Expositor's Bible: The Book of Job Part 10

Now the proper beginning of this appeal is in the twenty-third verse, with the words: "How many are mine iniquities and my sins?" But before Job reaches it he expresses his sense of the danger and difficulty under which he lies, interweaving with the statement of these a marvellous confidence in the result of what he is about to do.

Referring to the declarations of his friends as to the danger that yet threatens if he will not confess sin, he uses a proverbial expression for hazard of life.

"_Why do I take my flesh in my teeth, And put my life in my hand?_"

Why do I incur this danger, do you say? Never mind. It is not your affair. For bare existence I care nothing. To escape with mere consciousness for a while is no object to me, as I now am. With my life in my hand I hasten to G.o.d.

"_Lo! He will slay me: I will not delay-- Yet my ways will I maintain before Him_" (_chap. xiii._ 15).

The old Version here, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," is inaccurate. Still it is not far from expressing the brave purpose of the man--prostrate before G.o.d, yet resolved to cling to the justice of the case as he apprehends it, a.s.sured that this will not only be excused by G.o.d, but will bring about his acquittal or salvation. To grovel in the dust, confessing himself a miserable sinner more than worthy of all the sufferings he has undergone, while in his heart he has the consciousness of being upright and faithful--this would not commend him to the Judge of all the earth. It would be a mockery of truth and righteousness, therefore of G.o.d Himself. On the other hand, to maintain his integrity which G.o.d gave him, to go on maintaining it at the hazard of all, is his only course, his only safety.

"_This also shall be my salvation, For a G.o.dless man shall not live before Him._"

The fine moral instinct of Job, giving courage to his theology, declares that G.o.d demands "truth in the inward parts" and truth in speech--that man "consists in truth"--that "if he betrays truth he betrays himself," which is a crime against his Maker. No man is so much in danger of separating himself from G.o.d and losing everything as he who acts or speaks against conviction.

Job has declared his hazard, that he is lying helpless before Almighty Power which may in a moment crush him. He has also expressed his faith, that approaching G.o.d in the courage of truth he will not be rejected, that absolute sincerity will alone give him a claim on the Infinitely True. Now turning to his friends as if in new defiance, he says:--

"_Hear diligently my speech, And my explanation with your ears.

Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know that I shall be justified.

Who is he that will contend with me?

For then would I hold my peace and expire._"

That is to say, he has reviewed his life once more, he has considered all possibilities of transgression, and yet his contention remains. So much does he build upon his claim on G.o.d that, if any one could now convict him, his heart would fail, life would no more be worth living; the foundation of hope destroyed, conflict would be at an end.

But with his plea to G.o.d still in view he expresses once more his sense of the disadvantage under which he lies. The pressure of the Divine hand is upon him still, a sore enervating terror which bears upon his soul. Would G.o.d but give him respite for a little from the pain and the fear, then he would be ready either to answer the summons of the Judge or make his own demand for vindication.

We may suppose an interval of release from pain or at least a pause of expectancy, and then, in verse twenty-third, Job begins his cry. The language is less vehement than we have heard. It has more of the pathos of weak human life. He is one with that race of thinking, feeling, suffering creatures who are tossed about on the waves of existence, driven before the winds of change like autumn leaves. It is the plea of human feebleness and mortality we hear, and then, as the "still sad music" touches the lowest note of wailing, there mingles with it the strain of hope.

"_How many are mine iniquities and sins?

Make me to know my transgression and my sin._"

We are not to understand here that Job confesses great transgressions, nor, contrariwise, that he denies infirmity and error in himself.

There are no doubt failures of his youth which remain in memory, sins of desire, errors of ignorance, mistakes in conduct such as the best men fall into. These he does not deny. But righteousness and happiness have been represented as a profit and loss account, and therefore Job wishes to hear from G.o.d a statement in exact form of all he has done amiss or failed to do, so that he may be able to see the relation between fault and suffering, his faults and his sufferings, if such relation there be. It appears that G.o.d is counting him an enemy (ver.

