The passage: Job says: if only you would hide me in the grave and keep me secret until your wrath is past, set me a time and remember me! If a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my appointed time I will wait until my change comes. You will call, and I will answer; you will long for the work of your hands.
The book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems: from a position of the most vantageless realism, it assaults the very citadel of the ideal! Its hero sits among the ashes, covered with loathsome boils, scraping himself with a potsherd. Sore in body, mind, heart and spirit, he is the type of humanity in the depths of misery. I mean the individual endlessly repeated: Job is the human being, at the centre of pain’s assaults and fear’s invasions, which sooner or later threaten to overwhelm every man, show him enslaved to the external, and stir him to seek the infinite, where alone he is free. In leaden despair Job cries aloud to the unseen Might, scarcely known, which he still regards as the God of his life. It is no slave’s cry, no more than Prometheus’ defiance of Jupiter from his rock. Job is more overwhelmed than the Titan, for he is in infinite perplexity as well as pain, but there is no cowardice in his cry. Before the Judge he asserts his innocence and will not grovel, knowing that would insult the holy. He feels he has not deserved such suffering, and will neither tell nor listen to lies for God.
Prometheus is more stonily patient than Job. Job is no Stoic; he bemoans himself like a brave child who thinks he suffers wrong and recoils, bewildered, from the unreason of it. Prometheus faces a tyrant he despises, and endures with unbewailing unsubmission, upheld by knowing he fights humanity’s battle against an all but all-powerful Selfishness; endurance is the only weapon that avails. Job is more troubled because the one who has laid on him a torture so heavy that he takes his flesh in his teeth for pain is He who is the head and heart, the beginning and end of things. Job cannot and will not believe him a tyrant; even as he pleads against his dealing with him he loves him, and looks to him as the source of life and gladness. He dares not think God unjust, yet cannot allow that he has done anything to deserve this. Hence his profound perplexity: how can the two be reconciled? It has not occurred to him that what it would be unfair to lay on him as punishment may be laid on him as favour, by a supreme love that would give him blessing beyond all prayer—blessing he would not dare ask if he saw what it requires, but which, once known, he would endure all again to have. So he is sorely divided: he must not think God has mistaken him, yet the seeming mistake forces itself on him at every turn. He had never relaxed his pursuit of a godly life, yet the God he acknowledged in all his ways has raised his hand against him as rarely against any transgressor: his children swept away, his possessions gone, he is poor as the poorest and diseased as the vilest. Worse than all, death is denied him; he is left to linger in self-loathing, meeting at every turn the awful suggestion that God has cast him off. He does not deny there is evil in him—“Do you open your eyes on such a one,” he pleads, “and bring me into judgment with you?”—but he denies he has been a wicked man, a doer of what he knew to be evil, or that there was any guile in him. And who, because he knows and laments the guile in himself, will dare deny that there was once a Nathanael in the world? Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran, the book would have been very different: his perplexity would have been how a just God could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if he were a perfect being who chose the evil he knew in all its enormity. I call no one Master but Christ, and from him I learn that his quarrel with us is that we will not do what we know, will not come to him that we may have life. How much more powerful with men would be expostulation grounded on what they will not do rather than on what they have done!
Job’s child-like judgment of God had never been perverted, to the dishonour of the great Father, by the low popular theories that explain God’s ways through people who do not understand him. Such explanations suit those who do not care to know him, content to stare from afar at the cloud where thunders and voices come from; to those who would arise and go to the Father they are a grievous burden, threatening to sink them to Tophet. The contradiction between Job’s idea of God’s justice and what has befallen him haunts him, with a sting worse than all his other misery, but it is not fixed in hopelessness by an accepted explanation more frightful than itself. Let the world-sphinx put what riddles she will; she can devour no man while he waits an answer from the world-redeemer. Job refused his friends’ explanation because he knew it false; accepting the kind many would give him today would have meant being devoured at once by the monster. He holds to the skirt of God’s garment and besieges his door, the one source of true answer. No answer will do but the one God alone can give; for who but God can justify God’s ways to his creature?
We must not look for logic in a soul whose very consciousness is contradiction; misery is rarely logical, being itself a discord. Yet it is natural that Job, feeling as if God wronged him, should long to see God, to stand face to face with him and confront the One. His one hope is that if he could get God to listen and lay his case clear, God would see how things were, explain the matter, and give him peace: the man in the ashes would know that the foundations of the world still stand, and that God has not closed his eyes or—horror of horrors—ceased to be just. Surely the Just would set the mind of his justice-loving creature at rest!
