INTRODUCTORY
“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil."—Job 1:1
In magnificence of argument and beauty of style, the Book of Job is one of the greatest in literature. It is surrounded by clouds of mystery as to authorship, as to the characters presented, and as to the period of its writing. Moreover, there have been almost endless discussions as to the ultimate purpose and value of it. The book has been described as "the problem of pain." I think that may abide, but if it presents the problem of pain, it does not afford any solution of the problem. It is very difficult, and perhaps impossible, to crystallize into anything like a brief statement the purpose of the book.
Nevertheless its value is that it is the Book of Job. That is to say, it is the account of a man. Everything gathers around that central fact; and as we read, we see this man related to the spirit world, accessible to the approach of spiritual forces outside his own personality both for good and evil. In other words, God and Satan are revealed as interested in this man. We see him also related to other human beings, his wife, and a little group of friends gathered round him. Many acquaintances are referred to, but they disappear, very quickly disappear, as acquaintances do in circumstances such as those in which Job found himself. But ultimately we see him within the consciousness of his own personality. One great element of the book is that all things seem to retire, or to be retired from him, until he is alone with himself.
It is to this last phase of the revelation that I propose to devote a series of articles, Job within his own personality. While we move through, we shall hear the voices of the philosophers talking to him; we shall pay little attention to them. Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar, and that fine young man who appears at the end, Elihu, will all be heard; but we shall do with them very largely what we have often to do with the philosophers, let them talk, while we attend to profounder matters!
I submit then, by way of introduction to these meditations, that as we take our way through this book, ever and anon we hear this man Job say things which arise out of his own deepest elemental experience. He replied to the philosophers. Thank God he did. But ever and anon, in the midst of his speech to those who were arguing with him, there welled up from the deepest of his consciousness, some challenge, some cry, and some question. Those are the things to which we want to give our special attention. Each one of them is elemental, and affords a deep insight into human nature.
The general thesis of our articles is that of the answers of Jesus to Job. If there be no New Testament, or if we take away from it its essential value in its presentation of Christ, then we still have the Book of Job; it will remain in literature, but it will be the record of an unanswered agony. There is no answer to Job till we find it in Jesus. But we find an answer to every such cry of Job in Jesus. These are therefore Old Testament questions that get answered fully in the New Testament and the Truth Himself.
As an introduction to this line of consideration, it is important that we refer to what we see of the man, as to his surroundings, his relation to the spirit-world, and his relation to human beings, in order that currently we may listen to him.
First, then, let us see the man. We are told his name. We are told that he came from, or belonged to, Uz. About Uz we know practically nothing. Such a place is mentioned in Genesis. Whether it is the same or not does not matter. The name passes and the location passes. It is the man we want to see. He is at once revealed in the words, "That man was perfect and upright, . . . one that feared God and eschewed evil." Two words thus describe the man; and two phrases tell us the secret of his being what he was. The man is described as "perfect and upright."
We must not read into that word "perfect" all that our English word may mean. It does not mean at all that he was a sinless being.
The word "perfect," the Hebrew word, simply means complete; he was complete. I think I will put the thought of that word into a phrase with which we are quite familiar. I do not know that I like it, but it will help us. It means he was an all-round man in the best sense of that word.
But more, he was "upright." The Hebrew word means straight. He was an all-round man, and he was straight. I do not know that we could pay any man today a higher compliment than to say that of him. The statement so far has not touched upon his relationship with God. It has had to do rather with his human relationships. Job had nothing in him that his fellow-men could bring as a charge against him. He was complete and straight.
But the recorder also gives the secret of this uprightness or completeness of Job. He says he was one "that feared God." That is religion. "And eschewed evil." That is morality. The two things are put into juxtaposition of statement, as they always are in fact. That is the ultimate meaning of the word of Jesus; the first law, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God"; (Luke 10:27) and the second like to it, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hangeth the whole law and the prophets." Morality is ever rooted in religion. A man who is an all-round man in the true sense of the word, and who is known to his neighbors as a straight man, a man against whom men can bring no specific charge, that man has dealings with God. He "feared God." And he turned down evil—yes, that is it exactly—eschewed. He turned down evil. A man with an upward outlook, and from the upward look he learned how to deal with all the things by which he was surrounded; he turned down evil.
The remarkable fact is that according to the record, that estimate of Job was ratified by God Himself. God said to Satan the same thing about him: "A perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil." That Divine estimate is intensified, because God said of him, "There is none like him in the earth."
So we are brought face to face with a man of integrity, a man of uprightness, a man having relationship with God, turning down evil wherever it presented itself. It is very important we should remember that.
