'Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not
thou the chastening of the Almighty: 18. For He maketh sore, and
bindeth up: He woundeth, and His hands make whole. 19. He shall
deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch
thee. 20. In famine He shall redeem thee from death: and in war from
the power of the sword. 21. Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the
tongue: neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh.
22. At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh: neither shalt thou be
afraid of the beasts of the earth. 23. For thou shalt be in league
with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at
peace with thee. 24. And thou shalt know that thy tabernacle shall be
in peace; and thou shalt visit thy habitation, and shalt not sin. 25.
Thou shalt know also that thy seed shall be great, and thine offspring
as the grass of the earth. 26. Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full
age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season. 27. Lo this, we
have searched it, so it is; hear it, and know thou it for thy
good.'--JOB v. 17-27.
The close of the Book of Job shows that his friends' speeches were
defective, and in part erroneous. They all proceeded on the assumption
that suffering was the fruit of sin--a principle which, though true in
general, is not to be unconditionally applied to specific cases. They
all forgot that good men might be exposed to it, not as punishment,
nor even as correction, but as trial, to 'know what was in their
hearts.'
Eliphaz is the best of the three friends, and his speeches embody much
permanent truth, and rise, as in this passage, to a high level of
literary and artistic beauty. There are few lovelier passages in
Scripture than this glowing description of the prosperity of the man
who accepts God's chastisements; and, on the whole, the picture is
true. But the underlying belief in the uniform coincidence of inward
goodness and outward good needs to be modified by the deeper teaching
of the New Testament before it can be regarded as covering all the
facts of life.
Eliphaz is gathering up, in our passage, the threads of his speech. He
bases upon all that he has been saying the exhortation to Job to be
thankful for his sorrows. With a grand paradox, he declares the man
who is afflicted to be happy. And therein he strikes an eternally true
note. It is good to be made to drink a cup of sorrow. Flesh calls pain
evil, but spirit knows it to be good. The list of our blessings is not
only written in bright inks, but many are inscribed in black. And the
reason why the sad heart should be a happy heart is because, as
Eliphaz believed, sadness is God's fatherly correction, intended to
better the subject of it. 'Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,' says
the Epistle to the Hebrews, in full accord with Eliphaz.
But his well-meant and true words flew wide of their mark, for two
reasons. They were chillingly didactic, and it is vinegar upon nitre
to stand over an agonised soul and preach platitudes in an
unsympathetic voice. And they assumed unusual sin in Job as the
explanation of his unparalleled pains, while the prologue tells us
that his sufferings were not fruits of his sin, but trials of his
righteousness. He was horrified at Job's words, which seemed to him
full of rebellion and irreverence; and he made no allowance for the
wild cries of an agonised heart when he solemnly warned the sufferer
against 'despising' God's chastening. A more sympathetic ear would
have detected the accent of faith in the groans.
The collocation, in verse 18, of making sore and binding up, does not
merely express sequence, but also purpose. The wounding is in order to
healing. The wounds are merciful surgery; and their intention is
health, like the cuts that lay open an ulcer, or the scratches for
vaccination. The view of suffering in these two verses is not
complete, but it goes far toward completeness in tracing it to God, in
asserting its disciplinary intention, in pointing to the divine
healing which is meant to follow, and in exhorting to submission. We
may recall the beautiful expansion of that exhortation in Hebrews,
where 'faint not' is added to 'despise not,' so including the two
opposite and yet closely connected forms of misuse of sorrow,
according as we stiffen our wills against it, and try to make light of
it, or yield so utterly to it as to collapse. Either extreme equally
misses the corrective purpose of the grief.
On this general statement follows a charming picture of the
blessedness which attends the man who has taken his chastisement
rightly. After the thunderstorm come sunshine and blue, and the song
of birds. But, lovely as it is, and capable of application in many
points to the life of every man who trustfully yields to God's will,
it must not be taken as a literally and absolutely true statement of
God's dealings with His children. If so regarded, it would hopelessly
be shattered against facts; for the world is full of instances of
saintly men and women who have not experienced in their outward lives
such sunny calm and prosperity stretching to old age as are here
promised. Eliphaz is not meant to be the interpreter of the mysteries
of Providence, and his solution is decisively rejected at the close.
But still there is much in this picture which finds fulfilment in all
devout lives in a higher sense than his intended meaning.
The first point is that the devout soul is exempt from calamities
which assail those around it. These are such as are ordinarily in
Scripture recognised as God's judgments upon a people. Famine and war
devastate, but the devout soul abides in peace, and is satisfied. Now
it is not true that faith and submission make a wall round a man, so
that he escapes from such calamities. In the supernatural system of
the Old Testament such exemptions were more usual than with us, though
this very Book of Job and many a psalm show that devout hearts had
even then to wrestle with the problem of the prosperity of the wicked
and the indiscriminate fall of widespread calamities on the good and
bad.
But in its deepest sense (which, however, is not Eliphaz's sense) the
faithful man is saved from the evils which he, in common with his
faithless neighbour, experiences. Two men are smitten down by the same
disease, or lie dying on a battlefield, shattered by the same shell,
and the one receives the fulfilment of the promise, 'there shall no
evil touch thee,' and the other does not. For the evil in the evil is
all sucked out of it, and the poison is wiped off the arrow which
strikes him who is united to God by faith and submission. Two women
are grinding at the same millstone, and the same blow kills them both;
but the one is delivered, and the other is not. They who pass through
an evil, and are not drawn away from God by it, but brought nearer to
Him, are hid from its power. To die may be our deliverance from death.