His friends are good, religious men of the pharisaic type: men who pay court to God instead of coming into his presence as children; men whose traditional theories satisfy their feeble intellects and who therefore think everyone must accept them or perish; men anxious to appease God rather than trust him, who would rather receive salvation from God than God as their salvation. They would persuade Job to confess he was a hypocrite, insisting such things could not come on him but for wickedness, and, since they knew of no open wickedness, for some secret vileness. They grow angry when he will not be persuaded against his knowledge of himself. Nor was Job overweening, for the prologue prepares us: God says to the accuser, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?” God gives him into Satan’s hand confident of the result, and at the end approves what Job has said of himself. Yet the very appearance of God is enough to turn Job against himself: his part was to trust God altogether, in spite of every appearance and reality. He will justify himself no more. He sees that though God has not been punishing him for sins, he is far from what he ought to be: “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer you? I will lay my hand on my mouth.”
But let us look more closely at how Job thinks and speaks about God, and how he addresses him—so different from the pharisaic in all ages, in none more than our own.
Growing indignant at the idea that his nature needed such treatment, Job cries, “Am I a sea or a whale, that you set a watch over me?”—you know I am not wicked. “You set a print upon the heels of my feet!”—so that my footprints show the way I have gone. To his friends he cries: “Will you speak wickedly for God, and talk deceitfully for him?”—do you not know I am the man I say? “Will you accept his person?”—siding with him against me? “Is it good that he should search you out? or as one man mocks another, do you so mock him?”—saying what you do not think? “He will surely reprove you, if you secretly accept persons!”—even God’s own person!
Such words please the Father of spirits. He is not a God who accepts flattery that puts him above obligation to his creatures, who demands a righteousness different from his own, or who deals ungenerously with his poverty-stricken children. Job is confident of receiving justice. His faith is profound, yet he is always complaining—a strange but natural conflict that is simply the form his faith takes in trouble. Even while he declares the hardness of his treatment, he seems sure that all he needs to set things right is admission to God’s presence: to be heard must be to have justice. Used by any living man, his language would horrify the religious of today in proportion to their lack of truth, just as it horrified his three friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was “doctrine” and rebuke. God speaks no word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech; he has always sought such as Job to worship him. It is those who know only the outsides of religion, who speak of God only as the Almighty or Providence, who say of a man who goes close up to God and speaks out of the deepest in the nature God made, “he is irreverent.” For such men, to utter the name of God in the drama, highest of human arts, is blasphemy. They pay court to God without loving him, treating him as far away rather than as the only home. They accept God’s person. “Shall not his excellency”—another thing than what you admire—“make you afraid? Shall not his dread”—another thing than the pagan respect you show—“fall upon you?”
In his desolation, God’s truth seems to Job, more plainly than ever, the one thing that holds together the world that came into being by the word of his mouth. If God cannot be reached, nothing is left to the man so lately greatest in the east but despair and hell. Like a child escaping the dogs of the street, he flings the door open and rushes, not looking back, to seek the presence of the living one. Carrying the burden of his death, he cries, “Look what you have laid on me! Shall mortal man, the helpless creature you made, bear a cross like this?” God is the God of comfort, known to man as refuge and life-giver or not known at all. But alas, Job cannot come to him; he sees his face nowhere; God has hidden himself. “Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him and fill my mouth with arguments. Will he plead against me with his great power? No! he would put strength in me. There the righteous might dispute with him, and I should be delivered for ever from my judge. Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive him; on the left hand and the right I cannot behold him. But he knows the way I take; when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”
He cannot find him! Yet he is in God’s presence all the time, and his words enter the ear of God his Saviour.
The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but God, and is justified in it. Grandest of all, he implies, if he does not say, that God owes something to his creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery: that God owes himself to the creature he made in his image, since he made him unable to live without him. This highest claim of his creatures upon him is his divinest gift to them. To fulfil it he sent his Son, that he himself, the Father of him and of us, might follow into our hearts. Perhaps the worst thing in a theology built out of man’s dull possible, and not out of the being and deeds and words of Jesus Christ, is its constant impression that God acknowledges no such obligation. Are we not the clay, and he the potter? how can the clay claim from the potter? We are the clay, but his clay, spiritual, live clay, with needs and desires and rights—clay worth the Son of God’s dying for, that it might learn to consent to be shaped to honour. We can have no merits, but God has given us rights. Apart from him we have nothing, but having come forth from him we have rights toward him—never, never against him! His whole labour is to induce us to claim what he gave us the rights to in creating us. We had no claim to be created, which would be absurd, but being made, we have claims on our maker: our needs are our claims. A man who will not provide for his child’s hunger is condemned by the whole world.
