itself in what Bildad proceeds to say in the very picturesque passage
that follows. Truths, however, may be taken hold of in a wrong way to
establish false conclusions; and in this way Job's interlocutor errs
with not a few of his painstaking successors. The rush or papyrus of
the river-side cannot grow without mire; the reed-grass needs
moisture. If the water fails they wither. So are the paths of all that
forget God. Yes: if you take it aright, what can be more impressively
certain? The hope of a godless man perishes. His confidence is cut
off; it is as if he trusted in a spider's web. Even his house, however
strongly built, shall not support him. The man who has abandoned God
must come to this--that every earthly stay shall snap asunder, every
expectation fade. There shall be nothing between him and despair. His
strength, his wisdom, his inheritance, his possessions piled together
in abundance, how can they avail when the demand is urged by Divine
justice--What hast thou done with thy life? This, however, is not at
all in Bildad's mind. He is not thinking of the prosperity of the soul
and exultation in God, but of outward success, that a man should
spread his visible existence like a green bay tree. Beyond that
visible existence he cannot stretch thought or reasoning. His school,
generally, believed in God much after the manner of English
eighteenth-century deists, standing on the earth, looking over the
life of man here, and demanding in the present world the vindication
of providence. The position is realistic, the good of life solely
mundane. If one is brought low who flourished in luxuriance and sent
forth his shoots over the garden and was rooted near the spring, his
poverty is his destruction; he is destroyed because somehow the law of
life, that is of prosperity, has been transgressed, and the God of
success punishes the fault. We are made to feel that beneath the
promise of returning honour and joy with which Bildad closes there is
an _if_. "God will not cast away a perfect man." Is Job perfect? Then
his mouth will be filled with laughter, and his haters shall be
clothed with shame. That issue is problematical. And yet, on the
whole, doubt is kept well in the background, and the final word of
cheer is made as generous and hopeful as circumstances will allow.
Bildad means to leave the impression on Job's mind that the wisdom of
the ancients as applied to his case is reassuring.
But one sentence of his speech, that in which (ver. 4) he implies the
belief that Job's children had sinned and been "cast away into the
hand of their rebellion," shows the cold, relentless side of his
orthodoxy, the logic, not unknown still, which presses to its point
over the whole human race. Bildad meant, it appears, to shift from Job
the burden of his children's fate. The catastrophe which overtook them
might have seemed to be one of the arrows of judgment aimed at the
father. Job himself may have had great perplexity as well as keen
distress whenever he thought of his sons and daughters. Now Bildad is
throwing on them the guilt which he believes to have been so terribly
punished, even to the extremity of irremediable death. But there is no
enlightenment in the suggestion. Rather does it add to the
difficulties of the case. The sons and daughters whom Job loved, over
whom he watched with such religious care lest they should renounce God
in their hearts--were they condemned by the Most High? A man of the
old world, accustomed to think of himself as standing in God's stead
to his household, Job cannot receive this. Thought having been once
stirred to its depths, he is resentful now against a doctrine that may
never before have been questioned. Is there, then, no fatherhood in
the Almighty, no magnanimity such as Job himself would have shown? If
so, then the spirit would fail before Him, and the souls which He has
made (Isaiah lvii. 16). The dogmatist with his wisdom of the ages
drops in the by-going one of his commonplaces of theological thought.
It is a coal of fire in the heart of the sufferer.
Those who attempt to explain God's ways for edification and comfort need
to be very simple and genuine in their feeling with men, their effort on
behalf of God. Every one who believes and thinks has something in his
spiritual experience worth recounting, and may help an afflicted brother
by retracing his own history. But to make a creed learned by rote the
basis of consolation is perilous. The aspect it takes to those under
trial will often surprise the best-meaning consoler. A point is
emphasised by the keen mind of sorrow, and, like Elijah's cloud, it soon
sweeps over the whole sky, a storm of doubt and dismay.
X.
_THE THOUGHT OF A DAYSMAN._
JOB SPEAKS. CHAPS. ix., x.
