future life comes in flashes upon the mind; for its retention we need the support of positive revelation.

3. The natural weakness and frailty of man is complemented by his spiritual power and greatness as partaker of an endless life.J.

HOMILIES BY R. GREEN

Job 14:1, Job 14:2

Lessons from the brevity of human life.

These words are consecrated to a supreme moment. Chosen to be the words spoken at the side of the grave, “while the corpse is made ready to be laid in the earth,” they hear a solemn and overwhelming testimony to a truth men are apt, in the heat of the day, to forget. So many are the duties and toils of men that the hurry of a short life is hardly noticed, save when, by enforced attention, the thoughts recur to it. The truth is establishedman’s life is short, it is sorrowful, its early promise is destroyed, it hurriedly passeth away, it lacks permanence and stability. What, then, is the proper course of conduct to pursue in such circumstances?

I. IT IS WISE TO BE DILIGENT IN THE FULFILMENT OF DUTY. Days lost cannot be recovered. The duty omitted cannot be afterwards attended to without intrenching upon some other. A watchfulness over the moments saves the hours. Diligence prevents waste, and the days are numbered. Diligence is imperative if life’s large work is to be done in its little time. He learns the value of time who diligently applies himself to his work. And no one has any time to lose.

II. The brevity of life is AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO PATIENCE UNDER TROUBLE, The way is not long. The strength is taxed, but not for long. The lit e of “few days” is “full of trouble.” Happily it is but for a “few days.” Life is not stretched out beyond endurance. And the vision of immortality may gild the horizon as the light of a setting sun. All the future to the humble and obedient is bright, and the present weary march is not longer than can be borne, even by feeble human strength.

III. The brevity of human life may properly act as A SALUTARY CHECK AGAINST ENTERTAINING TOO HIGH AN ESTIMATE OF EARTHLY THINGS. The things of time have their importancetheir very great and solemn importance. And he who has a just view of the future will be the more likely to place a just estimate on the present. But he will “sit loose” to things of time. He will remember he is but a sojourner. That the goods and possessions he now calls his own will soon be held by other hands. He will therefore see that he must not put so high a price upon the present as to barter away the future and more durable possessions for it. Life opens to him like a flower in its beauty; it “cometh forth like a flower’ in its promise, but it “is cut down.” It is vain to build too confidently on such a hope. It is unwise to live wholly for so uncertain a tenure, that fleeth as a shadow and continueth not.

IV. The brevity of human life MAKES IT NEEDFUL THAT MEN SHOULD LOSE NO OPPORTUNITY OF LAYING HOLD ON THE LIFE IMMORTAL. The true preparation for the life to comethe permanent and enduring lifeis to occupy this present one with careful and diligent fidelity. Great issues depend upon it. The condition of the future; the attainment of character; the recorded history; the everlasting approval or disapproval of the manner in which life has beer held, which the eternal Judge will pass upon it, and which will be reflected in the solitudes of the individual conscience.R.G.

Job 14:7-10

Sad views of life.

If the tree be cut down, it springs again; but if man dieth, he wasteth away. Certainly, then, man’s hope is not in this life. The dismal views given in these few verses demand the full assurance of the resurrection. This is a feature of the Book of Job. It presents a negative view of human life. There is always a demand to be met. Only the fuller teachings of the New Testament meet it. Consider this aspect of human life with its demand for supplementary views in order to completeness and satisfaction. The complementary character of subsequent revelations.

I. THE PRESENT LIFE OF MAN PRESENTS CHARACTERISTICS OF IMPERFECTNESS WHICH INDICATE THAT THIS CANNOT BE THE COMPLETE VIEW OF LIFE.

II. THE MORAL, SPIRITUAL, AND INTELLECTUAL CAPABILITIES WHICH ARE OBVIOUSLY BUT PARTIALLY CALLED INTO PLAY DEMAND OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES FOR THEIR FULL DEVELOPMENT, AND INDICATE THE INCOMPLETENESS OF THE VIEW OF LIFE WHEN. CONFINED TO THE PRESENT ONLY.

III. THE ASPIRATIONS OF MEN TOWARDS CONDITIONS THAT CANNOT BE ATTAINED IN THIS LIFE ARE A TESTIMONY TO ITS INCOMPLETENESS.

IV. THE IDEALS OF LIFE ARE SO FAR SUPERIOR TO THE REALIZATIONS, THAT THEY BECOME A CONSTANT PROPHECY OF SOMETHING BETTER AND HIGHER THAN THE PRESENT LIFE.

V. THE HOPE OF HIGHER CONDITIONS THAN THE PRESENT IS STRONGEST IN THE BEST AND PUREST SOULS.

VI. THE PAINFULNESS OF THE PRESENT WITH THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF CAPACITY FOR GREAT AND PURE ENJOYMENT A FURTHER EVIDENCE OF THE INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE IF THE VIEW BE RESTRICTED TO THE PRESENT.

VII. ALL IS SATISFIED IN‘ THE SUBSEQUENT REVELATIONS, AND IN THE CALM ASSURANCE THEY GIVE OF THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD AND THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME.R.G.

Job 14:14

The future life.

“If a man die, shall he live again?” The true answer to this solemn question is the only sufficient response to the sad wail of the previous verses. “There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, but man dieth, and wasteth away.” The answer cometh from afar. It is difficult to determine the measure of light that Job had on the question of the future life. Read in the light of our New Testament teaching, some of his phrases are full of hope; but we may have put the hope there. Generally it is the language of inquiry, and often of inquiry unsatisfied. Sometimes faith bursts through all doubt and gloom, and the confidence of a strong and assured hope takes the place of tremulous fear. Still the question rings in every breast; still the longing for a fuller life in which the ideals of the present may be reached prevails; still men go to the side of the dark river and look into the gloom, and hoping and half fearing ask, “If a man die, shall he live again?” The only satisfactory answer to this comes to us from the lips of the Redeemer, and that is wholly and entirely satisfactory. We mark

I. THE EAGER, UNSATISFIED CRY OF MEN APART FROM DIVINE REVELATION.

II. THE PARTIAL UNFOLDING OF THE TRUTH IN THE EARLIER REVELATIONS.

III. THE PERFECT AND UNEQUIVOCAL REVELATION MADE BY JESUS CHRIST Of this last we may notice.

1. Christ’s teachings all proceed on the assumption that there is a future life.

2. His teachings are constantly supported by an appeal to the future conditions of reward and punishment.

3. Very much of his teaching would be unmeaning and inexplicable in the absence of such future.

4. But he crowns all his teaching by himself becoming the Disputant, and affirming and demonstrating the future life. “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed in the place concerning the bush, when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him.”

5. He crowns all by the raising of the dead to life, and by the example of his own triumph over death. But Job had not this consolation, and he still abides in gloom, as must all who have not the perfect revelation of God.R.G.

HOMILIES BY W.F. ADENEY

Job 14:1, Job 14:2

The flower and the shadow.

I. WHERE IS A COMMON CHARACTER IN ALL HUMAN LIFE. Job seems to be suffering from exceptional troubles. Yet he regards his condition as typical of that of mankind generally. He turns from himself to “man that is born of a woman.” We differ in external circumstances, possessions, honours; in bodily, mental, and moral characteristics. But in our fundamental constitution we are alike. The points of resemblance are more numerous than the points of difference.

1. All born of women come in the common descent from the first parents.

2. All are frail and short-lived.

3. All suffer from the troubles of lit e.

4. All sin.

5. All have Christ for their brother, able and willing to be also their Saviour.

6. All may enter the eternal life and dwell for ever in the love of God, on the same conditions of repentance and faith.

II. MAN SHARES THE CHARACTERISTICS OF NATURE. Job sees in nature types of human life. We are a part of nature, and the laws of nature apply to us. This fact should save us from amazement when trouble comes upon us. It is just in the course of nature. We have not been singled out for a miracle of judgment. It is not that God is writing bitter things against us in particular. Oars is part of the general experience of all nature. Our greatest evil, however, is not that which befalls us in the course of nature, but that which we bring upon ourselves unnaturally. There is something monstrous about sin. We feel a gentle pathos in natural sorrow, but we recognize a terrible tragedy, a dark and dreadful curse, in our self made sorrow of sin. That is infinitely worse than the lading of flowers and the fleeing of shadows.

III. NATURE SETS FORTH THE SAD SIDE OF LIFE.

1. Brevity. Man is “of few days.” The age of nature is maintained by succession, not by continuance. The race goes on, the individual passes.

2. Trouble. “Full of trouble.” “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together” (Rom 8:22). The advance of nature is through conflict and struggle.

3. Frailty. Man is born of a woman, “the weaker vessel” (1Pe 3:7). The flower, which is the most beautiful thing in nature, is the most fragile. Crushed by a careless step, or nipped by frost, or withered by the very sun that drew out its life and painted its loveliness, it is yet the type of human life. The most exquisite flowers may be the most delicate, and the finest souls the most sensitive. The hot Southern sun quickly turns a garden into a desert. The same fate is found among the most cultivated and valued lives. The flowers are not saved by their beauty and fragrance. Some of the most precious lives are cut down in their prime. The scythe that mows the meadows cuts off the summer flowers in the height of their short-lived beauty. The rough, common fate of man is indiscriminate, laying low the best of men together with their less-valued companions.

4. Unreality. A mere shadow! and a moving shadow! What could be more unsubstantial and transient? Yet the frailty and changefulness of life make our human existence appear no more real.

CONCLUSION. Observe another side of the scene. The very melancholy of the picture suggests that it does not cover the whole field. Nature is not dissatisfied with her changefulness. The flowers do not bewail their untimely end. Man alone looks with sorrow on his fate. The reason is that he is made for something greater. The Divine instinct of immortality is in him. lie is more than a part of nature. A child of God, he is called to share a larger life than that of the natural world. The Christian who is cut down as a frail flower on earth will yet bloom as an immortal flower in Paradise.W.F.A.

Job 14:4

A clean thing out of an unclean.

Job seems to mean that man cannot transcend his origin. He comes from the frail, imperfect, human stock; how, then, can he be expected to manifest the traits of perfection and immutability? Job’s question and the difficulty it contains may be applied in various ways.

I. EVOLUTION. We are not now concerned with the scientific aspect of the question of evolution. That must be determined by the men of science. But there is a religious aspect of it that calls for attention, because some are dismayed as though evolution had banished God from his universe. Now, if this idea of the world is set forth as a substitute for the theological conception of creation and providence, it is removed from its rightful sphere and made to trespass on a foreign domain, where it cannot justify the claims of its supporters. There it is confronted by Job’s question, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” Evolution signifies a certain kind of progress. But the cause must be equal to the effect. It is contrary to the very law of causation that dead matter should produce life, and that the merely animal should produce the spiritual human being. For every elevation and addition a corresponding cause is needed. If the unclean ape were the ancestor of a saint, something must have been added that was not in the ape. Whence was this? It must have had a cause. Thus we may see that evolution requires the idea of the Divine, not only at the primal creation, but throughout the process.

II. HEREDITY. Men inherit their parents’ characters. The man who is not the heir of any estate is yet perforce an heir of the most real kind of property. Now, the past of our race is stained with sin, steeped in iniquity. It is not to be supposed that the succeeding generations will be spotless. Moral guilt cannot be charged till the individual soul has chosen evil, and consented to sin in its own freedom. But the degradation of evil tendencies is in us from our birth. Men are shapen in iniquity and conceived in sin (Psa 51:5).

III. REDEMPTION. This is offered by God. It cannot come from man. No sinful man could redeem his brethren. To do this would be to bring the clean out of the unclean. We must have a sinless Redeemer. Moreover, as sin has lowered the whole of life, there is need of a perfect Man to raise the type of the race. Even this would not be enough, for the great work is not to set an example, but to transform the world. None but God who created it can do this. Thus we need what we have in Christa sinless, perfect Man, who is also the only begotten Son of God.

IV. REGENERATION.

1. In the individual man. He must first be regenerated. All prior attempts at goodness fail. Really clean words cannot come out of a foul heart. Clean deeds must spring from a clean soul. All the corrupt man’s conduct is besmirched with the filth of his own inner life. He must be pure in heart in order to live a truly pure life. The sinner must have a new heart before he can live a new life.

2. In Christian work. He who would lead others from sin must first forsake sin himself. The reformer must be a reformed man. The missionary must be a Christian. To do good we must first be good.W.F.A.

Job 14:6

The day’s work.

Job prays that at least God will turn aside from vexing his short-lived creature, and let him finish his day’s work. Then he will be no more. This is a prayer of despair, and it springs from a one-sided view of life and providence. Yet it has its significance for us.

I. MAN IS GOD‘S SERVANT. He is more than the hireling, for whom a hard master cares nothing so long as he can exact the full tale of work. Still, he is the servant. We are not our own masters, and we are not put into the world to do our own will. Our business is to serve.

1. To work. To live for a purpose. Idleness is sin. The man who needs not work to earn his bread should still work to serve his Master.

2. To obey. Our business is just to do God’s will in God’s way. It is not for us to choose; our duty is to follow the Master’s orders.

II. MAN HAS AN ALLOTTED TASK. Each man has his own life-work. Some may be slow in discovering their peculiar vocation. With many this may not be at all what they would have chosen for themselves. Still, if the thought of duty is foremost, all may see that there is something that duty calls them to do. It gives us a great sense of confidence to discover this, and to fling all wild fancies aside in the single desire to accomplish our true life-task. Often the only rule is “Do the next thing;” and if we will but do it, that is just the one task God has called us to.

III. MAN HAS A DAY FOR HIS WORK.

1. A full day. There is the opportunity. God can never require what man is unable to perform. He does not seek the work of eternity from the creature of a day.

2. Only a day. There is no time to be lost. We have but one day for our day’s work. If we waste the morning we shall have no second opportunity. This short season should be well filled. If the work is hard it is not interminable. Diligence and patience are becoming in a man who has but one short life for his work.

IV. MAN IS EXPECTED TO ACCOMPLISH HIS WORK. His business is not merely to sway his limbs and exercise his muscles, but to do something effective, to produce. We should all aim at a definite end in our life’s work. The village blacksmith can enjoy his rest because

“Something attempted, something done,

Has earned a night’s repose.”

A busy life may be a fruitless one. But no life need fail of fruitfulness, inasmuch as the work to which we are all called is designed to lead to useful ends.

V. MAN CANNOT ACCOMPLISH HIS WORK WITHOUT GOD‘S CO–OPERATION. Job prays that God will not hinder him. if, indeed, God did oppose a man in his life’s work, that man would be certainly doomed to failure, it is hard enough to succeed in any case; it is impossible to do so when God is frustrating our efforts. No one can defeat Providence. But it is not enough to be let alone. Job desires that God will look away from him, for the look of anger blasts and withers. But we may pray that God will look upon us in favour and helpfulness. The greatest success in the world was accomplished by men who were “fellow-workers with God” (2Co 6:1-18.).W.F.A.

Job 14:7-14

Is there a life beyond the grave?

We have here one of the dim Old Testament speculations on the life beyond, that stand out in startling contrast to the prevalent obscurity and apparent indifference of ancient Hebrew thought in regard to the great future. This serves as a good starting-point from which to approach the more full Christian light on the resurrection.

I. THE CRAVING FOR IMMORTALITY IS INSTINCTIVE. The craving may be hidden by more pressing desires of the moment; it may even be crushed by despair. But it is not the less natural and instinctive. For when we come to ourselves and calmly reflect on life and its issues, we cannot be satisfied that death should end all. Then there wakes up in us a deep, insatiable hunger for life. The essential characteristic of this desire is its craving for more than the repose of a future that is rescued from the turmoil of this present time; its object is life. It is not enough for us that an end may come to our present troubles, That is all Job desired at first (see Job 3:1-26), but now a deeper thought stirs in his breast, and he thinks of the possibility of living again. Surely it is a miserable degradation of this instinct of immortality that represents the future blessedness as chiefly consisting in indolent repose.

II. NATURE DOES NOT SATISFY THE CRAVING FOR IMMORTALITY. Job turns to the analogies of nature. They are obscure and contradictory. The tree that has been cut down will sprout again from its roots. But is this life the fate of man? “Man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?” Has he any root remaining that can be quickened at the scent of water? Then if the tree sprouts again, there are other things in nature that cease altogether, e.g. the stream that is entirely dried up. May not man’s fate be like these temporal things that come to an end? We look for analogies in the awakening spring, in the emerging of the butterfly from the chrysalis, in the return of day after night. These analogies afford but faint suggestions, little more than fanciful illustrations, Nature does point to the existence of an unseen universe, but she gives us little, if any, hints as to our share in the life beyond the present and the seen.

III. CHRIST SATISFIES THE CRAVING FOR IMMORTALITY. He has brought “life and incorruption to light through the gospel” (2Ti 1:10).

1. By his revelation of God. In Christ we see God as our Father. Such a God cannot mock us with a delusion, cannot plant an instinct in us for which there is no satisfaction. All other instincts have their objects provided. A good Father will not let this starve and pine into disappointment.

2. By his direct teaching. Christ said little about the future life, but that little was clear, unhesitating, emphatic. He made no mention of harps and palms, but he said, “I am the Resurrection, and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (Joh 11:25).

3. By his own resurrection. He is “the Firstfruits from the dead” (1Co 15:20). One man has risen. This is enough to show that death does not end all.

4. By his saving grace. He not only reveals the life beyond. He gives the life eternal. A mere shadowy existence in Hades would be no boon; an existence of torment in Gehenna would be a curse. We want a full and glorious life. That is not ours by nature; it is the gilt of God (Rom 6:23); and it is received through Christ (1Jn 5:11, 1Jn 5:12).W.F.A.

Job 14:17

Sealed transgression.

Job seems to think that God has sealed his transgression up in a bag, keeping it in reserve to bring out against him at some future judgment.

I. WE CANNOT TAKE BACK OUR SINS. They are ours before we have let them loose on the world. Then they pass out of our control. They may wander far in their mischievous effects, or they may be checked by the providence of God. But, in any case, they have passed away from us beyond all chance of recovery. The bag in which God puts our sins is sealed, and it is impossible for us to break the seals. We may well be on our guard against producing those evil things that we cannot hold in or suppress.

II. OUR SINS ARE WITH GOD. He has them in his bag. We may not have thought that he noticed our conduct, and we may not have considered that our wickedness was an offence against God. Yet God could not be indifferent to our violation of his laws. Our first dealings with our sins was in the privacy of our own hearts. When we next meet them they will be in God’s possession, thoroughly examined by him, and ready to be used as he thinks fit in his judgment of us.

III. OUR SINS ARE RESERVED FOR THE FUTURE. We do not now see them; they are sealed up in God’s bag. The judgment is not yet. Because it is delayed many men refuse to expect it, and grow indifferent to their guilt. But time will not alter it. We cannot expect future immunity because we enjoy present forbearance. How is the time for repentance. If the opportunities the present affords are neglected, can they be pleaded in extenuation of our guilt when at last we are called up for judgment?

IV. IT IS OUR IMPENITENCE, NOT GOD‘S WILL, THAT CAUSES OUR SINS TO BE SEALED UP IN GOD‘S BAG. In the dreadful anguish and perplexity of his soul, Job seemed driven to the conclusion that God was carefully treasuring up his sins out of a spirit of opposition to him. Such an idea is quite impossible to one who knows God as he is revealed in Christ. God cannot delight himself in retaining our sins. They are no treasures for him. He would much rather be rid of them. The seal that holds them is our hard heart.

V. THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST BREAKS THE SEAL OF SINS. Those sins that are still retained can yet be cast away, and the offer of forgiveness means that the bag may be opened. The past is not irreparable. Although it cannot be reversed, it may be forgiven and forgotten. Christ has taken the great bag of the world’s sins as a heavy burden upon his own shoulders. He has carried it with him to the grave. He has left it there, buried with the dark, bad past, and he has risen without it in a new life, triumphant and redemptive. Now, the preaching of his gospel is the declaration that for every sinner who repents and trusts Christ the bag of sins is gone; it will be remembered no more. Those who dread the reappearance of their sins as witnesses against them may have a sure hope of escaping them in the atoning work of Christ.W.F.A.

Job 14:19

How waters wear the stones.

I. THE PROCESS. Job compares the process of providence to the action of the winter torrents in the wadys of a desert region. Few phenomena in nature are more striking to those who examine them than those of erosion. A small trickling stream cuts through a great hill, and makes a deep winding valley. Water constantly flowing over granite rocks smooths the hard stone and wears it away, eating its course through the most solid cliffs. The falls of Niagara are receding, and in front of them is seen an ever-lengthening chasm as the river continually cuts away the rock over which it pours. This process is compared by Job to the friction of time and trouble.

1. From apparently feeble causes. The water does not seem capable of effecting the marvellous results that are attributed to it. Slight causes may have great issues.

2. By slow degrees. The worst and the best things are both produced slowly. We cannot judge of the process by its immediate effects.

3. With irresistible force. We cannot resist time. The slow course of providence is a river that cuts through all opposition. It is impossible for man to succeed when he opposes God; for the very rock is worn by the waters that wash over it. Thus vain hopes perish. The worst troubles are not sudden blows, but wearing anxieties and gnawing griefs.

II. ITS LESSONS. Job drew from the process only a conclusion of despair, or at best an expostulation with God for bringing his irresistible might to bear on so feeble a creature as man. But other and wider conclusions may be inferred.

1. It is foolish to trust in our own hopes. They may be solid as granite, and yet time and disappointment may wear them away. The robustness of the hopes is no guarantee of their permanence. The sanguine man is not kept secure by his self-confidence.

2. We should examine the character of our hopes. Low hopes fail first. The stream runs through the valley, sparing the crags on the mountain-top, though these are exposed to all the fury of the gale, and only wearing those that lie in its sunken course. There is safety in elevation of character.

3. The failure of earthly hopes is designed to turn our mind to heavenly hopes. God does not frustrate every hope of man. Job’s idea is the fruit of his despair. Foolish hopes are destroyed, and even innocent hopes, in some cases, in order that we may build higher and found our true hopes on the immovable rock of God’s truth. The Rock of Ages is never worn by the waters of time or trouble.

4. The destroying process carries away much that we are glad to lose. It does not select the rich treasures and pleasant experiences of life. Job thought that God carefully sealed up his sin in a bag (verse 17), while he destroyed his hope as with the waters that wear the stones. But when a man truly repents, God washes away his sins, and gives him a good and enduring hope. Many troubles are worn away by the slow but sure erosion of the waters of time. Even while we fear them they are being lessened for us. God’s destructive agencies are all directed by his supreme goodness. We need not fear the wearing waters if we are reconciled to the God who directs their course, and says to the flood, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.”W.F.A.

Fuente: The Complete Pulpit Commentary

CHAP. XIV.

Job sets forth the shortness and misery of human life. He expresses his faith in a future state; and declares, that after his change God will call, and he will answer him.

Before Christ 1645.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

B.Jobs Reply: Attack upon his friends, whose wisdom and justice he earnestly questions:

Job 12-14

1. Ridicule of the assumed wisdom of the friends, who can give only a very unsatisfactory de scription of the exalted power and wisdom of the Divine activity:

Job 12

1And Job answered and said,

2No doubt but ye are the people,

and wisdom shall die with you.

3But I have understanding as well as you;

I am not inferior to you;
yea, who knoweth not such things as these?

4I am as one mocked of his neighbor,

who calleth upon God, and He answereth him;
the just, upright man is laughed to scorn!

5He that is ready to slip with his feet

is as a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease.

6The tabernacle of robbers prosper,

and they that provoke God are secure;
into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.

7But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee,

and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:

8 or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee,

and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.

9Who knoweth not in all these

that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?

10In whose hand is the soul of every living thing,

and the breath of all mankind.

11Doth not the ear try words,

and the mouth taste his meat?

12With the ancient is wisdom;

and in length of days understanding.

13With Him is wisdom and strength,

He hath counsel and understanding.

14Behold He breaketh down, and it cannot be built again;

He shutteth up a man, and there can be no opening.

15Behold, He withholdeth the waters, and they dry up;

also He sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth,

16With Him is strength and wisdom;

the deceived and the deceiver are His.

17He leadeth counsellors away spoiled,

and maketh the judges fools.

18He looseth the bond of kings,

and girdeth their loins with a girdle.

19 He leadeth princes away spoiled,

and overthroweth the mighty.

20 He removeth away the speech of the trusty,

and taketh away the understanding of the aged.

21He poureth contempt upon princes,

and weakeneth the strength of the mighty.

22He discovereth deep things out of darkness,

and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.

23He increaseth the nations and destroyeth them;

He enlargeth the nations, and straighteneth them again.

24He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth,

and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way.

25They grope in the dark without light,

and He maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.

2. The resolution to betake himself to God, who, in contrast with the harshness and injustice of the friends will assuredly do him justice:

Job 13:1-22

1Lo, mine eye hath seen all this,

mine ear hath heard and understood it.

2What ye know, the same do I know also;

I am not inferior unto you.

3Surely I would speak to the Almighty,

and I desire to reason with God.

4But ye are forgers of lies,

ye are all physicians of no value.

5O that ye would altogether hold your peace,

and it should be your wisdom.

6Hear now my reasoning,

and hearken to the pleadings of my lips.

7Will ye speak wickedly for God,

and talk deceitfully for Him?

8Will ye accept His person?

will ye contend for God?

9Is it good that He should search you out?

or as one man mocketh another, do ye so mock Him?

10He will surely reprove you,

if ye do secretly accept persons.

11Shall not His excellency make you afraid?

and His dread fall upon you?

12Your remembrances are like unto ashes,

your bodies to bodies of clay.

13Hold your peace, let me alone that I may speak,

and let come on me what will.

14Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth,

and put my life in mine hand?

15Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him:

but I will maintain mine own ways before Him.

16He also shall be my salvation:

for a hypocrite shall not come before Him.

17Hear diligently my speech,

and my declaration with your ears.

18Behold now, I have ordered my cause;

I know that I shall be justified.

19Who is he that will plead with me?

for now, if I hold my tongue, I shall give up the ghost.

20Only do not two things unto me;

then will I not hide myself from Thee.

21Withdraw Thine hand far from me;

and let not Thy dread make me afraid.

22Then call Thou, and I will answer:

or let me speak, and answer Thou me!

3. A vindication of himself, addressed to God, beginning with the haughty asseveration of his own innocence, but relapsing into a despondent cheerless description of the brevity, helplessness, and hopelessness of mans life:

Job 13:23 to Job 14:22

23How many are mine iniquities and sins?

make me to know my transgression and my sin.

24Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face,

and holdest me for Thine enemy?

25Wilt Thou break a leaf driven to and fro?

and wilt Thou pursue the dry stubble?

26For Thou writest bitter things against me,

and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth.

27Thou puttest my feet also in the stocks,

and lookest narrowly unto all my paths;
Thou settest a print upon the heels of my feet.

28And he, as a rotten thing, consumeth,

as a garment that is moth-eaten.

Job 14

1Man that is born of a woman,

is of few days, and full of trouble.

2He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down;

he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

3And dost Thou open Thine eyes upon such an one,

and bringest me into judgment with Thee?

4Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?

not one!

5Seeing his days are determined,

the number of his months are with Thee,
Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass;

6turn from him that he may rest,

till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day.

7For there is hope of a tree,

if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.

8Though the root thereof wax old in the earth,

and the stock thereof die in the ground;

9yet through the scent of water it will bud,

and bring forth boughs like a plant.

10But man dieth, and wasteth away!

yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?

11As the waters fail from the sea,

and the flood decayeth and drieth up:

12so man lieth down and riseth not:

till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake,
nor be raised out of their sleep.

13O that Thou wouldest hide me in the grave,

that thou wouldest keep me secret until Thy wrath be past,
that Thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me!

14If a man die, shall he live again?

all the days of my appointed time will I wait,
till my change come.

15Thou shalt call, and I will answer Thee;

Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands.

16For now Thou numberest my steps;

dost Thou not watch over my sin?

17My transgression is sealed up in a bag,

and Thou sewest up mine iniquity.

18And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought,

and the rock is removed out of his place.

19The waters wear the stones;

Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth;
and Thou destroyest the hope of man.

20Thou prevailest forever against him, and he passeth;

Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away.

21His sons come to honor, and he knoweth it not;

and they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them.

22But his flesh upon him shall have pain,

and his soul within him shall mourn.

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

Zophar in Job 11 had specially arrayed against Job the wisdom and omniscience of God, in order to convict him partly of ignorance in Divine things, partly of his sinfulness and need of repentance. Job now meets this attack by strongly doubting the wisdom of his friends, or by representing it as being at least exceedingly ordinary and commonplace, being capable neither of worthily comprehending or describing the Divine wisdom and greatness, nor of demonstrating actual sin and guilt on his part. This demonstration of their incompetency, delivered in an ironical tone, accompanied by a description of the wisdom and strength of God far transcending that of Zophar in energy and inspired elevation of thought, forms the first part of his discourse (Job 12.) This is followed by an emphatic asseveration of his innocence, clothed in the declaration of his purpose to appeal to God, the righteous Judge, and from Him, by means of a formal trial, to which he purposes summoning Him, to obtain testimony in favor of his innocence, which shall effectually dispose of the suspicions of the friends (Job 13:1-22). As though such a trial had already been instituted, he then turns to God with a solemn assertion of his innocence, but failing to meet with a favorable declaration from God in answer to his appeal, he immediately sinks back into his former discouragement and despair, to which he gives characteristic expression in a long description of the shortness of life, the impotence and helplessness of man as opposed to the Divine omnipotence (Job 13:23 to Job 14:22). [Davidson characterizes this discourse as this last and greatest effort of Job]. Each of these three parts is subdivided into sections which are distinctly separated, Parts I. and II. into two sections each of about equal length; Part III. into five strophes of 5 to 6 verses each.

2. First Division.First Section: Sarcasm on the wisdom of Zophar, and the two other speakers, as being quite ordinary and commonplace: Job 12:2-12.

First Strophe: Job 12:2-6. [Sarcasm on the friends (Job 12:2) changing into angry invective (Job 12:3), then into bitter complaint of his own lot (Job 12:4), of the way of the world (Job 12:5), and of the security of the wicked (Job 12:6)].

Job 12:2. Of a truth ye are the people. , with the logical accent on the first word, signifies not: ye are people, the right sort of people, but: ye are the people, the totality of all people, the race of men; , therefore as in Isa 40:7; Isa 42:5. The Cod. Alex. of the LXX. expresses correctly the sense; . As to , comp. the simple , Job 9:2.

Job 12:3. I also have a heart as well as you, i.e., I lack understanding no more than you. therefore as above in Job 8:10; Job 9:4; comp. Job 11:12 [he also has a heart like them, he is therefore not empty, , Del.], and as below in Job 12:24.I do not stand behind you: lit., I do not sink down beneath you, or: I do not fall away before you; the in relates to the stand-point of the friends, from which Job might seem to be a , one falling below them, meaner than themselves. [Ewald takes in the comparative sense, which however would give an unsuitable rendering, to fall more than another].And to whom are such things not known? Lit., and with whom is not the like of these things? viz., the like of your knowledge of Divine things. , lit. with, is used here in the sense of an inward indwelling, as also in Job 14:5 b, and as elsewhere is used: Job 9:35; Job 10:13, etc.

Job 12:4. A mockery (, lit., a laughing, laughter, Inf. subst., like , Job 17:6) to my own friend must I be.[Lit., a mockery to his neighbor, etc.]. Instead of one might expect to find ; an exchange of persons, however, takes place, that the expression may be made as general as possible: one who is a mockery to his own friend must I be. Comp. similar examples of the exchange of persons in Psa 91:1 seq.; Isa 2:8. [Must I become, best as exclamation, expressing Jobs sense of indignity: (1) At such treatment from friends; (2) such treatment to such as he, (Dav.) see remainder of verse].I who called to Eloah and found a hearing: lit., one calling [still in 3d person] to Eloah, and He heard him, in apposition to the subjectIin : which is the case also with , one who is just, godly (pure, blameless), comp. Pro 11:5 a, these words being placed with emphasis at the end of the whole exclamation. [Zcklers rendering of this clause being: a mockery (am I);the just, the godly man! Noyes and Wemyss render the second member: I who call upon God that He would answer me (or to listen to me). Noyes objects to the other rendering the use of the present participle. This form, however, is used to denote a continuous fact in Jobs life, and a permanent quality grounded thereon, the Vav. consec. then indicating the Divine result consequent on Jobs conduct and character.E.].

Job 12:5. For misfortune scornaccording to the opinion of the prosperous: i.e., the prosperous (lit. the secure, who lives free from care, comp. Isa 33:20) thinks, that contempt is due to the unfortunate. [It is the ordinary way of the great multitude to over-whelm the unfortunate with contempt, and to give to the tottering still another push. Dillm.] thus = contemptus, as in Job 12:21, and Job 31:34; = destruction, ruin, misfortune, as in Job 30:24; Job 31:29; Pro 24:22; and (plur. fem. st. constr. from ), or, after a form which is better authorized, , signifies an opinion, fancy, thought (from , to fashion, used of the minds fashioning its thoughts). This is the interpretation adopted by most of the moderns, since the time of Aben Ezra. The rendering of the Targ., Vulg., [E. V.], Levi b. Gerson, and other Rabbis, preferred also by Luther, De Wette, Rosenm. [Noyes, Carey, Rod.], etc., which takes in the sense of a torch, yields no tolerable sense, at least no such sense as suits the second member (a torch of contempt [Luther: a despised taper] in the opinion of the prosperous is he who is ready to totter, or to whom it is appointed that his feet slip, etc.) [Against this rendering, found in E. V., may be urged (1) The expression a despised torch is meaningless. As Con. suggests a consumed or expiring torch would be pertinent, but a torch despised is like anything else that is despised. (2) is superfluous and insipid. Why ready to waver? (3) This rendering presupposes a noun , with the meaning vacillatio, wavering, lit. ready for waverings, for which however there is no authority, and which would require here rather the vowel pointing: .(4) It destroys the rhythm of the verse. See Con., Dillm., Dav. and Delitzsch. E.]. The rendering of Hitzig (Geschichte des Volkes Israel I., 112) is peculiar; he takes to mean: a soothing bandage, a cure (from the root , to wind, or bind around, here the sing. corresponding to the plur. found in Jdg 4:4, which is not a proper name [Lapidoth], but taken in connection with the preceding signifies: a mistress of healing bandages), so that the sense would then be: Healing is a scorn [is scorned] in the opinion of the prosperous (?).Ready (is it, the contempt) for those whose foot wavers., Part. Niph. from , hence , ready, as in Exo 34:2. Comp. below Job 15:23, where may also be found the wavering of the foot as a figurative expression of falling into misfortune; Psa 38:17 (16) Ewald (Bibl. Jahrb. IX. p. 38) would instead of read , a stroke, and Schultens and Dillmann would assign this same meaning of plaga, percussio to this same form (from ,): a stroke, is due to those whose foot wavers. As if a new parallelism of thought must of necessity be found between a and b!

Job 12:6. Secure are the tents of the spoilers, lit. to the spoilers; i.e., to powerful tyrants, savage conquerors, and the like. On tents comp. Job 5:24; Job 11:14. is the aramaizing third plur. form of a verb which has for its perf. (see Job 3:26), but which derives its imperf. forms from . Moreover is not merely a pausal form, but stands here removed from the place of the tone: comp. the similar pathetic verbal forms in Psa 36:9; Psa 57:2; Psa 73:2; also Ewald, 194, a.And security, plur. et abstr. from (secure, free from care), have they who defy God [ denotes the sin of these undeservedly prosperous ones against men, (lit. those who provoke God, who insolently assail Him) their wickedness against God. Schlott.] they who carry Eloah in their hand: lit., he who carries, (….. ); from among those who rage against God and defy Him, one is selected as an example, such an one, viz., as bears God in his hand, i.e., recognizes no other God than the one he carries in his hand or fist, to whom therefore his fighting weapon is to be his God; comp. Hab 1:11; Hab 1:16; also the dextra mihi Deus of Virg. Aen. 16, 773. [Delitzsch renders a little more precisely perhaps: he who causes Eloah to enter into his hand; from which translation it is clear that not the deification of the hand, but of that which is taken into the hand is meant. That which is taken into the hand is not, however, an idol (Abenezra), but the sword; therefore he who thinks after the manner of Lamech, as he takes the iron weapon of attack and defense into his hand, that he needs no other God. The deification of the weapon which a man wields with the power of his own right hand, and the deification of the power which wields the weapon, as in Hab. l. c. and Mic 2:1, are, however, so nearly identical as descriptive of the character here referred to, that either resolves itself into the other. Conant, who adopts the rendering of E. V.: he into whose hand God bringeth (E. V. adds abundantly) i.e. whom God prospers, objects that by the other rendering the thought is expressed very coarsely, as to form, when it might be done in the Hebrew with great felicity. It is difficult to see, however, how the sentence: he who takes God in his hand could be expressed more idiomatically or forcibly than in the words of the passage before us. Wordsworth somewhat differently: who grasps God in his hand. The wicked, in his impious presumption, imagines that he can take God prisoner and lead Him as a captive by his power. But this is less natural than the above.E.]