Now for the account. We watch this man, and we do so in the realm of the physical, in the realm of the mental, and in the realm of the spiritual. This man, straight and complete, fearing God, turning down evil, is seen visited by Satan, and, as a result, swiftly came overwhelming calamities. The reason of these calamities is not to be found in the man himself. That is the mistake courtly Eliphaz, and argumentative Bildad, and blunt Zophar made. They all believed that the reason of his calamity was something in himself. The book introduces him in such a way as to make it perfectly plain that it was not so. We see Job stripped of everything upon which man naturally depends on the side of the natural. Stripped of wealth, suddenly reduced from opulence to poverty. Stripped of his children, who are swept out. Stripped of his own health. The vim and the virility and the vigour of his manhood all taken from him, sapped away. Presently the stripping goes further, and he loses the partnership of love in faith. I am referring to the account of his wife. Don't let us criticize her until we have been where she was. See what it meant to him. So far, wealth gone, children gone, she had stood by; and then there came the moment when her love-lit eyes looking at her man in agony, physical agony, she said, "Renounce God, and die." Which meant, I would rather know you were dead, than see you suffer. I sympathize with her. So does every woman. Yes, but get into Job's soul. She who had stood by, the companion of his faith, for very love of him is suggesting to him that he abandon his faith. He is stripped of her partnership in faith.
And still the process runs on, and it is a long one. His friends—he loses them. They came. It is an old, old account. One has often said it, but I am going to repeat it. I like these men; I like Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar for two or three reasons. I like them first because they came to see him when he was in the darkness, when the other crowd of acquaintances had all gone. Then I like them because when they came into his presence they sat still and shut their mouths for seven days. That is a great proof of friendship, the ability to say nothing. And yet again, when they did speak, I like them because they said everything they had to say to him and not to other people about him. The only mistake they made was that they tried to put him into a philosophy that did not hold him. He welcomed them, he was so glad to see them that he poured out his soul in a great wail of agony which he had been nursing, and then he found that they did not understand him. He lost his friends.
That brings us to the mentality of Job, his own personal consciousness. There was rooted in him a conviction of integrity which was assailed by his friends. He was misunderstood. Perhaps there is nothing worse in human life than that our lovers should misunderstand, when we cannot explain things, try as we will. In the case of Job the result was that currently he lost the sense of the greatness of his own personality. At the beginning, in the midst of the agony, he had said, "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither." As though he had said, I am still there, whatever happens. But he lost this, and cursed the day he was born. And yet more! In the gloom and darkness, he lost his sense of God as just. He never lost the sense of God in some ways; but he did lose his conviction that God was just. God, yes, always God; but surrounded with fog and mist and mystery. God became the tragedy in his thinking. Thus we see the man: physically stripped; mentally misunderstood; and therefore spiritually, all the way through struggling, groping after a solution of God as the One Who was dealing with him.
Thus, taken as a whole, with that tragic background, this Book of Job faces a fact which is everywhere apparent in human life, and which still causes perplexity. What is it? That there is suffering, and sometimes tragic and terrible suffering in the world, which is not the result of the sin of the sufferer. In this great central book of the Biblical literature, in this drama of Job, that great fact is faced: a man suffering, not because he has done wrong. We are still facing it everywhere. In every land, in city or in the country, we are faced by people thus suffering. In some countries on this earth are people who are constantly living in conditions that create suffering on a grand scale as the rest of the world glides on not knowing their experience. But even in America as well as other sections on this cursed planet Satan has his party.
If the final light may not be clear, I suggest that it shows that a human life has wider values than that of its own existence or experience; or rather, that out of the experiences of one life, there may be wider, higher values than the individual at the time may know. I will content myself now with saying one thing only. Through this man's suffering the devil's blasphemy against humanity was denied.
In the dramatic scene at the beginning, transactions in the spiritual world are revealed. The sons of God present themselves before God, the term "sons of God" being equivalent to angelic beings, the messengers of God. Among them came Satan, angelic, but fallen: and God asks him, "Whence comest thou?" There is tragedy in his answer. "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it." That reveals the endless restlessness of evil. Then came the question of God. "Hast thou considered My servant Job?" "Considered" is a very strong word. It means, Hast thou been watching him? Hast thou been examining him? Hast thou been going round and round the citadel of this man's soul, trying to find some way to break in? "Hast thou considered?" Now listen to Satan. "Doth Job fear God for nought?" That is the devil's blasphemy against human nature. Ie runs on. "Hast Thou not made a hedge about him, and about all that he hath on every side?" That was true. Said the devil, "Thou hast blessed the work of his hands." Perfectly true. "And his substance is increased in the land." And that also was true.