“Ah, but,” says the partisan of God, “the Almighty’s relation is very different from an earthly father’s; there is no parallel.” I grant it. The man did not create the child; he only yielded to an impulse created in himself. God is infinitely more bound to provide for his child than any man for his; the relation is divinely closer. Every hunger, aspiration and longing of our nature is to be referred to him, who made all our needs and made us creatures of a thousand necessities—and have we no claim on him? We have innumerable, infinite claims; and his one great claim on us is that we should claim our claims of him.
It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in a way that allows appeal to his righteousness. How could he be righteous, or have anything to do as judge of all the earth, if he owed us nothing? He owes us nothing that he does not pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection or disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every act of his being he puts himself under obligation to his creatures. When doubt and dread invade and the voice of love in the soul is dumb, nothing can please the Father better than to hear his child cry to him from whom he came, “Here I am, O God! You made me: give me what you made me needing.” The child’s necessity, weakness and helplessness are the strongest of his claims. If I am a whale, I can claim a sea; a sea, room to roll and break in waves; a lion, I seek my meat from God; a child, I claim above all that if any need of mine is denied, it be by the love of a father who will let me see his face and plead my cause before him. This must be just what God desires! What would he have but that his children claim their birthright, the divine nature, God himself, which he made them for and has been giving them ever since he began them to be? A created need is a created claim, and the Father’s heart delights to acknowledge it. The story of Jesus is the heart of his answer, not primarily to prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children he has sent out into his universe.
Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, adorable creator and done less than he has done for his children, that any being but Jesus Christ could have been worthy of all-glorifying worship, that his nature could have lacked absolute love and self-devotion, these highest splendours!
In the light of this truth, look at the words at the head of this sermon: “Oh that you would hide me in the grave!” Job appeals to his creator, whom his sufferings force him to regard as displeased with him, though he knows not why. We know he was not displeased, but Job had not read the preface to his own story. He asks God to hide him and forget him for a time, so that the maker’s desire to see once more the work of his hands may awake in him, and silence, absence and loss may speak for the buried one and make the parent’s heart long for the child’s face. Then “you shall call and I will answer you; you will have a desire to the work of your hands,” and Job will rise in joy to plead the cause of his righteousness with confidence. For God is nearer to a man than anything he has made: what is closer than the making and the made, the willing and the answering that owes its power to answer to the other’s will and desire? God must love his creature who looks up to him with hungry eyes—hungry for life, acknowledgment, justice. The whole existence of a creature is one entire claim on his creator: just therefore, let him do with me as he will, even seat me in the ashes to scrape myself with a potsherd, I will bring forward my claim all the more, insist on it, assail with it the ear and heart of the Father. Is it not the sweetest music a maker’s ear can hear—except the word of the perfect Son, “Lo, I come to do your will, O God!”? We, imperfect sons, shall learn to say the same, and so enter our birthright and share the divine nature; that is why the Son came and died, to slay our selfishness and mean hollow pride and wake our childhood. We are our Father’s debtors for our needs, rights and claims, and he will have us pay the uttermost farthing. So true is he that he will even compel us, through misery if need be, to put in our claims, for he knows we have eternal need of them: without the essential rights of his being, who can live?
I protest, therefore, against all teaching that, born of the faithlessness of the human heart, gives the impression that God’s exceeding goodness toward man is not the natural and necessary outcome of his being. The root of every heresy popular in the church draws nourishment only from unbelief. The idea that God would be God all the same, as glorious as he needed to be, had he not taken on himself the divine toil of bringing home his wandered children or done anything to seek and save the lost, is false as hell. It is as if God could be less than he is—less than perfect, less than Jesus Christ, less than Love absolute; as if the God of the New Testament were not under his own perfect necessity of loving-kindness, but had made himself better than, by his own nature and love, he needed to be. They would have it that, being unbound, he deserves the greater homage! So he might, if he were not our Father. But to think of the living God not as our Father but as one who has greatly condescended, not at all bound by his own willed grandeur of righteous nature to do as he has done, is killing to all but a slavish devotion, and thinks of him as nothing like the God we see in Jesus Christ.