Second Strophe: Job 12:7-12. [Return to the thought of Job 12:3the shallowness of the friends wisdom on the Divine. Such knowledge and deeper every one possessed who had eyes and ears. For (1) every creature in earth and sea and air proclaimed it (710); and (2) every man of thought and age uttered it in the general ear (11, 12). Dav.]

Job 12:7. But ask now even the beaststhey can teach thee.[, recovery from the crushing thought of Job 12:4-6, and strong antithesis to the assumption of the friends. Dav.] , as also in the second member, voluntative [or, jussive], hence not literally futurethey will teach it to theeas commonly rendered. Here the form of address is different from that adopted heretofore in this discourse, being now directed to one only of the friends, viz. to Zophar, to whose eulogy of the absolute wisdom of God (Job 11:7-9) reference is here made, with the accompanying purpose of presenting a still more copious and elaborate description of the same.

Job 12:8. Or think thoughtfully on the earth: lit. think on the earth, i.e. direct thoughtfully thy observation to the earth (which comes under consideration here, as is evident from what follows, as the place where the lower order of animals is found, the , Gen 9:2; 1Ki 5:13), and acquire the instruction which may be derived from her. The rendering of as a substantive, in the sense of shrub (comp. Job 30:4; Gen 2:5), is on several grounds untenable; for , shrub is, according to those passages, masculine; the use of the preposition instead of the genit., or instead of or before , would be singular; and the mention of plants in the midst of the animals (beasts, birds, fishes), would be out of place (against Berleb. Bib., Bttcher, Umbreit, etc.).

Job 12:9. Who would not know in all this, etc.So is to be rendered, giving to the instrumental sense, not with Hahnwho knows not concerning all this, which would yield too flat a sense, and lead us to over look the retrospective reference which is to be looked for to the various kinds of animals already cited. Neither with Ewald [Hengst., Noyes] is it to be taken in the sense of among all these, as if the passage contained a reference to a knowledge possessed by all the creatures of God as their Creator, or possibly to the groaning of the creature after the Godhead, as described in Rom 8:18 sq. This partitive rendering of (which Renan as well as Ewald adopts: qui ne sat parmi tous ces tres, etc.) is at variance with the context, as well as the position of the words ( before ).That the hand of Jehovah hath made this. refers essentially to the same object with , only that it embraces a still wider circle of contemplation than the latter expression, which refers only to the classes of animals afore-mentioned. It denotes the totality of that which surrounds us, the visible universe, the whole world ( , Heb 11:3); comp. Isa 66:2; Jer 14:22; where is used in this comprehensive signification; so also above in Job 11:8 seq., to which description of the all-embracing greatness of God there is here a manifest reference. Ewald, Dillmann [Conant, Davidson] translate: that the hand of Jehovah hath done this. By , this, Ewald understands the decreeing of suffering and pain (of which also the groaning creation would testify); Dillmann refers it to the mighty and wise administration of God among His creatures; both of which explanations are manifestly more remote than the one given above. [The meaning of the whole strophe is perverted if is, with Ewald, referred to the destiny of severe suffering and pain. Since as a glance at what follows shows, Job further on praises God as the governor of the universe, it may be expected that the reference is here to God as the creator and preserver of the world. Bildad had appealed to the sayings of the ancients, which have the long experience of the past in their favor, to support the justice of the Divine government; Job here appeals to the absoluteness of the Divine rule over creation. Delitzsch.]Apart from the Prologue (Job 1:21), the name occurs only here in the mouth of Job, for the reason doubtless that the whole expression here used, which recurs again word for word in Isa 41:20 (Isa 66:2) was one that was everywhere much used, not unfrequently also among the extra-Israelitish monotheists (and the same is true of the expression , Job 28:28).

Job 12:10. In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all the bodies of men.[Evidently these words are more naturally referred to the act of preservation than to that of creation. Schlottm.] Observe the distinction between , the lower principle of life, which fills all animals, and , the godlike personal spirit of man. Otherwise in Ecc 3:19; Ecc 3:21, where , in a wider sense, is ascribed even to the beasts.

Job 12:11-12. To the knowledge of God which rests on the observation of the external cosmos (notitia Dei naturalis externa s. acquisita), is here added the human wisdom and insight which springs from experience, especially that of the aged, as a second source from which Job might draw (which may be regarded as the equivalent of that which is sometimes called notitia Dei naturalis interna).

Job 12:11. Does not the ear prove sayings, even as [adquationis, as in Job 5:7] the palate tastes food for itself (Dat. commodi). Both comparisons illustrate the power of judicious discrimination possessed by the human spirit, by which it discerns the inner worth of things, especially as it exists in aged persons of large experience. So again later in Elihus discourse, Job 34:3. The opinion of Umbreit, Delitzsch, etc., that Job in this verse utters an admonition not to receive without proof the sayings of the ancients, to wit, those of which Bildad had previously spoken, Job 8:10 (should not the ear prove the sayings?), lacks proper support. A reference to that remote passage in the discourse of Bildad should have been more clearly indicated than by the accidental circumstance that there as here the word , sayings, utterances, is used. Moreover the aged who are here mentioned (, as in Job 15:10; Job 29:8) are by no means identical with the fathers of former generations, whom Bildad had mentioned there.

Job 12:12. Among the aged is wisdom, and a long life (works, gives) understanding [or lit. length of days is understanding]. The verse is related to the preceding as logical consequent to its antecedent: As the ear determines the value of words, or the palate the taste of food, so aged men have been able to acquire for themselves in the course of a long life a true insight into the nature of things, and a truly rational knowledge of the same,and I have been to school with such men, I have also ventured to draw from this source! This is the meaning of the passage as clearly appears from the context, and it makes it unnecessary to assume: a. with Starke, etc., that Job reckons himself among the aged, and as such sets himself in the fullness of his self-consciousness against, the three friends as being younger than himself (which is distinctly refuted by what we find in Job 5:26; Job 29:8; Job 29:18; Job 15:10); b. with Ewald, to conjecture the loss of a passage after Job 12:12, which would furnish the transition from that verse to Job 12:23; c. with Dillmann, that originally Job 12:12 stood before Job 12:9-10, thus immediately following Job 12:8; d. with Delitzsch, Hengstenberg. etc., that Job 12:23 is to be connected closely and immediately with Job 12:12, so that thus the following order of thought would be expressed: assuredly wisdom is to be found among the aged, but in reality and in full measure it is to be found only with God, etc. [i.e. with Conant, that the verse is to be rendered interrogatively, on the ground that Job would not appeal to tradition in support of his positions; to which Davidson replies that Job assails tradition only where he has found it false; and here, where he is exposing the vulgarity of the friends much-boasted insight, it is quite in place to refer to the facility any one had for coming in contact with such information; and in Job 13:2, where Job recapitulates Job 12:13-25, these two sources of information, sight and hearsay are directly alluded to.Besides Delitzsch and Hengstenberg, Schlottmann and Merx connect the verse with the preceding. On the contrary Con., Dav., Dillm., Ren., Good, Wemyss, etc., connect it with the following, and correctly so on account of the strict connection in thought, and especially the resumption of the thought in varying language in Job 12:16.In answer to the objection of abruptness in the transition if Job 12:13 be detached from the preceding, Davidson says well that it is quite in place; the whole chapter and speech is abrupt and passionate.E.].

First Division: Second Section: An animated description of the exercise of Gods wisdom and power, by way of actual proof that he is by no means wanting in the knowledge of God, which Zophar had denied to him: Job 12:13-25. [It is possible perhaps to exaggerate this idea that Job in the passage following is consciously emulating his opponents. Something there is of this no doubt, but it must not be forgotten that the description here given of the Divine wisdom and omnipotence is an important part of Jobs argument, as tending to show that these attributes so far from being employed by the ends which they had described, are exercised to produce hopeless confusion and ruin in human affairs.E.].

First double strophe: Job 12:13-18 (consisting of two strophes of 3 verses each).

a. Job 12:13-15. [The theme in its most general statement].

Job 12:13. With Him are wisdom and might, His are counsel and discernment.The suffixes in and point back to Jehovah, Job 12:9-10, to whom the whole following description to Job 12:25 in general relates. [With Him, , him, doubly, emphatic (a) in opposition to the just mentioned wisdom of men, Job 12:12; (b) with awe-ful omission of Divine name, and significant allusion and intonation in the pronoun. Dav.]. The verse before us forms as it were the theme of this description, which presents Jobs own personal confession of faith in respect to the nature and wisdom of God. It is therefore neither an expression of the doctrinal views of a hoary antiquity, or of the aged sages of Job 12:12 (Umbreit) [Ewald, Schlottm.], nor a statement of that which is alone to be esteemed as genuine Divine wisdom, in antithesis to the more imperfect wisdom of the aged (Delitzsch, Hengstenberg). There is to be sure a certain progression of thought from Job 12:11 on: the adaptation to their uses of the organs of hearing and of taste, the wisdom of men of age and experience, and the wisdom of God, transcending all else, and united with the highest power, are related to each other as positive, comparative, and superlative. But there is not the slightest intimation of the thought that the absolute wisdom of God casts into the shade those rudiments of itself which are to be found in the sphere of the creature, or would hold them up as utterly worthless. Rather is what is said of the same in our verse in some measure the fruit, or a specimen of the wisdom of the aged, which Job also claims to possess, as a pupil of such aged men. Comp. below Cocceius, in the Homiletical Remarks on Job 12:10-13. Of the four designations of the absolute Divine intelligence here given, which accord with the language of Isa 11:2, and the accumulation of which intensifies the expression to the utmost, denotes that side of Gods intelligence which perceives things in the ground of their being, and in the reality of their existence [the general word and idea comprehensive of all others, Dav.]. that which is able to carry out the plans, purposes, and decisions of this universal wisdom against all hindrance and opposition [virtus, , vir. Dav.]; , that which is never perplexed as to the best way of reaching its purpose; , that which can penetrate to the bottom of what is true and false, sound and corrupt, and distinguish between them: Delitzsch; [ actively force, passively strength, firmness: Dav.].

Job 12:14. Lo, He tears down, and it is not built up (again). This is the first example of the irresistible exercise of this absolute might and wisdom of God. Job describes it as directed above all else to the work of tearing down and destroying, because in his recent mournful experiences he had been led to know it on this side of its activity; comp. Job 9:5 seq., where in like manner the mention of the destructive activities of the Divine omnipotence precedes that of its creative and constructive operation. Whether there is a reference to Zophars expression (Job 11:10; so Dillmann) is doubtful. He shuts up a man (lit. He shuts over a man), and it cannot be opened. The expression , to shut over any one, is to be explained from the fact that use was frequently made of pits, perhaps of cisterns, as prisons, or dungeons: comp. Gen 37:24; Jer 38:6; Lam 3:53. Where this species of incarceration is not intended, is used either with the accus. or with (comp. Job 3:10; and 1Sa 1:6).

Job 12:15. Lo, He restrains the waters, and they dry up (Is. 50:38); He letteth them forth (again), and they overturn the earth. A remarkable parallel in thought to this description of the operation of the Divine omnipotence in the visible creation, now withdrawing and now giving life, but ever mighty in its agency, may be found in Psa 104:29-30. A reference to Zophars comparison of past calamity with vanished waters (Job 11:16) is scarcely to be recognized.

b. Job 12:16-18. [Resumption of the themespecially of the Divine wisdom bringing confusion and humiliation on earths mightiest].

Job 12:16. With Him are strength and true knowledge (, precisely as in Job 11:6). His are the deceived and the deceiver [the erring one, and the one who causes to err]: i.e., His intelligence is so far superior to that of man that alike he who abuses his wisdom in leading others astray, and he who uses it for their good, are in His hand, and constrained to serve His purposes. He thus makes evil, moral and intellectual, subservient to the good: Gen 50:20; Psa 18:27. [ and here are to be understood not so much in the ethical as in the intellectual sense: if a man thinks himself wise because he is superior to another, and can lead him astray, in comparison with Gods wisdom the deceiver is not greater (in understanding) than the deceived; He has them both in his hand, etc. Dillm.]

Job 12:17. He leads counsellors away stripped: or who leads counsellors, etc.for from this point on to the end of the description (Job 12:24) Job speaking of God uses the present participle. The circumstantial accus. , which here and in Job 12:19 is used in connection with , (and that in the singular, like , Job 24:7; Job 24:10), is rendered by the ancient versions captive, or chained (LXX., Targ. on Job 12:19 : ; Targ. on Job 12:17 : catenis vinctos), whereas etymologically the signification made naked (exutus), violently stripped is the only one that is authenticated. The word therefore is equivalent to the expression naked and barefoot, Isa 20:4, not to barefoot alone, as Oehler, Hitzig, Dillmann, etc., suppose from comparison with the LXX. in Mic 1:8. Naturally we are to understand the description here to be of counsellors led away stripped as captives taken in war: comp. Is. l. c. and 2Ch 28:15, as also what pertains to , counsellors in Job 3:14.And judges He makes fools. , as in Isa 44:25, to infatuate, to show to be fools. Such an infatuation of judges as would cause the military and political ruin of their country to proceed directly from them (as in the breaking out of great catastrophes over certain kingdoms, e.g. over Egypt, Isa 19:17 seq.; over Israel and Judah, 2Ki 19:26; etc.), is not necessarily to be assumed here (comp. Job 5:20), although catastrophes of that character are here especially prominent in the thought of the speaker.

Job 12:18. He looses the bond of kings; i.e., He looses the bond, or the fetters, with which kings bind their subjects, He breaks the tyrannical yoke of kings, and brings them rather into bondage and captivity, or as the second member expresses this thought more in the concrete: He binds a girdle on their loins. It seems that lit. girdle, in this second member should accord with in the first. So much the more should the latter be pointed , and be construed as stat. constr. Comp. (= , from , to bind). Of less authority, etymologically, is the interpretation required by the Masoretic punctuation regarded as st. constr. of , discipline, castigatio, although it gives a sense quite nearly related to the preceding, it being presupposed that discipline is to be understood in the sense of rule, authority (so among the moderns, Rosenm., Arnh., Vaih., Hahn, Delitzsch [Ges., Carey], etc.). But discipline is a different conception from authority, and can very well take for its object , fetters, Job 39:5; Psa 116:16, but not castigationem. So Dillmann correctly, who also however rightly rejects the interpretation of Ewald, Hirzel, Heiligst., Welte, etc., according to which denotes the fetters, with which kings are bound, so that the relation between a and b would be not that of a logical progression, but of direct antithesis, as in Job 12:15. [Hengstenberg calls attention to the paronomasia of , and ].

Second Double Strophe: Job 12:19-25 (divided into one strophe of three, and one of four verses): [The description continued: the agency of the Divine wisdom in confounding the great of earth].

a. Job 12:19-21. [Special classes of leaders brought to shame described].

Job 12:19. He leads priests away spoiled (see on Job 12:17), and those firmly established He overthrows. [ priests, not princes (E. V.) In many of the States of antiquity the priests were personages no less important, were indeed even more important and honored than the secular authorities. Dillm. The juxtaposition of priests and kings here points to the ancient form of priestly rule, as we encounter the same in the person of Jethro and in part also in Melchizedek. Schlott.].All objects are called , firmly-enduring [perpetual], which survive the changes of time. Hence the term is applied, e.g., to water which does not become dry (aqu perennes), or firmly founded rocks (Jer 49:19; Jer 50:44), or mighty, invincible nations (Jer 5:15), or, as here, distinguished and influential persons (Vulg., optimates). [, slip, in Piel, overthrow, aptly antithetic [to . Dav.].

Job 12:20. He takes away the speech of the most eloquent: lit. of the trusted, of those who have been tried as a peoples orators and counsellors; for they are the (from , to make firm, trustworthy, not from , to speak, as D. Kimchi thinks, who would explain the word diserti, as though it were punctuated ). On b comp. Hos 4:11; and as regards , taste, judgment, tact, see 1Sa 25:33.

Job 12:21. He pours contempt on nobles (exactly the same expression as in Psa 107:40), and looses the girdle of the strong, ( lit. containing of great capacity [Delitzsch: to hold together, especially to concentrate strength on anything] only here and Job 41:7; i.e., He disables them for the contest (by causing the under-garments to hang down loosely, thus proving a hindrance for conflict; comp. Isa 5:27; also below Job 38:3; Job 40:7). The translation of Delitzsch is altogether too forced, and by consequence insipid: He pours contempt on the rulers of the state, and makes loose the belt of the mighty.

b. Job 12:22-25. [The Divine energy as especially operative among nations].

Job 12:22. [This verse must naturally form the prelude to the deeper exercise of power and insight among nations, and its highest generalization, comp. 16b. Dav.].He discovereth deep things out of the darkness, and brings forth to light the shadow of death;i.e., not: He puts into execution His hidden purposes in the destiny of nations (Schlottm.), [for who would call the hidden ground of all appearances in God, ! Dilllm.], but: He brings forth into the light all the dark plans and wickedness of men which are hidden in darkness; comp. 1Co 4:5 : ( . . ., and the proverb: There is nothing spun so fine but all comes to the light; see also Job 24:13 seq.; Isa 29:15; Rom 13:12; 1Th 5:5, etc. [Deep things out of the darkness, , must mean hidden tendencies and principles, e.g., those running under national life, Job 12:23, naturally more subtle and multiplex than those governing individual manifestation on however elevated a scale) and darkness, and shadow of death, figures (Job 11:8) descriptive of the profoundest secresy. These secret tendencies in national life and thoughtnever suspected by men who are silently carried on by themHe detects and overmasters either to check or to fulfil. David. A truth which brings joy to the good, but terror to all the children of darkness (Job 24:13 seq.), and not without threatening significance even to the friends of Job. Dillmann].

Job 12:23. He makes nations great, anddestroys them; He spreads nations abroad andcauses them to be carried away (or: carries them away captive, comp. , synonymous with , abducere in servitutem; also 2Ki 18:11). [Rodwell: then straitens them: leads them, i.e., back into their former borders]. Instead of the LXX. () as well as some of the Rabbis read , who infatuates, makes fools. But the first member of the verse corresponds strictly in sense to the second, on which account the Masoretic reading is to be retained, and to be interpreted of increase in height, even as the parallel in b of increase in breadth, or territorial enlargement (not as though it meant a dispersion among other nations, as the Vulg. and Aben Ezra incorrectly interpret this ). [The in both members, says Schlottmann, is not used Aramaice with the accus., but as sign of the Dat. commodi.]

Job 12:24. He takes away the understanding ( as in Job 12:3) of the chief of the people of the land (, can certainly signify the people of the earth, mankind, [Hirzel], after Isa 42:5; for its use in the more limited sense of the people of a land, comp. below Job 15:19). [We have intentionally translated nations, people, for is the mass held together by the ties of a common origin, language, and country; , the people bound together by unity of government. Delitzsch].And makes them wander in a pathless waste: ( , synonymous with , or with , comp. Job 38:26; and Ewald, 286, 8). The whole verse, the second member of which recurs verbatim in Psa 107:40 presents an exact Hebrew equivalent for the Latin proverb: quem Deus perdere vult, prius dementat, a proverb on which the history of many a people and kingdom, from the earliest antiquity down to the present, furnishes an actual commentary that may well make the heart tremble. Concerning the catastrophes of historic nationalities in the most ancient times, which the poet here may not improbably have had before his mind, comp. Introd., 6, e.

Job 12:25. They grope in darkness without light and He makes them to wander like a drunken man. Comp. Isa 19:14, and especially above in Job 5:13-14, a similar description by Eliphaz, which Job here seems desirous of surpassing, in order to prove that he is in no wise inferior to Eliphaz in experimental knowledge of the righteous judgments of God, the infinitely Wise and Mighty One.

4. Second Division: First Section: Resolution to appeal to the judicial decision of God, before which the harsh, unloving disposition of the friends will assuredly not be able to maintain itself, but will be put to shame: Job 13:1-12.

First Strophe: Job 13:1-6. [Impatience with the friends, and the purpose to appeal to God].

Job 13:1. Behold, mine eye hath seen all (that), mine ear hath heard and perceived for itself. here equivalent to , all that has been here set forth, all that has been stated (from Job 12:13 on) in respect to the evidences of the Divine power and wisdom in the life of nature and men. [, dativus commodi, or perhaps only dat. ethicus: and has made it intelligible to itself (sibi); of the apprehension accompanying perception. Del.].On Job 13:2 comp. Job 12:3, the second member of which is here repeated word for word.

Job 13:3. But I will speak to the Almighty. , but nevertheless, puts that which now follows in emphatic antithesis to the preceding: notwithstanding that I know all this, I will still, etc. [Three feelings lie at the back of this antithesis: (1) The folly of longer speaking to the friends. (2) The irrelevancy of all such knowledge as they paraded, and which Job had in abundance. (3) Antagonism to the prayer of Zophar that God would appearJob desires nothing more nor betterbut I, to the Almighty will I speak. Dav.]. Observe also the significantly accented , I ( ), which puts the speaker in definite antithesis to those addressed (, Job 13:4, ), as one who will not follow their advice to make penitent confession of his guilt towards God; who will rather plead against God.I desire to plead with God. , Inf. absol. as obj. of the verb; comp. Job 9:18; and for the signification of , to plead, to vindicate ones cause against an accusation, comp. Amo 5:10; Isa 29:21; also below Job 13:15, Job 19:5. , to desire, to be inclined, here essentially as in Job 9:3. always for in pause]. That passage (Job 9:3) certainly stands in some measure in contradiction to this, implying as it does the impossibility of contending with God; it is however a contest of another sort from that which is intended there that he proposes here, a contest not of one arrogantly taking the offensive, but of one driven by necessity to the defensive.

Job 13:4. But ye are (only) forgers of lies. puts another antithetic sentence alongside of the first which was introduced by (Job 13:3), without however laying any special stress on ; hence: and however, but again, etc.; not: ye however (Hirzel). (from , to plaster, to smear, to paste together; comp. , plaster Eze 13:10 seq., and Talmudic grease) are lit. daubers of lies, i.e., inventors of lies, concinnatores s. inventores mendacii; not: imputers, fasteners of falsehood, assutores mendacii, as Stickel, Hirzel, Schlottmann, Delitzsch, etc., explain both against philology and the context (neither Job 14:17 nor Psa 119:69 support this definition); nor again: deceitful patchers, sarcinatores falsi, i.e., inanes, idutilis, as Hupfeld explains.Physicians of no value are ye all. are not patchers [Con. botchers] of vanity, i.e., such as patch together empty unfounded assertions (Vulg., Ew., Olsh., Dillm.), [Good, Con., Dav.], but in accordance with the universal usage of : worthless, useless physicians, medici nihili, miserable quacks, who are incapable of applying to Jobs wounds the right medicine to soothe and heal. [Job calls their false presuppositions regarding his guilt , their vain attempts at a Theodicy and Theory of Providence . Dav.].

Job 13:5. Oh that ye would be altogether silentthat would be reckoned to you for wisdom.Comp. Pro 17:28; the Latin proverb: Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses; also the honorable title, bos mutus, the mute ox, given to Thomas Aquinas during his student life at Paris, by his fellow-students, as well as by his teacher, Albertus Magnus. The jussive, , is used in a consecutive sense: then would it be, prove, pass for; comp. Ewald, 347, a, Gesen., 128, 2.

Job 13:6. Hear now my reproof, and give heed to the charges of my lips.So correctly Hirzel, Dillm., Del., etc., while several other moderns explain: Hear my defense [Con., E. V., reasoning], and attend to the arguments of my lips. As if could signify anything else than , correptio (so correctly LXX,, Vulg.Comp. in Job 6:25; Job 40:2), and as if (defectively for ) could even in one instance sink the meaning of the stern word , to strive, to quarrel! Furthermore it is a long moral reproof and animadversion of the friends which immediately follows, Job 13:7-12. His reply and vindication of himself to God first follows Job 13:13 seq., or indeed properly not before Job 13:17 seq.

Second Strophe: Job 13:7-12. [Scathing rebuke of their dishonesty and presumption in assuming to be Gods advocates (Job 13:7-9), and warning of the consequences to themselves when God shall rebuke them for their conduct].

Job 13:7. Will ye for God [ emphatic] speak that which is wrong, will ye for Him speak deceitfully?The preposition signifies here for, in favor of any one, as also in Job 13:8, Jdg 6:31. On comp. Job 5:16; Job 6:30.

Job 13:8. Will ye show partiality for Him (lit. lift up His countenance, i.e. show preference for His person), or will ye take the part of Gods advocates? (lit. contend for God, comp. , Jdg 6:31). These are the two possible ways in which they could speak in favor of God: either as clients, dependents, taking His part slavishly, for mercenary ends, or as patrons or advocates, presumptuously and naively taking Him under their protection. [There thus appears a subtle and very effective irony in these questions of Jobs. His charge of partiality is also, as Davidson says, a master-stroke of argumentation, effectually debarring the friends from any further defense of God in this direction, or almost at all.E.].

Job 13:9. Will it be well [for you] when He searches you out (goes to the bottom of you, as in Pro 28:11; Psa 139:23) or can you deceive Him as a man is deceived?viz. in regard to your real disposition and the sentiment of your heart, of which a more searching investigation must reveal to Him that it by no means corresponds to His holy nature and life., Hiph. from (in Imperf. , with a non-syncopated , for , Gesen. 53 [ 52] Rem. 7 [Green, 142, 3]), is lit. to cause to waver [to hold up anything swaying to and fro], to keep one in suspense, to make sport of any one, [E. V. to mock], hence to deceive; ensnare; comp. Gen 31:7; Jdg 16:10; Jer 9:4.) [Schlott., who renders: will ye mock him? explains by quoting from Jarchi: dicendo: in honorem tuam mendacia nos finximus].

Job 13:10. Surely He will sorely chastise you (Job 5:17) if ye are secretly partial:i.e. if ye are actuated not by love of the truth and conscientious conviction, but by selfish interest in your relations with Him, as One who is mightier. That with which Job hereby reproaches them is (as Del. rightly observes) a , Rom 10:2 (comp. Joh 16:2), an advocacy contrary to ones better knowledge and conscience, in which the end is thought to sanctify the means.

Job 13:11. Will not His majesty (, as in Job 31:23, exaltation, dignity; not a kindling of wrath, or a lifting up for contention, as Bttch. renders it after the Vulg.) confound you (Job 3:5), and the dread of Him ( the dread, the terror which He inspires) fall upon youthen, namely, when He will reveal Himself as your Judge. Job here anticipates what according to Job 42:7 seq. really happened afterwards. [It is a peculiarity of the author of our book that he drops every now and then hints of how the catastrophe is to turn out, showing unmistakably both the unity of conception and the authorship of the book. Dav.]

Job 13:12. Your maxims (become) proverbs of ashes: to wit, then when God will judge you. , memorable sayings, apothegms, memorabilia [Dav. old saws] (comp. Mal 3:16; Est 6:1): so does he name here, not without irony, the admonitions and warnings which they had addressed to him, in part as the Chokmah of the ancients, or even as divinely inspired communications. [The sarcasm in the word is cutting: comp. of Eliph. Job 4:7; and Job 8:8. Dav.] He characterizes these maxims as , i.e. as empty and unsubstantial like ashes or dust, like ashes (the emblem of nothingness and worthlessness, Isa 44:20) scattered to every wind. The second member is strictly parallel: Your bulwarks become bulwarks of clay. [While Job 13:12 a says what their speeches, with the weighty nota bene, are, Job 13:12 b says what their become; for always denotes a = , and is never the exponent of the predicate in a simple clause. Del.] , lit. back, ridge (comp. Job 15:26) here equivalent to breastwork, bulwark; so does Job call here the reasonings behind which they sought refuge, the glittering, pathetically urged arguments which they had arrayed against him. Comp. , Isa 41:21, and , 2Co 10:4. [The rendering of E. V. your bodies (are like) to bodies of clay, is evidently taken from the signification back: and the whole verse is a reminder of their mortality. But this is much less suited to the language used, less pertinent to the context, and less effective for Jobs purpose than the rendering here given.E.] For , mud, potters clay, as an emblem of what is frail, easily destroyed, incapable of resistance, comp. Job 38:14; Isa 45:9 seq.

Second Division: Second Section: Declaration of his consciousness of innocence as against God in the form of a solemn confession, in which he boldly challenges Him: Job 13:13-22.

First Strophe: Job 13:13-16. [Turning from the friends, he expresses more emphatically than before his purpose to appeal to God, cost what it may at the first, confident of ultimate acquittal. Dillmann says: It seems that the poet intentionally cut this strophe short, in order by this very brevity to emphasize more strongly the gravity of these thoughts.]

Job 13:13. In silence leave me alone: lit. be silent from me (), i.e., desist from me, cease from your injurious assaults, and let me be in peace. [According to Schlott. the preposition here is the of source or cause: be silent because of the weight of my words; acc. to the above, a constr. prgnans is assumed. Conant, etc., translate: Keep silence before me. Barnes thinks it possible that Job may have perceived in them some disposition to interrupt him in a rude manner in reply to the severe remarks which he had made. Comp. on Job 6:29. More probably, however, the verse is, like Job 13:5, an expression of his weariness with their vain platitudes, and unjust accusations, and a demand that they should stand by in silence while he should plead directly with God.E.]Then will I speak, or: in order that I may speak. [Conant: That I now may speak:. Strong double emphasis in the use of the cohortative future, and the pronoun; the latter emphasizing the first person, the former his strong determination to speak.E.]And let come upon me what will. as in Deu 24:5. here for , a condensed form of expression similar to , 2Sa 18:22; comp. Ewald, 104, d.

Job 13:14. Wherefore should I take my flesh into my teeth:i.e. be solicitous to save and to preserve my body at any price, like a beast of prey, which drags off its booty with its teeth, and so secures it against other preying animals. This proverbial saying, which does not occur elsewhere, is in itself clear (comp. Jer 38:2). The second member also signifies essentially the same thing: and (wherefore should I) put my soul in my hand:i.e. risk my life, seek to save it by means of a desperate exertion of strength (comp. the same expression in Jdg 12:3; 1Sa 19:5; 1Sa 28:21). [This, says Dillmann, is indeed scarcely the original meaning of the phrase; nor is it to be understood, as commonly explained, that what one has in the hand easily falls out and is lost. The primary meaning is rather: to commit or entrust the life to the hand in order to bear it through, i.e. to make a desperate effort to save it (see Ewald on the passage): such an attempt is indeed dangerous, because if the hand fails, the life is lost, and so the common explanation attaches itself naturally to the phrase, to expose the life to apparent danger. Here, however, the original meaning is altogether suitable, and indeed necessary, because only so do the first and second members agree: why should I make an extreme effort to save my life?] Such a desperate effort Job would make, in case he should declare himself guilty of the reproaches brought against him. while at the same time he bore no consciousness of guilt within himself. This, however, would not be of the least avail, for according to Job 13:15 a he has nothing more to hope for, he sees before him nothing but certain death from the hand of God. Hence, therefore, his question: Wherefore should I seek to save my life at any priceI who have nothing more to hope for? Compared with this interpretation, which is the only one suited to the context, and which is adopted by Umbreit, Ewald, Vaih., Dillm., etc., the many interpretations which vary from it are to be rejected, especially those according to which the second member is not to be regarded as a continuation of the question, but as an assertionaccording to Hirzel in the positive form: and even my life do I riskaccording to Hahn and Delitzsch in the negative: nay, I even put my life at stake: in like manner, that of Bttcher: wherefore should I seek to preserve my life at any price, seeing that I willingly expose it, etc.

[Wordsworth agrees in this interpretation of the meaning of each member of the verse, but differs from Zckler, etc., in the application: The question (he says) is put hypothetically. You may ask me why I am thus bold to desire to expose myself to a trial before God? The reason is because I am sure that I have a good cause; I know that in the end He will do me right. See what follows.The Vulg. renders: Quare lacero carnes meas dentibus meis, et animam meam porto in manibus meis? Hengstenberg follows this rendering, explaining the first clause of the wrong, the violence which he would do to his moral personality, if by silence he should plead guilty to the accusations of the friends. Schultens, who is followed in substance by Rosenmller, Good, Wemyss, Bernard, Barnes, Renan, Davidson, Carey, Rodwell, Elzas, regards both members as proverbially expressing the idea of risking life, and the clause not in its usual interrogative sense, but as equivalent to: in spite of every thing. (Schult., super quid, on any account.) is thus a resumption of the in 13b. This rendering gives a consistent and forcible sense throughout: Be silent now, and let me alone, and I for my part will assuredly speak, be the consequence what it may: Cost what it may, I will risk it all, I will risk my person and my life: lo, He will slay me, etc., yet in his very presence, etc, (comp. on Job 9:21-22). The objection to this is of course the unusual rendering of . On the other hand the objection to the interpretation adopted in our comm. is the unusual sense in which we are constrained to take the proverbial expressions of the verse, particularly the latterto take the life in the handwhich according to this interpretation must mean to seek to save the life, whereas in every other instance it means to risk it. It is thus at best a choice between difficulties, or unusual expressions. And it may fairly be queried whether the difficulty in regard to is not largely obviated by the close connection in which it stands with the just preceding.E.].

Job 13:15. Lo, He will slay me:viz. through my disease, which will certainly bring about my speedy dissolution (comp. Job 6:13; Job 7:6; Job 9:25; Job 10:20). I have no (more) hope; i.e., I do not direct my thoughts to the future, I am not in a state of waiting, expectation ( without an obj., prstolari, exactly as in Job 6:11; Job 14:14), and this indeed is so naturally, because for me there is nothing more to wait for, seeing that my condition is hopeless, and my fate long since decided. So, according to the Kthibh is the phrase to be explained, while the Kri, must signify in accordance with the suffix: until then, viz., until I am slain, I wait (so substantially Luther), or again: I wait for Him, that He may slay me (Delitzsch) [i.e., I wait what He may do, even to smite with death]. The context by no means yields the rendering of the Vulg., which also rests on the Kri; etiam si occiderit me, in ipso (Deo) sperabo [so also E. V., though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him]: an utterance which has acquired a certain celebrity as a favorite sentiment alike of pious Jews and Christians (comp. Delitzsch on the passage), as the funeral text of the Electoress Louise Henriette of Brandenburg, and as the poetic theme of a multitude of popular religious hymns. It scarcely expresses however the meaning here intended by Job, which is far removed from any expression of a hope reaching beyond death.Only my ways (viz., the innocence of my ways) will I prove in His presence. , referring back to the whole preceding sentence, hence the game as nevertheless, however. He has already despaired of life, but of one thing he does not despair, freely and openly to prove before God the blamelessness of his life: physically therefore he can succumb, that he concedes, but morally he cannot (Del.).

Job 13:16. Even this will be my salvation that the unholy comes not before Him:i.e., does not dare to present himself so confidently before Him. In the fact that He is filled with towards God he sees accordingly a pledge of salvation, i.e., of victory in the trial in which he is involved. For this sense of comp. 1Sa 14:45; 2Ch 20:17; Hab 3:8 (not however in Job 30:15, where it signifies rather prosperity, and that of the earthly sort). [He wavers between two contradictions: on the one side he believes according to an opinion widely prevalent in the Semitic East, that no one can see God without dying; on the other side he reassures himself with the thought that God cannot reveal Himself to the wicked. Renan]. is referred by Bttcher, Schlott., [Con., Dav., and so E. V.], etc., to God: He also ministers to my help, to my deliverance, for, etc. But this does not agree with the contents of the preceding verse. For the neuter rendering of , which we find already in the LXX., ( ) comp. Job 15:9; Job 31:28; Job 41:3. [In favor of the personal sense for , referring it to God, Schlottmann argues that it would scarcely be said of a circumstance in Hebrew that it would be anybodys salvation: and Davidson objects to the neuter rendering that it originates in a cold conception of Jobs mental agitation, and gives to a sense feeble almost to imbecility. On the other hand Dillmann argues against the masculine sense that in that case the connection between the first and second members of this verse would be imperfect, and that the contrast between what would thus be said of God in this verse and that which has been said in Job 13:15 would be too violent].

Second Strophe: Job 13:17-22. [Determination to cite God finally reached, with conditions of pleading before Him.Dav.].

Job 13:17. Hear, O hear my declaration. , a strongly emphasized appeal that they should hear him, essentially the same in signification as Isa 6:9, only that here is not intended as there a continued but an attentive hearing for the time being; comp. Job 21:2; Job 37:2., here declaration, signifies in Arabic confession, religion. Its synonym in he second member, [and let my utterance sound in your ears], formed from the Hiph. of the verb (Job 15:17; Psa 19:3) signifies here (the only place where it occurs in the O. T.) not brotherly conduct as in post-biblical Hebrew, but utterance. With it is better to supply or , let it enter, let it sound in your ears, than to repeat from a.

Job 13:18. Behold now I have made ready the cause. , causam instruere, as in Job 23:4; comp. the simple , Job 33:5. On b comp. Job 11:2.

Job 13:19. Who is he that will contend with me?i.e., attempt with success to prove that I am in the wrong. As to the thought compare the parallel passages, Isa 1:9; Rom 8:34; and as to the lively interrogative , Job 4:7.Then indeed (if any one succeeds in that, in convicting me of wrong) I would be silent and die: then, as one defeated within and without, I would without offering further resistance, let death come upon me as merited punishment. The explicitness and calmness with which he makes this declaration shows how impossible it seems to him that he should be proved guilty, how unalterably firm he stands in the consciousness of his innocence. [E. V., for now, if I hold my tongue, I shall give up the ghost, is less simple, and less suited to the connection].

