The Book of Job is probably a late part of the Old Testament. It deals
with problems which indicate some advance in religious thought. Solemn
and magnificent, and for the most part sad; it is like a Titan
struggling with large problems, and seldom attaining to positive
conclusions in which the heart or the head can rest in peace. Here all
Job's mind is clouded with a doubt. He has just given utterance to an
intense longing for a life beyond the grave. His abode in Sheol is
thought of as in some sense a breach in the continuity of his
consciousness, but even that would be tolerable, if only he could be
sure that, after many days, God would remember him. Then that longing
gives way before the torturing question of the text, which dashes
aside the tremulous hope with its insistent interrogation. It is not
denial, but it is a doubt which palsies hope. But though he has no
certainty, he cannot part with the possibility, and so goes on to
imagine how blessed it would be if his longing were fulfilled. He
thinks that such a renewed life would be like the 'release' of a
sentry who had long stood on guard; he thinks of it as his swift,
joyous 'answer' to God's summons, which would draw him out from the
sad crowd of pale shadows and bring him back to warmth and reality.
His hope takes a more daring flight still, and he thinks of God as
yearning for His creature, as His creature yearns for Him, and having
'a desire to the work of His hands,' as if His heaven would be
incomplete without His servant. But the rapture and the vision pass,
and the rest of the chapter is all clouded over, and the devout hope
loses its light. Once again it gathers brightness in the twenty-first
chapter, where the possibility flashes out starlike, that 'after my
skin hath been thus destroyed, yet from my flesh shall I see God.'
These fluctuations of hope and doubt reveal to us the attitude of
devout souls in Israel at a late era of the national life. And if they
show us their high-water mark, we need not suppose that similar souls
outside the Old Testament circle had solid certainty where these had
but a variable hope. We know how large a development the doctrine of a
future life had in Assyria and in Egypt, and I suppose we are entitled
to say that men have always had the idea of a future. They have always
had the thought, sometimes as a fear, sometimes as a hope, but never
as a certainty. It has lacked not only certainty but distinctness. It
has lacked solidity also, the power to hold its own and sustain itself
against the weighty pressure of intrusive things seen and temporal.
But we need not go to the ends of the earth or to past generations for
examples of a doubting, superficial hold of the truth that man lives
through death and after it. We have only to look around us, and, alas!
we have only to look within us. This age is asking the question again,
and answering it in many tones, sometimes of indifferent disregard,
sometimes flaunting a stark negative without reasoned foundation,
sometimes with affirmatives with as little reason as these negatives.
The modern world is caught in the rush and whirl of life, has its own
sorrows to front, its own battles to fight, and large sections of it
have never come as near an answer to Job's question as Job did.