24). He would like to have the reason for that. So far as he knows himself he has sought to obey and honour the Almighty. Certainly there has never been in his heart any conscious desire to resist the will of Eloah. Is it then for transgressions unwittingly committed that he now suffers--for sins he did not intend or know of? G.o.d is just. It is surely a part of His justice to make a sufferer aware why such terrible afflictions befal him.

And then--is it worth while for the Almighty to be so hard on a poor weak mortal?

"_Wilt thou scare a driven leaf-- Wilt thou pursue the dry stubble-- That thou writest bitter judgments against me, And makest me to possess the faults of my youth, And puttest my feet in the stocks, And watchest all my paths, And drawest a line about the soles of my feet-- One who as a rotten thing is consuming, As a garment that is moth-eaten?_"

The sense of rigid restraint and pitiable decay was perhaps never expressed with so fit and vivid imagery. So far it is personal. Then begins a general lamentation regarding the sad fleeting life of man.

His own prosperity, which pa.s.sed as a dream, has become to Job a type of the brief vain existence of the race tried at every moment by inexorable Divine judgment; and the low mournful words of the Arabian chief have echoed ever since in the language of sorrow and loss.

"_Man that is born of woman, Of few days is he and full of trouble.

Like the flower he springs up and withers; Like a shadow he flees and stays not.

Is it on such a one Thou hast fixed Thine eye?

Bringest Thou me into Thy judgment?

Oh that the clean might come out of the unclean!

But there is not one._"

Human frailty is both of the body and of the soul; and it is universal. The nativity of men forbids their purity. Well does G.o.d know the weakness of His creatures; and why then does He expect of them, if indeed He expects, a pureness that can stand the test of His searching? Job cannot be free from the common infirmity of mortals. He is born of woman. But why then is he chased with inquiry, haunted and scared by a righteousness he cannot satisfy? Should not the Great G.o.d be forbearing with a man?

"_Since his days are determined, The number of his moons with Thee, And Thou hast set him bounds not to be pa.s.sed; Look Thou away from him, that he may rest, At least fulfil as a hireling his day._"

Man's life being so short, his death so sure and soon, seeing he is like a hireling in the world, might he not be allowed a little rest?

might he not, as one who has fulfilled his day's work, be let go for a little repose ere he die? That certain death, it weighs upon him now, pressing down his thought.

"_For even a tree hath hope; If it be hewn down it will sprout anew, The young shoot thereof will not fail.

If in the earth its root wax old, Or in the ground its stock should die, Yet at the scent of water it will spring, And shoot forth boughs like a new plant.

But a man: he dies and is cut off; Yea, when men die, they are gone.

Ebbs away the water from the sea, And the stream decays and dries: So when men have lain down they rise not; Till the heavens vanish they never awake, Nor are they roused from their sleep._"

No arguments, no promises can break this deep gloom and silence into which the life of man pa.s.ses. Once Job had sought death; now a desire has grown within him, and with it recoil from Sheol. To meet G.o.d, to obtain his own justification and the clearing of Divine righteousness, to have the problem of life explained--the hope of this makes life precious. Is he to lie down and rise no more while the skies endure? Is no voice to reach him from the heavenly justice he has always confided in? The very thought is confounding. If he were now to desire death it would mean that he had given up all faith, that justice, truth, and even the Divine name of Eloah had ceased to have any value for him.

We are to behold the rise of a new hope, like a star in the firmament of his thought. Whence does it spring?

The religion of the Book of Job, as already shown, is, in respect of form, a natural religion; that is to say, the ideas are not derived from the Hebrew Scriptures. The writer does not refer to the legislation of Moses and the great words of prophets. The expression "As the Lord said unto Moses" does not occur in this book, nor any equivalent. It is through nature and the human consciousness that the religious beliefs of the poem appear to have come into shape. Yet two facts are to be kept fully in view.