Job 13:20. Only two things do not Thou unto me: these are the same two things which he has already deprecated in Job 9:34 in order that he may successfully achieve his vindication, and so, as it is here expressed in b, not be obliged to hide before God. In Job 13:21 we are told wherein they consist, viz., a, in heavy unremitting calamities and chastisements (Thy hand remove Thou from me), here of the hand which punishes, as previously in Job 9:34); and b, in terror, confusion, and trepidation produced by His majesty; comp. above, Job 13:11.

Job 13:22. Thenif these two alleviations are granted to mecall Thou and I will answer:i.e., summon me then to a criminal trial, or which would be eventually still more advantageous to me: allow me the first word, let me be the questioner. Obviously it is in this sense that we are to take b, where , to reply (supply ) is connected transitively with accus. of the person, as elsewhere ; comp. Job 20:2; Job 32:14; Job 40:4.

6. Third Division. The vindication of himself to God, with a complaint over the vanity and helplessness of human existence: Job 13:23Job 14:22. [That Job, lifted up by the proud consciousness of innocence, might really fancy for the moment that God would answer his challenge, is not in itself improbable in view of the present temper of his soul, and the entire plan of the poem, according to which such an intercourse of God with men as may be apprehended by the senses lies within the bounds of possibility (Job 38. seq.), and should not be described (with Schlottm.) as a fanatical thought; although indeed he could not long continue in this fancy; not only the non-appearance of God, but also every consideration of a more particular sort must convince him of the idleness of his wish. Dillmann. Hence the sudden change of his apology to a lamentation].

First Strophe: Job 13:23-28. Having repeatedly announced his purpose (Job 13:13 seq., 17 seq.), Job now at length passes directly to the demonstration of his innocence, but at once falls from a tone of confident self-justification into one of sorrowful lamentation, and faint-hearted despair, out of which he does not again emerge during this discourse.

Job 13:23. How many are (then) my iniquities and sins; my wickedness and my sin make known to me!Inasmuch as denotes sin or moral aberration in general (occasionally also indeed sins of weakness), transgression or evil-doing of a graver sort, however flagrant wickedness, open apostasy from God (comp. Hoffmann, Schriftbew. I., 483 seq.), the enumeration which is here given is on the whole neither climactic nor anti-climactic, but alike in a and b the more special and stronger expression precedes, while the more general term follows. Observe still further that the characteristic expression used to denote the smallest and slightest offenses, (Psa 19:13) is not introduced here at all. Of such failures of the most insignificant sort Job would indeed be perfectly well aware that he was guilty; comp. above Job 9:2; Job 9:14 seq.

Job 13:24. Wherefore hidest Thou Thy face (a sign of the Divine displeasure, comp. Isa 54:8) and regardest me as Thine enemy?The question is an expression of impatient wonder at the non-appearance of God.

Job 13:25. A driven leaf wilt Thou terrify? with He interrog. like , Job 15:2. Comp. Gesenius 100 [ 98], 4 [E. V. wilt thou break a leaf, etc. And so Bernard: but against usage]. And pursue the dry chaff? The meaning of this troubled plaintive double question is: How canst Thou, who art Almighty and All-sufficient, find Thy pleasure in persecuting and afflicting a weak and miserable creature like me? It is not with reference to the universal frailty of mankind, of which he partook (Hahn), but with special reference to the fearful visitation which had come on him, and he destruction which had begun in his body, that he compares himself to a driven leaf, i. e. one that is tossed to and fro by the wind [comp. Lev 26:36), and to the dry chaff, which is in like manner blown about (comp. Psa 1:4, etc.).

Job 13:26. For Thou decreest for me bitter things (or also with consecutive rendering of : that Thou decreest, etc.). here is equivalent of course to bitter painful punishments; and , lit. to write, refers to a written decree announcing a judicial sentence: comp. Job 31:35; Psa 149:9; Isa 10:1.And makest me to inherit the iniquities of my youth: the sins of my earlier years, long since forgiven and forgotten, by comparison with which as being the half-conscious misbehaviour of childhood, or the manifestations of youthful thoughtlessness (Psa 25:7), so severe and fearful a penalty would seem to be needless cruelty. [He can regard his affliction only as the inheritance of the sins of his youth, since he has no sins of his mature years that would incur wrath to reproach himself with. Del.E. Ver. makest me to possess, etc., not sufficiently expressive. His old age inherited the accumulated usury and consequence of youthful sins. Dav.] To cause one to inherit anything is the same as causing him to experience the consequences of anything (here the bad consequences, the punishments); comp. Pro 14:18; Ps. 69:37 (Psa 69:36); Mar 10:17; 1Co 6:10, etc.

Job 13:27. And puttest my feet in the block:i. e. treatest me as a prisoner. , poet. for , Ewald, 443, b. [jussive in form though not in signification; used simply from the preference of poetry for a short pregnant form. Del.], comp. Job 15:33; Job 23:9; Job 23:11. here and Job 33:11 is a wooden block with a contrivance for firmly fastening the feet of a prisoner, the same with the of Jer 20:3, and the of Act 16:24, or , or the Roman instruments of torture called cippus, codex or nervus. In times still recent wooden blocks of this kind were in use among the Arabians, as Burckhardt had occasion to observe (Travels, p. 420). And watchest all my paths:i. e. does not allow me the slightest freedom of motion: comp. Job 7:12; Job 10:14.Around the roots of my feet Thou dost set bounds:i. e. around the place where I stand, where the soles of my feet are placed (the soles firmly fixed in one point being compared to the roots of a tree), Thou dost make marks, bounds, lines of demarcation, which Thou dost not permit me to cross. This is the simplest and philologically the most suitable definition of the Hithpael (from ,); found only here, in which definitions Gesenius, Ewald (1st Ed.), Schlottm., Hahn, Del, Dillm., [Con., Elz.and see below the rendering of Hirzel, Noyes, etc.], etc., essentially agree. Not essentially different as to the sense, although philologically not so well authenticated are the explanations of Rosenm., Umbreit [Hengst., Merx], etc.: Thou drawest a circle around my feet; of Ewald (2d Ed.): Thou makest sure of my feet (comp. Peshito and Vulgate: vestigia pedum meorum considerasti); of Hirzel [Frst]: Thou dost make Thyself a trench around the roots of my feet [others, e. g. Noyes, Renan, Davidson, Rdiger, take in this sense of cutting or digging a trench, but regard the Hithpael as indirectly and not directly reflexive, sibi, not se susculperedost dig a trench for thyself]; of Raschi, Mercier, etc.: Thou fastenest Thyself to the soles of my feet. [E. V., Good, Wem., Bernard, etc.: Thou brandest (settest a print upon, E. V.) the soles of my feet; evidently supposing the expression to refer to some process of branding criminals in the feet: for which, however, there is no good authority.]The three parallel figures contained in the verse all find their actual explanation in the fearful disease, with which Job was visited by God, in consequence of which he was doomed to one place, being unable to move on account of the unshapely swelling of his limbs. [Mercier has already called attention to the gradation which marks the proofs given in these verses of the Divine anger. (1) God hides His face. (2) He shows Himself an enemy. (3) He issues severe decrees against him. (4) He punishes sins long since passed. (5) He throws him into cruel and narrow imprisonment. Hengst.]

Job 13:28. Although he (the persecuted one) as rottenness wastes away, as a garment which the moth has eaten (comp. Job 4:19). This forcible description of the weakness and perishableness of his condition is given to emphasize the thought, how unacccountably severe is Gods treatment of him (comp. above Job 13:25). It is introduced by (instead of ) objectivizing the subject, and giving to the discourse a more general application, valid also for other men, and at the same time providing a transition to the following lament, referring to human misery in general. [Thou hast set this enclosure around one who does not grow like a tree, but moulders away moth-eaten like a garment. Job looks at himself ab extra; he will hardly own himself; he hardly recognizes himself, so changed is he by affliction and disease, and he speaks of himself in the third person. How natural and touching is this! Wordsworth.]

Third Division: Second and Third Strophes: The lament over mans mortality, frailty and vanity continued: Job 14:1-12.

Second Strophe: Job 14:1-6. [Mans physical frailty and moral impurity by nature made the ground of a complaint against the severity of Gods treatment, and of an appeal for forbearance.]

Job 14:1-2. Man, born of woman, of few days, and full of trouble, cometh up as a flower [and withereth, and fleeth as a shadow, and abideth not].This is the only right construction of the passage. The first verse contains only the subject, together with three appositional clauses more particularly descriptive of the same. Of these the first, (a phrase which is elsewhere exactly synonymous with man, e. g.Sir 10:18 : , and Mat 11:11 : .), belongs immediately to the notion contained in the subject, man, whom it characterizes according to his innate quality of weakness (as also in Job 15:14; Job 25:4), while the two following clauses illustrate the shortness of his life, (, constr. st. of , comp. Job 10:15), and the trouble which fills it (, as in Job 3:17; Job 3:26). It is disputed whether the second verb in Job 14:2, means to wither, or to be cut off. Etymologically both these definitions are possible, since may be taken either as Imperf. Niph. of = , succidi, or as Imperf. of a secondary Kal. (an alternate form ), synonymous with , to wither, to become dry, marcescere. The meaning to be cut off, however, is loss suitable to the flower than to fade [the latter, and not the former, being, as Dillmann points out, the natural destiny alike of the flower and of man]; comp. Isa 40:7; Psa 37:2; Psa 90:10; Psa 103:15 seq.; Mat 6:30; 1Pe 1:24; moreover, in the two parallel passages of our book, Job 18:16; and Job 24:24, it is by no means necessary to render in the sense of succidi, prcidi (against Hirzel, Gesenius, Delitzsch [Conant, Dav., E. V.], etc.). On b comp. Job 8:9; Psa 90:5; Psa 90:9-10. [Conant regards the article before as having a definite signification, that which marks the passing and declining day. This, however, would scarcely be in harmony with the verb , which describes rather the fleeting shadow of the cloud, to which the art. would be equally suitable. Merx transposes Job 14:28, of chap. 7., and inserts it here between Job 14:1-2, thus depriving it of the force and beauty which belong to it as the closing verse of that strophe, and as a transition to this, and at the same time weakening the beauty and pathos of this passage by the accumulation of figures.E.]

Job 14:3. And upon this one dost Thou keep Thine eye open?viz. in order to watch him, and to punish him for his sins, comp. Psa 34:17 [16]. , emphatically connecting something new with what has already been given, like our over and above. , upon this one, i. e. upon such an one as he is here described, upon so wretched a creature (Psa 103:14). [The pronoun here descriptive, such an one, talis, rather than demonstrative. By position the phrase is emphatic. E. V., Conant, etc., render the verb simply to open,=so much as open the eyes, so much as look upon him. The rendering given in our commy. to keep the eye open upon presupposes a double emphasis, the first and principal one on the pronoun, the second on the verb.E.]And me ([, emphatic, me] this particularly wretched example of the human race), dost thou bring into judgment before Thee?i. e., to judgment at Thy tribunal, where it is impossible to maintain ones cause.

Job 14:4. O that a pure one might come forth out of an impure:i. e., would it were only possible that one might remain free from the universal sinfulness of the human race, and from the misery accompanying the same, which is now absolutely universal and without exception, so that it has the appearance of unpitying severity when God visits those belonging to this race with punishment (comp. Job 14:5-6). , the customary optative formula (as in Job 14:13; Job 6:8), here connected with an accusative of the object, specifying the contents of the wish (so also in Job 31:31; Job 31:35; Psa 14:7; Deu 28:67). Hence not: who makes [E. V.: can bring] a pure one out of an impure? (Rosenm., Arnheim, Welte, [Renan]); nor: where can a pure one be found among the impure? as if here could have the partitive sense before the singular . [The Opt. rendering not only denies the possibility (of a morally clean coming out of a morally unclean), but gives utterance to the desire that it was otherwise. Dav.]. Not one: to wit, comes forth. [Not therefore can bring forth, as might be inferred from the literal rendering of ]. Not one pure will ever come forth in the line of development which has once been contaminated by sin; comp. Psa 51:7 [5]; also the expression Psa 14:3, which reminds us very closely of this . Ewald, with whom Dillmann agrees, punctuates instead of , and conforms the second member to the first: Oh that there were one! for the reason that a wish does not properly contemplate an answer. But a wish which is in itself incapable of realization is equivalent to a question, the answer to which is a strong negation. Moreover the passage is incomparably stronger and more emphatic according to the common rendering, than according to that of Ewald. [Moreover, why should he desire one such specimen? Plainly, the desire is nothing to the purpose, except as implying that not one such is to be found; and precisely this is asserted in the proper and usual construction of the words. Con.]. On the relation of this assertion by Job of the universality of human corruption to the earlier affirmation of Eliphaz in Job 4:17 seq., see the Doc. and Eth. Remarks.

Job 14:5-6, (the former the antecedent, the latter the consequent).If his days are determined (, lit. cut off [decisi], sharply bounded, defined ; comp. Isa 10:22; 1Ki 20:40), the number of his months with Thee (viz. is established, firmly fixed; here equivalent to , comp. Job 10:13), and Thou hast made [or set] his limit (read with the Kthibh, not the plural with the Kri, which is here less suitable, there being but one limit, one terminus to this earthly life)which he cannot pass (lit. and he passes it not) [observe that the particle in the first member of the verse extends its influence over all three members]: then look away from him, ( the opposite of Job 14:3 a; comp. Job 7:19) that he may rest ( here as in 1Sa 2:5 : to rest, to keep holiday, to be released from the of Job 14:1) that he may enjoy as a hireling his day.The last member literally reads: until that (to the degree that as in Job 8:21; 1Sa 2:5; Isa 47:7) he, like a day-laborer, find pleasure in his day, or, be satisfied with his day. This is the meaning of with the accus.(comp. Jer 14:10; Psa 102:15, and often); not to satisfy, in the sense of to discharge, to make good, [E. V. to accomplish] as Delitzsch explains it, when he translates: until he discharges [accomplishes] as a hireling his day. In favor of this latter rendering indeed, Lev 26:34; Lev 26:43, and 2Ch 36:21 may be cited; but the sense thence resulting is in each case harsh and artificial. For just why it should be said of a hireling, that he (in death) makes complete his days (comp. , Col 1:24) is not altogether apparent: the comparison of the (comp. Job 7:1) seems superfluous, inconsistent indeed, if we have to do simply with the thought: until the completion of the days of his life. [It is difficult to see why the definition adopted by the E. V. and Del. is not perfectly suitable to the connection. The objection to it is that it is not supported by usage, means everywhere to regard favorably, to take pleasure in. We are not justified in taking it in any other sense here. But the expression to enjoy as a hireling his day is variously understood. Some take here in some specific sense; e. g., the day of his discharge, his last day as a hireling (Bernard); his day of rest (Rodwell); and something similar is suggested by Jeromes optata dies. But this thought would have been more distinctly expressed.Others (Hengst., Wordsworth, Noyes, Barnes), explain it as a wish that man may enjoy his life at least as much, with the same freedom from care, as the hireling. But to this there are several objections. (1) would scarcely be used to express this idea, least of all, as here, without any qualification. (2) That Job regarded the day or service of a hireling as a term of hardship, from which deliverance was to be sought rather than as affording any measure of satisfaction to be desired, is evident from the parallel passage in Job 7:1-2. Comp. Job 3:19. (3) He has already expressed the burden of his longing in . This clause is rather to be regarded as an amplification of that thought: the rest, the enjoyment which the end of the days labor brings.It is unnatural to suppose that having reached in thought the goal of rest, he would go back to the joyless, even though painless toil preceding it. We are thus led to the explanation that the enjoyment hero spoken of is that which succeeds the labors of the day. The hirelings real enjoyment of his day comes when the shadow of evening (Job 7:2) brings with it the rest which he covets, and the wages he has earned. In like manner Job desires for man agitated by unrest ( Job 14:1) a respite, however brief, the satisfaction which the end of toil and sorrow would bring. It is not death however that he here prays may come, for that, as the following verses show, is a hopeless condition. And yet the thought of the end of toil suggests at once the thought of death and that hopeless beyond.E.].

Third Strophe: Job 14:7-12. The hopelessness of man when his earthly life is ended.

Job 14:7. For there is yet hope for the tree. , for introduces the reason for the request preferred in Job 14:6 in behalf of miserable and afflicted man: look away from him, etc. [The predication of hope made very strongly both by and the accent, the main division of the verse is at hope. Dav.].If it be cut down, It shoots up again (viz., the stump left in the ground, comp. Isa 6:13), and its sprout, the tender young shoot from the root [suckling], LXX. ; comp. h. Job 8:16) faileth not. Carey, Delitzsch, and others, correctly understand the tree of whose vitality and power of perpetual rejuvenescence Job seems more particularly to think here to be the datepalm, which on account of this very quality is called by the Greeks . It is not so probable that the oak or terebinth [E. V. teil] mentioned in the parallel passage in Isa 6:13, is intended here.

Job 14:8-9, present not properly another case, (Dillmann), but they develop the illustration already presented still further and more forcibly.If its root becometh old in the ground (, inchoative Hiph., senescere), and its trunk dieth in the dust (comp. Isa 40:24), i. e., if the tree die, not interrupted in its growth by the violent hand of man, while yet young and vigorous, but decaying with age, becoming dry and dead down to the roots.Through the scent of water (i. e., so soon as it feels the vivifying energy of water; comp. Jdg 16:9) [, may be taken either subjectively of the scenting, or inhalation of water by the tree; or, bettor, of the scent which water brings with it. When the English army landed in Egypt in 1801, Sir Sydney Smith gave the troops the sure sign that wherever date-trees grew there must be water. Vide R. WilsonsHistory of the Expedition to Egypt, page 18] it sprouts (again; comp. Psa 92:14) and puts forth boughs (comp. Job 18:16; Job 29:19), like a young plant; or also like a sapling newly planted (LXX.: ). That this description also is pre-eminently suitable to the palm appears from the fact that, as every oriental knows very well, in every place where this tree grows, water must be very near at hand, generally from the indestructible vitality and luxuriant fulness of this , (comp. Delitzsch on this passage. [Even when centuries have at last destroyed the palmsays Masius in his beautiful and thoughtful studies of naturethousands of inextricable fibres of parasites cling about the stem, and delude the traveller with an appearance of life. Del.]).

Job 14:10-12 present the contrast to the above: the hopelessness of man in death.

Job 14:10. But man dies and is brought down ( here in the intrans. sense confectum esse, to be prostrated, to be down, whence the usual signification, to be weak, is derived: [the Imperf, when transitive, is written ; when intransitive, as here, ]); man expires (, Imperf. consec., because the cheerless consequences of death are here further set forth), and where is he?where does he then go to? what becomes of him? Comp. the similar yearning question in Ecc 3:21.

Job 14:11. The waters flow away [lit. roll off] out of the sea, and a stream falls and dries up.This is the protasis of a simile, the apodosis of which is introduced, Job 14:12, by so, as below in Job 14:19, and as above in Job 5:7; Job 11:12 (in which latter passages indeed the figure follows, not precedes, the thing illustrated). Comp. the description, imitative of the present passage, in Isa 19:5, describing the drying up of the Nile ( ,) by a Divine judgmenta description which indeed the advocates of a post-Solomonic authorship of our book regard as the original of the passage before us (e.g., Volck, de summa carm. Job sent., p. 31). [ here should be taken of an inland sea or body of water, a sense which the application of the word to the lake of Tiberias, Num 34:11; the Euphrates, Isa 27:1; the Nile, see above, abundantly justifies. Such a drying up of large bodies of water is no uncommon phenomenon in the torrid regions of the East.E.]

Job 14:12. So man lies down and rises no more; till the heavens are no more, they awake not. , until the failure, i. e., the disappearance of the heavens (comp. the exactly equivalent phrase, , Psa 72:7), the same in meaning with , Psa 148:6. For according to the popular conception of the ancient Hebrews, the heavens endure forever: Psa 89:30 [29]; Jer 31:35. When in Psa 102:27; Isa 51:6; Isa 65:17 the heavens are described as waxing old and being changed, this statement does not exclude their eternal existence; for the supposition of a destruction of the universe in the sense of its annihilation is everywhere foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures. The expression before us, not to awake till the heavens are no more, is accordingly in any case equivalent to not to awake for ever [or never to awake], as the third member of the verse also clearly indicates: and are never aroused out of their sleepthey sleep a , Jer 51:39; Jer 51:57, an endless sleep of death. [It is assuredly straining the language, and at variance with the connection, and with Jobs present mood, to assume in the expression an implication that when the phenomenal heavens should disappear, man would awake. How far Jobs mind does reach out towards the idea of a resuscitation of humanity will be seen presently. Amid such fluctuations of thought and feeling as characterize his utterances, we are not to look for self-consistency, much less for a careful and exact expression of the highest forms of truth, whether as revealed elsewhere, or even as at times revealed to his own mind.E.] How unchangeable the cheerless outlook on such an eternal condition of death In Sheol presents itself to Job, is shown by the vividly expressed wish which Immediately follows that God, if it were possible, would cause him again to emerge out of this condition, which, however, he immediately recognizes as a yearning which is absolutely incapable of being realized.

8. Third Division: Fourth and Fifth Strophes: Continuation and conclusion of the description of the hopelessness of man in the prospect of death: Job 14:13-22.

Fourth Strophe: Job 14:13-17 : [If God would only permit a hope of the cessation of His wrath, and of his restoration from Sheol, how joyfully he would endure] until the change should come; but now He punishes without pity his sins.]

Job 14:13. Ah that Thou wouldst hide me (Hiph. as in Exo 2:3) in the realm of the dead, wouldst keep me secret until Thy wrath should change (comp. the description of such a hiding from Gods wrath in Isa 26:20; Psa 27:5; Psa 31:21 [20]), wouldst appoint me a set time (a , see on Job 14:5), and then remember meviz., for good, in order to re-establish me in the fellowship of Thy grace, and cause me to live in the same. This last expression accented with the emphasis of glowing passion, is the culmination of the yearning wish which Job here expresses, from which, however, he immediately recoils again, as from a chimerical idea which has no real foundation.

Job 14:14. If man dies, will he live?i. e., is it possible that he who has once died, will come to life again? The asyndetic introduction of this short but frequent question after the preceding verse, produces a contrast which is all the stronger. No answer to the question follows, because it is self-evident to the reader that it can be answered only in the negative. But strong as is his conviction of the impossibility of a return to life of the dead, equally sweet and gracious is the charm of the thought which dwells on the opposite possibility, which he has just expressed in the form of a wish. [If a man die, etc., finely natural interpretation of the cold reason and of doubt, striving to banish the beautiful dream and presentiment of a new bodily life with God; but in vain, the spirit tramples down the rising suspicion, and pursues more eagerly the glorious vision. Dav.] All the days of my warfare would I wait, until my discharge (lit. my exchange, comp. Job 10:17) should come.Job uses the term warfare here somewhat differently from Job 7:1 to denote not only the remainder of his toilsome and troublesome days on earth, but the whole dismal interval between the present and that longed-for goal in the future when he should be released from Hades; this release is here, in accordance with the figure of military service, designated as an exchange or discharge. [Hence the change here spoken of is not, as the old Jewish expositors, followed by some moderns, have explained it, the change produced by death. The word , however, has here a double significance, which should be appreciated to realize the full beauty of the passage. In addition to its primary and principal meaning as expressing the discharge of the soldier whose term of hard service has expired, it suggests also the sprouting anew (, Job 14:7) of the trunks and roots of the tree which has been cut down. The , in a word, which Job yearns for is a release from service which would be at the same time a springing up anew from death to life. That this double meaning is not forced, that it is a beautiful and happy stroke of genius, will not seem at all incredible to any one who will carefully trace out our authors masterly use of words in their various possibilities.E.]

Job 14:15. Thou wouldst call (to wit, in this discharge [by Ewald and others referred to the forensic call to the final trial, wherein Job confidently hoped to be acquitted; but the connection here indicates rather the call of love, yearning after its object; the voice of God returning to take His creatures to Himself (Dav.)E.], and I would answer Thee (would follow Thy call); Thou wouldst yearn after the work of Thy hands (Job 10:3); i. e., Thou, as. Creator, wouldst feel an affectionate longing after Thy creature, which Thou hadst hitherto treated harshly, and rejected. The true character of the relation of love between the Creator and His creature would again assert itself, it would become manifest that wrath is only a waning power (Isa 54:8), and love the true and essential necessity of His being. Del. [Job must have had a keen perception of the profound relation between the creature and his Maker in the past, to be able to give utterance to such an imaginative expectation respecting the future. Schlott.] Although only a phantasy of hope (Schlott.), it still furnishes an unconscious prophecy of that which was accomplished in Christs descent into Hades for the salvation of the saints of the Old Covenant.

Job 14:16. For now Thou numberest my steps, i. e., for at this time Thou watchest every step and motion, as those of a transgressor, comp. Job 13:27. , as in Job 6:21, introducing the contrast between a point of time on which the eye fixes in the future, and the sad reality of the present. [ assigns the reason for the wish which forms the contents of Job 14:13-15. It is not necessary, with Hirzel and Schlott., to supply any thing between Job 14:15-16, as, e. g., Thou dost not yearn for Thy creature now, for, etc. The construction of Umbreit, etc., which takes as an emphatic clause,=indeed now, is to be rejected.E.]And dost not hold Thyself back on account of my sins.This is the most satisfactory rendering of . It is found already in Mercier, (non reservas nec differs peccati mei punitionem), and is of late advocated by Delitzsch [and Wordsworth. It seems to Del. that the sense intended must be derived from , which means to keep anger, and consequently to delay the manifestation of it; Amo 1:11.] Dillmanns explanation gives the same sense: Thou dost not pass over my sins; a rendering, indeed, which rests on an emendation of the text to: , which is favored in some measure by the version of the LXX. Also the rendering advocated by Ewald, Heilig., Schlott. and Hahn: Thou givest no consideration to my sins (to ascertain, namely, whether they do in truth deserve to be punished so severely), does not differ very essentially. Other explanations lack satisfactory support: such as those of the Rabbis, which differ widely among themselves: e.g. Raschis: Thou waitest not over my sins, i. e. to punish them; Ralbags: Thou waitest not for my sins=repentance punishment; Aben-Ezras: Thou lookest not except on my sins. The same may be said of the attempt of Rosenm., Hirzel and Welte to render the sentence as an interrogative without : Dost Thou not keep watch over my sin? [So E. V., Conant, Dav., Rod., Gesen., Frst.In view of Job 13:27 b, it is not apparent why this rendering should be said to lack satisfactory support. The preposition cannot be urged against it, for it harmonizes well with the idea thus expressed; and the interrogative form gives vividness, force and variety to the passage.E.]

Job 14:17. Sealed up in a bag is my gullt. , lit. wickedness, as in Job 13:23 b, here of the aggregate of Jobs former transgressions (comp. Job 13:26 b), of the sum total, the entire mass of guilty actions committed by him, which, as he must believe, is preserved and sealed up by God with all care as a treasure, to be used against him in his own time; comp. Deu 32:34; Hos 13:12. For the figurative expression: to tie up in a bag,=to keep in remembrance, comp. Psa 56:9; 1Sa 25:29. Ewald, Hirzel, Renan, incorrectly explain the guilt sealed in a bag to be the judicial sentence of condemnation by God already issued against Job, which now only awaits execution; for of the preservation of such penal sentences in a bottle all oriental antiquity knows nothing whatever. [The figure is taken from the mode of preserving collected articles of value in a sealed bag. Del.]And Thou hast devised additions to my transgressions: lit. and Thou hast still further stitched (to wit, other, new transgressions) on my transgressions; i. e. hast made mine iniquity still greater than it is, and punished it accordingly more severely than it deserves. This accusation which Job here prefers against God is a bold one; but it is too much to affirm that it is pure blasphemy (Dillm.), because the language of Job throughout is simply tropical, and his real thought is that Gods treatment of him is as severe as if, in addition to his actual transgressions, he were burdened with a multitude of such as had been fabricated (comp. Hengstenberg on the passage). Hence the rendering of Ewald: Thou hast patched up, sewed up my transgression [E. V., Dillmann, Good, Wemyss, Bernard, Con., Barnes, Dav., Rod.], is equally unnecessary with the similar rendering of Umbreit, Vaih., Bttch.: and Thou coverest up my sins. Substantially the right interpretation is given by Rosenmller, Arnh., Hirz., Welte, Delitzsch, Hengst. [Gesen., Frst, Noyes, Renan, Words.].

[The main argument in favor of the interpretation adopted here by Zckler is that means properly not to sew up, but to sew on, patch on, and gen. to add. So Delitzsch. But (1): It looks very much like hyper-criticism to decide, from a very limited usage, that a word, the essential meaning of which is to sew, may mean to sew on, but cannot mean to sew up; or, if the essential meaning be to plaster, to patch, that it may mean to patch on to (to add a patch), but not to patch over. (2) The point becomes still weaker in a case where the word is used, as here, in a figurative, not a literal sense. (3) The parallelism favors the meaning to sew, or to patch up. It seems somewhat, incongruous, after representing God as having sealed up transgressions in a bag, to represent Him in the next clause as stitching, patching, or fabricating other sins. On the other hand, the thought of sealing sin in a bag is suitably supplemented by the thought that the bag is not only officially sealed, but carefully sewed together; or if, with Bernard, we explain: With such care dost Thou store up my iniquities in Thy bag, that if Thou seest the slightest possibility of its giving way in any part, so that some of them might slip out and be lost, Thou immediately stoppest up the hole with a patch. (4) Admitting that the apparent blasphemy of the expression may be explained away, as above by Zckler, its admitted audacity still remains. But Job is not now in one of his Titanic moods of defiance. He resembles not so much Prometheus hurling charges against the Tyrant of the skies, as Hamlet, meditating pensively on death and the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, but with an infinitely purer pathos than is found even in the soliloquy of the melancholy Dane. It is but a moment ago (Job 14:15 b) that he recognized in a strain of inimitable beauty the yearning bent of Creative Love. He is now indeed complaining of the present severity of Gods dealings with him, but the plaintive tenderness of that sentiment still floats over his spirit and lingers in his words, softening them into the tone of a subdued reproachful moan, very different from the bitter outcry of rebellious defiance.E.]

Fifth Strophe: Job 14:18-22. Conclusion: completing the gloomy delineation of that which in reality awaited Job, in opposition therefore to the yearning desire of his heart.

Job 14:18. But in sooth a falling mountain crumbles away: observe the paronomasia in the original between the participle describing and (). [ at the beginning as elsewhere strongly adversative, introducing in opposition to the dream of a possible restoration in the preceding strophe the stern reality, the inexorable and universal law, which dooms everything to destruction. The use of this conjunction here is a strong confirmation of the position maintained in the concluding remarks on Job 14:17 that the sentiment of Job 14:15-17 lingers also around Job 14:16-17, and that accordingly Job 14:17 b cannot be a daring suggestion of the charge of fabricating iniquity against Job.E.]And a rock grows old out of its place. is rightly rendered: to grow old, to decay by the LXX., and among moderns by Hirzel, Umbreit, Vaihinger, Schlottmann. The topical meaning: to be removed is indeed admissible, and is supported by the Vulg., Rosenm, Ewald, Hahn, and generally by the majority of moderns. The more pregnant meaning of the passage, however, would be lost by the adoption of this latter rendering, which is simply prosaic in its simplicity.

Job 14:19. In this verse a and b continue the series of figures begun in Job 14:18, which are intended to illustrate the unceasing operation of the Divine penalty or process of destruction decreed for men, whereas c first introduces that which is to be illustrated by means of the adquationis (as in Job 5:7; Job 11:12; Job 12:11). Water hollows out stones (comp. the Lat. gutta cavat lapidem);its floods wash away the dust of the earth. , fem. sing., referring to the plural , according to Gesenius, 146 [ 143] 3, [Green. 275, 4. The harshness of the construction which is necessitated by taking in the sense which belongs to it elsewhere of a self-sown growth, is shown in the rendering of E. V.: Thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth. Moreover, the limitationself-sownis against this rendering, which would require rather some more comprehensive term, such as . The fem. suffix in originates in the same principle which determines the fem. form of the verb, and like the latter refers to .E.].And the hope of mortal man [note the use of , bringing man into the category of destructible matter.E.]Thou destroyest:i. e. just as incessantly and irresistibly as the physical objects here mentioned yield to the gradual processes of destruction in nature, so dost Thou cause man to perish without any hope of being brought to life again, and this too at once, suddenly (, Perf, of the accomplished fact. [For the form of the verb see Green, 112, 3]). The four figures here used are not introduced to exemplify the idea of incessant change ruling in the realm of nature, whereas from man all hope of a change for the better in his lot is taken away (so Hahn, who takes the in c in the adversative sense, but they describe the processes of destruction in nature, and more especially in the lower sphere of inorganic nature, as types of the gradual ceaseless extinction to which man succumbs in death. This moreover is not to be understood as though Job contemplated those processes with a view to console himself with the thought that his destruction in death was a natural necessity, (Hirzel), but in order to exhibit as forcibly and thoroughly as possible the absolute hopelessness of his condition in prospect of the dark future which death holds up before him; see Job 14:20-22, which admit of no other than this disconsolate sentiment for Job 14:19 c. [The descending gradation in the series of objects from which the illustrations here are taken is quite noticeablemountainrockstonesdust; and suggests at least the query whether we do not have here something more than four distinct emblems of decay, whether it is not intended to show a succession of stages in the process: the mountains crumbling into rocks, the rocks breaking down from age into stones, the stones wearing away into dust, and the dust being washed by the waters into the abyss; whether accordingly all nature is not thus resolving itself into the dust to which man too at the last returns What hope is there indeed for man, whose house of clay is crushed like the moth (Job 14:19), when the doom even of the everlasting mountains isdust!E.].

Job 14:20. Thou overpowerest him foreverthen he passeth away. with accus. if the person is not: to assail (Hirzel) [Con. Del.], but as in Job 15:24; Ecc 4:12, to overpower, and is not continually, evermore, but forever; comp. Job 4:20; Job 20:7; Job 23:7.As to the emphatic , then he passeth away, Greek , , comp. Job 10:21; also in respect of form the same poet. Imperf. in Job 16:6; Job 16:22; Job 20:25.Disfiguring his countenance, so Thou sendest him away; i. e., in the struggle of death, or when decay sets in, Thou makest him unlike himself, distortest his features, etc., and so sendest him forth out of this life ( as in Lev 20:23; Jer 28:16; the consecut. very nearly as in Psa 118:27).

Job 14:21. Should his sons be in honor, he knows it not; if they are abased he perceives them not: [ after here of the direct object: in Job 13:1 however as dat. ethicus. Del.]. The same contrast between , to come to honor, and , to be insignificant, to sink into contempt, is presented in Jer 30:19; for comp. also Isa 66:5. The mention of the children of the dead man has nothing remarkable about it, since Job is here speaking in general terms of all men, not especially of himself. It is somewhat different in Job 19:17; see however on the passage. The description in the passage before us of the absolute ignorance of the man who is in Sheol of that which takes place in the world above, reminds us of Job 3:13 seq. Comp. in addition Ecc 9:5-6 (see Comm. on the passage).

Job 14:22. Only his flesh in him feels pain, and his soul in him mourns: i. e., he himself, his nature, being analyzed into its constituent parts of soul and body (comp. Job 17:16), perceives nothing more of the bright life of the upper world; he has only the experience of pain and sorrow which belongs to the joyless, gloomy existence of the inhabitants of Sheol, surrounded by eternal night. The brevity of the expression makes it impossible to decide with certainty whether Job here assumes that man carries with him to Sheol a certain corporeality (a certain residue, kernel, or some reflex of the earthly body), or whether he mentions the flesh along with the soul because (as is perhaps the case also in Isa 66:24; Jdt 16:17) he attributes to the decaying body in the grave a certain consciousness of its decay (Dillmann; comp. Delitzsch, who would cast on the departed soul at least a painful reflection of that process). The former view, however, is the more probable in view of what is said in Job 19:27 (see below, Doctrinal and Ethical Remarks on Job 19., No. 3). By means of , in him, occurring in both members, the two factors of the nature belonging to the man who has died are emphatically represented as belonging to him, as being his own; the suffixes in and are thus in like manner strengthened by this doubled as in Greek the possessive pron. by . It is not probable that only, is through a hyperbaton to be referred simply to , expressing the thought: only he himself is henceforth the object of his experiences of pain and mourning, he concerns himself no more about the things of the upper world (Hirzel, Delitzsch), [Noyes, Schlott.]. This rendering is at variance with the position of the words, and with the doubled use of . Dillmann rightly says: the limiting belongs immediately not to the subject, but to the action: he no longer knows and perceives the things of the upper world, he is henceforth only conscious of pain, etc. Hengstenberg on the contrary arbitrarily explains [and so Wordsworth]: The situation in Job 14:22 is in general not that of the dead, but of one who is on the point of death, of whose flesh (animated as yet by the soul) alone could the sense of pain be predicted (?).

[Job 14:21-22 are a description of the afterlife in two of its principal aspects. (1) As one of absolute separation from the present, and so of entire unconsciousness and independence in regard to all that belongs to life on earth (Job 14:21).(2). As one of self-absorbed misery, the self-absorption being indicated by the repeated , and the double suffixes in each member of Job 14:22. The thought of Job 14:21 leads naturally to that of Job 14:22. The departed knows nothing of the living, nothing of all that befalls those who during life were in the closest union with himself; the consciousness of his own misery fills him.