It is with an infinitely sad restatement of what God has been made to
appear to him by Bildad's speech that Job begins his reply. Yes, yes; it
is so. How can man be just before such a God? You tell me my children
are overwhelmed with destruction for their sins. You tell me that I, who
am not quite dead as yet, may have new prosperity if I put myself into
right relations with God. But how can that be? There is no uprightness,
no dutifulness, no pious obedience, no sacrifice that will satisfy Him.
I did my utmost; yet God has condemned me. And if He is what you say,
His condemnation is unanswerable. He has such wisdom in devising
accusations and in maintaining them against feeble man, that hope there
can be none for any human being. To answer one of the thousand charges
God can bring, if He will contend with man, is impossible. The
earthquakes are signs of His indignation, removing mountains, shaking
the earth out of her place. He is able to quench the light of the sun
and moon, and to seal up the stars. What is man beside the omnipotence
of Him who alone stretched out the heavens, whose march is on the huge
waves of the ocean, who is the Creator of the constellations' the Bear,
the Giant, the Pleiades, and the chambers or spaces of the southern sky?
It is the play of irresistible power Job traces around him, and the
Divine mind or will is inscrutable.
"_Lo, He goeth by me and I see Him not:
He passeth on, and I perceive Him not.
Behold, He seizeth. Who will stay Him?
Who will say to Him, What doest Thou?_"
Step by step the thought here advances into that dreadful imagination
of God's unrighteousness which must issue in revolt or in despair.
Job, turning against the bitter logic of tradition, appears for the
time to plunge into impiety. Sincere earnest thinker as he is, he
falls into a strain we are almost compelled to call false and
blasphemous. Bildad and Eliphaz seem to be saints, Job a rebel
against God. The Almighty, he says, is like a lion that seizes the
prey and cannot be hindered from devouring. He is a wrathful tyrant
under whom the helpers of Rahab, those powers that according to some
nature myth sustain the dragon of the sea in its conflict with heaven,
stoop and give way. Shall Job essay to answer Him? It is vain. He
cannot. To choose words in such a controversy would be of no avail.
Even one right in his cause would be overborne by tyrannical
omnipotence. He would have no resource but to supplicate for mercy
like a detected malefactor. Once Job may have thought that an appeal
to justice would be heard, that his trust in righteousness was well
founded. He is falling away from that belief now. This being whose
despotic power has been set in his view has no sense of man's right.
He cares nothing for man.
What is God? How does He appear in the light of the sufferings of Job?
"_He breaketh me with a tempest,
Increaseth my wounds without cause.
If you speak of the strength of the mighty,
'Behold Me,' saith He;
If of judgment--'Who will appoint Me a time?'_"
No one, that is, can call God to account. The temper of the Almighty
appears to Job to be such that man must needs give up all controversy.
In his heart Job is convinced still that he has wrought no evil. But
he will not say so. He will anticipate the wilful condemnation of the
Almighty. God would assail his life. Job replies in fierce revolt,
"Assail it, take it away, I care not, for I despise it. Whether one
is righteous or evil, it is all the same. God destroys the perfect and
the wicked" (ver. 22).
Now, are we to explain away this language? If not, how shall we defend
the writer who has put it into the mouth of one still the hero of the
book, still appearing as a friend of God? To many in our day, as of old,
religion is so dull and lifeless, their desire for the friendship of God
so lukewarm, that the passion of the words of Job is incomprehensible to
them. His courage of despair belongs to a range of feeling they never
entered, never dreamt of entering. The calculating world is their home,
and in its frigid atmosphere there is no possibility of that keen
striving for spiritual life which fills the soul as with fire. To those
who deny sin and pooh-pooh anxiety about the soul, the book may well
appear an old-world dream, a Hebrew allegory rather than the history of
a man. But the language of Job is no outburst of lawlessness; it springs
out of deep and serious thought.