The first is that even a natural religion must not be supposed to be a thing of man's invention, with no origin further than his dreams. We must not declare all religious ideas outside those of Israel to be mere fictions of the human fancy or happy guesses at truth. The religion of Teman may have owed some of its great thoughts to Israel.

But, apart from that, a basis of Divine revelation is always laid wherever men think and live. In every land the heart of man has borne witness to G.o.d. Reverent thought, dwelling on justice, truth, mercy, and all virtues found in the range of experience and consciousness, came through them to the idea of G.o.d. Every one who made an induction as to the Great Unseen Being, his mind open to the facts of nature and his own moral const.i.tution, was in a sense a prophet. As far as they went, the reality and value of religious ideas, so reached, are acknowledged by Bible writers themselves. "The invisible things of G.o.d from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity." G.o.d has always been revealing Himself to men.

"Natural religion" we say: and yet, since G.o.d is always revealing Himself and has made all men more or less capable of apprehending the revelation, even the natural is supernatural. Take the religion of Egypt, or of Chaldaea, or of Persia. You may contrast any one of these with the religion of Israel; you may call the one natural, the other revealed. But the Persian speaking of the Great Good Spirit or the Chaldaean worshipping a supreme Lord must have had some kind of revelation; and his sense of it, not clear indeed, far enough below that of Moses or Isaiah, was yet a forth-reaching towards the same light as now shines for us.

Next we must keep it in view that Job does not appear as a thinker building on himself alone, depending on his own religious experience.

Centuries and ages of thought are behind these beliefs which are ascribed to him, even the ideas which seem to start up freshly as the result of original discovery. Imagine a man thinking for himself about Divine things in that far-away Arabian past. His mind, to begin with, is not a blank. His father has instructed him. There is a faith that has come down from many generations. He has found words in use which hold in them religious ideas, discoveries, perceptions of Divine reality, caught and fixed ages before. When he learned language the products of evolution, not only psychical, but intellectual and spiritual, became his. Eloah, the lofty one, the righteousness of Eloah, the word of Eloah, Eloah as Creator, as Watcher of men, Eloah as wise, unsearchable in wisdom, as strong, infinitely mighty,--these are ideas he has not struck out for himself, but inherited. Clearly then a new thought, springing from these, comes as a supernatural communication and has behind it ages of spiritual evolution. It is new, but has its root in the old; it is natural, but originates in the over-nature.

Now the primitive religion of the Semites, the race to which Job belonged, to which also the Hebrews belonged, has been of late carefully studied; and with regard to it certain things have been established that bear on the new hope we are to find struck out by the Man of Uz.

In the early morning of religious thought among those Semites it was universally believed that the members of a family or tribe, united by blood-relationship to each other, were also related in the same way to their G.o.d. He was their father, the invisible head and source of their community, on whom they had a claim so long as they pleased him. His interest in them was secured by the sacrificial meal which he was invited and believed to share with them. If he had been offended, the sacrificial offering was the means of recovering his favour; and communion with him in those meals and sacrifices was the inheritance of all who claimed the kinship of that clan or tribe. With the clearing of spiritual vision this belief took a new form in the minds of the more thoughtful. The idea of communion remained and the necessity of it to the life of the worshipper was felt even more strongly when the kinship of the G.o.d with his subject family was, for the few at least, no longer an affair of physical descent and blood-relationship, but of spiritual origin and attachment. And when faith rose from the tribal G.o.d to the idea of the Heaven-Father, the one Creator and King, communion with Him was felt to be in the highest sense a vital necessity. Here is found the religion of Job. A main element of it was communion with Eloah, an ethical kinship with Him, no arbitrary or merely physical relation, but of the spirit. That is to say, Job has at the heart of his creed the truth as to man's origin and nature. The author of the book is a Hebrew; his own faith is that of the people from whom we have the Book of Genesis; but he treats here of man's relation to G.o.d from the ethnic side, such as may be taken now by a reasoner treating of spiritual evolution.