The description in Job 14:22 of his experience of that misery is more obscure.may be renderedon account of: only on his own account his flesh suffereth pain, etc. The objection to this is its non-emphatic position, and the separation between it and . In any case the suffix refers to the man, not (as Conant, Dav., Ren., Rod.) to flesh in a, and to soul in b, for in that case would require . The proper rendering of therefore is in him (in = Germ, an; i. e., his flesh and spirit as belonging to him, as that with which he is invested).But why connect the flesh here with the soul? The simplest explanation seems to be that the realm of the dead, the under-world, in its broadest extent embraces both the grave, where the body lies, and Hades where the soul goes, as may be seen in Psa 16:10, where and are conjoined; and that accordingly by poetic personification, the mouldering flesh is here represented as sharing the aching discontent, the lingering misery of the imprisoned soul. It is no uncommon thing even for us to speak of the comfort, rest, equality, etc., of the grave, as though its occupants might have some consciousness of the same. So on the other hand it would seem that Job here introduces into the resting-place of the body something of that which made the place of the departed soul an object of dread. It may be indeed, as our Comm. suggests above, that the passage reflects some peculiarity in the opinion of antiquity touching the relation of the corporeal and spiritual parts of humanity, after death, but our grounds for affirming this are too precarious.E.].

DOCTRINAL AND ETHICAL

It is undeniable that Job in this reply to Zophars attack, which at the same time closes the first colloquy, shows himself decidedly superior to the three friends not only in acuteness, high poetic flight of thought, and penetrative fiery energy of expression, but also in what may be called doctrinal correctness, or purity. In the latter respect he seems to have made progress in the right direction from the stand-point which he had previously occupied. At least he exhibits in several points a perception of sin which is in some measure more profound and accurate, in so far as he, notwithstanding that he repeats the emphatic asseveration of his innocence (see especially Job 13:16; Job 13:19), makes mention of his own sins, not simply of those of his opponents. No doubt it is one of his principal aims to criticize sarcastically and severely their one-sided wisdom (Job 12:2 seq.; Job 13:1 seq.); no doubt he censures with visible satisfaction the one-sided application which they make of their narrow doctrine of retribution, and holds (Job 13:9) that if God in the exercise of rigid justice, should scrutinize them, the result would be anything but favorable to them! Now, however, more decidedly and explicitly than in his previous apologies, he includes himself also in the universal mass of those who are sinfully corrupt and guilty before God. He several times admits in the last division (Job 13:23Job 14:22) that by his sin he had furnished the inexorable Divine Judge, if not with valid and sufficient cause at least with occasion for the severe treatment which He had exercised toward him. Here belongs the prayer, addressed to God to show him how much and how grievously he had in truth sinned (Job 13:23). Here also belongs the supposition which he expresses (Job 13:26) that possibly it was the transgressions of his youth of which he was now called to make supplementary confession; and following thereupon we have his lamentationwhich reminds us of Davids penitential prayer (Psa 51:7; comp. Psa 14:3)concerning the nature of human depravity, which he represents as embracing all, and organically transmitting itself, so that no one is excepted from it (Job 14:4)an utterance which agrees in substance with the proposition previously advanced by Eliphaz (Job 4:17), but which more profoundly authenticates the truth under consideration, so that the Church tradition is perfectly justified in finding in it one of the cardinal sedes doctrin on the subject of original sin. Here finally belongs the description, involving another distinct confession of his own sinfulness, in which he shows how God unsparingly punishes his sin, lies in wait, as it were, for it, and carefully notes it in His book (a thought which is favored, by the corresponding Hebrew expression to seal transgression in a bag)nay, more, seems to interest Himself in wilfully enlarging this, His register of sins (Job 14:16-17). With these several indications of a more profound and comprehensive consciousness of sin, which are indeed still far from signifying a genuine contrite submission beneath Gods righteous discipline, that true penitence which Gods personal interposition at last works in him (Job 42:2 seq.), there stands immediately connected another evidence of progress in Jobs frame of mind, which is also contained in the closing division of this discourse, especially in the 14th chapter, which is characterized by wondrous beauty and astonishing power. Job utters here for the first time, if not the hope, at least the yearning desire for a release from the state of death (Job 14:13-17). He prays that, instead of being shut up in an eternally forlorn separation from God in the gloomy realm of shadows, he may rather be only kept there for a season, until the Divine wrath is ended, and then, when the Creator should remember His creature, to be restored to His fatherly love and compassion. This does not indeed amount to a hope that He would one day be actually released from Hades; it is simply a dream, born of the longing of this sorely tried sufferer, which imagination summons before him as a lovely picture of the future, of which, however, he himself is the next moment assured that it can never be a reality! If we should still call it a hope, we must in any case keep in view the wide interval which separates this forlorn flame of hope, flickering up for once only, and then immediately dying out, from that hope of a resurrection which with incomparably greater confidence is expressed in Job 19:25 seq. At best we can but say, with Ewald; The hope exists only in imagination, without becoming a certainty, while the speaker, whom it has surprised, only follows out the thought, how beautiful and glorious it would be, were it really so. This simple germ-hope of a resurrection, however, acquires great significance as a step in the doctrinal and ethical course of thought in our book. For it is the clear radiance of an unconscious prophecy of the future deliverance of spirits out of their prison through Christs victory over the powers of darkness (Mat 12:40 seq.; Luk 23:43; Eph 4:8 seq.; Php 2:10 seq.; Col 2:15; 1Pe 3:18 seq.; Rev 1:18; Heb 2:14), which here shines forth in the depths of a soul beclouded by the sorrows of death. On the other side Job expresses so strong a yearning after permanent reconciliation with his Creator, so pure a representation of the nature of the communion of man with God, as a relation which behooves to be of eternal duration, that this very intensity of the religious want and longing of his heart carries with it, in a measure, the pledge that his yearning was not in vain, or that his would one day be fulfilled. Comp. on the one side what is said by Schlottmann, who (on Job 14:15) rightly emphasizes the thought that Job must have had a deep experience in the past of the inwardness of the relation between the creature and his Creator, if he was able to give such an expression to it as this dreamy hope of the future;on the other side by Delitzsch, who not less strikingly and beautifully points out how totally different would have been Jobs endurance of suffering, if he had but known that there was really a release from Hades, and how at the same time in the wish of Job that it might be so, there is revealed the incipient tendency of the growing hope. For, he continues, the author of our book confirms us in what one of the old writers says, that the hope of eternal life is a flower which grows on the brink of hell. In the midst of the hell of the feeling of Gods wrath, in which Job is sunk, this flower blooms for him. In its blooming, however, it is not yet a hope, but a longing. And this longing cannot unfold itself into a hope, because no light of promise shines into the night which rules in Jobs soul, and which makes the conflict yet darker than it is in itself.

2. When we compare Jobs frame of mind, and religious and moral views of the world, as indicated in this discourse, with those expressed in his former discourses, we find these two points of superiority and progress: a more correct insight into sin, and above all, in his relation to the Divine Creator, an inward sense of fellowship blossoming into what is at least a lively longing after eternal union with God. In other respects, however, the present outpouring of his sorely tempted and afflicted heart exhibits retrogression rather than progress. The illusion of a God tyrannically tormenting and hostilely persecuting him has a stronger hold upon him than ever before (see especially Job 13:15 seq.). And this illusion is all the stronger in that, on the one hand, he finds within himself that the witness of his conscience to his innocence is more positive than ever (Job 13:16; Job 13:19), while on the other hand, he is unable to free himself from the preconceived opinion which influences him equally with the three friends, which admits no other suffering to be possible for men than that of penal retribution for sin (comp. Job 13:23; Job 13:26; Job 14:16 seq.). There arises thus a strange conflict between his conscience, which is comparatively pure, and the gloomy anxieties produced by that preconceived notion, and by the contemplation at the same time of his unspeakable wretchednessa conflict which, in proportion as he neither can nor will relinquish his own righteousness, urges him to cast suspicion on Gods righteousness, and to accuse Him of merciless severity. This unsolved antinomy produces within him a temper of agonizing gloominess, which in Job 13:13 seq. expresses itself more in presumptuous bluster and Titan-like storming against Gods omnipotence, in Job 14:1 seq. more in a tone of elegiac lamentation and mourning. Immediately connected herewith is the melancholy, deeply tragical character which attaches to his utterances from beginning to end of this discourse. For it has been truly remarked of the passage in Job 12:7 seq., in which, with a view to surpass and eclipse that which had been said in the right direction by his three predecessors, he describes the absolute majesty of God in nature and in the history of humanity, that it is a night-scene (Nachtgemlde), picturing the catastrophes which God brings to pass among the powers of the world of nature and of humanity; and that the one-sidedly abstract, negative, repelling, rather than attractive representation of Gods wisdom, is the reflection of the midnight gloom of his own feelings, which permits him to contemplate God essentially only on the side of His majesty, His isolation from the world, and His destructive activity. [For the wisdom of God, of which he speaks, is not the wisdom that orders the world in which one can confide, and in which one has the surety of seeing every mystery of life sooner or later gloriously solved; but this wisdom is something purely negative. Of the justice of God he does not speak at all, for in the narrow idea of the friends he cannot recognize its control; and of the love of God he speaks as little as the friends, for as the sight of the Divine love is removed from them by the one-sidedness of their dogma, so is it from him by the feeling of the wrath of God which at present has possession of his whole being. Hegel has called the religion of the Old Testament the religion of sublimity; and it is true that, so long as that manifestation of love, the incarnation of the God head, was not yet realized, God must have relatively transcended the religious consciousness. From the book of Job, however, this view can be brought back to its right limits; for, according to the tendency of the book, neither the idea of God presented by the friends, nor by Job, is the pure undimmed notion of God that belongs to the Old Testament: The friends conceive of God as the absolute One, who acts only according to justice; Job conceives of Him as the absolute One, who acts according to the arbitrariness of His absolute power. According to the idea of the book, the former is dogmatic one-sidedness, the latter the conception of one passing through temptation. The God of the Old Testament consequently rules neither according to justice alone nor according to a sublime whim. Delitzsch I.: 239, 240].

It has been still further truly remarked that the mournfulness of his lamentations over the hopeless disappearance of man in the eternal night of the gravein contemplating which he is led to regard the changes which take place in the vegetable kingdom as more comforting and hope-inspiring than the issue of mans life, with which he can compare only the processes of destruction and the catastrophes of inorganic nature (Job 14:7 seq., 18 seq.)has its echo in classical heathenism in such passages as the following from Horace (Od. IV. 7, 1):

Nos ubi decidimus
Quo pins neas, quo dives Tullus et Ancus,
Pulvis et umbrasumus.

Or like this from Homer (Il. VI. 146 seq.):

Like the race of leaves
Is that of humankind. Upon the ground
The winds strew one years leaves; the sprouting wood
Puts forth another brood, that shoot and grow
In the spring season. So it is with man;
One generation grows while one decays;

(Bryants Transl.)

Or like this meditation of Simonides (Anthol. Gr. Appendix, 83):

Nought among men unchangeable endures.
Sublime the truth which he of Chios spoke:
Mens generations are like those of leaves!
Yet few are they who, having heard the truth
Lodge it within their hearts, for hope abides
With all, and in the breasts of youth is planted.
Or like this elegy from Moschus (III. 106 seq.):

The meanest herb we trample in the field,
Or in the garden nurture, when its leaf,
At winters touch is blasted, and its place
Forgotten, soon its vernal buds renews,
And, from short slumber, wakes to life again.
Man wakes no more!man valiant, glorious, wise,
When death once chills him, sinks in sleep profound,
A long, unconscious, never-ending sleep.

(Gisborne.)

Or like that saying of the Arabian panegyrist of Muhamed, Kaabi ben-Sohair:Every one born of Woman, let his good fortune last never so long, is at last borne away on the bier, etc.: or like that still more impressive description in the Jagur Veda: While the tree that has fallen sprouts again from the root, fresher than before, from what root does mortal man spring forth when he has fallen by the hand of death?

Finally, it has been rightly shown that besides the tone of mourning and hopeless lamentation which sounds through this discourse, it is also pervaded by a tone of bitterness and grievous irritation on the part of Job. not only against the friends (this being most forcibly expressed in Job 4:7 seq.) but even in a measure against God, especially in those passages where he presumptuously undertakes to argue with Him (Job 13:13 seq.), and where he even reproaches Him with making fictitious and arbitrary additions to His list of charges, after the manner of the friends when they calumniated him and invented falsehoods against him (Job 14:17; see on the passage). A singular contrast with this tone of defiant accusations is furnished in the plaintive pleading tone with which he submits the twofold condition on which he is willing to prosecute his controversy with God, to wit, that God would allow a respite for a season from his sufferings, and that He would not terrify and confound him with His majesty (Job 13:20-22). It is everywhere the terrible idea of a God who deals with men purely according to His arbitrary caprice, not according to the motives of righteousness and a Fathers love, this phantom which the temptation has presented before his dim vision instead of the true God,it is this which drives him to these passionate outbreaks, which in several respects remind us of the attitude of a hero of Greek tragedy towards the fearful might of an inexorable Fate. [This phantom is still the real God to him, but in other respects in no way differing from the inexorable ruling fate of the Greek tragedy. As in this the hero of the drama seeks to maintain his personal freedom against the mysterious power that is crushing him with an iron arm, so Job, even at the risk of sudden destruction, maintains the steadfast conviction of his innocence in opposition to a God who has devoted him, as an evil-doer, to slow but certain destruction. It is the same battle of freedom against necessity as in the Greek tragedy. Accordingly one is obliged to regard it as an error, arising from simple ignorance, when it has been recently maintained that the boundless oriental imagination is not equal to such a truly exalted task as that of representing in art and poetry the power of the human spirit, and the maintenance of its dignity in the conflict with hostile powers, because a task that can only be accomplished by an imagination formed with a perception of the importance of recognizing ascertained phenomena. In treating this subject, the book of Job not only attains to, but rises far above, the height attained by the Greek tragedy; for on the one hand it brings this conflict before us in all the fearful earnestness of a death-struggle; on the other however it does not leave us to the cheerless delusion that an absolute caprice moulds human destiny. This tragic conflict with the Divine necessity is but the middle, not the beginning nor the end, of the book; for this god of fate is not the real God, but a delusion of Jobs temptation. Human freedom does not succumb, but it comes forth from the battle, which is a refining fire to it as conqueror. The dualism, which the Greek tragedy leaves unexplained, is here cleared up. The book certainly presents much which, from its tragic character, suggests this idea of destiny, but it is not its final aimit goes far beyond: it does not end in the destruction of its here by fate; but the end is the destruction of the idea of this fate itself. Delitzsch I. 242 sec.].

HOMILETICAL AND PRACTICAL

The points of light which these three chapters exhibit in a doctrinal and ethical respect, have a background of gloom, here and there of profound blackness. The homiletic expositor nevertheless finds in them in rich abundance both texts for exhortation and comfort, and themes for didactic edification. Here belongs of course the beautiful passage containing the physico-theological argument for an infinitely powerful and wise Maker and Ruler of the world (Job 12:7-12)a passage which in detail indeed exhibits no progressive development, but which does nevertheless present an occasion for such a teleologic advance of thought, in so far as it dwells first on the animal world, then on the realm of human life and its organic functions, in order to produce from both witnesses for a Supreme Wisdom ordering all things. But here still further belongs the description which follows of the Divine majesty and strength which display themselves in the catastrophes of human history (Job 12:13-25),a description which may be made the foundation of reflections in the sphere of historical theology, or ethical theology, as well as the physico-theological argument. Here belongs again the passage which follows, in which Job sharply censures the unfriendly judgment and invidious carping of his opponents (Job 13:1-12)a passage which reminds us in many respects of New Testament teachings, as e. g. of Mat 7:1-5, and of Mat 23:2 seq.Finally, we may put in this class the lamentation in the closing division, especially in Job 14, over the vanity and perishableness of the life of man on earth, which is compared now to a driven leaf, now to the process of mouldering, or being devoured by the moth, now to a fading flower, or a rock worn away and hollowed out by the waters, together with those passages which are interwoven with this lamentation, in which he glances at the beginning of life, poisoned by sin, and at its dismal outlook in the future appointed for it after death by the Divine justice, which is contemplated by itself, isolated from grace and mercy.The following extracts from the older and later practical expositors may serve to indicate how these themes may be individually treated.

Job 13:7-10 Brentius: All creatures proclaim the Creator, and cry out in speech that cannot be described: God has made meas Paul also says (Rom 1:19; comp. Psa 19:1 seq.). If any one therefore properly considers the nature of beasts, birds, fishes, he will discover the wonderful wisdom of the Creator (certain examples of the same being here brought forward, such as the instinct which the deer and the partridge exhibit, the wonderful strength of the little sucking-fish [Echines]). Thus by the natures of animals the invisible majesty of God is made visible and manifest. For not only did God create all things, but He also preserves, nourishes and sustains all things: the breath, whether of beasts or of men, is all lodged in His hand.Cocceius: What all these things severally contribute to the knowledge of the Creator, as it would be a most useful subject of thought, so it is too vast to be here set forth by us. Suffice it that Natural Theology is here established by Job. When he says this (, Job 13:9), he doubtless points out individual things. He thus confesses that every single thing was made and is governed by God, not only masses of things, and the universe as a whole, as the Jews dream. In fact individual animals, plants, etc., utter their testimony to the Divine efficiency. These opinions, either by the light of nature, or the intercourse of the fathers, were transmitted even to the gentiles.Hengstenberg: In order to make the wisdom of the friends quite contemptible, Job attributes to the animals a knowledge of the Divine omnipotence and wisdom, their existence being an eloquent proof of those attributes, so that they can become teachers of the man who should be so blind and foolish as to fail to know the divine omnipotence and wisdom. That which can be learned from brutes, that as to which we may go to school to them, Job will not be so foolish as not to know, neither will he need to learn it first from his wise friends. Just as here the animals, so in Psalms 19 the heavens are represented as declaring the glory of God, which is revealed in them. Jehovah, the most profound in significance of the Divine names, here bursts forth suddenly out of its concealment, the lower names of God being in this connection unsatisfactory. Jehovah, Jahveh, the One who Is, the absolute, pure Being, is most appropriately the name by which to designate the First Cause of all existences.

Job 12:11-13. Cocceius: If the mind judges concerning those things which are presented either by signs, such as words, or by themselves, as food to the palate, whether they are true or false, useful or injurious; if by experience (by which many things are seen, heard, examined), by the knowledge of very many things, and of things hidden, and by sagacity it is fitted to make a proper use of thingsdoes it not behoove that God, who gave these things should be omniscient without weakness, nay, with fulness of power, so that all things must obey His nod? For He beholds not, like man, that which belongs to another, but that which is His own. Nevertheless neither is judgment given to man for nought, but so that he may have some power of doing that which is useful, of refusing, or of not accepting that which is hurtful. Much less is Gods wisdom to be exercised apart from omnipotence or sovereignty over all creatures.

Job 12:16 seq. Cramer: Not only true but also false teachers are Gods property; but He uses the latter for punishment (2Th 2:10), yet in such a way that He knows how to bring forth good out of their ill beginning. The Lord is a great king over all gods; all that the earth produces is in His hand (Psa 95:3); even false religions must serve His purposes (comp. Oecolampadius, who remarks on Job 12:16 b: I refer this to , or false religions, of which the whole earth is full; he says here, that they come to be by His nod and permission). Such might and majesty He displays particularly toward the mighty kings of earth, to whom He gives lands and people, and takes them away again, as He wills (Dan 4:29).Zeyss: Rulers, and those who occupy their place, should diligently pray to God that He would keep them from foolish and destructive measures (in diets, council-chambers, in regard to wars, etc.), in order that they may not plunge themselves and their subjects into great distress (1Ki 3:9).

Job 13:14 seq. Brentius: You see from this passage that it is harder to endure the liability and dread of death than death itself. For it is not hard to die, seeing that whether disease precedes or not, death itself is sudden; but to hear in the conscience the sentence of death (soil.Thou shalt surely die!) this indeed is most hard! This voice no man can hear without despair, unless, on the other hand, the Lord should say to our soul: I am thy salvation!Wohlfarth: Earthly things lostlittle lost; honor lostmuch lost; God lostall lost! thus does Job admonish us.

Job 13:23-28. Oecolampadius: See the stages by which the calamities come, swelling one above the other. (1) To begin with, the face is hidden, and friendship is withheld; then (2) enmity is even declared; (3) persecution follows, and that without mercy, or regard for frailty; (4) reproaches and grave accusations are employed, and the memory of past delinquencies is revived; (5) guards are imposed, lest he should escape, and fetters in which he must rot. (Mercier and others, including of late Hengstenberg, have called attention to these same five stages.)Zeyss (on Job 13:24): Besides the external affliction, internal trials are generally added.(On Job 13:26): Even the sins of youth God brings to judgment in His own time (Psa 25:7). Think of that, young men and women, and flee youthful lusts!

Job 14:1 seq. Brentius: Mans misery is set forth by the simile of the flower; for bodily beauty and durability can be compared to nothing more suitably than to the flower and the shadow.Verily with what miseries man is filled, is too well known to need reciting. For nowhere is there any state or condition of men which does not have its own cross and tribulation; and thus all things everywhere are filled with crosses.The thing to be done, therefore, is not to shun the cross, but to lay hold on Christ, in whom every cross is most easily borne.Zeyss: Although no man is by nature pure and holy (Job 14:4), true believers nevertheless possess through Christ a two-fold purity: (1) in respect of their justification; (2) in respect of their sanctification and renewal: Heb 1:3; Heb 9:14; 1Jn 1:7, etc.

Job 14:7 seq. Zeyss: As a tree sprouts up again, so will men, who have been cut down by the axe of death, germinate again out of the grave on the Last Day; Joh 5:28-29.Hengstenberg: The prospect of a future life here vanishes away from Job. How indeed could it be otherwise, seeing that he has lost altogether out of his consciousness and experience the true nature of God, on which that hope rests, Gods justice and mercy? In these circumstances the belief in an endless life must of necessity perish within him, for to this faith there was not given until the latter part of the Old Dispensation any firm declaration from God to which it could cling, while before that it existed rather in the form of a longing, a yearning, a hope. Further on, however, [in Jobs history] it again recovers its power.

Job 14:13-17 : See Doctrinal and Ethical Remarks, No. 1.

Job 14:18 seq. Cramer: Nothing on earth is so firmly established, but it must perish; and they who occupy themselves with the things of earth, must perish in them (Sir 14:20 seq.; 1Jn 2:16 seq.).Zeyss: Although mountains, stones and rocks, yea, all that is in the world, are subject to change, Gods word, and the grace therein promised for believers, stand fast forever; Psa 117:2; Isa 54:10.Vict. Andre: Like an armed power the feeling of his present cheerless condition again overpowers Job, and again the feeble spark is extinguished, which had just before (Job 14:13-17), illumined his soul with so tender a gleam of hope. To his former reflections on nature (Job 14:7-12) he now opposes the fact, no less true, that even that which is most enduring in nature itself, such as mountains, rocks, and soils, must gradually decay. And so it seems to him now, in accordance with this fact, as though human life also were destined by God only to endless annihilation. Death it iswith its pale features so suddenly disfiguring the human countenancewhich again stands in all its horror, and annihilating power, before his despairing soul!

Fuente: A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures, Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical by Lange

CONTENTS

Job continues his discourse through this chapter. He seems, in what is here said, to be addressing himself more than his friends, and from the view he takes of the miseries of life to implore God for a mitigation of his sorrows.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

(1) Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. (2) He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. (3) And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? (4) Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one. (5) Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; (6) Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day.

What a striking enquiry? Who, from such a polluted creature as man, can bring forth anything clean? Precious JESUS! thou, and thou only; for a poor polluted sinner, washed in thy blood, will come forth clean, and the darkest creature in corruption be made whiter than snow.

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Job 14:2

‘I will not now ask, writes Charlotte Bronte in 1848, ‘why Emily was torn from us in the fullness of an attachment, rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers; why her existence now lies like a field of green corn trodden down, like a tree in full bearing struck at the root. I will only say, sweet is rest after labour, and calm after tempest, and again that Emily knows that now.’

Job 14:2

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

Burke.

The Apparently Ridiculous

Job 14:4

Throughout the Bible we shall find that we are always startled by the apparently ridiculous.

I. Take the instance of the text: ‘Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?’ You must not read that in a schoolboy tone. The meaning of it is in the emphasis or in the very colour of the voice with which it is read. Bring a clean thing out of an unclean? impossible! Bring a clean thing out of an unclean? absurd! God must reduce us to that intellectual confusion before He can make anything good of us.

II. Take another instance, equally potent, and strikingly illustrative of the fundamental position of the discourse. You find it in Joh 3:4 : ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ You see the text does not stand alone; Job is corroborated by John. How can a man be born again when he is old? It does not stand to reason; it is ridiculous; I do not like to say so to this fair young man who has wrought all these wondrous miracles, but in my soul I feel that he is out of his head, for he is an innocent or an inoffensive idealist; he dreams well, he talks badly. ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ ‘How can a man be born when he is old?’ Thus literalism confronts spiritualism, and they enter into their old and their eternal quarrel. Nicodemus, though a master in Israel, was a literalist; he knew only the alphabet, and then a few of the words, but his words never ran into poetry, never quivered into revelation and apocalypse and idealism. He was great within the four corners of the alphabet; outside of that alphabet he was weak as other men.

III. I read in Jer 13:23 , ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ Why, it stands to reason that he cannot, it is ridiculous to think that he can, and yet this is what God is supposed to be calling upon man to do; why, it cannot be done! There you come upon the original difficulty; here is the appeal to the ridiculous with which we are so far familiarly acquainted; we saw it in Job, we heard it in John, and now we go back into the Old Testament and find Jeremiah suggesting or teaching the same doctrine, and making the same appeal to the ridiculous and the impossible. Christianity is an appeal to the impossible.

IV. You will find from the beginning of the Bible to the end inquiries that suggest an appeal to the ridiculous. When men wish to disobey God or when men want to get rid of the Christ, they will say, The incarnation? why, it stands to reason that the incarnation, as it is usually understood, is quite a mistake, something worse than a dream; that God, eternal, omnipotent, infinite, majestic beyond all conceived majesty, should become a little crying babe in the manger or a stable, why, it is surprising that the world could tolerate the notion for one little moment. So it is, and the world never can entertain it; but this is not an appeal to the world, this is an appeal to the world that is within the world and above the world, and that will outlast it. Faith itself must often be ridiculous to reason, that is, to narrow uncultivated and unsanctified reason; but to reason, when God has undertaken its sanctification, faith is the culmination of reason, the very glory of logic.

Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. VII. p. 174.

Reference. XIV. 4. Spurgeon, Sermons, No. 2734.

Job 14:5

He sendeth us to His world as men to a market, wherein some stay many hours, and eat and drink, and buy and sell, and pass through the fair, till they be weary; and such are those who live long and get a heavy fill of this life. And others again come slipping in to the morning market, and do neither sit nor stand, nor buy nor sell, but look about them a little, and pass presently home again; and these are infants and young ones, who end their short market in the morning, and get but a short view of the fair. Our Lord, who hath numbered man’s months, and set him bounds that he cannot pass, hath written the length of our market, and it is easier to complain of the decree than to change it.

Samuel Rutherford.

Job 14:6

This verse is rendered in the Vulgate: ‘Dimitte me paululum, ut quiescam, donec optata veniat dies’ ‘Let me free for a little that I may have quiet till the longed-for day come’. This text is inscribed on a memorial tablet in one of the old churches of Troyes.

Job 14:7

Even as are the generations of leaves such are those likewise of man; the leaves that be the wind scattereth on the earth, and the forest buddeth and putteth forth more again, when the season of spring is at hand.

Homer, Iliad , VI. 146 f. (tr. W. Leaf).

Job 14:10

In his autobiographic sketches De Quincey, after telling how one of his little sisters died when he was in childhood, adds: ‘So did my acquaintance (if such it should be called) commence with mortality. Yet, in fact, I knew little more of mortality than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away; but, perhaps, she would come back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance! gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength! I was sad for Jane’s absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?’

How to Die Well

Death doth not bring about an end of being, but only a change of state; it is not a goal but a gate. Of what infinite importance is it that we should die well! Is it not wise to learn how to do that which it is of infinite importance to do well?

I. Unless our death be sudden and unexpected, there will come to us all a moment when we shall realize that our life on earth is over, and that our last moments have come. Now it is plain that the time, the circumstances, the causes of our death are beyond our power. There is one thing and that the essential thing within it. It matters comparatively little when or where we die, and these things are decided for us. It is of infinite importance how we die, and that depends on ourselves.

II. What, then, is the secret of dying well? The secret is no secret for us, i.e. it is a secret which has been revealed long ago: to die well, the hand of the dying man must clasp the hand of the Lord of Life. This is the one thing needful for us all. Gaining that, we have not lived in vain, whatever we have lost. Losing that, though we have gained the whole world, better were it for us that we had not been born. That our dying hand should grasp the living Christ’s, or better still that His hand should grasp ours this should be our lifelong aim, longing, and prayer.

III. Die a penitent and you cannot die ill. One would wish to be prepared for the last difficult steps of our journey by the ministrations of the Church to be encouraged to make acts of faith and hope, and love, to have our wandering gaze constantly directed to that Lamb of God Who takes away our sins. The conclusion to be drawn from this is plain. We ought to live as men who have to die some day and may die any day. The thought ‘Can I meet Jesus thus?’ should be a continual restraint to us in our business and our pleasure, in our sorrows and in our joys.

F. Watson, The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, p. 207.

Reference. XIV. 10. D. G. Watt, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv. p. 260.

An Answer to a Great Question

Job 14:14

I. What does Nature say about it? The economy of Nature says, yes! There is nothing wasted in all God’s works, and surely man, the chief of His creation, shall not perish eternally; he shall live again.

II. What does Reason say about it? In all human beings there is a strong repugnance at the thought of death. Reason suggests the answer to the question, ‘God will have a desire to His handiwork’.

III. What does Revelation say about it? Our present body is called a natural body, fit only for the soul, the intelligence, to live in. The second body is called the spiritual body, fit for the spirit to live in an environment of pure affection and absolute holiness. We are, as it were, half in the old life and half in the new.

J. Bentley, The Church Homilist, p. 134.

References. XIV. 14. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture Job, p. 43. J. Baines, Sermons to Country Congregations, p. 136. R. J. Campbell, City Temple Sermons, p. 161. Bishop Matthew Simpson, Sermons, p. 331. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 764. XIV. 14, 15. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (10th Series), p. 265. XIV. 15. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2161.

Job 14:21

‘It is the bitterest element in the vast irony of human life,’ says Mr. Morley in his Life of Cobden, ‘that the time-worn eyes to which a son’s success would have brought the purest gladness, are so often closed for ever before success has come.’

Reference. XV. 4. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2943.

Fuente: Expositor’s Dictionary of Text by Robertson

“Handfuls of Purpose”

For All Gleaners

“… full of trouble.” Job 14:1

This is one of the exaggerations quite pardonable to men in hours of agony. There have been bright minds that have found more joy than sorrow in the world. Unquestionably there is a diversity of temperament, and that ought to be taken into account in every consideration of the whole subject of human discipline. It certainly seems as if some lives were left without the brightness of a single gleam of hope; one trouble succeeds another like cloud coming after cloud, until the whole horizon is draped in blackness. Consider the many sources and springs and occasions of trouble in human life. Take the individual constitution: some men seem to be born utterly wanting in all the conditions of health; from infancy upward they are doomed to depression, weakness, pain, and all the influences which contribute towards settled melancholy; others, again, seem to be wounded every day through their children; the hard-hearted, the ungrateful, the impenitent, the selfish, the thoughtless; others again have no success in business; whatever they do perishes in their hands; they are always too late in the morning; they always feel that some other man has passed by them in the race of life, and plucked the fruit which they intended to enjoy; others, again, are beaten down in the conflict for the want of physical strength, or mental energy, or rational hopefulness: they think it is no use proceeding further; they say the fates are against them, and so they sink into neglect, and pass away without leaving any traces of successful work in life. We must distinguish between the trouble which is external, physical, and traceable more or less to our own action, and that mysterious heart-trouble which comes from solemn moral reflection, from the reckoning up of sins, and from a thoughtful calculation of all the actions, thoughts, and purposes which have deserved divine condemnation. There is no trouble to be compared with the trouble of the mind. He is not poor who has left to him an estate of thought, reflection, contemplation, and the power of prayer. In talking of trouble we should also talk about its mitigations. Is it possible that there can be a life anywhere on which some beam of sunshine does not alight? We are not now talking about the insane, or those who suffer from increasing and continued melancholy, but about the general average of human life; and, so speaking, surely we can always find in the hardest lot some mitigation of the burden, some compensation for extra darkness and difficulty. We should look out for the mitigations. Instead of arguing from the difficulty we should argue from the strength which is able to bear it in some degree. All this is never easy to do, and he would acquire no influence over men who sought to drive away their burdens, their difficulties, and their fears. Better look at them seriously, add them up as to their real value, and so acquire standing-ground in the estimation of the hearer as to be enabled to proceed to enumerate mercies, blessings, alleviations, and the like, so as to mitigate the horrors of the actual situation. Then, whatever trouble we may have, we must remember that it is not to be compared with the distress of him who said, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” We think of him, and justly so, at all times as a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. No man had sorrow like Christ’s. He is therefore not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but from his own experience he is sensitive to all our sufferings, and responsive to all our appeals. Then we should look at the “afterwards” promised to those who bear discipline well and pass through chastisement patiently and unmurmuringly: “No chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.”

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

Job’s Reply to His Three Friends. I.

Job 12-14

“And Job answered and said, No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you” ( Job 12:1-2 ).

This was unkind; but very human! Perhaps it was provoked: for we think we have discovered a tone of taunting in the three eloquent speeches which have been addressed to the patriarch. Was it worthy of Job to return taunt for taunt? Was it worthy of Elijah to mock the idolatrous worshippers? We must not separate ourselves from the human race, and stand back in the dignity of untouched critics, and say what was worthy, or what was not worthy; we must rather identify ourselves with the broad currents of human experience, and take other men as very largely representing what we would have done under the same circumstances. “There is none righteous, no, not one.” Criticism may be the supreme vice. Job represents ourselves in this quick and indignant introduction. He will get better as he warms to his subject. Indeed, all the speakers have done this, straight through the story, as we have clearly seen. They began snappishly, peevishly, mockingly; but somehow a mysterious influence operated upon them, and every man concluded his speech in most noble terms. Better this than the other way. Do not some men always begin well and end ill? Are not some lives like inverted pyramids? Happy is the man who, however beefly he may begin the tale of his life, grows in his subject expands, warms, radiates until all that was little and mean in the beginning is forgotten in the splendour and magnificence of the consummation. Still, Job does begin sharply. He lifts his hand, and by a circular movement strikes every man of the three in the face, and leaves them smarting under the blow for a little while.

Job accuses the three men of being guilty of narrow criticism. Narrow criticism spoils everything. It also provokes contempt That which is out of proportion always elicits a sneering criticism: it is too high, too low; it is exaggerated in one dimension, it is out of square, and out of keeping with the harmony and the fitness of things, so that a half-blind man could almost see how the whole thing is out of true geometry. Whatever is so is pointed at, and is remarked upon, either with flippancy or with contempt. When did the bowing wall ever attract to itself the respect of the passer-by? When did ever that which is onesided, obviously out of plomb, draw to itself the commendation of any sensible critic? Job said: So far as you have gone you are right enough: who knoweth not such things as these? Your criticism lacks breadth; you are like a point rather than an edge; you see one or two things most clearly, but you do not take in the whole horizon: your minds are intense rather than comprehensive. This is the fault of the world! It is peculiarly and incurably the fault of some men. They see single points with an intensity indescribable, and you cannot get them to see any other point, and complete the survey of the whole. They are men of prejudice, stubborn men; they imagine that they are faithful, when they are only obstinate; they suppose themselves to be real, when they are only incapable. It is illustrated on every hand. Narrow criticisms have driven men away from the Church who ought to have been its pillars and its luminaries. We must, therefore, take in more field. There is what may be called a sense of proportion in man. Not only has man an ear by which to try words, and a palate by which to test foods, but he has in him a sense of proportion: he seems to know without a schoolmaster when a thing is the right length, the right shape; whether there is enough, or too much of it. Ask him to define this feeling in words, or justify it by canons of art, and he cannot do so. But there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding. The untaught man stops before a house that is ridiculously low, and points it out. Why should he do so? What is it that moves him but that inscrutable and undefinable sense of proportion, which would seem to be in every man? So with a house that is disproportionately high. Though in haste, the man draws up to look at it, to point it out; or if he be without companion he remembers the disproportionate thing, and relates at home what he has seen on the road. Why may not men build as they please without criticism? Simply because there is a common sentiment, a common opinion, an inborn sense of proportion and right; and men cannot be exaggeratedly individual without provoking criticism for their offence against the established customs and conclusions of the world. The three friends of Job, we now begin to see, had but a very short view of life, it was a very high one, and it went in the right direction; they were all religious men, but narrowly religious. They would have been more religious if they had been more human. They would have better represented God if they had broken down in tears, hung upon Job’s neck, and said Oh, brother, the hand is hard upon thee, and to us it is a mystery that tests our faith in God. But they were too sternly and squarely theological: they knew where God began and ended, what circuit he swept; and they judged everything by a narrow and unworthy standard. It is not enough to be right in points; it is not enough to have excellent traits of character: the whole character must be moulded symmetrically, and the whole man must be taken in before any one point of him can be understood. So it is with the living God: we are not to take out individual instances and dwell upon them in their separateness: we are to take in the whole horizon, and judge of every star in the firmament by every other star that shares the great honour of lighting the universe.