It will be answered that we have fallen and God is thereby freed from any obligation, if any ever were. That is another lie. No amount of wrong-doing in a child frees a parent from the divine necessity of doing all he can to deliver him; the bond cannot be broken. It is the vulgar, slavish, worldly idea of freedom that it means being bound to nothing. God’s idea of liberty is not such! Speaking as a man: the more vital obligation he takes on, the more children he creates with claims on him, the freer he is as creator and giver of life, the essence of his Godhead; to make scope for his essence is to be free. Our Lord teaches that the truth, known by obedience to him, will make us free: our freedom lies in living the truth of our relations to God and man. To be alone in the universe would be to be slave to unspeakable longings and lonelinesses. And speaking humanly again: God could not be satisfied with himself without doing all a God and Father could do for the creatures he made—without doing just what he has done, is doing and will do to deliver his sons and daughters and bring them home rejoicing. To answer the human heart’s cry, “Would that I could see him! would that I might come before him and look on him face to face!” he sent his Son, the express image of his person. And lest our understanding of God be limited by the constant presence to our weak, dullable spiritual sense of any embodiment whatever, he took him away. Having seen him, in his absence we understand him better. If we dare, like Job, to plead with him in the heart-eating troubles that come from being unable to love the misrepresentation of him our would-be teachers hold out; if we speak out before him what seems to us right, will he not be pleased with his children’s love of righteousness—the truth that will not part him from his righteousness? He will not plead against us with his great power but put strength in us, and instruct us where we are wrong. The heart that wants to think aright, worships him not as a tyrant but as perfectly righteous, will not call unjust things righteous, and clings to the skirt of his garment with pleading eyes is the Father’s delight, and he will open to it riches of his being it has not entered that heart to conceive. “O Lord, they tell me I have so offended against your law that as I am you cannot look on me, but threaten me with eternal banishment from you. But if you do not look on me, how can I ever be other than I am? I was born in sin and have never known myself clean: how can I see sin as you see it, or cleanse myself? You must take me as I am and cleanse me. Is it not impossible that I should behold the final goodness of good and final evilness of evil? How then can I deserve eternal torment? Had I known good and evil as you see them and still chosen evil, I know not what I should not deserve; but you know it has always been something good in the evil that enticed my selfish heart, and all my kind’s. You require us to forgive: surely you forgive freely! Bound you may be to destroy evil, but are you bound to keep the sinner alive to punish him, even if it makes him no better? Sin cannot be deep as life, for you are the life; sorrow and pain go deeper than sin, for they reach the divine in us: you can suffer, though you will not sin. To see men suffer might make us shun evil but never hate it; we might see that you hate sin, but never that you love the sinner. Chastise us in loving kindness, and we shall not faint. Evil is deep in us, but we are not all evil, for we love righteousness; and are you not yourself, in your Son, the sacrifice for our sins, the atonement of our breach? You made us subject to vanity but have taken your godlike share of the consequences. Could we ever have come to know good as you know it except through the sea of sin and the fire of cleansing? They tell me I must say for Christ’s sake or you will not pardon, and it takes the heart out of my poor love; I thank you that nowhere in your gospel does one of your servants say such a thing. In spite of our fears and grovelling, our weakness and wrongs, you will be to us what you are, such a perfect Father as no loving child-heart on earth could invent. You will take our sins on yourself and give us your life to live with. You bear our griefs and carry our sorrows; surely you will one day enable us to pay every debt we owe each other. You have given yourself to us that, having you, we may be eternally alive with your life. We run within the circle of what men call your wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the zone of your love!”
But be it well understood that when I say rights I do not mean merits of any sort. We can deserve nothing from him, in the sense of any right proceeding from ourselves. All our rights are such as the bounty of inconceivable love has glorified our being with, bestowed for the one purpose of being satisfied, and so deep and delicate that they cannot be satisfied until we long for it with our deepest desire. The giver of them came to men, lived with men, and died by the hands of men that they might possess these rights abundantly; God could do no more to fulfil his part, save what he is still doing every hour for every individual. Our rights are rights with God himself at the heart of them. He could recall them only by making us cease; while we exist, by the being that is ours, they are ours. If he could not make us care for the rights he gave out of the depth of his creative being, I think he would have to uncreate us. As to deserving, that is absurd; he had to die in the endeavour to make us listen and receive. “When you have done all that is commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done what it was our duty to do.” Duty is a thing prepaid: it can never have desert. There is no claim on God that springs from us; all is from him.