Eliphaz's promises rise still higher in verses 22 and 23, in which is
set forth a truth that in its deepest meaning is of universal
application. The wild beasts of the earth and the stones of the field
will be in league with the man who submits to God's will. Of course
the beasts come into view as destructive, and the stones as injuring
the fertility of the fields. There is, probably, allusion to the story
of Paradise and the Fall. Man's relation to nature was disturbed by
sin; it will be rectified by his return to God. Such a doctrine of the
effects of sin in perverting man's relation to creatures runs all
through Scripture, and is not to be put aside as mere symbolism.
But the large truth underlying the words here is that, if we are
servants of God, we are masters of everything. 'All things work
together for good to them that love God.' All things serve the soul
that serves God; as, on the other hand, all are against him that does
not, and 'the stars in their courses fight against' those who fight
against Him. All things are ours, if we are Christ's. The many
mediaeval legends of saints attended by animals, from St. Jerome
and his lion downwards to St. Francis preaching to the birds, echo the
thoughts here. A gentle, pure soul, living in amity with dumb
creatures, has wonderful power to attract them. They who are at peace
with God can scarcely be at war with any of God's creatures.
Gentleness is stronger than iron bands. 'Cords of love' draw most
surely.
Peace and prosperity in home and possessions are the next blessings
promised (ver. 24). 'Thou shalt visit [look over] thy household, and
shalt miss nothing.' No cattle have strayed or been devoured by evil
beasts, or stolen, as all Job's had been. Alas! Eliphaz knew nothing
about commercial crises, and the great system of credit by which one
scoundrel's fall may bring down hundreds of good men and patient
widows, who look over their possessions and find nothing but worthless
shares. Yet even for those who find all at once that the herd is cut
off from the stall, their tabernacle may still be in peace, and though
the fold be empty they may miss nothing, if in the empty place they
find God. That is what Christians may make out of the words; but it is
not what was originally meant by them.
In like manner the next blessing, that of a numerous posterity, does
not depend on moral or religious condition, as Eliphaz would make out,
and in modern days is not always regarded as a blessing. But note the
singular heartlessness betrayed in telling Job, all whose flocks and
herds had been carried off, and his children laid dead in their
festival chamber, that abundant possessions and offspring were the
token of God's favour. The speaker seems serenely unconscious that he
was saying anything that could drive a knife into the tortured man. He
is so carried along on the waves of his own eloquence, and so absorbed
in stringing together the elements of an artistic whole, that he
forgets the very sorrows which he came to comfort. There are not a few
pious exhorters of bleeding hearts who are chargeable with the same
sin. The only hand that will bind up without hurting is a hand that is
sympathetic to the finger-tips. No eloquence or poetic beauty or
presentation of undeniable truths will do as substitutes for that.
The last blessing promised is that which the Old Testament places so
high in the list of good things--long life. The lovely metaphor in
which that promise is couched has become familiar to us all. The ripe
corn gathered into a sheaf at harvest-time suggests festival rather
than sadness. It speaks of growth accomplished, of fruit matured, of
the ministries of sun and rain received and used, and of a joyful
gathering into the great storehouse. There is no reference in the
speech to the uses of the sheaf after it is harvested, but we can
scarcely avoid following its history a little farther than the 'grave'
which to Eliphaz seems the garner. Are all these matured powers to
have no field for action? Were all these miracles of vegetation set in
motion only in order to grow a crop which should be reaped, and there
an end? What is to be done with the precious fruit which has taken so
long time and so much cultivation to grow? Surely it is not the
intention of the Lord of the harvest to let it rot when it has been
gathered. Surely we are grown here and ripened and carried hence for
something.
But that is not in our passage. This, however, may be drawn from
it--that maturity does not depend on length of days; and, however
Eliphaz meant to promise long life, the reality is that the devout
soul may reckon on complete life, whether it be long or short. God
will not call His children home till their schooling is done; and,
however green and young the corn may seem to our eyes, He knows which
heads in the great harvest-field are ready for removal, and gathers
only these. The child whose little coffin may be carried under a boy's
arm may be ripe for harvesting. Not length of days, but likeness to
God, makes maturity; and if we die according to the will of God, it
cannot but be that we shall come to our grave in a full age, whatever
be the number of years carved on our tombstones.
The speech ends with a somewhat self-complacent exhortation to the
poor, tortured man: 'We have searched it, so it is.' We wise men
pledge our wisdom and our reputation that this is true. Great is
authority. An ounce of sympathy would have done more to commend the
doctrine than a ton of dogmatic self-confidence. 'Hear it, and know
thou it for thyself.' Take it into thy mind. Take it into thy mind and
heart, and take it for thy good. It was a frosty ending, exasperating
in its air of patronage, of superior wisdom, and in its lack of any
note of feeling. So, of course, it set Job's impatience alight, and
his next speech is more desperate than his former. When will
well-meaning comforters learn not to rub salt into wounds while they
seem to be dressing them?