It is difficult to find an exact modern parallel here; but we have not
to go far back for one who was driven like Job by false theology into
bewilderment, something like unreason. In his "Grace Abounding," John
Bunyan reveals the depths of fear into which hard arguments and
misinterpretations of Scripture often plunged him, when he should have
been rejoicing in the liberty of a child of God. The case of Bunyan
is, in a sense, very different from that of Job. Yet both are urged
almost to despair of God; and Bunyan, realising this point of
likeness, again and again uses words put into Job's mouth. Doubts and
suspicions are suggested by his reading, or by sermons which he hears,
and he regards their occurrence to his mind as a proof of his
wickedness. In one place he says: "Now I thought surely I am possessed
of the devil: at other times again I thought I should be bereft of my
wits; for, instead of lauding and magnifying God with others, if I
have but heard Him spoken of, presently some most horrible
blasphemous thought or other would bolt out of my heart against Him,
so that whether I did think that God was, or again did think there was
no such thing, no love, nor peace, nor gracious disposition could I
feel within me." Bunyan had a vivid imagination. He was haunted by
strange cravings for the spiritually adventurous. What would it be to
sin the sin that is unto death? "In so strong a measure," he says,
"was this temptation upon me, that often I have been ready to clap my
hands under my chin to keep my mouth from opening." The idea that he
should "sell and part with Christ" was one that terribly afflicted
him; and, "at last," he says, "after much striving, I felt this
thought pass through my heart, Let Him go if He will.... After this,
nothing for two years together would abide with me but damnation and
the expectation of damnation. This thought had passed my heart--God
hath let me go, and I am fallen. Oh, thought I, that it was with me as
in months past, as in the days when God preserved me."
The Book of Job helps us to understand Bunyan and those terrors of his
that amaze our composed generation. Given a man like Job or like
Bunyan, to whom religion is everything, who must feel sure of Divine
justice, truth, and mercy, he will pass far beyond the measured
emotions and phrases of those who are more than half content with the
world and themselves. The writer here, whose own stages of thought are
recorded, and Bunyan, who with rare force and sincerity retraces the
way of his life, are men of splendid character and virtue. Titans of
the religious life, they are stricken with anguish and bound with iron
fetters to the rock of pain for the sake of universal humanity. They
are a wonder to the worldling, they speak in terms the smooth
professor of religion shudders at. But their endurance, their vehement
resolution, break the falsehoods of the time and enter into the
redemption of the race.
The strain of Job's complaint increases in bitterness. He seems to see
omnipotent injustice everywhere. If a scourge (ver. 23), such as
lightning, accident or disease, slayeth suddenly, there seems to be
nothing but mockery of the innocent. God looks down on the wreck of
human hope from the calm sky after the thunderstorm, in the evening
sunlight that gilds the desert grave. And in the world of men the
wicked have their way. God veils the face of the judge so that he is
blinded to the equity of the cause. Thus, after the arguments of his
friends, Job is compelled to see wrong everywhere, and to say that it
is the doing of God. The strophe ends with the abrupt fierce
demand,--If not, who then is it?
The short passage from the twenty-fifth verse to the end of chap. ix.
returns sadly to the strain of personal weakness and entreaty. Swiftly
Job's days go by, more swiftly than a runner, in so far as he sees no
good. Or they are like the reed-skiffs on the river, or the darting
eagle. To forget his pain is impossible. He cannot put on an appearance
of serenity or hope. God is keeping him bound as a transgressor. "I
shall be condemned whatever I do. Why then do I weary myself in vain?"
Looking at his discoloured body, covered with the grime of disease, he
finds it a sign of God's detestation. But if he could wash it with snow,
that is, to snowy whiteness, if he could purify those blackened limbs
with lye, the renewal would go no further. God would plunge him again
into the mire; his own clothes would abhor him.
And now there is a change of tone. His mind, revolting from its own
conclusion, turns toward the thought of reconciliation. While as yet
he speaks of it as an impossibility there comes to him a sorrowful
regret, a vague dream or reflection in place of that fierce rebellion
which discoloured the whole world and made it appear an arena of
injustice. With that he cannot pretend to satisfy himself. Again his
humanity stirs in him:--
"_For He is not a man, as I, that I should answer Him,
That we should come together in judgment.
There is no daysman between us
That might lay his hand upon us both.
