These two men--Job and John--present us, first with a _comparison_, and
then with a _contrast_. It is interesting to examine side by side their
views of the sin that represented so terrific a problem.
Job thought of it as a _contaminating_ thing. He felt that his soul was
soiled. 'What shall I do?' he cries, 'what shall I do? If I bathe myself
in snow water and wash my hands never so clean, yet shalt Thou plunge me
in the ditch and mine own clothes shall abhor me!' Every day of his life
he thought he heard, morning and noon and night, the awful Voice of the
Most High. 'Though thou wash thee with niter, and take thee much soap,
yet thine iniquity is marked before Me, saith the Lord God.' He felt as
Macbeth felt when advised to cleanse the stain from his guilty hands.
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand! No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red!
Job was like the old lama, in Rudyard Kipling's _Kim_, who, year after
year, wandered through cities and rice-fields, over the hills and across
the plains, always searching, but searching in vain, for the River, the
River of the Arrow, the River that could cleanse from sin!
John, on the other hand, thought of sin as a _condemning_ thing. The
great word 'condemnation' occurs on almost every page of his writings.
He feels that every man's sin carries its own conviction. It is like
finger-print evidence; it speaks for itself; it needs no long procession
of corroborating witnesses. There it is! It tells its own terrible tale,
and there is no gainsaying it.