But lest any unchildlike soul, in arrogance and ignorance, think to stand on his rights against God and demand this or that after the will of the flesh, I will name some of the things he has a right to, perhaps first of all, from the God of his life, because of the divine germ in him. He has a claim on God for any pain, want, disappointment or misery that would help show him to himself as the fool he is; a claim to be punished to the last scorpion of the whip, spared no pang that may urge him toward repentance; even a claim to be sent into the outer darkness, whether what we call hell or something speechlessly worse, if nothing less will do. He has a claim to be compelled to repent: hedged in on every side, with the great shepherd’s strong, sharp-toothed sheep-dogs sent after him one after another to thwart every desire, foil every plan and frustrate every hope, until he sees that nothing will ease his pain or make life worth having but the presence of the living God within him, that nothing is good but God’s will and nothing noble enough for the heart’s desire but oneness with the eternal. For this God must make him yield his very being, that he may enter in and dwell with him.
That the man would enforce none of these claims is nothing: it is not a man who owes them to him but the eternal God, bound by his own will of right toward the creature he made to discharge them. His candle burns dim in the man’s soul; it must shine as the sun. For what is the all-pervading dissatisfaction of his wretched being but an unrecognized hunger after his Father’s righteousness? The soul God made hungers thus, though the selfish, usurping self that is its consciousness hungers only for low things, ever trying in vain to fill its narrow content with husks. For even the most degraded chamber of the soul, the temple of the deified Self, cannot be filled with less than God; the usurping Self must be miserable until it stops looking at itself in the mirror of Satan and opens its innermost closet to the God who means to dwell there and make peace.
He who has looked on the face of God in Jesus Christ, whose heart overflows even a little with answering love, sees God standing with full hands, and his children hanging back, refusing to take, doubting the God-heart that is absolute in truth and love.
It is not at first easy to see how God answers Job; I find no explanation at all of why he afflicted him. He justifies Job’s words, says Job has spoken rightly of him and his friends have not, and calls up before him one after another the works of his hands. The answer, like some of our Lord’s, seems addressed to Job himself and not to his intellect: to the revealing, God-like imagination in the man, not to any logical faculty. It sets forth God’s power as seen in his handiwork and wondered at by the men of the time, and all that is said of the creatures concerns their show to men’s eyes. In what belongs to nature’s deeper meanings and her mediation between us and God, her appearances are her truths, far deeper than any scientific discoveries about them. God cares most for the show of things, for it is the face of far deeper things; in it we see, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. To know a primrose is higher than to know all its botany, just as to know Christ is infinitely higher than to know all theology, all that is said about his person or babbled about his work. The body of man likewise exists for its outside, the face and form in which revelation dwells, not for its hidden secrets. So Nature exists primarily for her face, her look, her appeals to heart and imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s further use. What is our knowledge of the oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and ozone of the atmosphere beside the blowing of the wind on our faces, or the analysis of water beside the babble of a running stream? What is any knowledge of things to the heart, beside its child-play with the Eternal! By infinite decomposition we should learn nothing more of what a thing is, for the moment we decompose it, it ceases to be and its meaning is gone. Far more than astronomy does the mere look of the vault over our heads do for us: think what our idea of greatness, God and infinitude would be if we were reared under a flat white ceiling instead of a blue, light-spangled firmament! I would not depreciate science, but its discoveries are unspeakably less precious than the merest gifts of Nature, which we take unthinking from her hands from morning to night. One day, I trust, we shall enter their secrets from within, by natural contact between our heart and theirs. When we are one with God we may understand in an hour what no man of science, investigating from the surface with the keenest intellect, would reach in a lifetime. Whether such power will come in this world or only beyond it matters nothing to me: life is one, God is the same there and here, and I shall be the same, however larger the life he gives me.
The argument implied in the poem, not expressed, seems to be this: Job saw God so far before him in power, and his works so far beyond his understanding that they filled him with wonder—creation’s vast might, the times and seasons, the marvels of the heavens, the springs of the sea, the gates of death; the animals with their generations, providing, beauties and instincts; the strange and awful behemoth on land and leviathan in the sea, perhaps now vanished from the living world. Beholding these, he ought to have reasoned that he who could work so grandly beyond his understanding must use wisdom in things that touched him nearer, though they came no nearer his understanding: “Shall he that contends with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproves God, let him answer it.” “Will you annul my judgment? Will you condemn me that you may be righteous?” In this world power is no proof of righteousness; but was it likely that he who could create should be unrighteous? Did such works foreshadow injustice toward the creature made in his image? Did Job understand even his own being, history and destiny? Might not God’s ways with him be beyond him, and might he not trust him to do justice? His maker was so much greater than Job that his ways with him might well be beyond Job’s comprehension; God’s thoughts were higher than his as the heavens are higher than the earth!