Let Him take away His rod from me,
And let not His terror overawe me;
Then would I speak and not fear Him:
For I am not in such case in myself._"
If he could only speak with God as a man speaks with his friend the
shadows might be cleared away. The real God, not unreasonable, not
unrighteous nor despotic, here begins to appear; and in default of
personal converse, and of a daysman, or arbiter, who might lay
reconciling hands upon both and bring them together, Job cries for an
interval of strength and freedom, that without fear and anguish he may
himself express the matter at stake. The idea of a daysman, although
the possibility of such a friendly helper is denied, is a new mark of
boldness in the thought of the drama. In that one word the inspired
writer strikes the note of a Divine purpose which he does not yet
foresee. We must not say that here we have the prediction of a
Redeemer at once God and man. The author has no such affirmation to
make. But very remarkably the desires of Job are led forth in that
direction in which the advent and work of Christ have fulfilled the
decree of grace. There can be no doubt of the inspiration of a writer
who thus strikes into the current of the Divine will and revelation.
Not obscurely is it implied in this Book of Job that, however earnest
man may be in religion, however upright and faithful (for all this Job
was), there are mysteries of fear and sorrow connected with his life
in this world which can be solved only by One who brings the light of
eternity into the range of time, who is at once "very God and very
man," whose overcoming demands and encourages our faith.
Now, the wistful cry of Job--"There is no daysman between
us"--breaking from the depths of an experience to which the best as
well as the worst are exposed in this life, an experience which cannot
in either case be justified or accounted for unless by the fact of
immortality, is, let us say, as presented here, a purely human cry.
Man who "cannot be God's exile," bound always to seek understanding of
the will and character of God, finds himself in the midst of sudden
calamity and extreme pain, face to face with death. The darkness that
shrouds his whole existence he longs to see dispelled or shot through
with beams of clear revealing light. What shall we say of it? If such
a desire, arising in the inmost mind, had no correspondence whatever
to fact, there would be falsehood at the heart of things. The very
shape the desire takes--for a Mediator who should be acquainted
equally with God and man, sympathetic toward the creature, knowing the
mind of the Creator--cannot be a chance thing. It is the fruit of a
Divine necessity inwrought with the constitution and life of the human
soul. We are pointed to an irrefragable argument; but the thought
meanwhile does not follow it. Immortality waits for a revelation.
* * * * *
Job has prayed for rest. It does not come. Another attack of pain makes
a pause in his speech, and with the tenth chapter begins a long address
to the Most High, not fierce as before, but sorrowful, subdued.
"_My soul is weary of my life.
I will give free course to my complaint;
I will speak in bitterness of my soul._"
It is scarcely possible to touch the threnody that follows without
marring its pathetic and profound beauty. There is an exquisite
dignity of restraint and frankness in this appeal to the Creator. He
is an Artist whose fine work is in peril, and that from His own
seeming carelessness of it, or more dreadful to conceive, His
resolution to destroy it.
First the cry is, "Do not condemn me. Is it good unto Thee that Thou
shouldest despise the work of Thine hands?" It is marvellous to Job
that he should be scorned as worthless, while at the same time God
seems to shine on the counsel of the wicked. How can that, O Thou Most
High, be in harmony with Thy nature? He puts a supposition, which even
in stating it he must refuse, "Hast Thou eyes of flesh? or seest Thou
as man seeth?" A jealous man, clothed with a little brief authority,
might probe into the misdeeds of a fellow-creature. But God cannot do
so. His majesty forbids; and especially since He knows, for one thing,
that Job is not guilty, and, for another thing, that no one can escape
His hands. Men often lay hold of the innocent, and torture them to
discover imputed crimes. The supposition that God acts like a despot
or the servant of a despot is made only to be cast aside. But he goes
back on his appeal to God as Creator, and bethinks him of that tender
fashioning of the body which seems an argument for as tender a care
of the soul and the spirit-life. Much of power and lovingkindness goes
to the perfecting of the body and the development of the physical life
out of weakness and embryonic form. Can He who has so wrought, who has
added favour and apparent love, have been concealing all the time a
design of mockery? Even in creating, had God the purpose of making His
creature a mere plaything for the self-will of Omnipotence?
"_Yet these things Thou didst hide in Thine heart._"
These things--the desolate home, the outcast life, the leprosy. Job
uses a strange word: "I _know_ that this was with Thee." His
conclusion is stated roughly, that nothing can matter in dealing with
such a Creator. The insistence of the friends on the hope of
forgiveness, Job's own consciousness of integrity go for nothing.