Then, again, Job points out that there is always another view to be taken than the one which is represented:

“I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you” ( Job 12:3 ).

We always omit to take in the opinion of the other man. That is papal infallibility; and it lives in every country under heaven. We forget that there is another man in the house who has not yet spoken, and until he has spoken the whole truth has not been declared. There is a child crying, and until we understand through what gamut its cry passes we cannot comprehend the whole situation of things. The dying man is as essential a witness in this great evidence, concerning God and providence, as is the testimony of the most robust and energetic witness. The truth is not with any three men. No three points can represent the circle. And God always works in circles, he knows nothing about any other geometrical figure. It seem to occur here and there, no doubt; but when taken into relation with all other things, the universe is a globe, a sphere, an infinite dewdrop. Who, then, stands up and says, Behold, this is the whole truth of God, and beside it there is nothing to be said? A man who should utter such words should be excommunicated from the altar, until he has learned that he knows nothing, and is but part of an immeasurable totality. Job insists upon being heard; he says, There are not three in this company, but four; and four is an even number, and the even number must be heard. There must be no triangular constituency in the great moral universe. Each man sees something which no other man sees; and until we have got the other man’s testimony we are operating upon a broken witness. Every man in the church should pray. When the last little child has uttered his sentence, when the poorest, frailest woman has breathed her wordless sigh into the great supplication, then heaven will have before it the whole prayer of humanity. But are there not men who are instructed in theology? The worse for the world if their instruction has led them to narrowness and to finality! Theology is not a profession; it is the whole human heart, touched, kindled with a passion that seeks God. We must hear the patient as well as the doctor; we must hear the sufferer as well as the comforter; we must listen to Job as well as to his three friends.

Then Job cannot get away from what wicked men say:

“I am as one mocked of his neighbour, who calleth upon God, and he answereth him: the just upright man is laughed to scorn” ( Job 12:4 ).

Everything seems to favour this view. Said Job, Look at me; my neighbours who were wont to consult me now mock me; they who knew that I have called upon God say, God has answered him in sore boils, and has thrown him to the dust that he may know how great is his hypocrisy: these many years I have maintained a character as a just upright man, now I am laughed to scorn: what else can I do? Look at me: what an answer I am to their sarcasm! I cannot touch myself at any point without inflicting wounds upon my flesh with my own fingers; I am a stranger to my nearest and dearest friends: how can I claim that God hears and answers prayer? When they mock, I know they can justify their taunt; when they laugh me to scorn, I know that there is reason in the malignant laughter. So Job, too, swings down to the dark point; so Job also becomes as narrow as his critics. But there is some palliation for the narrowness which Job takes to, for he is under pain, the thong has cut to the bone; he has nobody to speak to that can understand a word that he says: if he was narrow, it was most excusable in him. Job says:

“He that is ready to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease” ( Job 12:5 ).

An apparently unintelligible statement. The Revised Version says “In the thought of him that is at ease there is contempt for misfortune.” Take the figure of the lamp. The idea would then be that of a long dark road; a man has passed through it safely, he is in the house of security, and when he hears of some poor traveller struggling along the same road, and afraid his light will be blown out, he cares nothing for him; he himself being at ease at home “despises” the man who is struggling along the dark road with a lamp that threatens to be blown out before the journey is completed. Take the other idea, which is in substance the same, namely, that ill-regulated or unsanctified prosperity leads to the contempt of other men less fortunate other men to whom prosperity is denied. A sad effect indeed, contempt for misfortune, reviling men and saying, They ought to have done better, they have themselves to blame for all this: look at me; I have no misfortune; I have lost nothing, I miss nothing, whatever I touch becomes gold, and wherever I look upon the earth a flower acknowledges the blessing of my glance. Such is the boast of impious prosperity, unsanctified and irrational success. This is the necessity of the case, unless there be a vivid realisation of the providence of God in human life. Every night when the good man adds up his book he must write at the foot of the page, “What hast thou that thou hast not received?” Then the more he has the better. He will never say look at me; he will say, Look at God: how kind his bounties are, and large! His mercy endureth for ever: the Lord my God teacheth me to get wealth; I must spend my wealth to the honour and glory of him who has taught my hands their skill, and gifted my mind with its peculiar and gracious faculty. When Job came into misfortune he heard the laughter of the mocker. He understood the rough merriment but too well; he said It is always so: “he that is ready to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease”; the men who are now laughing at me are men who have shared my bounty in brighter days. Alas, poor human nature! I am now laughed to scorn by the men who once would have been made happy by the touch of my hand.

Then Job becomes his better self. He goes out, and he takes a broad and a right view of human nature a medicine always to be recommended to diseased minds. “Canst thou minister to a mind diseased?” Yes, by taking the sufferer up the mountain, down the river, across the sea; bringing him into close identity with the spirit of nature, the healing spirit, the spirit of benediction, the spirit of sleep. Job stands up like a great natural theologian, and preaches thus:

“But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee: and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? in whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind” ( Job 12:7-10 ).

He who talks so will surely live again! He is very low down now, but he will come up, because the spirit of wisdom has not deserted him. He will reason upwards. He will make himself acquainted with all the nature that is accessible to him. So we say to all men, Make the most of scientific inquiry: have telescopes and microscopes, and go to day-schools and night-schools: study every little insect that lives that you can bring under your criticism: acquaint yourselves with the habits of fowls and fishes, and animals of every name, and plants of every genera: go into all departments of nature; and depend upon it you are on the stairway which if followed will bring you up into the higher air and the broader light. Never believe there are two Gods in the universe the God of nature and the God of the Bible. There is but one God, There are two aspects of his revelation. Every pebble belongs to God. You cannot lose a pebble. The thief cannot run away without running into the very arms of the God he seeks to fly from. You cannot steal a single insect out of the museum of nature. You cannot take up one little grain of sand, and escape with it. All our felonies are little vulgar larcenies; they are all on the surface; we can mete out to them adequate punishment: but no man can steal from God in the sense of losing out of the creation anything which God has put into it. And everywhere God has written his name in large letters. The microscope is one of the doors into heaven; the telescope is another a thousand doors all in one, and all falling back on their golden hinges to let the worshippers through in millions. Who ever introduced into the Church the most horrible heresy that nature is not God’s, or that contempt for nature is the only appropriate attitude in relation to it, or the only right feeling regarding it? God is the gardener. He knows all the roses. You cannot steal a rose-leaf without his eye being upon you, and without his voice saying to the conscience, That rose-leaf is mine. You cannot shake a dewdrop off a flower without God knowing that the position of the dewdrop has been changed. There is not a little creature whose heart requires a microscope of the greatest power to see it that has not been, in one way or another do not bewilder yourselves as to methods created by the power and wisdom of God. We must, too, remember that there are two classes of workers. Some of our brethren are studying, according to Job’s direction, “the beasts,” “the fowls,” “the earth,” “the fishes of the sea.” They are still our brethren; they are not to be despised. Others are studying the greater things of God, that is to say, studying somewhat of his thought, purpose, love. They are the higher students, but they are still members of the same glorious academy. When the theologian says that the naturalist is contemptible, he is guilty of falsehood; when the naturalist says that the theologian is fanatical, he is guilty of falsehood: the two should be brothers, living together in amity and charity.

Job lays down a great doctrine which seems to have been forgotten:

“Doth not the ear try words? and the mouth taste his meat?” ( Job 12:11 ).

What is the meaning of the inquiry? Evidently this that there is a verifying faculty in man: the ear knows when the sentence has reached the point of music; the ear knows not only words, but, figuratively, understands reasoning; and the ear, taken as the type of the understanding, being the door through which information goes, says, Yes, that is right; No, that is wrong. Doth not the mouth taste meat, has not man a palate? The palate pronounces judgment upon everything that is eaten, saying, That is sweet, that is bitter; this is good, wholesome; that is poisonous and utterly to be rejected. What is that wondrous thing called the palate? It is not merely an animal appendage, but it is a critical faculty; it is something in the mouth that says, This may be taken, but not that. Now Job argues: As certainly as the ear tries words, and the mouth tastes meat, there is a spirit in man which says, That is true, and that is false; that is right, and that is wrong: has God given man an ear and a palate for the trying of words and the tasting of foods, and left him without understanding? The appeal is to the inward witness, the individual conscience, the inextinguishable light, or a light that can only be extinguished by the destruction of everything that makes a man. Here is the great power of Christ over all his hearers. He knows there is an answering voice. Once there stood a scribe, or other man of letters and wisdom, who said, when Christ answered a question wisely, “Well, Master, thou hast said the truth.” A man knows when he hears the truth. He may not know it today, and under this light, and within a certain number of instances; but there comes a time when every man is judge, gifted with the spirit of penetration; and by so much as he exercises that spirit of penetration will he become wise unto salvation, and in proportion as he distrusts it will he either grieve the Spirit or quench the Holy Ghost.

So Job will not be satisfied with Bildad’s tradition or with the broad generalisations of Eliphaz; he will try the words, put them to the test of spiritual experience, and pronounce upon them as he may be guided by the Spirit of the living God. That is all any Christian teacher should desire. He must find his authority in his hearers. They must begin with him wherever they can. There may be times when the hearers will separate themselves from the teachers, saying, We cannot follow you there; we have not been up so high, we have not been so far afield; we know nothing about what you are now saying, but you have said a thousand things we do know, a thousand things we have tasted and felt and handled, and we will stand there altogether, hoping that by-and-by we may ascend to higher heights, and take in the wider magnitudes: then there shall be between teacher and taught a spirit of masonry, of true love, of mutual trust; the taught shall say, Teacher sent from God, pray on, go higher and higher, but remember that we cannot go so quickly, and that at present we are upon a lower level; and the teacher should say O fellow-students, let us pray together, and go a step at a time, and wait: for the very last scholar, and where there is most infirmity let there be most love, where there is truest doubt let there be largest sympathy, and in all things let there be loving communion in Christ Jesus. Men animated by that spirit can never get far wrong. They may have a thousand misconceptions, so far as mere opinions and words are concerned, but they are right in the substance of their being, right in the purpose of their nature, right in their motive and intention, and at the last they shall stand in the light, and thank the God who did not desert them when the midnight was very dark, and the winter was intolerably cold.

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

Job’s Reply to His Three Friends. II.

Job 12-14

In the latter part of the twelfth chapter Job shows that he has a fuller and grander conception of God than any of his three comforters have. He is not behind them in the instinct or in the enjoyment of divine worship. When he speaks of God he lifts up our thought to a new and sublime level: “With him is wisdom and strength, he hath counsel and understanding” ( Job 12:13 ). Regarded metaphysically or spiritually, God is the great mystery of all things; he covers all the range appropriate to counsel, wisdom, and understanding: he is spiritually incomprehensible. Then actively

“Behold, he breaketh down, and it cannot be built again: he shutteth up a man, and there can be no opening, Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth” ( Job 12:14-15 ).

What can man do? He cannot bring a single rain-cloud into the dry sky with promise of refreshment and fertility for the barren and languishing earth; he cannot make the sun rise one moment sooner than he is appointed by law astronomical to rise. Poor man! He can but stand in presence of natural phenomena with note-book in hand, putting down what he calls memoranda, looking these very carefully and critically over, and turning them into classical utterances which the vulgar cannot understand. But he is kept outside; he is not allowed to go to the other side of the door on which is marked the word Private. And as for God’s actions amongst the great and the mighty of the earth, they are as grasshoppers before him:

“He leadeth counselors away spoiled, and maketh the judges fools. He looseth the bond of kings, and girdeth their loins with a girdle” ( Job 12:17-18 )

He takes off their glittering diamond band, and replaces it with a slave’s girdle. “He leadeth princes away spoiled, and over-throweth the mighty” ( Job 12:19 ). Yet the mighty boast themselves: they live in palace, and in castle, and in strong tower; they indulge in jeering and jibing at those who have no such security. What are they in the sight of God? God is no respecter of persons: God looks upon character the very substance of life, its best and enduring quality; and where he finds right character he crowns it, he makes it better still by added blessing. But are there not those who set up their own enigmas and riddles as philosophies and revelations?

“He removeth away the speech of the trusty, and taketh away the understanding of the aged. He poureth contempt upon princes, and weakeneth the strength of the mighty” ( Job 12:20-21 ).

When did God pour contempt upon the poor, those who have no helper, and those for whom there is no man to speak? When was he hard with the afflicted and the infirm? So Job magnifies what he himself has seen of the providence and grace of God, and makes himself as it were a solitary exception to the great sovereignty of the heavens; yet now and again he says, in effect almost in words it shall not always be so: he who has bowed me down shall straighten me again, and I shall yet live to praise him. Now and again he stands up almost a poet and a prophet, for by anticipation he enjoys the deliverance and the triumph which he is sure must supervene.

Having spoken to the comforters, therefore, in their own theological language, and showed that he was a greater theologian than any of them, he gives them to understand that in their argument they have somehow missed something:

“What ye know, the same do I know also: I am not inferior unto you. Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God” ( Job 13:2-3 ).

He turns away from the three talkers, practically saying, Let me continue this controversy with heaven, and not with earth: you vex me, you fret me; you do not touch the reality of the case; yours are all words, clever and beautiful words, but you never come near my wound: away! Let me speak directly to the condescending heavens: though judgment has fallen upon me, yet mercy will come from the same quarter. Job, therefore, feels that the three friends have missed something. He gropes after God. He says, The answer must come whence the mystery has come: you did not afflict me, and you cannot heal me: this is a matter of original application, of direct appeal to heaven: he who began must finish; you have nothing to do with it. How happy we should often feel ourselves if we could shake our souls free from uninformed sympathisers, and from people who offer us keys which were never meant to open the lock of God’s mystery! This is what Job does. He says in effect I have listened to you, your words have passed over me, the ear has heard them, and rejected them; now give me opportunity of talking with God.

“But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value” ( Job 13:4 ).

What is it that feels this to be the case in our human education? We listen to men, and say So far, good: there is sense in what you say; you are not without mental penetration; unquestionably your appeals are marked by ability: but somehow the soul knows that there is something wanting. The soul cannot always tell what it is, but there is a spirit in man which says The statement to which you have just listened is onesided, imperfect, incomplete; it wants rounding into perfectness. Surely there is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding. Wise men come before us, and say, Here is the world: what more do you want? A beautiful little world, a mere speck of light no doubt, still, there is room enough in the world to live in: we may cultivate the earth and rejoice in all its productions, flower and fruit alike: what more do you want? We listen, and say, That is a good argument: certainly the world is here, and a world that gives fruits and flowers, and has in it birds of its own, birds that cannot fly beyond its atmosphere, birds made to sing in this cage, and to make the children of men glad. But we no sooner consent to the solidity of the argument than a voice within us says O fool, and slow of heart! You are bigger than any world God ever made, greater than the universe on which he seems to have lavished an infinity of wisdom and strength: in this poor little fluttering heart lies a divinity that mocks all space, and defies all time, and tramples upon all the challenges and offers of the material universe. Then men say, Be learned, be wise; science is the providence of life, submit to it; there are certain known measurable laws, accept them, and live within them: roof yourself well in with laws and proved generalisations, and be content. No sooner have we admitted that the appeal is good and strong, certainly up to a given point unquestionably so, than the same voice within us says, Have they ever told you what life is? and you live! Not what life is beyond the stars, but what your own life is? Have they ever seen it, measured it, weighed it, revealed it to your sight? Why, sir, you live! That is a mystery next to the fact that God lives. What is life? As well ask you to be content with your garments and pay no attention to your physical condition, as ask you to be content with things that are outside your mind and neglect the mind itself. So with many a criticism passed upon the Christian religion; we feel that the criticism is clever, sharp, pungent, acute; if it were a question of mere criticism we should say, It is admirably done; but when the critic has ceased, this mysterious voice, this inner self, this impalpable, invisible thing called the soul, or the spirit, says, The statement is incomplete: it is wanting in vitality; the men who have made that statement are conscious themselves that they have not touched the limit of things. So Job felt. He said, “What ye know, the same do I know also; I am not inferior unto you.” Up to a given point we go step for step, and say, The reasoning is perfectly good, but after that what remains? What after death, what after visible facts; what about will, motive, passion, love, and all the mysterious spiritual forces that throw man into tumult or gladden him with sacred joy? About these things you seem to have nothing to say.

Job therefore directs them to keep their tongues quiet, saying, “O that ye would altogether hold your peace! And it should be your wisdom” ( Job 13:5 ). That is not mere mockery; that is solid philosophy. In presence of some mysteries we must simply be silent. He who can be reverently silent in the presence of such mysteries is a great scholar in the school of God; he has courage to say, I do not know. He is along the line, he is eloquent at many a point, but he suddenly comes to points in the line which confuse him and defy him, and there he closes his lips: but his silence is prayer, his speechlessness is religion; this is not the dumbness of opposition, it is the silence of adoration.

Now Job asks a question or two, the principle of which applies to all ages: “Will ye speak wickedly for God?” ( Job 13:7 ). What an extraordinary combination of terms! If a man speak about God, can he do so “wickedly”? The answer is a melancholy Yes. Some of the things we shall have most deeply to repent of may be our sermons respecting God. We have created our sermons, and tried to force God into them, and to make him a consenting partner in our evil deed. Who will arise to speak righteously about God, and call him Father? To what evil treatment has he been subjected! How cruel have men been with God! First of all they conceive a certain theory of the Almighty, and then they bend everything into the lines which they have laid down. There are those who would overpower conscience by sovereignty. This is never to be allowed. God never comes into conflict with the human conscience. From the beginning he has been careful to keep himself, so to say, in harmony with the self which he has given to man, in the sense of being a spirit which could discern good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, partiality and impartiality. There are those who have said that God has damned some portions of the human race. Who ever said so is a liar! He “speaks wickedly for God.” Whoever says to the human conscience, Sit down: you have no right to ask about this appearance of partiality on the part of God, speaks deceitfully for the most high. “God is love”; “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him might not perish, but have everlasting life.” Who can challenge great speeches like that? These are the appeals that make the whole world kin. There you find no show of favour or partiality or selection. Whenever God goes beyond what we believe to be the letter of the law, it is never to exclude but always to include men whom we thought were for ever to be kept outside. He says to the Jew, What if I go after the Gentile? I made the Gentile as certainly as I made the Jew. And what said the most stubborn of Jews? At a certain time of spiritual revelation he said, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” There you have a philosophy that will stand the wear and tear of life; there you have a gospel that you can stand up and preach to the living and the dead. Alas! it is possible to have an immoral theology; in other words, it is possible to “speak wickedly for God.” We are to stand upon great principles, eternal truths, the sweet and proved realities of grace. There you are strong, with all the strength of personal experience; there you are gracious, with all the tenderness of real human sympathy. There is a God preached by some men that ought never to be believed in. Such men have no authority for their preaching in Holy Scripture. If they quote texts, they misquote them; if they point to chapter and verse, they never point to context. The providence of God must always illustrate the grace of God, and God “is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil”; “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust”: “God is love.” He must be spoken of in loving language; he must be revealed in all the attributes which indicate passion, mercy, tenderness, pity, clemency, care for the infirm, the feeble, the desolate, and the lost. In doing so, do we forget the righteousness of God? Certainly not, but it is the glory of righteousness to be compassionate; it is the glory of justice to flower out into charity. There is no unrighteousness in God. But partiality would be unrighteousness. First to give man a conscience, and then to insult and dishonour it, would be unrighteous. To teach that God has chosen one man to go to heaven and another man to go to hell, is to perpetrate a direr blasphemy than was done by the hand of Iscariot. This great evangelical doctrine must be declared in all its fulness and gravity, in all its argumentative nobleness, and in all its sympathetic tenderness, if the world is to be affected profoundly and savingly. The world is never affected by an argument which it cannot understand: men are moved by passions, impulses, instincts, intuitions, by something coming to them which has a correspondence in their own nature, and to which that which is in them answers as an echo to a voice.

Now let us take our stand on these great principles, and the world will not wish us to withdraw our ministry. When we thus magnify God we unite the human race; we do not break it up and distribute it, classify it and mark it off for monopolies and primacies and selfish sovereignties: we unite the human heart in all lands and climes, in all ages and under all circumstances. Nothing may be so impious as piety. Nothing may be so irreligious as religion. “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Job having thus rebuked his friends makes what he terms a “declaration”:

“Hear diligently my speech, and my declaration with your ears” ( Job 13:17 ).

Then he begins to say that all things are done by God; he says, Whatever is, God rules, and overrules; it is therefore not to be judged by the moment, or by some limited line, or newly-invented standard. God must have time, as well as nature. You say you must give nature time; you must remember that the seasons are four in number, and that they come and go in regular march and harmony. What you accord to nature you ought not to deny to God. It has pleased him so to make the world that not only is there in it one day, but there is a Tomorrow, and there is a third day: on the third day he perfects his Son. We must await the issue, and then we shall be called upon to judge the process. Now we see so little; we know next to nothing; we spend our lives in correcting our own mistakes: by-and-by the process will be consummated, and then we shall be asked to pronounce a judgment upon it; and in heaven’s clear light, and in the long day of eternity, we shall see just what God has done in the human race, and why he has done it Oh for patience! that mysterious power of waiting which is a kind of genius; the silence that holds its tongue under the assurance that at any moment it may be called upon to break into song, and testimony, and thanksgiving. Silence is part of true religion. He is not ignorant who says, I do not know. He may be truly wise; he may be but indicating that up to a given point he feels sure and strong and clear, and he is waiting at a door fastened on the other side until those who are within open it and bid him advance. Be it ours to be close to the door, for it may open at any moment, and we may be called to advance into larger spaces and fuller liberties.

Job is not afraid to say that “the deceiver and the deceived” are both in the hands of God. Job is not afraid to say that all affliction is sent of heaven, and that no affliction springs out of the dust. Job is represented, in the English version, as saying, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” But that is not what Job did say. He said he will slay. It would be beautiful to retain the English just as we find it, but justice of a grammatical kind will not allow it Job says: He will slay me, but I will still call his attention to great principles: in the very agony of death I will hold up before him that which he himself has told me. So Job, by a gracious and happy self-contradiction, says he will be slain, and yet he will contend; he will fall, and yet from the dust he will plead. Surely in the man’s heart was hidden a promise which he dare not divulge in words, but which was all the time warning him, comforting him, inspiring him, and making his weakness the very best and purest of his power.

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

Job’s Reply to His Three Friends. III.

Job 12-14

We have often had occasion to rejoice when Bible speakers have come down to a line with which we are ourselves familiar. Upon that line we could judge them correctly, as to their wisdom and understanding of human affairs. It is the peculiar distinction of Bible speakers and writers that now and again they ascend to heights we cannot climb: what they are uttering upon these sunlit elevations we cannot always tell; the great men are out of sight, often out of sound; we hear but reports of what they are declaring, and they themselves are more echoes than voices; they cannot tell what they have seen, or heard, or spoken; they have been but instruments in the hands of God. But, ever and anon, they come down to the common earth, and talk in our mother-tongue, and look us steadfastly in the face: then we can form some true judgment of the value of their thinking, of the scope of their imagination, and of the practical energy of their understanding. An instance of that kind occurs in the fourteenth chapter. Job begins to talk about “Man.” So long as he talked about himself there was a secret behind his speech which we could not penetrate. There is, indeed, a secret of that kind behind every man’s speech. No man says all he knows; no man can say all he means: behind the most elaborate declarations there are mysteries of motive and thought and purpose, which the man himself can never represent in adequate words. But now Job will speak about man in general; that is to say, about the human race; and when he begins so to speak, we can subject his words to practical tests, and assign them their precise value in historical criticism.

What does Job say about man? Is it true that man is a creature whose existence is measurable by days? What are “days”? mere fleeting shadows of time, hardly symbols of duration, going whilst they are coming, evaporating whilst we are remarking upon their presence? How long is it between sunrise and sunset? To the busy man it is nothing. To the idle man it is, and ought to be, a long time: but to the energetic servant, busy about his Lord’s work, what is the day? A little rent in the sky, a little gleam of light shining through a great immeasurable darkness. Is it true, then, that man’s existence, as we know it, is measurable by days? Are his days but a handful at the most? Are the days of our years statable in clear numbers? Does human existence humble itself to be settled by the law of averages? Has that mysterious quantity, that awful secret, human life, been dragged to the table of the arithmetician and made to accommodate itself to some form of statistics, so that whatever A or B may do, the common man, the medial quantity, will live to forty years, or fifty, and the whole stock of the human population may be struck down at that figure? Calculate upon that: offer them prices at that: write out their policies at that figure. Is it so, that man who can dream poems and temples and creations can be scheduled as probably finishing his dream at midnight or at the crowing of the cock? Are we so frail? Is life so attenuated a thing, that at any moment it: may snap, and our best and dearest may vanish for ever from our eyes? Job was either correct or incorrect when he said that: every man can judge the patriarch at this point. Is man like a flower which cometh forth, and is cut down? Is he no stronger than that? Beautiful indeed: a child of the sun, a spot of loveliness in a desert of desolation, a comely child: but may he die in the cradle: may his cradle become his coffin? May he never learn to walk, to talk, to love? It is so, or it is not so? There is no need to expend many words about this. Job is now talking about facts, and if the facts can be produced as against him here, we may dismiss him when he takes wing and flies away to horizons that lie beyond our ken.

But Job may be right here, and if he here talk soberly, truly, with wise sadness, he may be right when he comes to discuss problems with which we are unfamiliar. Is man “full of trouble”? Does any man need to go to the lexicon to know what “trouble” means? Is that word an etymological mystery? Do people know trouble by going to school? or do they know it by feeling it? Does the heart keep school on its own account? Do men know grief at first sight, and accost it as if they were familiar with it, and had kept long companionship with it in existences not earthly? The patriarch says “full” of trouble. That is a broad statement to make, and it is open to the test of practical observation and experience. What does “full of trouble” literally mean in the language which the patriarch employed? It means, satiated with trouble; steeped, soaked in trouble; so that the tears could be wrung out of him as if he had been purposely filled with these waters of sorrow. Is that true? Is man full of trouble, in other words, may trouble come into his life by a thousand different gates? Is it impossible to calculate, on awakening in the morning, how trouble will come into the heart through the gate of business, through personal health, through family circumstances? Will the letter-carrier bring a lapful of trouble to the man’s breakfast-table? Is man full of trouble, sated with sorrow, soaked and steeped in the brine of grief? We can tell: here we need no learned annotator with ponderous books and far-reaching traces of words: the heart knoweth its own bitterness. Who has ever stumbled at the first and second verses of the fourteenth chapter of the Book of Job, saying, These verses are not true? Nay, who has not gone to them in the dark and cloudy time and the day of desperate sorrow, and said, These words express the common experience of the race? Then Job says, man “fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” Is this true, or is the word “shadow” a rhetorical expression? Is not our life more like a stable rock? Is not our existence firm like a mountain? Can we not say positively that we shall go into such and such a city, and continue there a year, and buy, sell, and get gain? Has the Lord not allowed us to use the one little word “year” as if we had a right to it? Were we speaking about a long lifetime or an eternity then modesty might restrain our speech; but does the Lord say we are not to lay claim to one year for residence in a foreign city for commercial purposes, but that even in a promise for a year we must say, “if the Lord will”? Let this question be settled by facts. Do not be led away by words, however many and vital, but say, Has Job thus far laid his hand upon the realities of human experience? Is he but indulging in flights of imagination, and painting pictures which have no reference to the realities of life?

Assuming Job to be right, the question comes, How to account for this? Surely man, as we know him, cannot be made to be a creature of “days,” the subject of “trouble,” a “flower” for transitoriness of existence, or a “shadow” for evanescence? “Man” is the first word in the chapter, and it is a larger word than “days,” “trouble,” “fear,” “shadow”; to use the word in the old English sense, these terms do not equivocate with the word “man.” There is something more than we see: there is the argument of consciousness, an argument without words; that great terrible argument of sentiency, inward knowledge, instinct, intuition, call it what you may: there is something in “man” that will say to “fear” and “shadow,” You do but represent one little section of my existence: I am more than you are: I am not a daisy which an ox can crush; I am not a shadow which can be chased away from the wall: in some respects I am weak enough a mere child of days; my breath is in my nostrils, I know, but I know also that there is something within all the enfoldings and complications of this mysterious condition of life which says it will not die. Left to construct an argument in words, that argument might be borne down by a greater fury of words; but how to deal with the divinity that stirs within us! After all our arguing is done, that mysterious spirit says it lives still; that mysterious Galileo says, when the inquisitorial argument and the torture process are all concluded, I still live: I cannot, will not die; only one power can crush me, and that is the power that made me. Yes, there is an argument of consciousness, after all controversy in words has had its windy way.

Now Job comes to the fixed realities of life. He says, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one ” ( Job 14:4 ). There he would seem to be philosophical in the modern sense of the term: he would appear to have fixed his reasoning upon what we call the law of cause and effect. He speaks like a wise man. The proposition which he lays down here is one which is open to immediate and exhaustive scrutiny. But he proceeds: “Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass” ( Job 14:5 ). Is all that true? Do we live an “appointed” time on the earth? Are our days meted out to us one by one, and is a record kept by the Divine Economist, and can we not beg just one more day, to finish the marble column, or to put one last touch to the temple whose pinnacles are already glistering in the sun? Is all settled? Have we only liberty to obey? Let facts declare themselves. Job’s appeal to heaven, based upon these supposed facts, is full of pathos. You find the appeal in the sixth verse “Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish as an hireling his day.” In other words, Do not look at him, O God; but let him do his little day’s work, and go to his beast’s refuge in the ground. Or in other words, The discrepancy between thy look and his fate would drive man mad: spare him thy glance: if thou hast made him to be but a superior beast of burden, oh! do not look at him; he would misunderstand thy look, it would seem to touch somewhat of kinship in his soul, and thy look might give him a hope which thou hast determined to blight; Lord of mercy, do not look at the man thou hast doomed to die; let him run through his little tale of work, and bury himself in the eternal night. Job already begins to feel a movement of the soul which cannot be content with words of a negative kind. Why should man be so affected by the look of God? No beast prays to be released from the overruling observation of God. What is this masonry that understands the signs of the heavens? What is it within us that answers to an appeal made from the highest places? There we come upon the line of mystery: and my affirmment is that nowhere do we find answers direct, clear, simple, complete, and grand to all the hunger of the soul as we find in the Book of God a Book which covers the whole space, answers the inquiry, turns the question into exultation and praise.

Job reasons, and reasons wrongly. The reasoning is good, but the application is inadequate and fallacious, thus:

“For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant” ( Job 14:7-9 ).

Beautiful! fact turned into poetry: the tree blossoms under the touch of Job’s reasoning. But what does he make of it? We shall see presently. Meanwhile, Job says “there is hope of a tree.” If there is hope of anything, there must be hope of man. If you can find anywhere in nature a point at which hope begins, you have seized the key of the whole situation. If anything can die, and live again, you have secured the whole revelation of God’s purpose concerning man. We only need to find it anywhere. The kingdom of heaven is like unto a grain of mustard seed: after the mustard seed has been given the rest is but a commonplace: the trunk, the branches, the singing birds, what are these but mere sequences that cannot help themselves? the miracle is in the seed itself the first thought, the first word. Given an alphabet, and you have given a literature; given one thought, and you have given companionship to God. Job admitted the whole case the moment he got so far in his reasoning as to say “there is hope of a tree.” Job did not at once see what his reasoning; led to. It was enough, however, to have a good beginning.

Now see how he drops where he ought to have risen. The contrast begins in the tenth verse “But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost.” Does Job end there? Job cannot give up the case yet; even when he is denying a thing he asks questions which call it back again for consideration; he cannot release his hand upon the great possibility: he lets it go so far, even an arm’s length, and then he asks a question, and the subject turns back, and says, You are not done with me yet; we must have larger speech than we have yet had: come, let us continue together in sweet and hopeful fellowship, for out of discussion, contemplation, and prayer light may break, morning may dawn. Therefore Job having declared that “man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost,” ends with “and where is he?” He does not say “and is nowhere,” “and is not,” “and cannot be found any more.” Sometimes the very asking of a question is like the offering of a prayer; sometimes a question may be so put as to involve its own answer. Do not scorn men who gather around the Bible and ask questions concerning it; do not wonder that men cannot get at the meaning if the whole Bible all at once, and become completed saints at one day’s sitting over the sacred oracles; Jesus Christ encouraged the asking of great questions; he believed that the very asking of great questions was itself a process of education. So Job says, “Where is he?” “As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up: so man lieth down, and riseth not” ( Job 14:11-12 ): is that a full-stop? No; Job cannot come to a period yet; he is at a colon, the very next stop to a full one, but not a full one “So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.” Words difficult for us to understand, but still, read in the spirit of Job’s hopefulness when he put the question, they may be made to meet a secret hope that there is coming a time in which man’s resurrection shall contrast with nature’s dissolution. Who can tell? Nay, the very word “sleep” has in it somewhat of hope “They shall not awake,” are they then but slumbering? It may be. “Raised out of their sleep,” are they, then, but recruiting their energy in a night’s rest? So it may be. We believe it. Life and immortality are brought to light through the gospel; and, bringing Christ’s preaching to bear upon the Book of Job, we see that many a dark place is lighted up. This is not a post hoc ? We are not bringing back history upon history as a mere controversial resort; this is the right and philosophical method of reading life to bring the third day to bear upon the first day to explain all its mystery and illumine all its darkness. Jesus Christ thus reasoned, and we are prepared to follow him in all his argument. Job should have reasoned the other way: but who is always right? Who is always equal to the occasion? It is easier to lie down than to stand up; it is easier to go down a hill than to struggle against a steep. We cannot blame the patriarch. He might have reasoned “There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant,” and if a common vegetable can do this, how much more shall man respond to the touch divine, and abolish death, and be like the golden wheat, springing up out of corruption, sixtyfold, an hundredfold, in answer to the sower’s care! But we are not always equal to ourselves. In one man the “selves” are many. Sometimes the man is almost an angel; sometimes he is a mighty reasoner, and can hold his work clear up to the midday sun, and defy that bright critic to show a flaw in all the process, yet that selfsame man is often tired, worn down, overborne by the long-lasting fatigues of life, so that he can hardly utter his own prayers, or crown them with an energetic Amen. Do not, therefore, rush in upon a man at his weakest moment, and say, This is what he believes: see what a palpable hypocrisy, what an ill-concealed weakness of the soul. That is not the man. Meet him tomorrow, and the vitality will be back in his eye, and the thunder will have returned to his voice. Address yourself to a man at his highest point, as God does: God answers our ideal prayers, and interprets our ideal selves, and thus sees in us more than we can for the moment see in our own nature. How we sometimes miss the parable of the growing world! All nature teaches resurrection: the trees do but sleep; the earth itself does but gather around her the coverlet of snow, and say, like a tired mother, Let me sleep awhile. All nature is a Bible written with the finger of God upon the one subject of resurrection. There is a rising again; there is a return to the paths of life; there is a perpetual urgency of nature towards larger growth. Sometimes the summer is so rich, so warm, so fecundant, that it would seem as if winter could never come back, as if the earth had entered upon the days and the delights of Paradise.

One thing is certain: we have yet to die; we have yet to be, so far as the body is concerned, like water spilt upon the ground which cannot be gathered up, we have yet to yield up the spirit into the hands of him who created it. A right beautiful thing to do when we get into the right state of mind! Then there is no dying: there is a falling asleep, there is an ascension, there is a “languishing into life,” there is a process of passing into the bosom of God. O thou bright little dewdrop, thou dost not tremble with pain when the sun comes to call thee up to set thee in the rainbow! O poor shrinking heart of man, trembling flesh, misgiving, doubtful spirit, when thy Lord comes thou shalt not know that thy feet are in the river: he will kiss thee into peace, and life, and heaven!

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

Job’s Reply to His Three Friends. IV.

Job 12-14

A very curious specimen of the black and white art of colouring is this whole speech of Job. Sometimes it appears to be all blackness, and then it is suddenly and tenderly relieved by whiteness, like the radiance of a large, soft planet. We must not, therefore, put our finger down upon any one point and say, This is the speech. The speech has a million points, and they belong to one another, and can only be understood in their relation and their unity. We have seen Job half in the grave; yea, more than half nothing out of it but his head: but, blessed be God, so long as the head is out of the tomb we hear eloquent speech about life, and death, and trouble, and hope. And was not the heart out of the grave as well as the head, that is to say, all the affectional sentiments, all the moral impulses, all that makes a man more than a mere genius? Truly so.

Job now opens a new source of consolation:

“Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands” ( Job 14:15 ).

