I NEED A DAYSMAN - WHERE IS HE?

THE CRY FOR A DAYSMAN

"There is no daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both." JOB 9:33

"There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus."—1 TIMOTHY 2: 5

            Whatever the dramatic interest in the Book of Job may be, and it is great; whatever interest we may find in listening to the eloquent addresses of the philosophers, or the impassioned responses of Job, the final value of the book lies deeper. That is to be found in the fact that here we see a man stripped to the nakedness of his own individuality; and as we listen to these men talking to him, and to his replies to them, surprisingly through the process some great cry comes up out of his essential elemental human nature.

            The first of these cries which arrests me is found in these words:

"There is no daysman betwixt us,

That might lay his hand upon us both."

            This occurs in the first cycle of controversy between Job and his friends, and in the course of his reply to Bildad. Bildad had argued, and quite correctly argued, that God must be just. Job commenced his answer by agreeing so far, as he said:

"Of a truth I know that it is so,"

And followed this declaration by asking a question:

"How can a man be just with God?"

            It is of vital importance that we should understand that question. It does not ask how a man can be justified before God. It was a forensic question, a word of the law-court. Job meant, how can a man argue his case with God so as to justify himself? His friends had declared that he was suffering on account of sin. His question was as to how he could argue his case with God, so as to prove that this accusation was false. Continuing, he gave his reasons why it was impossible; and it was then that this great cry came out of his life:

"There is no daysman betwixt us,

That might lay his hand upon us both."

            The cry revealed Job's apprehension of the only way by which a man could have dealings with God. Our method of consideration will be that of considering the cry, and then showing how the final answer to the need revealed is found in Jesus, covering the ground by the consideration of the two texts brought thus into association.

"There is no daysman betwixt us,

That might lay his hand upon us both."

"There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus."

            The cry of Job was born of a double con­sciousness which at the moment was mastering him; first, that of the appalling greatness and majesty of God; and second, that of his own comparative littleness. This was not the ques­tion of a man who had dismissed God from his life and from the universe, and was living merely upon the earth level. It was rather the cry of a man who knew God, and was over­whelmed by the sense of His greatness. As he ran on, he illustrated this in such sentences as, He "removeth the mountains," "He over­turneth them in His anger," He "shaketh the earth out of her place; and the pillars thereof tremble. He commands the sun," and so forth.

            Over against that was the sense of his own comparative smallness. He felt he could not get to this God. He was altogether too small.

            The Hebrew singer, David, had the same feel­ing from a slightly different angle when he said:

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers,

The moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained;

What is man that Thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that Thou visitest him?"

            There we have the same double consciousness, that of the greatness of God, and the comparative littleness of man. There was a difference, however, in that David asked how can so great a Being notice so small a being; while Job's was rather, How can so small a being have dealings with so great a Being?

            Out of that double consciousness came this sense of need. The fundamental necessity was to get to God, but that to Job was the diffi­culty; and here there flashed forth this cry revealing the sense of the need for a daysman. To bring the idea into more modern terminology, it is as though Job had said: There is no umpire, there is no arbiter, there is no one who can stand between us, interpreting each to the other; me to God, and God to me. There is no one to lay his hand upon us.

            The laying of the hand suggests the imposing of authority on both, on the basis of a true interpretation of each to the other.

            Here, then, was Job crying out for someone who could stand authoritatively between God and himself, and so create a way of meeting, a possibility of contact.

            It is indeed a great cry found in this ancient writing. Many centuries have gone since the book was written and that cry escaped the human heart. Nevertheless, it is a cry of elemental human nature, and expresses an abiding need.

            Man's nature demands God for the full realization of itself. No man can live in the full sense of the word, unless he has conscious dealings with God. It is true that God has dealings with every man. There is no escape from Him. No single life on the earth is removed from God. He is the God in Whom we live and move, and have our being; and that quite without regard to our attitude towards Him. To use an old and familiar illustration. In the dark and disastrous night when Belshazzar and his lords were given to drunkenness and obscenity, Daniel, before giving him an interpretation of the handwriting on the wall, said, "The God in Whose hand thy breath is, and Whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified."

            This fact of contact with God is not enough for the realization of life. The fact that God makes His sun to shine so as to heal and to bless, without reference to character, does not in itself ensure the full realization of life. Life only becomes complete when man has dealings with God directly, and consciously. That is the true dignity of life. All the tragedy of human failure results from the fact that man has come to think of himself callously, instead of magnificently.

            This being granted, we also have to face a universal sense of distance; or of some discrepancy between God and man, so that men are not able to have conscious communion with Him. Prayer seems to be an utterance to the void, with no answering voice. There­fore, when by reason of strain or stress of any kind, man becomes conscious of his need for communion with God, at the same moment he is conscious of his need for some inter­mediary. This was the deepest meaning of the cry of Job:

"There is no daysman betwixt us,

That might lay his hand upon us both."