"_Were I to sin Thou wouldst mark me,
And Thou wouldst not acquit me of iniquity.
Were I wicked, woe unto me;
Were I righteous, yet should I not lift up my head._"
The supreme Power of the world has taken an aspect not of unreasoning
force, but of determined ill-will to man. The only safety seems to be in
lying quiet so as not to excite against him the activity of this awful
God who hunts like a lion and delights in marvels of wasteful strength.
It appears that, having been once roused, the Divine Enemy will not
cease to persecute. New witnesses, new causes of indignation would be
found; a changing host of troubles would follow up the attack.
I have ventured to interpret the whole address in terms of
supposition, as a theory Job flings out in the utter darkness that
surrounds him. He does not adopt it. To imagine that he really
believes this, or that the writer of the book intended to put forward
such a theory as even approximately true, is quite impossible. And
yet, when one thinks of it, perhaps impossible is too strong a word.
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God is a fundamental truth; but it
has been so conceived and wrought with as to lead many reasoners into
a dream of cruelty and irresponsible force not unlike that which
haunts the mind of Job. Something of the kind has been argued for with
no little earnestness by men who were religiously endeavouring to
explain the Bible and professed to believe in the love of God to the
world. For example: the annihilation of the wicked is denied by one
for the good reason that God has a profound reverence for being or
existence, so that he who is once possessed of will must exist for
ever; but from this the writer goes on to maintain that the wicked are
useful to God as the material on which His justice operates, that
indeed they have been created solely for everlasting punishment in
order that through them the justice of the Almighty may be clearly
seen. Against this very kind of theology Job is in revolt. In the
light even of his world it was a creed of darkness. That God hates
wrong-doing, that everything selfish, vindictive, cruel, unclean,
false, shall be driven before Him--who can doubt? That according to
His decree sin brings its punishment yielding the wages of death--who
can doubt? But to represent Him who has made us all, and must have
foreseen our sin, as without any kind of responsibility for us,
dashing in pieces the machines He has made because they do not serve
His purpose, though He knew even in making them that they would
not--what a hideous falsehood is this; it can justify God only at the
expense of undeifying Him.
One thing this Book of Job teaches, that we are not to go against our
own sincere reason nor our sense of justice and truth in order to
square facts with any scheme or any theory. Religious teaching and
thought must affirm nothing that is not entirely frank, purely just,
and such as we could, in the last resort, apply out and out to
ourselves. Shall man be more just than God, more generous than God,
more faithful than God? Perish the thought, and every system that
maintains so false a theory and tries to force it on the human mind!
Nevertheless, let there be no falling into the opposite error; from
that, too, frankness will preserve us. No sincere man, attentive to
the realities of the world and the awful ordinances of nature, can
suspect the Universal Power of indifference to evil, of any design to
leave law without sanction. We do not escape at one point; God is our
Father; righteousness is vindicated, and so is faith.
As the colloquies proceed, the impression is gradually made that the
writer of this book is wrestling with that study which more and more
engages the intellect of man--What is the real? How does it stand
related to the ideal, thought of as righteousness, as beauty, as
truth? How does it stand related to God, sovereign and holy? The
opening of the book might have led straight to the theory that the
real, the present world charged with sin, disaster, and death, is not
of the Divine order, therefore is of a Devil. But the disappearance of
Satan throws aside any such idea of dualism, and pledges the writer to
find solution, if he find it at all, in one will, one purpose, one
Divine event. On Job himself the burden and the effort descend in his
conflict with the real as disaster, enigma, impending death, false
judgment, established theology and schemes of explanation. The ideal
evades him, is lost between the rising wave and the lowering sky. In
the whole horizon he sees no clear open space where it can unfold the
day. But it remains in his heart; and in the night-sky it waits where
the great constellations shine in their dazzling purity and eternal
calm, brooding silent over the world as from immeasurable distance far
withdrawn. Even from that distance God sends forth and will accomplish
a design. Meanwhile the man stretches his hands in vain from the
shadowed earth to those keen lights, ever so remote and cold.