The true child, the righteous man, will trust absolutely, against all appearances, the God who has created in him the love of righteousness.
God does not, I say, tell Job why he afflicted him; he rouses his child-heart to trust. For the rest of Job’s life, I imagine, his slowly vanishing perplexities would give him fresh meditations about God and his ways, new opportunities of trusting him, and added means of growing in the knowledge of God. Everything we cannot understand is a closed book of larger knowledge and blessedness, whose clasps the blessed perplexity urges us to open. There can be nothing that is not in itself a righteous intelligibility—whether intelligible to us matters nothing. The awful thing would be anything unintelligible in its nature: that would be the same as no God. That God knows is enough for me; I shall know, if I can know. To think God did not know would be death, for it would be to conclude there was no God to know.
How much more than Job are we bound, who know him in his Son as Love, to trust God in all the troubling questions that press on us about the motions and results of things! About the lower animals, and about souls that seem never to wake from the sleep of death or to fall into it again, we will trust him.
In the confusion of Job’s thoughts—how could they be otherwise, with two such facts staring at each other, that God was just yet punishing a righteous man as if he were wicked?—he could not yet conceive or receive the thought that approving love itself might inflict or allow the torture, that such suffering is granted only to a righteous man that he may be made perfect. I can well imagine that, as one moment he doubted God’s righteousness and the next cried, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,” some doubt of God’s existence mingled in the chaos. To deny God’s existence may, paradoxical as it seems, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness; a man may be haunted with doubts and only grow in faith. Doubts are the Living One’s messengers to rouse the honest, the first knock at our door of things not yet understood but needing to be, and they commonly meet the inhospitable reception given angels who do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance, for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region unexplored. So Job’s longing to see God may well include a mighty desire to be assured of God’s being; to acknowledge is not to be sure of God. One great point in the poem is that when Job hears God’s voice, though it gives no explanation, it is enough: he knows that God is, and hears his creature’s cry. That God is there, knowing all about him, is enough to reconcile seeming contradictions and make the worst ills of outer life endurable. God settled everything when, answering out of the whirlwind, he showed he had not forsaken him. Nothing but a far closer divine presence can ever make life fit for a son of man, for the simplest of reasons: he is made in God’s image and must have in him the reality of which his being is the image; without it his conscious self is a mask, a spiritual emptiness. For the present, though, Job, yielding to God, was calmed and satisfied. Perhaps he came to see that if anything God could do would make him doubt God, it was time to be so troubled, that the imperfection of his knowledge of God might be revealed and an earthquake of his being bring to the surface the gold of God in him. To know that our faith is weak is the first step toward strengthening it; to be capable of distrusting is death; to know that we are, and cry out, is to begin to live—to begin to be made such that we cannot distrust, such that God may do anything with us and we shall never doubt him. Until doubt is impossible we lack true, childlike knowledge of God; for either God is such that one may distrust him, or to distrust him is the greatest injustice a man can commit, so that if we can distrust him we know him imperfectly or not at all. But all he was required to receive at the moment was the argument from God’s loving wisdom in his power to his loving wisdom in everything else. For power is a real and good thing, giving an immediate impression that it proceeds from goodness; however long it may last after goodness is gone, it was never born of anything but goodness. In the deepest fact power and goodness are one.
Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say. He had meant to order his cause before him; he had longed to see him to defend himself, imagining God as well as his friends wrongly accused him; but his speech is gone. To justify himself in the presence of Him who is Righteousness seems to him what it is: foolish, worthless labour. If God does not see him righteous he is not righteous and may hold his peace; if he is, God knows it better than he. All the evils and imperfections of his nature rise before him in the presence of the one pure one, who is right and has no selfishness. “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer you? I will lay my hand on my mouth. Once have I spoken, but I will not answer; yes, twice, but I will proceed no further.” Again, after God has called behemoth and leviathan to witness for him, he replies, “I know that you can do everything, and that no thought can be withheld from you. Who is he that hides counsel without knowledge?” This was the question with which God first made his presence known; in Job’s mouth now it is the humble confession, “I am that foolish man.” “Therefore I have uttered what I understood not; things too wonderful for me.” “Hear, I beg you, and I will speak”—henceforth he will cry to be taught, not to justify himself. “I will demand of you, and you declare to me”—he will seek the more diligently to know God’s counsel. That he cannot understand will no longer distress him but urge him to fresh endeavour after the knowledge of him who is perfect in all his doings. “I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”
Job had his desire: he saw the face of God—and abhorred himself in dust and ashes. He sought justification and found self-abhorrence. Was this punishment? The farthest from it possible. It was the best thing, to begin with, that the face of God could do for him. Self-contempt is a blessed gift when its giver is the visible glory of the Living One. To see there is to partake; to turn from self is to begin to be pure of heart. Job was right that he did not deserve to be punished so for his sins; neither did he deserve to see God’s face, yet that crown of all gifts was given him—and it was to see himself vile. By the very sufferings he had cried out against, the living one came near, and he was silent. Oh the divine generosity that lets us be abashed and self-condemned before the Holy, to come so near him as to see ourselves dark spots against his brightness! We must be of his kind, else no sight of him could make us feel small and ugly and unclean. To be rebuked before him is to be his. Good as Job was, he had never yet been right near God; now God has become very real to him; he knows in very deed that God is he with whom he has to do. God laid these troubles on him that through them he might draw nigh and enable him to know him.
Two things are clearly contained in this poem: that not every man deserves to be punished everlastingly from the Lord’s presence for his sins; and that the best of men, when he sees the face of God, will know himself vile. God is just and will never deal with the sinner as if he could commit the pure sin; yet if the best man is not delivered from himself, that self will sink him into Tophet.
Any man may, like Job, plead his cause with God, though perhaps not to like justification: he gives us liberty to speak and hears with absolute fairness. But, blessed be God, the one result for all who draw nigh will be to see him plainly, surely right, the perfect Saviour, the profoundest refuge even from the wrongs of their own being, so seeing him they will abhor themselves and rejoice in him. And, as the poem indicates, when we turn from ourselves to him, becoming true—being to God and ourselves what we are—he will turn again our captivity; those who sowed in tears shall reap in joy and come again rejoicing, bringing their sheaves. Then the waters that rise from God’s fountains will run in God’s channels.
The prosperity that follows Job’s submission embodies a great truth. A man must do right even if it send him to Hades, even to hell for ever, yet while the Lord lives we need not fear: all good things must grow out of and hang upon the one central good, the one law of life, the Will, the One Good. To submit absolutely to him is the only reason; then circumstance as well as all being must bud and blossom as the rose. What matter whether in this world or the next, if one day I know my life as perfect bliss, with no limitation, hindrance, pain or sorrow more than it can dominate in peace and perfect assurance?
I care not whether the book of Job is a history or a poem; I think it is both, and care not how much of each. It was probably, in the childlike days of the world, a well-known story in the east, which some man whom God had made wise to understand his will and ways took up and told as a poet. Who can say its age? It must be before Moses. I would gladly throw out Elihu’s part as an interpolation. One in whom, of all men I have known, I put the greatest trust once told me, in effect, that the language of the rest of the poem and that of Elihu differ as Chaucer’s and Shakspere’s do.
The poem is difficult, and in the original inaccessible to me; but through all the evident inadequacy of our translation, who can fail to hear two souls, the poet’s and Job’s, crying with agonized hope that, whatever the evil shows around them, truth and righteousness are the heart of things? Job’s faith, even his hope, seems at times on the point of giving way; he struggles like a drowning man, but his courage revives as his head rises. Christians we call ourselves! What would our faith not be, were it as much greater than Job’s as the word from Jesus’ mouth is mightier than what he heard out of the whirlwind! Here is a book of faith indeed, before the law was given by Moses: Grace and Truth have visited us—but where is our faith?
Friends, our cross may be heavy and the via dolorosa rough, but we have claims on God, the right to cry to him for help. He has spent and is spending himself to give us our birthright, which is righteousness. We cannot be saved but by leaving our sins: we shall not be condemned for past sins, but we shall be if we love the darkness rather than the light and refuse to come to him that we may have life. God offers us the one thing we cannot live without, his own self: we must make room for him and cleanse our hearts that he may come in, and do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father and the way to him—we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, and follow him.