            We now turn from the elemental cry of Job, and from the Old Testament, to consider the apostolic word concerning Jesus. "There is one Mediator between God and man." That is the Gospel in brief. That is Christianity fundamentally. Said Job, "There is no daysman." The answer is, "There is one Mediator." Elemental humanity, aroused to a sense of the necessity for God, a consciousness that God cannot be reached, cried out for someone to stand between them. At last in clearest tones the answer is found in the declaration that such a One is found, "the Man Christ Jesus."

            Let us examine this a little closely. The word "Mediator" conveys exactly the same idea as the word "Daysman." I do not quite like the word that first suggests itself to me, but reverently I will use it; it means a middle­man; or as we have already said, an arbiter; someone standing between man and God, someone who puts his hand on man and on God; someone who lays his hand on God with authority, the authority of partnership and fellowship; the authority of the fact that He is one with God, and enters into all the Divine counsels, and One Who lays His hand on me with the same authority, authority based upon the fact of His own humanity, that He knows human nature, not merely with the intellectual knowledge of Deity, but with the experimental know­ledge of the Incarnation. "The Man Christ Jesus" thus lays His hand on God and on man.

But again, of this one Mediator we are told that He "gave Himself a ransom." At once we reach the point of light and interpretation. It is not merely that He is Divine and human, but that by Him something has been done which makes the way of approach to God possible.

            The link of the declaration becomes a revelation. What is it that separates between man and God? A Hebrew prophet once ad­dressing the people of his own nationality, uttered these significant words, "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear." (Isa. 59:1) That is to say, if it be that man is unable to reach God, God can reach man, and hear him. Then the prophet gave the reason for this inability on the part of man. "But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid His face from you, that He will not hear." That is the reason of man's failure to get to God, and to have dealings with Him. The ideal man, that is, man according to the Divine purpose, needs no arbiter between himself and God. A sinless man needs no mediator. He will not cry out for a daysman. Ideal man walked with God, and talked with God. That was true of man as he was created according to the Biblical revelation.

            When we overleap the centuries or the millenniums, as the case may be, we find God's Second Man. He needed no arbiter between Himself and God. He walked with God and talked with God everywhere; heard the beauty of the Divine message in the songs of the birds, and saw the Divine glory flaming in flowers.

            The reason why man is conscious of his in­ability to thus commune with God is that something has intervened. There has been a rupture, and there is therefore a lack of articula­tion. Man was created to walk and talk with God, to think the thoughts of God after Him. All human success along the lines of science simply comes from the fact that man is struggling after that very thing. Nevertheless all the while there is a definite hiatus, a gap, between man and God.           Again, according to the Biblical account, that rupture was created when man fell from the spiritual to the psychic. He lost touch with God by reason of his rebellion against the government of God. By that rebellion he lost his sense of God, and the sense of his own spiritual nature. This is not to say that the psychic or the mental is essentially wrong; but it always fails when it is divorced from the spiritual. When man descended by rebellion to the level of the merely mental, he began a quest after God with the powers of his mind, and has never been able to find Him.

            Turning over the page in this Book of Job we hear Zophar speaking, and he said to Job:

"Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?

It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know? "

            The struggle of humanity to make contact with God through searching with nothing other than the mental occupied in the search, is always a failure, and is disastrous.

            It is at that point that Jesus comes in with His answer. "There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself a ransom." The word antilutron, here rendered "ransom," occurs only at this point in the whole of the New Testament. Moreover it is a word unknown in classical Greek. It always seems to me at this point Paul almost coined a new word. Nevertheless, I find something very much like it in Matthew and in Mark. That is to say, they both report Jesus as using the word lutron, as He said that the Son of Man had come to "give His life a ransom for many." (Matt. 20:28)

            An examination of the word shows that it refers to an activity wherein and whereby the sin which has shut us out from God is taken away; and so an activity wherein and whereby we are brought back, out of the realm of the merely mental into that of the spiritual. Thus the way to God is open. Therefore He is the Daysman.

            By that intermediation He restores the possibility of direct and immediate fellowship with God. When man yields himself, not theoretically, but actually, to the Man Christ Jesus, Who is the Mediator, he finds that the evil that had blinded him, and made him in­sensible of God, is removed; and direct dealing with God becomes not merely possible, but an actual experience. As Paul says in another of his letters, "we have access" through Him to the Father. Such access means not merely knowing much about God, but knowing God.

            It was indeed a great cry which Job uttered, born of his sense of lack of first-hand contact with God; and the cry has found its full and complete answer in the One of our humanity, and yet Himself one with God, Who becomes a Mediator, laying His hand with ultimate authority upon God, and upon man, thus bringing them into conscious fellowship.