What artist likes to throw away his own painting? Critics do not like it: they are perfectly ingenious in discovering flaws in it; but the artist himself says: I painted that picture with my heart. We have heard of the unwillingness of a preacher to throw away his own discourses. Said one to me a gentle soul, now with the gentle angels, a man whose mind was all beauty, and whose heart was all love “The critics have been hard upon my sermons, but I know what fire and life and force I spent upon them.” They represented the man’s best power; he had embodied his very soul in the living sentences of these discourses: how could he cut them up, and scatter the fragments, as if they had cost him nothing? We have heard the mother say, when the sword was in mid-air to divide the child, “O my lord, give her the living child.” It was a mother’s cry, and Solomon detected the maternal tone in the agony. What mother likes to abandon her own child? and is not a father represented as being pitiful to his children? “like as a father pitieth his children.” That would seem to be the argument of Job in this fifteenth verse “Thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands:” thou wilt not let cold cruel death break up thy child, cover him up with dust, and stamp him with the seal of annihilation and oblivion. Thus God has set many teachers within us; all our affections, emotions, impulses, everything that connects us one with another in social confidence and mutual honour, all these forces and ministries are meant to teach us that he himself is the same as we are, multiplied by infinity. Why not? God created man in his own image: in the image of God created he him. He is a little God, but he belongs to the divine family; he boasts not of royal blood, but of blood divine: when he stumbles, he falls like a son of God; when he breaks away from altar and sanctuary and oath, he seems to tear the heavens, so large does he become in God’s estimation, so greatly does he bulk amid the material things that are round about him and above him: what a gap, what a vacancy, what a loss! No darkness clouds the blue heaven when the beast dies, but when man dies who knows what pain quivers at the heart of things? A beautiful thought it was for Job to realise that man was the work of God’s hands. What is it that distinguishes one life from another, say, one voice from another, one hand from another? Are not all human hands alike? Cannot all men paint with equal skill? They have the same canvas, the same colours, the same brushes: now let them proceed one by one, and the signature of the one in colour will be equal to the signature of the other. But such is not the fact: the higher artist says to the younger and lower, What your picture wants is this touch. It lives! That one touch has separated the former picture from the present by the length of infinity. So all things are the work of God’s hands the beast and the angel: but who can measure the distance between the two? Thus this word “desire” yearning is the right word, a wringing of the heart, a drawing out of the soul in exquisite solicitude tenderly tender, as if God would touch without harming, lift up and set down without leaving any marks of violence upon his child. All this is helpful, not because it is ancient in history, but because it concurs with our own desire and experience. The love we bestow upon anything is the value of it: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him might not perish, but have everlasting life.” We measure all things by the love we assign them. Applying that same standard to God, how much must he love the world who, in any sense, died for it!

Then Job alters his tone:

“For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin?” ( Job 14:16 ).

Let us take it (though there is no little difficulty about the mere grammar of the passage) that Job is arguing from providence to morals. He proceeds in his reasoning from “steps” to “sin.” He would seem to trace the same criticism “for now thou numberest my steps”: therefore, as thou art so particular and critical about my steps, dost thou let my sin go past without observation? The passage has been rendered variously, but this would seem to be a meaning which inheres in the thought, because it is certainly true to our present conception of God’s rule. Let us be strong on the point of providence first. Have no fear of the ultimate condition of any man’s mind when that mind is perfectly certain as to the reality of a superintending providence. Deism may end in Christianity. Everything will depend upon its spirit: if it is haughty, intolerant, self-idolatrous, it will end in nothing but vanity; but if it can say, reverently, Up to this point I am clear; here I can stand, and think, and pray, and hope, be sure that the issue will be right. Is there, then, a providence in life? Do not think of some other man’s life only, but think of your own life when you are called upon to reply to this inquiry. Now go back, begin at the very first page of your own life: how unconnected the sentences, how almost incoherent the style; what a singular want of relation as between one part and another! So it is.

Unquestionably it is rough reading at the first. Now turn over a page. Has no light come? You answer, Yes, a little light has begun to dawn. Go on to the next page: add one day to another: let the events settle down into proportion; and presently you will begin to see that even your life has been as it were the darling of God. You have to deny yourself before you can deny divine providence. The matter is no longer theoretical, or you could easily dismiss it; but when a man is bound first to commit suicide before he can cease to believe, then God has wrought in him a gracious and blessed miracle. Job thus reasons: My steps are watched; I am an observed man; what I thought was a belt of cloud is a belt of omnipotence, and I cannot get through it; what I considered to be but a thin mist in the air is the very throne of God: I can do nothing without leave; I live by permission. Up to this point Job might have said: I am perfectly clear. But if so, what more? Does God pay so much attention to that which is without, and no attention to that which is within? Is he careful to measure a man’s steps, and oblivious of man’s transgression? This is the great reasoning, the fearless logic, that goes forward from point to point, and forces the soul to face the consequences of facts.

That Job is sure that his sin is watched is evident from the next verse:

“My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity” ( Job 14:17 ).

Job was acquainted with Oriental customs; he knew that the judge wore a scrip or a pouch, and that in this scrip were put all the documents which related to the particular case: the judge took them out of the scrip one by one. But there was something more than the general scrip or receptacle of the documentary evidence “Thou sewest up mine iniquity”: not only had the Oriental judge or accuser an open pouch in which he kept documents needful for the establishment of his case, but he had an inward and lesser compartment, carefully sewn up, in which were the special proofs that the general impeachment was sound. In the scrip there were two compartments one in which was the general accusation against the man, and the other in which there were the special and critical proofs cited to establish the charge. This is what Job saw when he looked upon God. Said he: I see the scrip, the full pouch; I see the documents that are written against me; and behind them all are proofs I cannot deny; the case is well ordered and set forth with masterly skill; not a point will be overlooked, and where I am strongest in denial God will be strongest in evidence. Job’s conception of the divine providence in its moral relations was not that of a general oversight, or of a loose-handed indictment as against any man or number of men; Job said in effect: Men make mistakes about this matter; they confuse their documents and their references; sometimes they lose papers which are essential to their case, and sometimes they cannot read all their own hands have written; and therefore even the wicked man will escape a just judgment: but when God undertakes to be judge, there is the scrip, there is the general accusation, there are the particular proofs, day and date down to hour and moment, and locality down to a footprint, and there is no reply to omniscience.

Now the patriarch turns, as has been his recent wont, to nature

“And surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man” ( Job 14:18-19 ).

Nature is terrible as well as gracious. What is so monotonous as sunshine? What is so mocking as the fixed stars? We cannot change their temper; we can work no miracle upon their image: there they shine, from century to century, from millennium to millennium. Praise the sun who may, and that he is worthy of praise who will deny, but his is a monotonous friendship. If the clouds did not come to help us we could not bear the sun’s fierce love. What if we owe as much to the clouds as to the sun? What if the attempering atmosphere has made the heavens possible as a source of enjoyment? Is there not a great principle of mediation even in nature? Does the sun shine straight upon the earth without anything between? Woe betide the earth then! The poor little handful of soil we call the earth could not live tor a moment it would stagger under the fierce blaze: but there is scattered between the sun and the earth a great intermediary ministry, a mollifying and attempering influence. And is there not a daysman between God and humanity? Is there not what answers to an atmosphere between the Essential Glory and this poor time-space and flesh-life, this mystery of body and soul chained together for one tumultuous hour? Job saw the mountain falling. Mountains do not fall in our country. True: but they do fall in volcanic regions; they fall where earthquakes are almost familiar: there “the rock is removed out of his place.” We do not learn everything in our own little land; we must go the world over to learn something of God’s method. Here the mountains are firm; yonder they are thrown up as if they were toys in the mighty hands of some player, who trifled with them and made them spin in the air. Here the rocks are emblems of solidity, but where earthquakes are known they are torn out of their places and hurled miles away. And even where there is no violent action of nature, there is a continual process of decay or ruin “the waters wear the stones.” All nature is wearing. Nature is killing, as well as making alive, every moment. The little, gentle, beautiful, soft, plashing water is wearing away the great rocks; the continual dropping of water will wear the stone. What we think gracious is often severe, and what we think severe is often gracious. But Job has fixed his mind upon this great fact that mountains cannot be relied upon, rocks cannot; be built upon, strong stones cannot be depended upon if there is water near flowing, active water. Water will get the better of any rock. That which seems to be nothing in comparison will wear the other out, and send the rock flowing down the stream. Job, therefore, gets sight of the severe aspect of nature, and he reasons upward from mountain, and rock, and stone, and things growing out of the dust to man, and says, “Thou destroyest the hope of man”: here you have volcanic action, earthquakes tearing out rocks, waters wearing stones, beautiful growths washed away, and a sudden, strange, awful blight falling in blackness upon the hope of the soul. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

What is the meaning of all this as applied to man? The meaning is perpetual overthrow “Thou prevailest for ever against him.” It is man who always goes down; it is the creature who is bowed under the hand of the Creator. O vain man, know this! What canst thou do against God? Why bruise thy poor fingers in thumping upon the eternal granite? Why dare Omnipotence to battle? “Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace”; “we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God”; lay down the arms of rebellion, and cry for quarter from the heavens: thou canst not prevail. Let the tumbling mountain teach thee, and the falling rock be an analogy for thy guidance; yea, let the stones perishing under the water teach thee, and see as the roots are washed out of the earth by the very rains that might have nourished them how terrible may be the providence of God. Say It is useless to fight against heaven; heaven’s weapons are stronger than mine, so are heaven’s hands; all the resources of infinity are with God, and I am nothing but a child of dust, and my breath is in my nostrils: I will look unto the hills whence cometh my help, and I will pray to him whom I have too long defied. That would be a wise man’s speech made tender by the tears of penitence. Man is always loser when he fights against God. Even when he seems to excel he excites but curiosity. If a man live a hundred years, he is pointed out as a curiosity in nature; attention is drawn to him as one who may have been forgotten as the angels were calling up the population of earth to heaven: he is questioned by curiosity; he is looked at by curiosity; he is written about as a curiosity. Why, ought he not to be set up as one who has defied God, and succeeded? There is a spirit in man which says, This is no triumph against eternal law, this is a curious instance, a rather striking exception: look at him very quickly, for tomorrow he may be gone! There is no successful warring against heaven. “Thou changest his countenance, and sendest him away.” There is a displacement of the first image. We say How changed from what he was when I saw him last! Then there was fire in his eye, there was military dominance in his voice; then he had but to speak, and it was done, within the circle in which he was lord: and now look how decrepit he is: how he falters, how he apologises for every request he makes, how dependent he is upon the meanest of those who are round about him! If he stoop, he cannot raise himself up again; being raised, he cannot stoop without danger. Poor man! how withered in complexion, how deathlike in aspect, how frail altogether! And he once was strong and bright and genial! Nor is this exceptional; this is universal. Such is the lot of every man. About the strongest giant will be said some day: He will never rise again; his life is now a question of moments; the great towering man is laid low, and cannot lift himself into his original attitude. Not only is there a displacement of the first image, but the vanity of family promotion is dead within him. He cares not what becomes of any one. “His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not.” He asks his own sons what their names are; he looks upon his own children with the vacancy of absent ignorance; he asks his own child where he lives now; he asks the younger if he is not the elder, and he mistakes the elder for the younger; and when he is told that his child is now high in society, he asks a question about him upside down, and inflicts upon his honour the stigma of an unconscious irony. “And they are brought low, but he perceiveth it not.” He is not even aware that their moral character has gone down; when they use profane language, he cannot discern between such language and the speech of prayer, all language has lost all meaning for him. And all dress and culture and station and name, whether high or low, he cannot tell. And this is man! No, says nature, this is not man: this is but a phase of man; this is but one chapter in the tragedy of man: the issue is not yet Even while man’s flesh has pain, “his soul within him shall mourn.” There is hope in that very word “mourn.” Why mourn? Because all the instincts say, What is to become of us? All the passions of man’s nature say, Are we to die? The marvellous power within man that prayed and sang and lived cannot die without protesting against its own murder. Read the soul of man, if you would believe in the immortality of man. Even when man longs to sleep he longs to wake again; even when he says he shall be but as one of the common lot and go down to the ground, he says, Shall I not live again? The very question is an argument; the very inquiry is part of a great process of reasoning: to be able to ask the question is to be able to answer it affirmatively.

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

Job’s Reply to His Three Friends. V.

Job 12-14

Now that the case in some measure of completeness is before us, we may profitably consider the history on a larger scale than its merely personal aspect. We have elements enough, in these fourteen chapters, for the construction of a world. We have the good man; the spirit of evil; the whole story of affliction and loss, pain and fear; and we have three comforters, coming from various points, with hardly various messages to be addressed to a desolate heart. Now if we look upon the instance as typical rather than personal, we shall really grasp the personal view in its deepest meanings. Let us, then, enlarge the scene in all its incidents and proportions; then instead of one man, Job, we shall have the entire human race, instead of one accuser we shall have the whole spirit of evil which works so darkly and ruinously in the affairs of men, and instead of the three comforters we shall have the whole scheme of consolatory philosophy and theology, as popularly understood, and as applied without utility. So, then, we have not the one-Job, but the whole world-Job: the personal patriarch is regarded but as the typical man; behind him stand the human ranks of every age and land.

We have little to do with the merely historical letter of the Book of Genesis: we want to go further; we want to know what man was in the thought and purpose of God. The moment we come to printed letters, we are lost. No man can understand letters, except in some half-way, some dim, intermediate sense, which quite as often confuses as explains realities. Yet we cannot do without letters: they are helps little, uncertain, yet not wholly inconvenient auxiliaries. We want to know what God meant before he spoke a single word. The moment he said, “Let us make man in our image,” we lost the solemnity of the occasion, that is to say, the higher, diviner solemnity. If it had been possible for us to have seen the thought without hearing, when it was a pure thought, without even the embodiment of words, the unspoken, eternal purpose of God, then we should understand what is to be the issue of this tragedy which we call Life. It was in eternity that God created man: he only showed man in time, or gave man a chance of seeing his own little imperfect nature. Man is a child of eternity. Unless we get that view of the occasion, we shall be fretted with all kinds of details; our eyes will be pierced and divided as to their vision by ten thousand little things that are without focus or centre: we must from eternity look upon the little battlefield of time, and across that battlefield once more into the calm eternity; then we shall see things in their right proportions, distances, colours, and relations, and out of the whole will come a peace which the world never gave and which the world cannot take away. Hear the great Creator in the sanctuary of eternity; his words are these “My word shall not return unto me void.” What is his “word”? This: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Is that word not to return void to the speaker? That is certainly the decree and oath of the Bible. But how long it takes to work out this sacred issue! Certainly: because the work is great. Learn how great in the idea of God is humanity from the circumstance that it takes long ages to shape and mould and inspire a man with the image and likeness and force of God. The great process is going on; God’s word is to be verified and fulfilled; at the last there is to stand up a humanity, faultless, pure, majestic, worthy, through God, to share God’s eternity.

Now, as a matter of fact, some men are farther on in this divine line than others are. We have seen the purpose: it is to make a perfect man and an upright; a man that fears God and eschews evil and lives in God; and, as a matter of fact, let us repeat, some men are farther along that ideal line than other men are. As a simple matter of experience, we are ready to testify that there are Jobs, honestly good men, honourable persons, upright souls: men that say concerning every perplexity in life, What is the right thing to be done? what is good, true, honest, lovely, and of good report? men who ask moral questions before entering into the engagements, the conflicts, and the business of life. And, as a matter of fact, these Jobs do develop or reveal or make manifest the spirit of evil: they bring up what devil there is in the universe, and make the universe see the dark and terrible image. But for these holy men we should know nothing about the spirit of evil. Wherever the sons of God come together we see the devil most patently. We are educated by contrasts, or we are helped in our understanding of difficulties by things which contrast one another: we know the day because we know the night, and we know the night because we know the day. We are set between extremes; we look upon the one and upon the other, and wonder, and calculate, and average, and then make positive and workable conclusions. Why fight about “devil”? There is a far greater word than that about which there is no controversy. Why then fret the soul by asking speculative questions about a personality that cannot be defined and apprehended by the mortal imagination, when there lies before our sight the greater word “evil”? If there had been any reason to doubt the evil, we should have made short work of all controversy respecting the devil. It is the evil which surrounds us like a black cordon that makes the devil possible. In a world in which we ourselves have seen and experienced in many ways impureness, folly, crime, hypocrisy, selfishness, all manner of twisted and perverted motive, why should we trouble ourselves to connect all these things with a personality, speculative or revealed? There are the dark birds of night the black, the ghastly facts: so long as they press themselves eagerly upon our attention, and put us to all manner of expense, inconvenience, and suffering, surely there is ground enough to go upon, and there is ground enough to accept the existence of any number of evil spirits a number that might darken the horizon and put out the very sun by their blackness. We might discredit the mystery if we could get rid of the fact. So far, then, we have the purpose of God, the ideal man, the spirit of evil arising to counteract his purposes and test his quality; then we have the whole spirit of consolatory philosophy and theology as represented by Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar. Let us hear what that whole system has to give us:

Three things, with varieties and sub-sections; but substantially three things. First, Fate. Philosophy has not scrupled to utter that short, sharp, cruel word. Things happen because they must happen: you are high or low, bad or good, fortunate or unfortunate, because there is an operation called Fatalism severe, tyrannous, oppressive, inexorable. So one comforter comes to tell you that what you are suffering cannot be helped; you must bear it stoically: tears are useless, prayer is wasted breath; as for resignation, you may sentimentalise about it, but as a matter of fact, you must submit. One comforter talks this dark language: he points to what he calls facts; he says, Look at all history, and you will find that men have to sup sorrow, or drink wine out of golden goblets, according to the operation of a law which has not yet been apprehended or authoritatively defined: life is a complicated necessity; the grindstone is turned round, and you must lay yourselves upon it, and suffer all its will a blind, unintelligent will; a contradiction in terms if you like; a will that never gives any account of itself, but grinds on, and grinds small. That comforter makes his speech, and the suffering world says No: thou art a miserable comforter: oh that I could state my case as I feel it! continues that suffering world then all thy talk would be so much vanity, or worthless wind: thou braggart, thou stoic, thou man of the iron heart, eat thine own comfort if thou canst digest steel, and feed upon thy philosophy if thou canst crush into food the stones of the wilderness: thy comfort is a miserable condolence.

Then some other comforter says: The word “Fate” is not the right word; it is cold, lifeless, very bitter; the real word is Sovereignty intelligent, personal sovereignty. Certainly that is a great rise upon the former theory. If we have come into the region of life, we may come into the region of righteousness. Explain to me, thou Bildad, what is the meaning of Sovereignty: I am in sorrow, my eyes run away in rivers of tears, and I am overwhelmed with bitterest distress, what meanest thou by Sovereignty? I like the word because of its vitality; I rejected the other speaker who talked of Fate because I felt within me that he was wrong, although I could not answer him in words; but Sovereignty tell me about that. And the answer is: It means that there is a great Sovereign on the throne of the universe; lofty, majestic, throned above all hierarchies, princedoms, powers; an infinite Ruler; a Governor most exalted, giving to none an account of his way, always carrying out his own purposes whatever man may suffer; he moves with his head aloft; he cares not what life his feet tread upon, what existences he destroys by his onward march: his name is God, Sovereign, Ruler, Governor, King, Tyrant. And the suffering world-Job says, No: there may be a Sovereign, but that is not his character; if that were his character he would be no sovereign: the very word sovereign, when rightly interpreted, means a relation that exists by laws and operations of sympathy, trust, responsibility, stewardship, account, rewards, punishments: be he whom he may who walks from star to star, he is no tyrant: I could stop him on his course and bring him to tears by the sight of a flower; I could constrain him to marvel at his own tenderness: I have seen enough of life to know that it is not a tyrannised life, that it does not live under continual terror; often there is a dark cloud above it and around it, but every now and then it breaks into prayer and quivers into song: No! Miserable comforter art thou, preacher of sovereignty; not so miserable as the apostle of Fate, but if thou hast ventured to call God Tyrant, there is something within me, even the heartthrob, which tells me that thou hast not yet touched the reality, the mystery of this case.

Then another man Zophar he may be called says, Not “Fate,” not “Sovereignty” as just defined by Bildad, but Penalty, that is the meaning of thy suffering, O world: thou art a criminal world, thou art a thief, a liar, oft-convicted; thou hast broken every commandment of God, thou hast sinned away the morning and the midday, yea, and at eventide thou hast been far from true and good: world, thou art suffering pains at thine heart, and they are sharp pains; they are God’s testimony to thine ill-behaviour; a well-conducted world would have swung for ever and ever in cloudless sunshine; thou hast run away from God, thou art a prodigal world, thou art in a far country in the time of famine, and God has sent hunger to punish thee for thy wantonness and iniquity. And the world-Job says No: miserable comforters are ye all! There seems to be a little truth even in what the first speaker said, a good deal of truth in what the second speaker revealed to me about sovereignty, and there is an unquestionable truth in what Zophar has said about penalty: I know I have done wrong, and I feel that God has smitten me for my wrong-doing; but I also feel this, that not one of you has touched the reality of the case: I cannot tell you what the reality is yet, but you have left the ground uncovered, you are the victims of your own philosophy, and your own imperfect theology; I rise and at least convict you of half-truths: you have not touched my wound with a skilled hand.

This is the condition of the Book of Job up to this moment; that is to say, within the four corners of the first fourteen chapters Job the ideal man; Job developing the spirit of evil by his very truth and goodness; men coming from different points with little creeds and little dogmas, and imperfect philosophies and theologies, pelting him with maxims and with truisms and commonplaces; and the man says, “Miserable comforters are ye all”: I know what ye have said, I have seen all that long ago; but you have not touched the heart of the case, its innermost mystery and reality; your ladder does not reach to heaven; you are clever and well-skilled in words up to a given point, but you double back upon yourselves, and do not carry your reasoning forward to its final issue. That is so. Now we understand this book up to the fourteenth chapter. We were not surprised to find a Job in the world, a really honest, upright, good man, reputed for his integrity and trusted for his wisdom; that did not surprise us: we were not surprised that such a man should be assaulted, attacked by the spirit of evil, for even we ourselves, in our imperfect quality of goodness, know that there is a breath from beneath, a blast from hell, that hinders the ascent of our truest prayers. And we can believe well in all these comforters as realities; they are not dramatic men, they are seers and traditionalists and lovers of maxims, persons who assail the world’s sorrow with all kinds of commonplaces, and incomplete and self-contradictory nostrums and assertions: and we feel that Job is right when he says I cannot take your comfort; the meat you give me I cannot eat, the water you supply me with is poison: leave me! Oh that I could come face to face with God! He would tell me and he will yet tell me the meaning of it all. We need not pause here, because we have the larger history before us, and we know the secret of all. What is it? What was hidden from Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar? What was it these men did not see? They did not see the meaning of chastening, chastisement, purification by sorrow, trial by grief; they did not know that Love is the highest sovereignty, and that all things work together for good to them that love God; that loss is gain, poverty is wealth, that affliction is the beginning of real robustness of soul, when rightly apprehended and fearlessly and reverently applied: “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby”; “Brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations”; “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” That is the real meaning of all the sorrow, allowing such portion of truth to the theory of Sovereignty and Penalty, which undoubtedly inheres in each and both of them. But God means to train us, to apply a principle and process of cultivation to us. He will try us as gold is tried: but he is the Refiner, he sits over the furnace; and as soon as God can discover his own image in us he will take us away from the fire, and make us what he in the far eternity meant to make us when he said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” How all this process of chastening becomes necessary is obvious enough, if we go back into our own hearts, and run our eye over the whole line of our own experience. If we have true light in us we shall have no doubt as to the necessity of this chastening and its meaning. Even God to reach his own ideal had himself to suffer. Is God simply a watching Sovereign, saying, These men must suffer a little more; the fire must be made hotter, the trial must be made intenser: I will watch them in perfect equanimity; my calm shall never be disturbed; the suffering shall be theirs, not mine; I will simply operate upon them mechanically and distantly? That is not the Bible conception of God. This is the Bible conception, namely, that in working out the ideal manhood, God himself suffers more than it is possible for man to suffer, because of the larger capacity the infinite capacity of woe. Now we seem to be coming into better ground. How much does God suffer for his human children? We know that he has wept over them, yearned after them, proposed to send his Son to save them, has in reality sent his Son in the fulness of time, born of a woman, born under the law; we know that the Bible declares that the Son of God did give himself up for us all, the just for the unjust, and that Christ, the God-man, is the apostle of the universe; his text is Sacrifice, his offer is Pardon. How much did God suffer? The sublimest answer to that inquiry is Behold the cross of Christ. If you would know whether God’s heart was broken over our moral condition, look at the cross of Christ; if you would understand that God is bent on some gracious and glorious purpose of man-making, behold the cross of Christ. It will not explain itself in words, but it is possible for us to wait there, to watch there, until we involuntarily exclaim, This is no man; this is no malefactor: who is he? Watch on, wait on; read yourself in the light of his agony, and at last you will say, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” What is he doing there? Redeeming the world. What is his purpose? To make man in God’s image and God’s likeness. Then is the process long-continued, stretching over the ages? Yes: he who is from everlasting to everlasting takes great breadths of time for the revelation of his fatherhood and the realisation of all the purposes of his love.

Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker

(See the Job Book Comments for Introductory content and general conclusions and observations).

V

THE FIRST ROUND OF SPEECHES

Job 4-14.

This debate extends from Job 4-31 inclusive. There are three rounds of speeches by all the four except that Zophar drops out in the last round. Each round constitutes a scene in Act II of the drama.

In this chapter we will discuss Scene I and commence with the first speech of Eliphaz (Job 4-5) the points of which are as follows:

Introduction (Job 4:1-2 ). In his introduction he deprecates grieving one so afflicted but must reprove Job,

1. For weakness and inconsistency. The one who had instructed, comforted, and strengthened others in their troubles, faints when trouble comes to him (Job 4:3-5 ).

2. Because Job had neither the fear of God nor personal integrity, for the fear of God gives confidence, and integrity gives hope, but Job’s complaint implies that he had neither confidence nor hope, therefore he must be devoid of the fear of God and of integrity (Job 4:6 ).

3. Because the observation of the general trend of current events argued Job’s guilt. The innocent do not perish; those who reap trouble are those who have sowed trouble and plowed iniquity. Ravening lions, though strong and terrible, meet the hunter at last (Job 4:7-11 ).

4. Because revelation also convicts him. Eliphaz relates one of his own visions (Job 4:12-17 ), very impressively, which scouted the idea that mortal man could be more just than God, or purer than his maker. But Job’s complaint seemed to embody the idea. Eliphaz argues from his vision that a pure and just God crushes impure and unjust men and suggests the application that Job’s being crushed reproves his impurity and injustice (Job 4:18-21 ).

5. Because Job’s outcry against God was foolish and silly, and since no angels would hear such complaint, or dare to avert its punishment (Job 5:1-2 ) there can be no appeal from the supreme to the creature.

6. Because observation of a particular case illustrates Job’s guilt (Job 5:3-5 ). The circumstances of this case seen by Eliphaz, make it parallel with Job’s case; a certain foolish man took root and prospered for a while, but the curse smote him suddenly and utterly; his children perished, his harvest was eaten by the hungry, and all his substance was snatched away.

7. Because these results are not accidental, nor of earthly origin, but must be attributed to God who punishes sin. Because man is a sinner he is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward (Job 5:6-7 ).

The remedy suggested to Job by Eliphaz is as follows:

1. Take your case to God confession of sin and repentance are suggested (Job 5:8 ) who will exalt the penitent (Job 5:11 ) as certainly as he has frustrated their craftiness (Job 5:12-14 ) and so the poor may have hope after the mouth of their iniquity is stopped (Job 5:15-16 ).

2. Instead of murmuring, count yourself happy in receiving this punishment, and after penitence expect restoration of prosperity (Job 5:17-27 ).

On comparing this analysis with that given by Dr. Tanner (see his Syllabus on the speech of Eliphaz) it will be noted that the author here differs widely with Tanner in his analysis and interpretation of this speech. Tanner presents Eliphaz as assuming the position that Job was a righteous man and that God would deliver him. The author presents Eliphaz as taking the position that Job had sinned, which was the cause of his suffering and that he should confess and repent; that he should count himself happy in receiving this punishment, and thus after penitence expect the restoration of prosperity. It will be recalled here that the author, in commending the Syllabus of Dr. Tanner noted the weakness of his analysis at this point.

There are several things notable in this first speech of Eliphaz, viz:

1. The recurrence in all his speeches of “I have seen,” “I have seen,” “I saw,” showing that the experience and observation of a long life constituted the basis of his argument.

2. The good elements of his arguments are as follows: (1) He refers to the natural law of sowing and reaping (Cf. Gal 6:7 ); (2) the sinner’s way to happiness is through confession and repentance; (3) chastisement of an erring man should be recognized as a blessing, since it looks to his profit (Cf. Pro 3:11 and the use made of it as quoted in Heb 12:5 ).

3. The bad elements in his speech are as follows: (1) His induction of facts ignores many other facts, particularly that all suffering is not penal; (2) He fails in the application of his facts, since the case before him does not come in their classification; in other words, through ignorance he fails in his diagnosis of the case, and hence his otherwise good remedies fall short of a cure.

4. The exquisite simplicity and literary power of his description of his vision, makes it a classic gem of Hebrew poetry.

The following points are noted in Job’s reply (Job 6-7) :

1. The rash words of my complaint are not evidence of previous sins, but the result of immeasurable calamities from the hand of God. They cannot be weighed; they are heavier than the sandy shores which confine the ocean; they are poisoned arrows from the quiver of the Almighty which pierce my very soul and rankle there; they are terrors marshalled in armies by the Almighty (Job 6:1-4 ).

2. The braying of an ass and the lowing of an ox are to be attributed to lack of food, not meanness. Let the favorable construction put upon the discordant noise of hungry animals be applied to my braying and lowing (Job 6:5 ), for in my case also there is the hunger of starvation since the food set before me is loathsome and without savor (Job 6:6-7 ).

3. I repeat my prayer to God for instant death, because I have not the strength to endure longer, nor the wisdom to understand (Job 6:8-9 ; Job 6:11-13 ) but while exulting in the pain that slays me, my consolation still is, that I have not denied the words of the Holy One (Job 6:10 ).

4. Instead of moralizing on the causes and rebuking suspected sins, friends should extend kindness to one ready to faint, even though he forsake the fear of God (or lest he forsake, Job 6:14 ). This is like the story of the drowning boy who asked the moralizing man on the bank to help him out first and then inquire into the causes of his mishap.

5. In your treatment of me, ye are like a deceitful brook, roaring with water only while the snow on the mountains is melting, but being without springs, directly you run dry. The caravans from the desert that come to it hoping, turn aside from its dusty channels and perish. So you that seemed like a river when I was not thirsty, put me to shame by your nothingness now that I thirst. Compare “Wells without water . . . clouds without rain” in Jud 1:12-13 .

6. Is it possible that you condemn me because you apprehend that otherwise I might ask you for help? In your moralizing are you merely hedging against the expectation of being called on to help a bankrupt sufferer, by furnishing a reward or ransom for the return of my stolen flocks and herds? Do you try to make me guilty that you may evade the cost of true friendship (Job 6:21-23 )? I have asked for no financial help, but for instruction. How forcible are right words !

7. But you, instead of explaining my calamities have been content to reprove the words of my complaint, extorted by the anguish of my calamities, words that under the circumstances should have been counted as wind, being only the speeches of one that is desperate.

8. The meanness of such treatment in your case would prompt in other cases to cast lots for the orphans of the dead and make merchandise out of a stranded friend by selling him as a slave (Job 6:27 ). This is a terrible invective, but more logical than their argument, since history abundantly shows that some believers in their creed have done these very things, the argument being that thereby they are helping God to punish the wicked.

9. He begs them to turn from such injustice, look on his face and behold his sincerity, concede his ability to discern a thing which is wicked, and accept his deliberate statement that he is innocent of the things which they suspect (Job 6:28-30 ).

10. He laments his case as hopeless (Job 7:1-10 ). Here Job asks if there is not a warfare to man and his days like the days of a hireling. His waiting for relief was like a hireling waiting for his wages, during which time he is made to pass months (moons) of misery. In this hopeless condition he longs for relief and would gladly welcome death from which there is no return to the walks of this life.

11. Job now lifts his voice in complaint to God (Job 7:11-21 ). In the anguish of his spirit he could not refrain from complaining that God had set a watch over him and terrified him with dreams and visions. He was made to loathe his life and again to wish for death. Then he closes this speech by raising the question with the Almighty as to why he would not pardon him if he had sinned (as his accusers had insinuated) and take away his iniquity. Here he addresses God as a “watcher of men”; as one who had made him a target for his arrows. Now we take up the first speech of Bildad, the Shuhite (Job 8 ).

The substance of this speech is as follows:

1. He charges that Job seeks to make himself better than God, then he hints at the sins of his children and insinuates that Job does not pray, for prayer of the right sort brings relief (Job 8:1-7 ).

2. He exhorts Job to learn the lesson from the past. The wisdom of the fathers must be good. Therefore, learn the lesson of the ancients (Job 8:8-10 ).

3. He contrasts the fate of the wicked and that of the righteous, reasoning from cause to effect, thus insinuating that Job’s condition was the result of a cause, and since (to him) all suffering was the result of sin, the cause must be in Job (Job 8:11-22 ).

The substance of Job’s reply is,

1. True enough a man cannot be righteous with God, since he is unable to contend with him. He is too wise and powerful; he is invincible. Who can match him (Job 9:1-12 )?

2. Praying does not touch the case. He is unjust and proves me perverse. Individual righteousness does not avail to exempt in case of a scourge. He mocks at the trial of the innocent and the wicked prosper. Then Job says, “If it be not he, who then is it?” This is the climax of the moral tragedy (Job 9:13-24 ).

3. There is no daysman betwixt us, and I am not able to meet him in myself for Judgment (Job 9:25-35 ).

4. I will say unto God, “Why? Thou knowest I am not wicked.” Here it will be noted that a revelation is needed in view of this affliction (Job 10:1-7 ).

5. God is responsible for my condition; he framed and fashioned me as clay, yet he deals with me as milk or cheese; it is just the same whether I am wicked or righteous; changes and warfare are with me (Job 10:8-17 ).

6. Why was I born? or why did I not die at birth? Then would I have escaped this great suffering, but now I must abide the time until I go into the land of midnight darkness (Job 10:18-22 ).

The substance of Zophar’s first speech is this:

1. What you have received is not as much as you deserve; you are full of talk and boastful; you are self-righteous and need this rebuke from God (Job 11:1-6 ).

2. You cannot find out God; he is far beyond man; he is all-powerful and omniscient; man is as void of understanding as a wild ass’s colt (Job 11:7-12 ).

3. Put away your wickedness; you need to get right and then you will be blessed; you should set your heart and house in order, then all will clear up; then you will be protected from the wicked (Job 11:13-20 ).

Job’s reply to the first speech of Zophar embraces three chapters, as follows:

1. No doubt you are the people and wisdom will die with you; I am not inferior to you; you mock and do not help; I, though upright, am a laughingstock and you, who are at ease, have contempt for misfortune; God brought this about (Job 12:1-6 ).

2. Learn the lessons from nature; the beasts, the birds, the earth, and the fishes can teach thee; everybody knows these things; the ear tries words and the palate tastes food, and wisdom is learned by age (Job 12:7-12 ).

3. God is the source of wisdom and power; he deals wisely with all men; he debases and he exalts (Job 12:13-25 ).

4. I understand it all as well as you; ye are forgers of lies; ye are physicians of no value; your silence would be wisdom; you speak wickedly for God, therefore your sayings are proverbs of ashes and your defenses are defenses of clay (Job 13:1-12 )

5. Why should I take my life in my hand thus? I want to be vindicated before I die; “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him”; I know that I am righteous; therefore I have hope (Job 13:13-19 ).

6. He pleads his cause with God; he asks two things of God, viz: (1) that he would put an end to his bodily suffering and (2) that he would abstain from terrifying him; then he challenges God to call him; then he interrogates God relative to his sins, God’s attitude toward him and his dealings with him; and finally charges God with unjust dealings with him (Job 13:20-28 ).

7. Man that is born of woman is frail and sinful; man’s weakness should excite pity with the Almighty; that which is born of an unclean thing is unclean and since a man’s days and months are numbered, why not turn from him as an hireling and let him rest (Job 14:1-6 ).

8. The hope of a tree, though it be cut down, is that it will sprout again but man’s destiny to lie down in death and rise no more till the heavens pass away should be a cause for mercy from God (Job 14:7-12 ).

9. In despair of recovery in this life Job again prays for death; that God would hide him in the grave till his wrath be past; that he would appoint him a day, in the hope that if he should die he would live again; his destiny is in God’s hands and therefore he is hopeless for this life (Job 14:13-17 ).

10. Like the mountain falling, the rock being removed out of its place and waters wearing away the stones, the hope of man for this life is destroyed by the providences of God; man is driven by them into oblivion; his sufferings become so great that only for himself his flesh has pain and only for himself his soul mourns (Job 14:18-22 ).