Communion with Eloah had been Job's life, and with it had been a.s.sociated his many years of wealth, dignity, and influence. Lest his children should fall from it and lose their most precious inheritance, he used to bring the periodical offerings. But at length his own communion was interrupted. The sense of being at one with Eloah, if not lost, became dull and faint. It is for the restoration of his very life--not as we might think of religious feeling, but of actual spirit energy--he is now concerned. It is this that underlies his desire for G.o.d to speak with him, his demand for an opportunity of pleading his cause. Some might expect that he would ask his friends to offer sacrifice on his behalf. But he makes no such request. The crisis has come in a region higher than sacrifice, where observances are of no use. Thought only can reach it; the discovery of reconciling truth alone can satisfy. Sacrifices which for the old world sustained the relation with G.o.d could no more for Job restore the intimacy of the spiritual Lord. With a pa.s.sion for this fellowship keener than ever, since he now more distinctly realises what it is, a fear blends in the heart of the man. Death will be upon him soon. Severed from G.o.d he will fall away into the privation of that world where is neither praise nor service, knowledge nor device. Yet the truth which lies at the heart of his religion does not yield. Leaning all upon it, he finds it strong, elastic. He sees at least a possibility of reconciliation; for how can the way back to G.o.d ever be quite closed?

What difficulty there was in his effort we know. To the common thought of the time when this book was written, say that of Hezekiah, the state of the dead was not extinction indeed, but an existence of extreme tenuity and feebleness. In Sheol there was nothing active. The hollow ghost of the man was conceived of as neither hoping nor fearing, neither originating nor receiving impressions. Yet Job dares to antic.i.p.ate that even in Sheol a set time of remembrance will be ordained for him and he shall hear the thrilling call of G.o.d. As it approaches this climax the poem flashes and glows with prophetic fire.

"_Oh that Thou would'st hide me in Sheol, That Thou would'st keep me secret until Thy wrath be past, That Thou would'st appoint a set time, and remember me!

If a (strong) man die, shall he live?

All the days of my appointed time would I wait Till my release came.

Thou would'st call, I would answer Thee; Thou would'st have a desire to the work of Thy hands._"

Not easily can we now realise the extraordinary step forward made in thought when the antic.i.p.ation was thrown out of spiritual life going on beyond death ("would I wait"), retaining intellectual potency in that region otherwise dark and void to the human imagination ("I would answer Thee"). From both the human side and the Divine the poet has advanced a magnificent intuition, a springing arch into which he is unable to fit the keystone--the spiritual body; for He only could do this who long afterwards came to be Himself the Resurrection and the Life. But when this poem of Job had been given to the world a new thought was implanted in the soul of the race, a new hope that should fight against the darkness of Sheol till that morning when the sunrise fell upon an empty sepulchre, and one standing in the light asked of sorrowful men, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

"Thou would'st have a desire to the work of Thy hands." What a philosophy of Divine care underlies the words! They come with a force Job seems hardly to realise. Is there a High One who makes men in His own image, capable of fine achievement, and then casts them away in discontent or loathing? The voice of the poet rings in a pa.s.sionate key because he rises to a thought practically new to the human mind.

He has broken through barriers both of faith and doubt into the light of his hope and stands trembling on the verge of another world. "One must have had a keen perception of the profound relation between the creature and his Maker in the past to be able to give utterance to such an imaginative expectation respecting the future."

But the wrath of G.o.d still appears to rest upon Job's life; still He seems to keep in reserve, sealed up, unrevealed, some record of transgressions for which He has condemned His servant. From the height of hope Job falls away into an abject sense of the decay and misery to which man is brought by the continued rigour of Eloah's examination.

As with shocks of earthquake mountains are broken, and waters by constant flowing wash down the soil and the plants rooted in it, so human life is wasted by the Divine severity. In the world the children whom a man loved are exalted or brought low, but he knows nothing of it. His flesh corrupts in the grave and his soul in Sheol languishes.