But listen again: "But put forth Thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will renounce Thee to Thy face." The devil's blasphemy against humanity was that man serves God for what he can get out of Him. It is an old song, but it is set to many a modern tune. They are still saying it. Much of this scintillating brilliant nonsense that is being published in the form of fiction, and in essays today, is saying the same thing. They say a preacher is continuing to preach what he does not believe, because he is afraid of losing his living.
They say the old lady goes to church, because of the blankets given away at Christmas. The same thing is meant when clever people talk about the rice Christians in China.
God said in effect, 'Go to! try it out; take away everything.' Thus Job is a battle-ground between God and Satan, between heaven and hell, between the truth about human nature at its deepest and the lie the devil is telling. Job went through all the process with an honesty that is the more magnificent, because at times he was hot in protest, and cried out to God for justice, and asked Him to maintain his integrity. In the end, the hissing lie of Satan the serpent was answered.
In all this there is permanent value. There are many who do not know the ultimate meaning of the experiences through which they are passing today. They are hidden away, with some suffering, some agony, some trouble gripping their hearts; not the result of their own sin. They say, What is God doing? I cannot tell them. But this book suggests that there is a meaning, and there is a value.
Job through all his agony stood up, and the literature telling the account has come down all the ages, giving the lie to the devil's lie about humanity. I think it is fair speculation, that Job, in the life beyond, will be thanking God for all he passed through, if he made that contribution to the truth of God about the lie of the devil.
Taking the book as a whole, it certainly has this value also. It proves the inadequacy of human thinking in the presence of human experience. This is true both in the case of the philosophers, and in the case of Job himself. We listen to the philosophers, Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar, and that wonderful young man Elihu, who began by saying, old men are not always wise; and then did some marvelous thinking. If we study all the speeches of Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar and Elihu, we shall not find anything to object to in what they said. Their philosophy was perfectly correct and true so far as it went. Who will quarrel with Eliphaz when he says, "Acquaint now thyself with Him and be at peace?" All they said was true. But there stood a human soul, stripped and in agony, and all they said never reached him, never accounted for him. His experience defied the thinking of the philosophers.
It defied his own thinking, too. He thought as furiously as his friends, but he got no solution until there came a day in the magnificent drama when God first broke across the speech of the philosophers, and silenced them.
Just as Elihu was in the midst of his eloquence, God said:
"Who is this that darkeneth counsel
By words without knowledge?"
By words without knowledge?"
I think that is what God is saying today as He is listening to some of the philosophers. Who are these that darken counsel by a multiplicity of words? They may be honest, sincere; but human experience sometimes is too big for definitions, and laughs at philosophers, in its agony.
All this is equally true of Job. He tried and could not understand, and all his speeches reveal his ignorance of the deepest meaning of his own experiences.
One other thing. Taking the book as a whole, it presents a universe in which, whatever the problems, God is seen as ultimate. There is no greater book in the Bible on the ultimate sovereignty of God than this. It may not explain all His methods, but it reveals Him as present and acting. Satan, the arch-enemy of all, wanting to prove that God blundered when He made man, suggesting that a man only fears God because of sycophancy, because of what he can get out of Him. The devil with a lie, and eager to prove his own lie. But mark the dramatic majesty of it. He cannot touch a hair upon the back of a single camel that belongs to Job, until he has Divine permission. God is enthroned high over evil. It is a universe in which God reigns. There is a moral center to, and basis of, all things. That is the vision that made Browning sing what some of us so often quote, because we love it so:
"That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst."
In a final word, centering attention upon Job, what does the book show? A man stripped to the nakedness of his own personality, stripped to the nakedness of his own being,
divested of all the things which clothe the spirit; divested of all the things upon which a man depends as he takes his way through life; those precious things—possessions, and children, and health, and love in comradeship with faith, and the friends that gather about us, and the conviction of the greatness of our own personality, and of the justice of God—Job lost them all. We see a man in the appalling majestic loneliness of his own being. Watching him, we listen to him.
In doing so I am more than interested, I am arrested and held, by the splendid argument of the man as against the insufficiency of the philosophy of his friends. But I hear more. Every now and then great essential and elemental cries come up out of the center of that personality so stripped and lonely; cries of need, cries of questions, cries of challenge. Then I shut the book and find no answer to one of them. It is a great thing to have heard them. It is a great thing to have had that unveiling of human need, but there is no answer.
Then I turn to the New Testament, and I see one Jesus, Who began without any wealth,
Who went through life largely devoid of the things that others depend upon. But before I am through with Him I find He has answered every question Job asked, and supplied every need that Job revealed. So- we will consider the answers of Jesus to Job.
Old Testament questions that get fully and finally answered in the New Testament by Truth Himself.
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