In this round of speeches the three friends have followed their philosophy of cause and effect and thus reasoning that all suffering is the effect of sin, they have, by insinuations, charged Job of sin, but they do not specify what it is. Job denies the general charge and in a rather bad spirit refutes their arguments and hits back at them some terriffic blows. He is driven to the depths of despair at the climax of the moral tragedy where he attributes all the malice, cunning, and injustice he had felt in the whole transaction to God as his adversary. They exhort him to repent and seek God, but he denies that he has sinned; he says that he cannot contend with the Almighty because he is too high above him, too powerful, and that there is no umpire, or daysman, between them. Here Job is made to feel the need of a revelation from God explaining all the mysteries of his providence. In this trial of Job we have ‘Satan’s partial victory over him -where he led Job to attribute the evils that had come upon him to God. This is the downfall in Job’s wrestle with Satan. He did not get on top of Job but gave him a great deal of worry. We will see Job triumphing more and more as he goes on in the contest.

QUESTIONS 1. What the points of Eliphaz’s first speech?

2. What things are notable in this first speech of Eliphaz?

3. What the points of Job’s reply (Job 6-7)?

4. What the substance of Bildad’s first speech?

5. What the substance of Job’s reply?

6. What the substance of Zophar’s first speech?

7. What Job’s reply?

8. Give a summary of the proceedings and results of the first round.

Fuente: B.H. Carroll’s An Interpretation of the English Bible

Job 14:1 Man [that is] born of a woman [is] of few days, and full of trouble.

Ver. 1. Man that is born of a woman, &c. ] Or, that is borne about by a woman in her womb. Job’s design is here to set forth the misery of man (whom in the last verse of the former chapter he had compared, 1. To a rotten thing; 2. To a moth eaten garment), ab exordio ad exodium, from his conception to his dissolution. Man, earthly man, that is born of a woman, or mannesse, that weaker vessel, who both breedeth, beareth, and bringeth forth in sorrow a weak sorry man, Gen 3:16 , and is (as Gregory expresseth it) ante partum onerosa, in partu dolorosa, post partum laboriosa, every way calamitous; neither is her babe in a better condition, but born with a cross on his back (as the story is told of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony), and having his whole life overspread with sins and miseries, as with a filthy leprous eruption. (Joh. Manl. loc. com.)

Is of few days ] Heb. Short of days. Short indeed, everything reckoned; for, 1. Childhood and youth are vanity. 2. Sleep, as a publican, takes off a third part of our time. 3. All the days of the afflicted are evil, and Mortis habet vices quae trahitur vita gemitibus (Aug. de Civ. Dei, lib. ix. c. 10); it is not a life, but a death rather that is spent in sorrow; in which regard Plotinus, the philosopher, held mortality a mercy, that we may not always be held uuder the miseries of this life present. 4. Scarce one of a thousand live that little time that they are here, but woefully waste the flower of their age, the strength of their bodies, the vigour of their spirits, in sinful pleasures and sensual delights, and then either sit and sing all too late, and in vain,

O mihi praeteritos referat si Iupiter annos!

or else complain with old Themistocles, that now they must die when they do but begin only to be wise. The life of a wicked man runneth out as the sand in an hour glass, that doth little good; he considereth not that upon this little point of time hangs the crown of eternity; and that the very next moment he may be cut off from all possibility of repentance, acceptation, and grace for ever. Hence his many troubles here; all which are but typical of those hereafter; besides the fear of death, which maketh him all his lifetime subject to bondage, Heb 2:15 . It were much to be wished that men would consider their time is short, their task long, and that, therefore, they should use all speed and diligence; lest (so as children have usually torn their books) they have ended their lives before they have learned their lessons.

And full of trouble ] Or, of indignation, commotion, perturbation. Those three vultures, fear, anger, grief, are frequently feeding upon his heart while he is in this world; and, like a ship in a storm, he is tossed much, but faileth little or nothing. Few and evil are the days of my pilgrimage, saith good old Jacob, Gen 47:9 . And she in the poet could say as much of her son Achilles:

N , E – (Thetis ap. Hom. lliad).

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Job Chapter 14

Now we come to a very remarkable chapter (14). Here we find how far were people, in those days even, ignorant as they were, from confounding the resurrection of the unjust with that of the just. This chapter brings in man raised from the grave. I would not say from the dead. Resurrection from the dead means some raised and others left. Resurrection from the grave will be true after all the saints are raised, and there remain only the wicked to be raised. That will be the resurrection from the grave, but not from the dead (for “from the dead” allows that others remain), there will be none left at that time. There are two resurrections. What is called in the common creeds of Christendom the “general resurrection” is a figment; it has no foundation in scripture. It is entirely opposed to the plainest words of God. Now you have in this world the righteous and the wicked all confused together. The tares are growing with the wheat. But that is only till the judgment come; that is only till the Lord come. And when the Lord comes there will be the separation of the righteous called not only from the dead (other dead being left in their graves), but to heaven where He is now. They are going to be like Himself – “the resurrection of the just.” But there remains the great mass of mankind; and that is what Job describes in this chapter. I shall have little more to show, if God will, next Wednesday, about “the resurrection of the just”; but here is the resurrection of the unjust. And therefore you observe how beautifully the language suits. “Man that is born of a woman” – not a word about anyone that is born of God. Those that are born of God will be the righteous. But “man that is born of a woman” (and all are) “is of few days” – it looks at man since the fall – “and full of trouble.”

Now, if you are speaking of those that are born of God, is that all you could say? Surely not! To depart is no doubt gain, but to live is well worth while; particularly when Christ is the object; and such can say in their measure, in spite of all their weaknesses and all their faults, “To me to live is Christ.” Yes, it is full of blessing; but here it is merely man born of woman, never born of God – not yet, till we come to a later chapter – not one of these is supposed to be born of God. “He cometh forth like a flower” – for they are all pretty much the same when they are born, so far like a flower – no doubt, an interesting object, but how soon developed and made perfectly plain. “He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” You know very well – we all know – that there is great mortality among the children; it is particularly there that we have death so frequent. “And dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.” It does not mean, “not one person,” but “not one thing.” I merely make that remark in order that it may be understood. “Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass.” It its all therefore an uncertainty – a precarious condition as far as man is concerned – but all settled of God.

“Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day. For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth, and wasteth away.” There is no hope for him for this earthly life; he dies and is done with. A plant on the contrary may be brought down to the worst and nothing appear, and yet it may shoot up again, particularly if there is water to help it. “Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth, and drieth up; so man lieth down, and riseth not.” There people very often stop, but not so the Spirit of God here by Job. For it is plain here he really does say what Scripture fully warrants – “till the heavens be no more.” A very remarkable expression. It might have been thought to be – and that we could easily understand as a natural thing – “till the earth be no more”; but man lives and dies, and does not rise – not till the earth be no more, but – “till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.”

Surely, what is here said is very striking, that even man without God – man who is only born of woman, and not of God – man is to sleep till the heavens be no more. Now take the last Book of the New Testament. In Rev 20 you find that, after the last outbreak of the world and the external nations of the world in the millennium, all that are not converted during the millennium will fall victims to Satan, after his release from the abyss, and they will all be rallied by him against Jerusalem on earth. They cannot touch Jerusalem above, the holy city. And not merely that, but “the camp of the saints about” – another striking thing. Why is there a camp of the saints around Jerusalem at that time? Has Satan gathered all the outside nations for one great effort to destroy the righteous that will then be on the earth? All the righteous flow up to Jerusalem, and as it will be entirely beyond the capacity of that Jerusalem to take in the saints from every quarter of the world, they will make a vast encampment round the “beloved city,” and that will be the great mark for Satan. Against that he thinks to hurl his battalions – all the rebels of the millennium on earth. And what happens then? Fire comes down from God and destroys them all. And what then? Satan is cast at last into the lake of fire. There is to be no temptation more; everything is going to be changed now. It is not merely that he is bound – he is cast into the lake of fire. There is no use which God can put him to; he is now to be punished for ever. And that is not all.

Heaven and earth flee away. And as the fire had consumed these wicked nations, they now are raised from the dead, and not only they, but all the wicked since the world began. This is the resurrection of the unjust, and they will all be in one company, and without one righteous person. You may ask what is to become of the righteous. Oh, they are translated, just as we are at the coming of the Lord for us before the millennium. They will be with the Lord. They are not spoken of; there is no need to speak about it. They were never promised to sit upon the throne; we were. They had their comfort all the time of their righteousness. They will enjoy nothing but comfort; and, consequently, as they never suffered with Christ, they are not to be glorified with Him. Nevertheless, they are to be raised, or as I should rather say, they are to be changed, because they do not die. But they will no doubt be changed.

That great principle of change will apply to all that are found alive – all the saints on the earth at that time. And we do find them in the next chapter. “The tabernacle of God is with men.” There they are the men; they are not the tabernacle. The tabernacle of God are the glorified saints – are those that had been already with Him and reigning – all those that were His, and they are particularly, as far as I know, the church. I do not know that one could predicate it properly of any but the church. Still, all the others will be blessed throughout all eternity. But the tabernacle of God is with men, and I presume that these men that are spoken of are the saints that are transported from the earth into the “new earth.” You may ask me, How and why? I say, God does not tell us, and I cannot tell you, beyond that I know it will be; and we are all bound to believe that it will be, because the word of God says so. So that there is the tabernacle of God quite distinct. And now when they are all in this city, fit for all eternity, the tabernacle of God, instead of being up in the air, comes down. It is not that it mingles with the other, but there it is. It deigns to be in the midst; God Himself is there, and all those that are in especial nearness to God will be there; but all the blessed inhabitants of the millennial earth will be there as the men with whom that tabernacle shall then be.

So that nothing can be plainer than how this coalesces with the words of Job. The wicked lie in the grave till the very end of the earth. Not merely the end of the age, but the absolute end, not only of the earth, but, of the heavens; and therefore it is said “till the heavens be no more.” For it might be thought that at the beginning of the millennium the earth sustains a very great change, and so it does. But it is not then; it is “till the heavens be no more,” and that will never be till the absolute end of all the dispensations of God; and then it is that the wicked from the beginning and up to the end of the millennium will be all raised for judgment. And this entirely agrees with the 5th of John. You recollect that very remarkable drawing out of the grand principle of life and judgment by our Lord Jesus. He is the source of life, and He is the executor of judgment. In giving life He had communion with His Father. “For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even so the Son quickeneth whom he will.” But He, and He alone, will judge the dead. And in effect He carries on the judgment of the living also, the “quick” or “alive.” But at this time all His enemies will be dead; all the wicked from the beginning of the world; and they will be sentenced therefore to that which lasts when the world is no more, when there is nothing but the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. They will meet their doom then. And it is lovely, it appears to me, that God should bring those that He loves into their blessing, long before those that are accursed meet their doom, and they will all meet this doom together.

Speaking now of those that are left when the Lord comes for His saints, there will, of course, be great executions of judgment; but then they remain (as a general law) till the end of all – till the thousand years are over, and the heavens and the earth that now are, are completely changed. I would therefore leave this with you as showing how Job had a very good inkling of this blessed truth – much more than the theologians have now- a-days. In general they are all partners in error, no matter who they may be. They may be Established or non-Established; they may be what they call the Free Churches; or they may be Ritualist or Roman Catholics, or anything; but they are all agreed in that great error; they jumble together both the righteous and the unrighteous in what they call one general judgment – a general resurrection – a thing that is entirely without one single scripture to justify it. Nay, more – that is condemned by all the light of the word of God, both Old Testament and New.

Now, I need not say much more; for Job turns from this very solemn scene that is before his mind to call upon the Lord, and says, “Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee; thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.” His heart is beginning to get a little courage. “For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin? My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity. And surely the mountain falling, cometh to nought, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of man.” But the Lord does not leave Job until he sees that he was not merely man looking up to God, but a man knowing God’s love that was taking him up and chastising him in order that he might be blessed more than ever he had been before. That is the great object of the Book of Job.

Fuente: William Kelly Major Works (New Testament)

Man. Hebrew. ‘adam. App-14. “Man” is to Job 14:1 what Job 14:1 is to the whole paragraph. The Hebrew accent (Dehi) emphasizes the word “man”, and divides the verse into two members; viz. (1) man and (2) his characteristics which are three: (1) his origin (born in sin), (2) his brevity of life, and (3) his fullness of sorrow.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

Chapter 14

Man that is born of a woman is of few days, he’s full of trouble. He comes forth like a flower, and is cut down: he flees also as a shadow [or the shadow on the sundial], and continues not ( Job 14:1-2 )

Oh, what a pessimistic kind of view of life. “Man that is born of a woman is of a few days and full of troubles.” Cheer up. It will soon be over. You’re of few days but it’s full of trouble. “Like a flower you blossom out but then you’re cut down. Like the declining shadow on the sundial.” You’re soon off into oblivion. You cease to exist.

And do you open your eyes upon such a one, and bring me into judgment with thee? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one. Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling, his day ( Job 14:3-6 ).

Job is really here sort of speaking to God now.

For there is hope of a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, as a tender branch thereof it will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant ( Job 14:7-9 ).

Now Job says, “There is no hope for man, he’s cut down and that’s it, that’s the end. Now even for a tree there is hope if you cut a tree off, it may spring up again out of the trunk, or out of the roots. There’s hope for a tree, that it might bud forth again even if it’s cut down. But for man there is no hope. You cease to exist. You’re cut off and that’s it.”

The man dies, and wastes away: yea, man gives up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decays and dries up: So man lies down, and rises not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep. Oh that you would hide me in the grave, that you would keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me! ( Job 14:10-13 )

Oh, Job said that it was just all over. That I would go into that oblivion. Now, again, we must remember that Job is speaking not divinely inspired truths. The things that Job are saying about death cannot be taken for doctrinal truth. This is Job talking. This is Job talking out of his own limited knowledge and understanding. This is Job expressing his own ideas of what death is, not what God’s truth is about death, but what his own ideas are about death. And the Jehovah Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, and others have made a tragic mistake in turning to the book of Job for their proof text for the soul sleep doctrines. In the thirty-eighth chapter, when God comes on the scene, and God begins to question Job, the first thing that God says is, “Who is this who darkeneth with words of counsel without wisdom or without knowledge?” All you guys talking all these things and you don’t know what you’re talking about. Then God said to Job, “Okay, gird yourself up, I’ll ask you a few questions. You think you’ve got the answers, let Me ask you a few questions. Number one, have you been beyond the gates of death? You know what’s there? You’ve been talking about death, ‘Oh death come, you know, hide me in oblivion, and all. There I’ll know nothing. There everything is silent, and all.’ Hey, have you been there? Do you know what’s going on there?” And God rebuked him for the statements that he was making concerning death, because he didn’t know anything about it. And thus, it is absolutely wrong to go to the book of Job to find scripture proof text for soul sleep.

Job then in verse Job 14:14 cried out, “If a man dies, does he go on living?” Now this is one of the basic questions that lies deep underneath a lot of crud in all of our lives. When you get right down to basic issues. When you get right down to the bottom line. What are the really important things? Surely it isn’t what you take in your lunch pail for lunch tomorrow, or what shoes shall you wear, or what suit shall you wear to work. The really important things are questions like Job is asking now. And these are the questions that are deep down in every man, and when someone who is close to you dies, it becomes very important to you. If a man dies, does he go on living? Or is death the end? Is death the final chapter? Is the book closed and is it all over when a man dies? Is that the end? Or does he go on living? Is there a dimension or sphere where life continues? Is there a continuation of life after death?

Jesus answered this question of Job. Up until the time of Jesus there was no adequate answer; it was just a burning question. But Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life, and he that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and he who lives and believes in Me shall never die” ( Joh 11:25 ). If a man dies, does he go on living? Jesus said, “Absolutely yes. If he lives and believes in Me, he’ll never die.” He goes on living. It’s in another sphere, it’s in another dimension, but life continues. Life does not end. You experience a metamorphosis. You move out of your tent, this earthly tent, your body, and you move into the building of God, not made with hands, that is eternal in the heavens. “For as long as we are at home in this body, living in this body, we are absent from the Lord,” but he said, “I would choose rather to be absent from this body and to be present with the Lord.” ( 2Co 5:7-8 ) “We know that when the earthly tent, our body, is dissolved, we have a building of God, not made with hands, eternal in heaven. So we who are in this body do often groan, earnestly desiring to be freed, not to be an unembodied spirit but to be clothed upon with the body which is from heaven” ( 2Co 5:1-2 ). So, if a man dies, yes, he does go on living in a new form, a new body, there in the presence of God.

all the days of my appointed time [Job said] will I wait, till my change comes ( Job 14:14 ).

A little glimmer of hope in a question, but then he goes right back into despair.

Thou shalt call, I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my sin? My transgression is sealed up in a bag, thee sew up mine iniquity. And surely the mountains falling cometh to nothing, and the rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones: and they wash away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth; and you destroy the hope of man. You prevail for ever against him, and he passes: you change his countenance, and send him away. His sons come to honor, and he doesn’t even know it; they are brought low, but he perceives not of them. But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn ( Job 14:15-22 ). “

Fuente: Through the Bible Commentary

Job 14:1-6

Job 14

THE CONCLUSION OF JOB’S FOURTH DISCOURSE:

JOB’S SOLILOQUY UPON LIFE’S BREVITY

Job 14:1-6

“Man that is born of a woman

Is of few days and full of trouble.

He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down:

He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.

And dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one,

And bringest me into judgment with thee?

Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.

Seeing his days are determined,

The number of his months is with thee,

And thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass;

Look away from him, that he may rest,

Till he shall accomplish, as a hireling, his day.”

“Man … is of few days and full of trouble” (Job 14:1). The brevity of mortal life is a fact that is alike applicable to men who live but a few years or many. Jacob, when presented before Pharaoh said, “The days of the years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty years: few and evil have been the days of my life” (Gen 47:9). Troubles of all kinds fall upon mankind in every walk of life; and even in those instances of remarkable health, prosperity and longevity that come to a few; even for them, the disasters that fall upon their loved ones have tremendous impact, with the result that none are exempt. Troubles come to all.

Job did not have the advantage that we have. The Christ had not come; the apostles had not yet lived. And although Job recognized the fact of countless troubles, he might not have known why. Paul tells us why. “By one man, sin entered the world, and death by sin; so that death passed upon all men” (Rom 5:12). Also, that Evil One who engineered the entry of death into our mortal life through that `one man,’ Adam, was also the architect of all those evils that came upon Job.

Although Job mentions human misery and suffering here, “His emphasis in this paragraph is upon the brevity of life.” The literature and musical excellence of mankind has been exhausted upon this very subject. As Shakespeare said it, “Life is like a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” From the H.M.S. Pinafore, who can forget the words, “Here today and gone tomorrow, yes I know, that is so”?

“Like a flower … like a shadow” (Job 14:2). There are no more beautiful metaphors than are these, regarding the brevity of life. Mortal existence is like a falling star (a meteorite) that streaks across the November sky at night, only for a moment, and then disappears forever. When one thinks of all the powers and abilities of men at their best, their excellence, their brilliance, their genius, their incredible abilities, their beautiful and adorable persons – when one thinks of all this and then remembers that it all collapses and self-destructs at last in the rottenness of a grave, he will instantly understand why Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Life on earth, at its best, is an epic tragedy.

In view of the ephemeral nature of mortal life, Job marveled that God was concerned at all with such a creature as man.

“And dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one” (Job 14:3)? “Job, not for an instant, questioned the fact of God’s interest in men; he only expressed amazement at it.” However, there are profound implications in this. In spite of man’s fleeting citizenship on earth, God has planted eternity in his heart; and God’s attention to the affairs of mortals is itself a pledge of man’s cosmic importance and of his restored fellowship with the Creator.

“Who then can bring a clean thing out of an unclean” (Job 14:4)? This passage does not teach, as some have asserted that, “Anyone born of woman is born in sin.” “It cannot be true that original sin is thus distinctly recognized. It is not man’s sinfulness, but his weakness, that Job was discussing here.”

“(Man’s) days are determined” (Job 14:5). “It is appointed unto man once to die.” There is nothing accidental about death. If it were merely a matter of chance, all of the billions who have lived on earth would certainly have exhibited one person who escaped it. Men vainly dream of conquering death, but it can never be done. We praise the medical fraternity, and well we should; but, although here and there, they may have plucked a feather from the wing of the death angel, his darkening shadow still falls upon us all.

“Thou hast appointed his (man’s) bounds that he cannot pass” (Job 14:5). God has set the boundaries, not only for men, but for nations also, “Having determined their appointed seasons and the boundaries of their habitation” (Act 17:26).

E.M. Zerr:

Job 14:1. It would be natural for us to think, “All men are born of women, hence the statement is meaningless.” We will appreciate the statement more after a little closer examination of the originals. That for women has a wide range of meaning the outstanding one of which is “mortal.” Man is from a word that has the idea of “human species.” The phrase therefore might well be worded: “The species of creatures that is born of a mortal,” etc. The additional words of Job are based on the truth in the first of the verse. The history of mankind also verifies the statement, and that fact further disproves the oft-repeated claim of the three friends, that trouble or affliction comes to man as a penalty for some special sin.

Job 14:2. The only point in this verse is the shortness of human life; the same thought is given in Jas 4:14. There is no comparison between man and flowers except as to the uncertainty of the length of existence on earth.

Job 14:3. The verse means to ask the friends if they think it is fair to require such a person to contend with another like him. Since mankind in general is subject to the frailties described above, it is unbecoming for one of such to set himself up as judge of another in the same class and involved in the same conditions.

Job 14:4. In view of the argument of the three friends, and of the facts established at V. 1, the clean man would be such a person as Job (and yet all men are in the same class as he). Therefore, it would be impossible for anyone to produce a clean man, because to do so it would be necessary to bring a clean thing out of that which is unclean and that could not be done.

Job 14:5. Job was addressing himself to God in whose hand is the life and existence of everyone. Determined and number should not be allowed to confuse us. It does not mean that God arbitrarily limits the exact length of man’s life. The key to the passage is in the words are with thee. God alone knows just how long any man is going to live, but that time will be brought about by the various conditions that may prove to be his lot in this earthly existence. Appointed his bounds was done when man was cut off from the tree of life and made subject to “vanity.” (Rom 8:20.)

Job 14:6. Much of the language of Job was spoken as if addressed directly to God. However, it was also intended to suggest to the friends what they should do. The present verse is one of such and means for the friend to let Job alone and allow him to live out his days unmolested by others.

Fuente: Old and New Testaments Restoration Commentary

Taking a more general outlook, Job declared that man’s life is ever transitory, and full of trouble. This should be a reason why God should pity him, and let him work out the brief period of its duration in quietness (1-6). Naturally, following this, he spoke of what the end of a man’s doing is, showing the endlessness thereof. There is hope for a bee that it will bud again, but there is none for a man (7-12). This dark assertion seems to have created in the mind of Job a question of wondering hope, If a man die, shall he live?

and he declared that if this were so, then he could endure through all the days of warfare (13-15). The whole answer ends in lamentation over his present condition, which is so strangely in contrast to the hope suggested.

Thus ends the first cycle. In it Job’s friends had, with differing emphasis propounded the one general philosophy that God is righteous, and punishes the wicked while He blesses the good. They had left Job to make the personal application. He had denied their philosophy by opposing facts to their arguments. He was not wicked but just, and yet he was afflicted. He could not understand it himself, and while refusing to accept their view, was crying out to God for some explanation.

Fuente: An Exposition on the Whole Bible

Shall Man Live Again?

Job 14:1-22

Continuing his appeal, Job looks from his own case to the condition of mankind generally, Job 14:1-6. All men are frail and full of trouble, Job 14:12; why should God bring a creature so weak into judgment with Him? Job 14:3. The sinfulness of man is universal-not one can be proved clean before God, Job 14:4. Since man is so frail Job pleads that he may not have such unwonted affliction, but may get some pleasure, Job 14:6, r.v., out of his brief day.

The anticipation of death as total extinction strengthens Jobs appeal, Job 14:7-12. Of a tree there is hope that, if cut down, it will sprout again, Job 14:7-9. But at present Job sees no such hope for man. He dies, and is done with, as waters fail from the sea, Job 14:10-12. This is a gloomy, despairing thought, and one against which the mind rebels as soon as uttered. Against the belief that death is the end of all things every mans better nature revolts. Hence the picture of another life beyond the present immediately rises to Job, Job 14:13-15. It may be only a yearning desire, for Job still asks the question, Job 14:14. Yet this desire, as that for a Daysman, Job 9:32-34, both suggested by the hearts despair, is equally answered by the gospel.

The hope for a future life is made stronger by the apparent injustices that exist now, Job 14:16-22. Gods treatment of Job appears to be so severe that Job must perish under His hand, Job 14:18-22. A future life is surely necessary to remedy the inequalities of the present. Evidently this is not the place and time of judgment.

Fuente: F.B. Meyer’s Through the Bible Commentary

Job 14:14

I. Consider some of the grounds for believing that the soul of man is immortal. (1) The main current of human opinion sets strongly and steadily towards belief in immortality. (2) The master-minds have been strongest in their affirmation of it. (3) The longing of the soul for life and its horror at the thought of extinction. There must be correlation between desire and fulfilment. (4) The action of the mind in thought begets a sense of continuous life. All things are linked together, and the chain stretches either way into infinity. It is unreasonable to suppose that we are admitted to this infinite feast only to be thrust away before we have well tasted it. (5) A parallel argument is found in the nature of love. It cannot tolerate the thought of its own end. Love has but one symbol-For ever! its logic is, There is no death. (6) There are in man latent powers, and others half revealed, for which human life offers no adequate explanation. There is within us a strange sense of expectancy. A Divine discontent is wrought into us-Divine because it attends our highest faculties. (7) The imagination carries with it a plain intimation of a larger sphere than the present. The same course of thought applies to the moral nature.

II. If we turn from human nature to the Divine nature, we shall find a like, but immeasurably clearer, group of intimations. (1) Without immortality there is failure in the higher purposes of God respecting the race; God’s ends are indicated, but not reached. (2) The fact that justice is not done upon the earth involves us in the same conclusion. (3) Man is less perfect than the rest of creation, and, relatively to himself, is less perfect in his higher than in his lower faculties. (4) As love is the strongest proof of immortality on the manward side of the argument, so is it on the Godward side. Divine, as well as human, love has but one symbol in language-For ever!

T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith, p. 237.

There is no distinct answer to be had to this question apart from God’s word. The inquiry may be presented as a twofold one: Is the soul immortal? Will the body be raised again?

I. As to the immortality of the soul, revelation alone can give a satisfactory answer. We may reason from the mind’s faculties, we may talk of its powers, and we may know the analogies that abound in nature. Still the doubt comes back again-a doubt so strong that it never dispelled the fears of antiquity. In Holy Writ alone we find that man is immortal, and that the breath which the eternal Jehovah breathed into man shall last as long as eternity.

II. In answering the second question, too, we must appeal to the declarations of Holy Writ, for if it occur, it is beyond the power of nature, and must be by supernatural power, and hence God alone can give the answer whether or not a resurrection of the dead can take place. In the New Testament the resurrection of the body is not only explicitly declared, but the doctrine of it is recognised as being the foundation of Christian faith. It is also made clear to our comprehension by the resurrection of Christ from the dead.

III. The Christian faith stands on the word of God. But while we rest it there, there are analogies in nature to help our minds, and, if possible, to impress more clearly this doctrine upon us. There is the sleep of winter, the reawakening in spring. There are the strange transformations in animal life, which, though analogies, are not proofs, for even these creatures shall die and be no more. They are not proofs, but they are illustrations of what almighty power can do.

IV. Without the resurrection God’s plan would be incomplete. If death were to reign, there would be no need of resurrection, but Christ was revealed “to destroy the works of the devil;” He became life to man; He became the second Adam to restore us. There needs to be a reunion, in order that the triumph through Christ shall be complete. Christ came to be a perfect Conqueror, to make no compromise with the enemy, to release man from under the curse of the Law, and as such He restores the soul to fellowship with God here, and by-and-bye He will call to the grave, and it shall give up its prey.

Bishop Matthew Simpson, Sermons, p. 331.

References: Job 14:14.-Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi., No. 432, and vol. xiii., No. 764; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 127; R. D. B. Rawnsley, Sermons in Country Churches, 2nd series, p. 208.

Job 14:14-15

It was one of the accurate adjustments of God’s dealings that the man whose body was the most humiliated by suffering of all mankind was also the man who of all the Old Testament saints received the clearest revelation of the body’s future beauty and loftiness.

I. Job considered that even in its intermediate state the body would be precious to God. “Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands.” Of that separate state we know but little. (1) That it will be a state of consciousness is evident, both from universal instinct and from the nature of spirit. Spirit can only exist in motion, and therefore the ancients called spirit perpetual motion. It is evident also from the general necessity that a creature once made to glorify God can never cease to glorify Him. (2) In the intermediate state the spirit must be happy. How can it be conscious and with Christ, and not happy? So that our Saviour doubly proves it when He says, “To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.”

II. Consider that broad foundation thought on which the patriarchs rested for everything, having the resurrection as its base, “Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands.” It is upon this principle that we at once see the unspeakable comfort there is in the full, simple recognition of the doctrines of grace. Once let any part of the work of grace have man in it, and in the same degree it has uncertainty in it. Man does not return to his own designs. Man does not finish his own work. But God does. If therefore the beginnings are entirely God’s, “the ends” are perfectly sure.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 10th series, p. 265.

Reference: Job 14:15.-H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2161.

Job 14:19

I. As “the waters wear the stones,” they teach us a lesson of perseverance. They write upon the rocks a parable of patient diligence. There are some things which must be done at a stroke, on the spur of the moment, or the opportunity is gone for ever. But the eye to see what is to be done, the skill to aim the stroke, the strength to give it, the coolness and courage to be as steady and self-possessed at the moment as if you had plenty of time to spare-these can come only by slow, patient, persevering work, like that with which “the waters wear the stones.”

II. The waters as they wear the stones may teach us a parable of life. They may remind us what little things may in time do great mischief. Not a few homes could be found in which it would pay to have this motto put up in golden letters, if only everybody would learn its lessons. They seem to lack nothing that is needed for a happy home. What is amiss? Only this, that no one has learned how much both the happiness and the unhappiness of life depend on little things. Little opportunities for a kind action, a kind word, a kind look, slip by continually. And so, because life is mostly made up of little things, the happiness of home is bit by bit destroyed, even as “the waters wear the stones.”

III. The water-worn rock teaches us another parable-a parable of character. Our character depends chiefly on the habits we form. There are good habits and bad habits. And how do these habits grow? Little by little, as “the waters wear the stones.” The Bible speaks of a “stony heart”-that is, a heart hardened in sinful habits, in unbelief and forgetfulness of God. We cannot change the past, but God can forgive it. Tears of repentance cannot wash away one sin, but the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin.

E. R. Conder, Drops and Rocks, p. 1.

Fuente: The Sermon Bible

born: Job 15:14, Job 25:4, Psa 51:5, Mat 11:11

of few days: Heb. short of days, Job 7:1, Job 7:6, Job 9:25, Gen 47:9, Psa 39:5

full: Job 5:7, Ecc 2:17, Ecc 2:23

Reciprocal: Gen 3:17 – in sorrow 2Ki 4:19 – My head Job 10:20 – my days few Psa 78:33 – years Psa 89:47 – wherefore Psa 103:15 – a flower Psa 144:4 – Man Ecc 3:18 – concerning Ecc 6:5 – this Ecc 6:10 – and it Jer 20:18 – came Mat 11:28 – all Mar 9:21 – How Luk 12:19 – for 1Co 7:29 – the time Jam 4:14 – a vapour

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

DAYS FEW AND EVIL

Of few days and full of trouble.

Job 14:1

There are two things connected with human life that Job grieves over: (1) the brevity of life, and (2) its sorrow.

I. The brevity of life.He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down, or is withered. There is hopefulness at the beginning; there is beauty in the opening life; there is much that predicts joy in the future of the child with his growing intelligence, and with his developing faculties. He comes forth into life opening his petals to the sun; while every day shows some new gleam of intelligence that never appeared before. Life becomes increasingly beautiful in its complexity as he, like a flower, claims kinship with the heavens, though the roots are in the earth. But like the flower, too, he is tender as he is beautiful, frail and delicate as he is propheticHe cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down. The disappointmentthe contradiction to all hope and prophecyis keen and sad. This figure is supplemented by anotherHe fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. The human heart protests against the thought of annihilation; indeed, all nature protests against it. There is no such thing in Gods physical universe. Even the cloud that comes and goes has not ceased. Here Jobs heart recoils at the thought of man coming and ceasing to be.

And what is the next step? Life, according to Job, being so transient and so disappointing, the very loveliness of the opening flower making the disappointment the more bitter, he asks God, Dost Thou open Thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me into judgment with thee?

II. But here Job comes face to face with another fact. Life is the transient, troubled thing it is because of its sin.He therefore asks in despair, Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one. Then follow other significant words, Seeing his days are determined. Turn from him, that he may rest, etc. In other words, Job asks God not to wither such a feeble transient thing as man with his glance; but to let him pass through his brief life and service as soon as possible, and then, like the weary hireling, rest. He prays that such a short, troubled, disappointing life should not be aggravated by Gods rebukes and judgments. If he were to last for ever, if there were a great future opening up before him, it were otherwise.

Job pleads that, seeing that man has no scope for liberty, he should have no burden of responsibility. It is the language of the human heart after all that we have here, although the words were wildly uttered in the dark; and God could understand all, and was patient with the man who uttered them. It is ever true that to the measure there is no liberty there should be no responsibility.

We have thus here the heart of man yearning for justice; finding false expression, it is true, and misrepresenting life all too gloomily; but yet the heart of a man who is as sincere as he is desperate. Brethren, I say it with reverence, God could and did understand and appreciate the sense of justice that underlay these mad, wild utterances. Job did not comprehend life. He did not understand the meaning of Gods dealing with him; but one thing he had masteredthe basis of eternal justice: namely, that where there is responsibility there should be liberty. The language here is, indeed, one of despair, and as such utterly unworthy of a man of faith; but it is not the language of blasphemy.

Illustration

Such is the brief record of human life. We inherit the faults and foibles, the good and bad, of our ancestors. We get to the end of our life just as our experience is ripe and we are beginning to understand. For most of us the chalice of life is full of trouble. There is no knowing what a day may bring forth; and at any moment the clouds may be marshalled in the sky for a storm. But that is not all. I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

Job 14:1. Man that is born of a woman A weak creature; and, withal, corrupt and sinful, and of that sex by which sin and all other calamities were brought into the world. Is of few days Few at the most, in comparison with the days of the first patriarchs, much more in comparison with the days of eternity. Man is now a short-lived creature in himself, and withers so soon of his own accord, that he needs no violent hand to cut him off. And full of trouble Liable to a variety of miseries. He is not only troubled, but full of trouble, Hebrew, , sebang rogez, satur trepid corporis et animi commotionis, full of disquietude and commotion in mind and body; exposed to labour and toil, affliction and pain, grief and fear: a day seldom passing without some cause of vexation and distress, some disorder, some calamity or other. And, therefore, Job intimates, man is a fitter object for Gods compassion than for his anger or severity.

Fuente: Joseph Bensons Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Job 14:4. Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Then seeing we are all stained with original and actual sin, why should Zophar, without the least proof, almost say that Jobs afflictions were the visitations of sins which exceeded the strokes? Presumptions which inflict the deepest wounds, are sins which provoke the Lord.

Job 14:5. His days are determined. Two things are to be noted here, that the death of man is determined because of sin, and that his days and months are numbered. But the decrees of God are in his own hands; he can add to the days of Hezekiah, and he can shorten the days of tribulation for the elects sake. So it would seem Job understood the sentence on man; for in Job 14:13 he prays the Lord for a speedier release, and to be hid in the grave.

Job 14:7. There is hope of a tree. By a beautiful climax Job expresses his hope in the resurrection of the dead. The oak sends forth shoots after it is felled; the daily and equinoctial tides return; the dry beds of rivers in tropical climates flow again with a swoln stream in the rainy season; and as men awake from sleep, so shall be the resurrection of the dead. If there be no future state, the only comfort of dying men, Job must have been devoid of reason to use all these most consoling figures of speech. See Job 19:25.

Job 14:11. As the waters fail from the sea, which washes down promontories, and carries the depositions to calmer places, so that seaports, like Canterbury, become inland towns; so man is buried in the grave till the heavens are no more, and then the dead shall rise again.

Job 14:14-15. If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. The LXX, , till I am made anew, by a resurrection from the dead. Our judicious Poole, from the words which presede and those which follow, refers this passage to the hopes which Job had of the resurrection of the dead. In this hope he was comforted to wait, all the days of his appointed time; literally, as in chap. Job 7:1, all the days of his warfare, till he should enter into peace; till thou shalt call, and I will answer thee.

Job 14:17. My transgression is sealed up in a bag. Hosea apparently applies this figure of speech to the sin of Ephraim: Hos 13:12. The gloss of the elder critics is to the sealing up of gold and silver in bags; others refer it to tribunals, where papers of indictment are opened against offenders. In the year 1820, we had much noise in England about a green bag.

Job 14:19. The waters wear the stones, by warring against the contour cliffs. Critics refer this, as in Schultens, to the deluge of Noah, which made the mountains fall, as in Job 14:18. The ancients knew much of the destruction of the earths surface by diluvian tides. See on Gen 8:3.

REFLECTIONS.

Job reserves the strength of his arguments to the close, and completely refutes the fine promises of Zophar concerning peace in the present world, and having light in old age clearer than noon. He gives us a portrait of life, as short and full of trouble.

Here is also an instructive view of death. It is a removal out of this world, and there is no recovery, like that of a plant, which may grow again; it is a great and awful change; the body changes its appearance when sick, and especially when it has been a little while dead. The soul removes to a new world, to new company, and has no more concern with earth. Let us think of this change, get ready for it, wait patiently till it comes, and in a word so live, that it may be a happy and glorious change to us.

We have an instructive view of the grave. It is a hidingplace to Gods people, a shelter from every storm. When oppressed with calamity, or when God foresees distress coming, then he sends them away, lodges them safe in the grave, and hides them from thousands of sins, sorrows and distresses, which they foresaw not. The grave is a chamber of repose to the saints. It is Gods work to hide men there. Let this reconcile good men to an abode in the grave, and teach them silence and submission when their pious friends are lodged there.

We have here a cheering aspect of the resurrection. Man lieth down, and riseth not till the heavens are no more; then he shall rise. God calls, and each of his servants shall answer, readily and joyfully, Here I am. God will have regard to the work of his grace in the hearts, and the work of his hands on the bodies of his saints, and will awake them again to a new and immortal life. The well grounded expectation of this is very comfortable to the saints under all the afflictions of life, and in the nearer views of death.

Fuente: Sutcliffe’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Job 14:1-6. How sorrowful the lot of man, whom God so straitly overlooks! Mans life is transitory and insubstantial (Job 14:1 f.), why does God act the inquisitor with one so frail?

Job 14:3. Let God cease to torment him (Job 14:6).

Job 14:4 is to be translated as mg. Oh that a clean thing could come out of an unclean! not one can. This is probably a gloss. It is the sigh of a pious reader, written on the margin, and mistakenly introduced into the text (Peake).

Job 14:6. For accomplish substitute mg. have pleasure in.

Fuente: Peake’s Commentary on the Bible

MAN’S DECAY AND DEATH

(vv.1-12)

What Job had said in chapter 3:28 he expands upon in these verses, giving a vivid description of the evanescent character of man’s life on earth. This is generally true of all mankind, though men do everything in their power to alleviate this condition. “Man who is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble” (v.1) Though Job himself lived 140 years after his bitter experience, yet when it was finished, it was only “few days.” Like a flower, man comes forth and fades away. Like a shadow he does not continue (v.2). In view of this brevity of life, Job wondered why God troubles Himself to bring him to judgment, as he thought God was doing.

“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one! This is impossible for any human being. Yet God is able to purify man’s hearts, cleansing them through the blood of Jesus Christ (1Jn 1:7), by faith (Rom 3:25). But this is found only in the New Testament, so Job did not understand such a marvellous gospel.

He recognises that God has determined the length of a man’s life, and man cannot overstep his limits. But why did Job not at this time fully submit to the superior work of God, and not chafe at the limits God had placed him under? (v.5). “Look away from him that he may rest,” Job says. Did he mean he wanted God to relax the limits, so he could rest comfortably? For he was only like a hired man: could he not finish his day’s work in peace?

In verses 7-10 Job contrasts himself to a tree, which can sprout again after being cut down. This is often seen, that a new tree begins to grow out of the stump of one cut down. Though the stump is dead, yet with moisture a new tree will sprout. “But man dies and is laid away Indeed he breathes his last and where is he?” (v.10). However, the fact is that, though man’s body is totally decayed in the grave, yet the new sprouting of a tree is a comparison, not a contrast to the eventual “sprouting” of a new body from the old. Man’s resurrection is longer delayed, but it is just as certain. In fact, Job knew this, as he declares in chapter 19:26, but in chapter 14 he is too concerned about the immediate future to take into proper consideration the distant future.

In verses 11-12 he likens man’s death to water evaporating from the sea or a river becoming dried up. “So man lies down, and does not rise till the heavens are no more.” This is an exaggeration because the time seemed so long to Job, as though death was the end of everything.

ANOTHER PLEA FOR DEATH

(vv.13-17)

Though he has inferred that death is the end of everything, Job pleads with God that he might die, thinking that he might thus be hidden until God’s anger had subsided. For he thought that his troubles stemmed from the wrath of God (v.13). In this he was totally mistaken. If only God would set a definite time where He might relax His trying dealings with Job, then Job would understand. But if he died, would he live again? (v.14). We have seen that he answered this himself in chapter 19:26-27, but his words show the state of confusion he was in, which caused him to often speak inconsistently.

He says, “All the days of my hard service I will wait till my change comes,” that is, wait for death – but not wait patiently! Meanwhile God was numbering Job’s steps, but Job did not want Him to watch over his sins, which he considered “sealed up in a bag,” not apparent, only needing covering by God Himself, for he did rightly think God could do this.

JOB THINKS GOD PREVAILS AGAINST MAN

(vv.18-22)

Not only does Job recognise that man dies, but in this life Job saw the evidence of God’s power being used to break man down to the dust. Is this what God thinks of His creation? Does He take pleasure in demolishing the work of His hands? “As a mountain falls and crumbles away, and as a rock is moved from its place; as water wears away stones, and as torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so You destroy the hope of man.” Why is God not content with letting man die, rather than to make him suffer before death?

Job sees only power on God’s side, God prevailing against man without man having any chance of recovery: man passes on. God changes His countenance (from pleasant to depressing) and sends man away (v.20), left alone to wander in misery Yet in reality God was dealing in pure love toward Job, not merely in power. Whether man’s sons come to honour or whether they are brought low, the father is so reduced as not to perceive it (v.21). Of course, before this Job’s sons had all been killed, but he thinks of this situation as a general truth, that man can find no pleasure in his family, no more than in himself. Rather, his flesh will be in pain and his soul will mourn (v.22). How painful and dismal is the picture he portrays!

Fuente: Grant’s Commentary on the Bible

14:1 Man {a} [that is] born of a woman [is] of few days, and full of trouble.

(a) Taking the opportunity of his adversaries words he describes the state of man’s life from his birth to his death.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes

Job’s despair ch. 14

In this melancholic lament Job bewailed the brevity of life (Job 14:1-6), the finality of death (Job 14:7-17), and the absence of hope (Job 14:18-22).

"Born of woman" (Job 14:1) reflects man’s frailty since woman who bears him is frail. Job 14:4 means, "Who can without God’s provision of grace make an unclean person clean?" (cf. Job 9:30-31; Job 25:4). God has indeed determined the life span of every individual (Job 14:5).

It seemed unfair to Job that a tree could come back to life after someone had cut it down, but a person could not (Job 14:7-10). As I mentioned before, Job gives no evidence of knowing about divine revelation concerning what happens to a human being after death. He believed in life after death (Job 14:13) but he did not know that there would be bodily resurrection from Sheol, the place of departed spirits (Job 14:12). [Note: See Hartley, pp. 235-37.] He longed for the opportunity to stand before God after he entered Sheol (Job 14:14), to get the answers from God that God would not give him on earth.

Essentially, "Sheol" in the Old Testament is the place where the dead go. There was common belief in the continuing personal existence of one’s spirit after death. When the place where unrighteous people go is in view, the reference is to hell. When the righteous are in view, Sheol refers to either death or the grave. [Note: See A. Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and the Old Testament Parallels, ch. 3: "Death and Afterlife."]

God later revealed that everyone, righteous and unrighteous, will stand before Him some day (Act 24:15; Heb 9:27; et al.), and God will resurrect the bodies of the dead (1 Corinthians 15). Job believed he would stand before God, though he had no assurance from God that he would (Job 14:16). Evidently Job believed as he did because it seemed to him that such an outcome would be right. He evidently believed in the theoretical possibility of resurrection but had no assurance of it. [Note: See James Orr, "Immortality in the Old Testament," in Classical Evangelical Essays in Old Testament Interpretation, pp. 259.] When he finally had his meeting with God, Job was confident that God would clear him of the false charges against him.

The final section (Job 14:18-22) contains statements that reflect the despair Job felt as he contemplated the remainder of his life without any changes or intervention by God. All he could look forward to, with any "hope" or "confidence," was death.

This reply by Job was really his answer to the major argument and several specific statements all three of his companions had made so far. Job responded to Zophar (Job 12:3), but his words in this reply (chs. 12-14) responded to statements his other friends had made as well.

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)

XII.

BEYOND FACT AND FEAR TO GOD

Job 12:1-25; Job 13:1-28; Job 14:1-22

Job SPEAKS

ZOPHAR excites in Jobs mind great irritation, which must not be set down altogether to the fact that he is the third to speak. In some respects he has made the best attack from the old position, pressing most upon the conscience of Job. He has also used a curt positive tone in setting out the method and principle of Divine government and the judgment he has formed of his friends state. Job is accordingly the more impatient, if not disconcerted. Zophar had spoken of the want of understanding Job had shown, and the penetrating wisdom of God which at a glance convicts men of iniquity. His tone provoked resentment. Who is this that claims to have solved the enigmas of providence, to have gone into the depths of wisdom? Does he know any more, he himself, than the wild asss colt?

And Job begins with stringent irony-

“No doubt but ye are the people

And wisdom shall die with you.

The secrets of thought, of revelation itself are yours. No doubt the world waited to be taught till you were born. Do you not think so? But, after all, I also have a share of understanding, I am not quite so void of intellect as you seem to fancy. Besides, who knoweth not such things as ye speak? Are they new? I had supposed them to be commonplaces. Yea, if you recall what I said, you will find that with a little more vigour than yours I made the same declarations.

“A laughing stock to his neighbours am I,

I who called upon Eloah and He answered me, –

A laughing stock, the righteous and perfect man.”

Job sees or thinks he sees that his misery makes him an object of contempt to men who once gave him the credit of far greater wisdom and goodness than their own. They are bringing out old notions, which are utterly useless, to explain the ways of God; they assume the place of teachers; they are far better, far wiser now than he. It is more than flesh can bear.

As he looks at his own diseased body and feels again his weakness, the cruelty of the conventional judgment stings him. “In the thought of him that is at ease there is for misfortune scorn; it awaiteth them that slip with the foot.” Perhaps Job was mistaken, but it is too often true that the man who fails in a social sense is the man suspected. Evil things are found in him when he is covered with the dust of misfortune, things which no one dreamed of before. Flatterers become critics and judges. They find that he has a bad heart or that he is a fool.

But if those very good and wise friends of Job are astonished at anything previously said, they shall be more astonished. The facts which their account of Divine providence very carefully avoided as inconvenient Job will blurt out. They have stated and restated, with utmost complacency, their threadbare theory of the government of God. Let them look now abroad in the world and see what actually goes on, blinking no facts.

The tents of robbers prosper. Out in the desert there are troops of bandits who are never overtaken by justice; and they that provoke God are secure, who carry a god in their hand, whose sword and the reckless daring with which they use it make them to all appearance safe in villainy. These are the things to be accounted for; and, accounting for them, Job launches into a most emphatic argument to prove all that is done in the world strangely and inexplicably to be the doing of God. As to that he will allow no question. His friends shall know that he is sound on this head. And let them provide the defence of Divine righteousness after he has spoken.

Here, however, it is necessary to consider in what way the limitations of Hebrew thought must have been felt by one who, turning from the popular creed, sought a view more in harmony with fact. Now-a-days the word nature is often made to stand for a force or combination of forces conceived of as either entirely or partially independent of God. Tennyson makes the distinction when he speaks of man:

“Who trusted God was love indeed

And love creations final law,

Though nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravin, shrieked against the creed,”

and again when he asks-

“Are God and nature then at strife

That nature lends such evil dreams,

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life?”

Now to this question, perplexing enough on the face of it when we consider what suffering there is in the creation, how the waves of life seem to beat and break themselves age after age on the rocks of death, the answer in its first stage is that God and nature cannot be at strife. They are not apart; there is but one universe, therefore one Cause. One Omnipotent there is whose will is done, whose character is shown in all we see and all we cannot see, the issues of endless strife, the long results of perennial evolution. But then comes the question, What is His character, of what spirit is He who alone rules, who sends after the calm the fierce storm, after the beauty of life the corruption of death? And one may say the struggle between Bible religion and modern science is on this very field.

Cold heartless power, say some; no Father, but an impersonal Will to which men are nothing, human joy and love nothing, to which the fair blossom is no more than the clod, and the holy prayer no better than the vile sneer. On this, faith arises to the struggle. Faith warm and hopeful takes reason into counsel, searches the springs of existence, goes forth into the future and forecasts the end, that it may affirm and reaffirm against all denial that One Omnipotent reigns who is all-loving, the Father of infinite mercy. Here is the arena; here the conflict rages and will rage for many a day. And to him will belong the laurels of the age who, with the Bible in one hand and the instruments of science in the other, effects the reconciliation of faith with fact. Tennyson came with the questions of our day. He passes and has not given a satisfactory answer. Carlyle has gone with the “Everlasting Yea and No” beating through his oracles. Even Browning, a later athlete, did not find complete reason for faith.

“From Thy will stream the worlds, life, and nature, Thy dread sabaoth.”

Now return to Job. He considers nature; he believes in God; he stands firmly on the conviction that all is of God. Hebrew faith held this, and was not limited in holding it, for it is the fact. But we cannot wonder that providence disconcerted him, since the reconcilation of “merciless” nature and the merciful God is not even yet wrought out. Notwithstanding the revelation of Christ, many still find themselves in darkness just when light is most urgently craved. Willing to believe, they yet lean to a dualism which makes God Himself appear in conflict with the scheme of things, thwarted now and now repentant, gracious in design but not always in effect. Now the limitation of the Hebrew was this, that to his idea the infinite power of God was not balanced by infinite mercy, that is, by regard to the whole work of His hands. In one stormy dash after another Job is made to attempt this barrier. At moments he is lifted beyond it, and sees the great universe filled with Divine care that equals power; for the present, however, he distinguishes between merciful intent and merciless, and ascribes both to God.

What does he say? God is in the deceived and in the deceiver; they are both products of nature, that is, creatures of God. He increaseth the nations and destroyeth them. Cities arise and become populous. The great metropolis is filled with its myriads, “among whom are six-score thousand that cannot discern between their right hand and their left.” The city shall fulfil its cycle and perish. It is God. Searching for reconciliation Job looks the facts of human existence right in the face, and he sees a confusion, the whole enigma which lies in the constitution of the world and of the soul. Observe how his thought moves. The beasts, the fowls of the air, the fishes of the sea, all living beings everywhere, not self-created, with no power to shape or resist their destiny, bear witness to the almightiness of God. In His hand is the lower creation; in His hand also, rising higher, is the breath of all mankind. Absolute, universal is that power, dispensing life and death as it broods over the ages. Men have sought to understand the ways of the Great Being. The ear trieth words as the mouth tasteth meat. Is there wisdom with the ancient, those who live long, as Bildad says? Yes: but with God are wisdom and strength; not penetration only, but power. He discerns and does. He demolishes, and there is no rebuilding. Man is imprisoned, shut up by misfortune, by disease. It is Gods decree, and there is no opening till He allows. At His will the waters are dried up; at His will they pour in torrents over the earth. And so amongst men there are currents of evil and good flowing through lives, here in the liar and cheat, there in the victim of knavery; here in the counsellors whose plans come to nothing; there in the judges who sagacity is changed to folly; and all these currents, and cross currents, making life a bewildering maze, have their beginning in the will of God, who seems to take pleasure in doing what is strange and baffling. Kings take men captive; the bonds of the captives are loosed, and the kings themselves are bound. What are princes and priests, what are the mighty to Him? What is the speech of the eloquent? Where is the understanding of the aged when He spreads confusion? Deep as in the very gloom of the grave the ambitious may hide their schemes; the flux of events brings them out to judgment, one cannot foresee how. Nations are raised up and destroyed; the chiefs of the people are made to fear like children. Trusted leaders wander in a wilderness; they grope in midnight gloom; they stagger like the drunken. Behold, says Job, all this I have seen. This is Gods doing. And with this great God he would speak; he, a man, would have things out with the Lord of all. {Job 13:3}

This impetuous passage, full of revolution, disaster, vast mutations, a phantasmagoria of human struggle and defeat, while it supplies a note of time and gives a distinct clue to the writers position as an Israelite, is remarkable for the faith that survives its apparent pessimism. Others have surveyed the world and the history of change, and have protested with their last voice against the cruelty that seemed to rule. As for any God, they could never trust one whose will and power were to be found alike in the craft of the deceiver and the misery of the victim, in the baffling of sincere thought and the overthrow of the honest with the vile. But Job trusts on. Beneath every enigma, he looks for reason; beyond every disaster, to a Divine end. The voices of men have come between him and the voice of the Supreme. Personal disaster has come between him and his sense of God. His thought is not free. If it were, he would catch the reconciling word, his soul would hear the music of eternity. “I would reason with God.” He clings to God-given reason as his instrument of discovery.

Very bold is this whole position, and very reverent also, if you will think of it; far more honouring to God than any attempt of the friends who, as Job says, appear to hold the Almighty no better than a petty chief, so insecure in His position that He must be grateful to any one who will justify His deeds. “Poor God, with nobody to help Him.” Job uses all his irony in exposing the folly of such a religion, the impertinence of presenting it to him as a solution and a help. In short, he tells them, they are pious quacks, and, as he will have none of them for his part, he thinks God will not either. The author is at the very heart of religion here. The word of reproof and correction, the plea for providence must go straight to the reason of man, or it is of no use. The word of the Lord must be a two-edged sword of truth, piercing to the dividing asunder even of soul and spirit. That is to say, into the centre of energy the truth must be driven which kills the spirit of rebellion, so that the will of man, set free, may come into conscious and passionate accord with the will of God. But reconciliation is impossible unless each will deal in the utmost sincerity with truth, realising the facts of existence, the nature of the soul and the great necessities of its discipline. To be true in theology we must not accept what seems to be true, nor speak forensically, but affirm what we have proved in our own life and gathered in utmost effort from Scripture and from nature. Men inherit opinions as they used to inherit garments, or devise them, like clothes of a new fashion, and from within the folds they speak, not as men but as priests, what is the right thing according to a received theory. It will not do. Even of old time a man like the author of Job turned contemptuously from school-made explanations and sought a living word. In our age the number of those whose fever can be lulled with a working theory of religion and a judicious arrangement of the universe is rapidly becoming small. Theology is being driven to look the facts of life full in the face. If the world has learned anything from modern science, it is the habit of rigorous research and the justification of free inquiry, and the lesson will never be unlearned.

To take one error of theology. All men are concluded equally under Gods wrath and curse; then the proofs of the malediction are found in trouble, fear, and pain. But what comes of this teaching? Out in the world, with facts forcing themselves on consciousness, the scheme is found hollow. All are not in trouble and pain. Those who are afflicted and disappointed are often sincere Christians. A theory of deferred judgment and happiness is made for escape; it does not, however, in the least enable one to comprehend how, if pain and trouble be the consequences of sin, they should not be distributed rightly from the first. A universal moral order cannot begin in a manner so doubtful, so very difficult for the wayfaring man to read as he goes. To hold that it can is to turn religion into an occultism which at every point bewilders the simple mind. The theory is one which tends to blunt the sense of sin in those who are prosperous, and to beget that confident Pharisaism which is the curse of church life. On the other hand, the “sacrificed classes,” contrasting their own moral character with that of the frivolous and fleshly rich, are forced to throw over a theology which binds together sin and suffering, and to deny a God whose equity is so far to seek. And yet, again, in the recoil from all this men invent wersh schemes of bland goodwill and comfort, which have simply nothing to do with the facts of life, no basis in the world as we know it, no sense of the rigour of Divine love. So Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar remain with us and confuse theology until some think it lost in unreason.

“But ye are patchers of lies,

Physicians of nought are ye all.

Oh that ye would only keep silence,

And it should be your wisdom”. {Job 13:4-5}

Job sets them down with a current proverb-“Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise.” He begs them to be silent. They shall now hear his rebuke.

“On behalf of God will ye speak wrong?

And for Him will ye speak deceit?

Will ye be partisans for Him?

Or for God will ye contend?”

Job finds them guilty of speaking falsely as special pleaders for God in two respects. They insist that he has offended God, but they cannot point to one sin which he has committed. On the other hand, they affirm positively that God will restore prosperity if confession is made. But in this too they play the part of advocates without warrant. They show great presumption in daring to pledge the Almighty to a course in accordance with their idea of justice. The issue might be what they predict; it might not. They are venturing on ground to which their knowledge does not extend. They think their presumption justified because it is for religions sake. Job administers a sound rebuke, and it extends to our own time. Special pleaders for Gods sovereign and unconditional right and for His illimitable good nature, alike have warning here. What justification have men in affirming that God will work out His problems in detail according to their views? He has given to us the power to apprehend the great principles of His working. He has revealed much in nature, providence, and Scripture, and in Christ; but there is the “hiding of His power,” “His path is in the mighty waters, and His judgments are not known.” Christ has said, “It is not for you to know times and seasons which the Father hath set within His own authority.” There are certainties of our consciousness, facts of the world and of revelation from which we can argue. Where these confirm, we may dogmatise, and the dogma will strike home. But no piety, no desire to vindicate the Almighty or to convict and convert the sinner, can justify any man in passing beyond the certainty which God has given him to that unknown which lies far above human ken.

“He will surely correct you

If in secret ye are partial.

Shall not His majesty terrify you,

And His dread fall upon you?” {Job 13:10-11}

The Book of Job, while it brands insincerity and loose reasoning, justifies all honest and reverent research. Here, as in the teaching of our Lord, the real heretic is he who is false to his own reason and conscience, to the truth of things as God gives him to apprehend it, who, in short, makes believe to any extent in the sphere of religion. And it is upon this man the terror of the Divine majesty is to fall.

We saw how Bildad established himself on the wisdom of the ancients. Recalling this, Job flings contempt on his traditional sayings.

“Your remembrances are proverbs of ashes,

Your defences, defences of dust.”

Did they mean to smite him with those proverbs as with stones? They were ashes. Did they intrench themselves from the assaults of reason behind old suppositions? Their ramparts were mere dust. Once more he bids them hold their peace, and let him alone that he may speak out all that is in his mind. It is, he knows at the hazard of his life he goes forward; but he will. The case in which he is can have no remedy excepting by an appeal to God, and that final appeal he will make.

Now the proper beginning of this appeal is in the twenty-third verse (Job 13:23), with the words: “How many are mine iniquities and my sins?” But before Job reaches it he expresses his sense of the danger and difficulty under which he lies, interweaving with the statement of these a marvellous confidence in the result of what he is about to do. Referring to the declarations of his friends as to the danger that yet threatens if he will not confess sin, he uses a proverbial expression for hazard of life.

“Why do I take my flesh in my teeth,

And put my life in my hand?”

Why do I incur this danger, do you say? Never mind. It is not your affair. For bare existence I care nothing. To escape with mere consciousness for a while is no object to me, as I now am. With my life in my hand I hasten to God.

“Lo! He will slay me: I will not delay-

Yet my ways will I maintain before Him”. {Job 13:15}

The old Version here, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,” is inaccurate. Still it is not far from expressing the brave purpose of the man- prostrate before God, yet resolved to cling to the justice of the case ashe apprehends it, assured that this will not only be excused by God, but will bring about his acquittal or salvation. To grovel in the dust, confessing himself a miserable sinner more than worthy of all the sufferings he has undergone, while in his heart he has the consciousness of being upright and faithful-this would not commend him to the Judge of all the earth. It would be a mockery of truth and righteousness, therefore of God Himself. On the other hand, to maintain his integrity which God gave him, to go on maintaining it at the hazard of all, is his only course, his only safety.

“This also shall be my salvation,

For a godless man shall not live before Him.”

The fine moral instinct of Job, giving courage to his theology, declares that God demands “truth in the inward parts” and truth in speech-that man “consists in truth”-that “if he betrays truth he betrays himself,” which is a crime against his Maker. No man is so much in danger of separating himself from God and losing everything as he who acts or speaks against conviction.

Job has declared his hazard, that he is lying helpless before Almighty Power which may in a moment crush him. He has also expressed his faith, that approaching God in the courage of truth he will not be rejected, that absolute sincerity will alone give him a claim on the infinitely True. Now turning to his friends as if in new defiance, he says:-

“Hear diligently my speech,

And my explanation with your ears.

Behold now, I have ordered my cause;

I know that I shall be justified.

Who is he that will contend with me?

For then would I hold my peace and expire.”

That is to say, he has reviewed his life once more, he has considered all possibilities of transgression, and yet his contention remains. So much does he build upon his claim on God that, if any one could now convict him, his heart would fail, life would no more be worth living; the foundation of hope destroyed, conflict would be at an end.

But with his plea to God still in view he expresses once more his sense of the disadvantage under which he lies. The pressure of the Divine hand is upon him still, a sore enervating terror which bears upon his soul. Would God but give him respite for a little from the pain and the fear, then he would be ready either to answer the summons of the Judge or make his own demand for vindication.

We may suppose an interval of release from pain or at least a pause of expectancy, and then, in verse twenty-third (Job 13:23), Job begins his cry. The language is less vehement than we have heard. It has more of the pathos of weak human life. He is one with that race of thinking, feeling, suffering creatures who are tossed about on the waves of existence, driven before the winds, of change like autumn leaves. It is the plea of human feebleness and mortality we hear, and then, as the “still sad music” touches the lowest note of wailing, there mingles with it the strain of hope.

“How many are mine iniquities and sins?

Make me to know my transgression and my sin.”

We are not to understand here that Job confesses great transgressions, nor, contrariwise, that he denies infirmity and error in himself. There are no doubt failures of his youth which remain in memory, sins of desire, errors of ignorance, mistakes in conduct such as the best men fall into. These he does not deny. But righteousness and happiness have been represented as a profit and loss account, and therefore Job wishes to hear from God a statement in exact form of all he has done amiss or failed to do, so that he may be able to see the relation between fault and suffering, his faults and his sufferings, if such relation there be. It appears that God is counting him an enemy (Job 13:24). He would like to have the reason for that. So far as he knows himself he has sought to obey and honour the Almighty. Certainly there has never been in his heart any conscious desire to resist the will of Eloah. Is it then for transgressions unwittingly committed that he now suffers-for sins he did not intend or know of? God is just. It is surely a part of His justice to make a sufferer aware why such terrible afflictions befall him.

And then-is it worthwhile for the Almighty to be so hard on a poor weak mortal?

Wilt thou scare a driven leaf-

Wilt thou pursue the dry stubble-

That thou writest bitter judgments against me,

And makest me to possess the faults of my youth,

And puttest my feet in the stocks,

And watchest all my paths,

And drawest a line about the soles of my feet-

One who as a rotten thing is consuming,

As a garment that is moth eaten?

The sense of rigid restraint and pitiable decay was perhaps never expressed with so fit and vivid imagery. So far it is personal. Then begins a general lamentation regarding the sad fleeting life of man. His own prosperity, which passed as a dream, has become to Job a type of the brief vain existence of the race tried at every moment by inexorable Divine judgment; and the low mournful words of the Arabian chief have echoed ever since in the language of sorrow and loss.

“Man that is born of woman,

Of few days is he and full of trouble.

Like the flower he springs up and withers;

Like a shadow he flees and stays not.

Is it on such a one Thou hast fixed Thine eye?

Bringest Thou me into Thy judgment?

Oh that the clean might come out of the unclean!

But there is not one.”

Human frailty is both of the body and of the soul; and it is universal. The nativity of men forbids their purity. Well does God know the weakness of His creatures; and why then does He expect of them, if indeed He expects, a pureness that can stand the test of His searching? Job cannot be free from the common infirmity of mortals. He is born of woman. But why then is he chased with inquiry, haunted and scared by a righteousness he cannot satisfy? Should not the Great God be forbearing with a man?

“Since his days are determined,

The number of his moons with Thee,

And Thou hast set him bounds not to be passed.

Look Thou away from him that he may rest,

At least fulfil as a hireling his day,”

Mens life being so short, his death so sure and soon, seeing he is like a hireling in the world, might he not be allowed a little rest? might he not, as one who has fulfilled his days work, be let go for a little repose ere he die? That certain death, it weighs upon him now, pressing down his thought.

For even a tree hath hope;

If it be hewn down it will sprout anew,

The young shoot thereof will not fail.

If in the earth its root wax old,

Or in the ground its stock should die

Yet at the scent of water it will spring,

And shoot forth boughs like a new plant.

But a man: he dies and is cut off;

Yea, when men die, they are gone.

Ebbs away the water from the sea,

And the stream decays and dries:

So when men have lain down they rise not;

Till the heavens vanish they never awake,

Nor are they roused from their sleep.

No arguments, no promises can break this deep gloom and silence into which the life of man passes. Once Job had sought death; now a desire has grown within him, and with it recoil from Sheol. To meet God, to obtain his own justification and the clearing of Divine righteousness, to have the problem of life explained-the hope of this makes life precious. Is he to lie down and rise no more while the skies endure? Is no voice to reach him from the heavenly justice he has always confided in? The very thought is confounding. If he were now to desire death it would mean that he had given up all faith, that justice, truth, and even the Divine name of Eloah had ceased to have any value for him.

We are to behold the rise of a new hope, like a star in the firmament of his thought. Whence does it spring?

The religion of the Book of Job, as already shown, is, in respect of form, a natural religion; that is to say, the ideas are not derived from the Hebrew Scriptures. The writer does not refer to the legislation of Moses and the great words of prophets. The expression “As the Lord said unto Moses” does not occur in this book, nor any equivalent. It is through nature and the human consciousness that the religious beliefs of the poem appear to have come into shape. Yet two facts are to be kept fully in view.

The first is that even a natural religion must not be supposed to be a thing of mans invention, with no origin further than his dreams. We must not declare all religious ideas outside those of Israel to be mere fictions of the human fancy or happy guesses at truth. The religion of Teman may have owed some of its great thoughts to Israel. But, apart from that, a basis of Divine revelation is always laid wherever men think and live. In every land the heart of man has borne witness to God. Reverent thought, dwelling on justice, truth, mercy, and all virtues found in the range of experience and consciousness, came through them to the idea of God. Every one who made an induction as to the Great Unseen Being, his mind open to the facts of nature and his own moral constitution, was in a sense a prophet. As far as they went, the reality and value of religious ideas, so reached, are acknowledged by Bible writers themselves. “The invisible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity.” God has always been revealing Himself to men.

“Natural religion” we say: and yet, since God is always revealing Himself and has made all men more or less capable of apprehending the revelation, even the natural is supernatural. Take the religion of Egypt, or of Chaldaea, or of Persia. You may contrast any one of these with the religion of Israel; you may call the one natural, the other revealed. But the Persian speaking of the Great Good Spirit or the Chaldaean worshipping a supreme Lord must have had some kind of revelation; and his sense of it, not clear indeed, far enough below that of Moses or Isaiah, was yet a forth reaching towards the same light as now shines for us.

Next we must keep it in view that Job does not appear as a thinker building on himself alone, depending on his own religious experience. Centuries and ages of thought are behind these beliefs which are ascribed to him, even the ideas which seem to start up freshly as the result of original discovery. Imagine a man thinking for himself about Divine things in that far away Arabian past. His mind, to begin with, is not a blank. His father has instructed him. There is a faith that has come down from many generations. He has found words in use which hold in them religious ideas, discoveries, perceptions of Divine reality, caught and fixed ages before. When he learned language the products of evolution, not only psychical, but intellectual and spiritual, became his. Eloah, the lofty one, the righteousness of Eloah, the word of Eloah, Eloah as Creator, as Watcher of men, Eloah as wise, unsearchable in wisdom, as strong, infinitely mighty, -these are ideas he has not struck out for himself, but inherited. Clearly then a new thought, springing from these, comes as a supernatural communication and has behind it ages of spiritual evolution. It is new, but has its root in the old; it is natural, but originates in the over nature.

Now the primitive religion of the Semites, the race to which Job belonged, to which also the Hebrews belonged, has been of late carefully studied; and with regard to it certain things have been established that bear on the new hope we are to find struck out by the Man of Uz.

In the early morning of religious thought among those Semites it was universally believed that the members of a family or tribe, united by blood relationship to each other, were also related in the same way to their God. He was their father, the invisible head and source of their community, on whom they had a claim so long as they pleased him. His interest in them was secured by the sacrificial meal which he was invited and believed to share with them. If he had been offended, the sacrificial offering was the means of recovering his favour; and communion with him in those meals and sacrifices was the inheritance of all who claimed the kinship of that clan or tribe. With the clearing of spiritual vision this belief took a new form in the minds of the more thoughtful. The idea of communion remained and the necessity of it to the life of the worshipper was felt even more strongly when the kinship of the God with his subject family was, for the few at least, no longer an affair of physical descent and blood relation. ship, but of spiritual origin and attachment. And when faith rose from the tribal god to the idea of the Heaven-Father, the one Creator and King communion with Him was felt to be in the highest sense a vital necessity. Here is found the religion of Job. A main element of it was communion with Eloah, an ethical kinship, with Him, no arbitrary or merely physical relation but of the spirit. That is to say, Job has at the heart of his creed the truth as to roans origin and nature. The author of the book is a Hebrew; his own faith is that of the people from whom we have the Book of Genesis; but he treats here of mans relation to God from the ethnic side, such as may be taken now by reasoner treating of spiritual evolution.

Communion with Eloah had been Jobs life and with it had been associated his many years of wealth, dignity, and influence. Lest his children should fall from it and lose their most precious inheritance, he used to bring the periodical offerings. But at length his own communion was interrupted. The sense of being at on with Eloah, if not lost, became dull and faint. It is for the restoration of his very life-not as we might think of religious feeling, but of actual spirit energy-he is now concerned. It is this that underlies his desire for God to speak with him, his demand for an opportunity of pleading his cause. Some might expect that he would ask his friends to offer sacrifice on his behalf, But he makes no such request. The crisis has come in a region higher than sacrifice, where observances are of no use. Thought only can reach it; the discovery of reconciling truth alone can satisfy. Sacrifices which for the old world alone sustained the relation with God could no more for Job restore the intimacy of the spiritual Lord. With a passion for this fellowship keener than ever, since he now more distinctly realises what it is, a fear blends in the heart of the man, Death will be upon him soon. Severed from God he will fall away into the privation of that world where is neither praise nor service, knowledge nor device. Yet the truth which lies at the heart of his religion does not yield. Leaning all upon it, he finds it strong, elastic. He sees at least a possibility of reconciliation; for how can the way back to God ever be quite closed?

What difficulty there was in his effort we know. To the common thought of the time when this book was written, say that of Hezekiah, the state of the dead was not extinction indeed, but an existence of extreme tenuity and feebleness. In Sheol there was nothing active. The hollow ghost of the man was conceived of as neither hoping nor fearing, neither originating nor receiving impressions. Yet Job dares to anticipate that even in Sheol a set time of remembrance will be ordained for him and he shall hear the thrilling call of God. As it approaches this climax the poem flashes and glows with prophetic fire.

Oh that Thou wouldst hide me in Sheol,

That Thou wouldst keep me secret until Thy wrath be past,

That Thou wouldst appoint a set time, and remember me!

If a (strong) man die, shall he live?

All the days of my appointed time would I wait

Till my release came.

Thou wouldst call, I would answer Thee;

Thou wouldst have a desire to the work of Thy hands.

Not easily can we now realise the extraordinary step forward made in thought when the anticipation was thrown out of spiritual life going on beyond death (“would I wait”), retaining intellectual potency in that region otherwise dark and void to the human imagination (“I would answer Thee”). From both the human side and the Divine the poet has advanced a magnificent intuition, a springing arch into which he is unable to fit the keystone-the spiritual body; for He only could do this who long afterwards came to be Himself the Resurrection and the Life. But when this poem of Job had been given to the world a new thought was implanted in the soul of the race, a new hope that should fight against the darkness of Sheol till that morning when the sunrise fell upon an empty sepulchre, and one standing in the light asked of sorrowful men, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

“Thou wouldst have a desire to the work of Thy hands.” What a philosophy of Divine care underlies the words! They come with a force Job seems hardly to realise. Is there a High One who makes men in His own image, capable of fine achievement, and then casts them away in discontent or loathing? The voice of the poet rings in a passionate key because he rises tea thought practically new to the human mind. He has broken through barriers both of faith and doubt into the light of his hope and stands trembling on the verge of another world. “One must have had a keen perception of the profound relation between the creature and his Maker in the past to be able to give utterance to such an imaginative expectation respecting the future.”

But the wrath of God still appears to rest upon Jobs life; still He seems to keep in reserve, sealed up, unrevealed, some record of transgressions for which He has condemned His servant. From the height of hope Job falls away into an abject sense of the decay and misery to which man is brought by the continued rigour of Eloahs examination. As with shocks of earthquake mountains are broken, and waters by constant flowing wash down the soil and the plants rooted in it, so human life is wasted by the Divine severity. In the world the children whom a man loved are exalted or brought low, but he knows nothing of it. His flesh corrupts in the grave and his soul in Sheol languishes.

“Thou destroyest the hope of man.

Thou ever prevailest against him and he passeth

Thou changest his countenance and sendest him away.”

The real is at this point so grim and insistent as to shut off the ideal and confine thought again to its own range. The energy of the prophetic mind is overborne, and unintelligible fact surrounds and presses hard the struggling personality.

Fuente: Expositors Bible Commentary