Job 40:1-24 Moreover the LORD answered Job, and said,… Its language has reached, at times, the "high-water mark" of poetry and beauty. Nothing can exceed its dignity, its force, its majesty, the freshness and vigour of some of its pictures of nature and of life. But what shall we say next? It is no answer, we may say, to Job's agonised pleadings. It is no answer to the riddle and problem which the experience and history of human life suggests, even to ourselves. Quite true. There is no direct answer at all. Even those partial answers, partial yet instructive, which have been touched on from time to time by speaker after speaker, are not glanced at or included in these final words. It is as though the voice of God did not deign to repeat that He works "on the side of righteousness." He only hints at it. Job is not even told the purpose of the fiery trial through which he himself has passed, of those in other worlds than his own who have watched his pangs. No! God reveals to him His glory, makes him feel where he had, gone wrong, how presumptuous he had been. That is all. He does not say, "All this has been a trial of thy righteousness: thou hast been fighting a battle against Satan for Me, and hast received many sore wounds." Nothing is said of the truth, already mooted and enforced in this Book, that suffering does its perfect work when it purifies and elevates the human soul, and draws it nearer to the God who sends or permits the suffering. Nor is any light thrown on that faint and feeble glimmer of a hope not yet fully born into the world, of a life beyond the grave; of a life where there shall be no more sorrow or sighing, where Job and his lost sons and daughters shall be reunited. The thoughts that we should have looked for, perhaps longed for, are not here. Those who tell us that the one great lesson of the whole book is to hold up the patriarch Job as the pattern of mere submission, mere resignation — those who search in it for a full Thodice, a final vindication, that is, and explanation of God's mode of governing the world — those, lastly, who find ill it a revelation of the sure and certain hope of a blessed immortality, can scarcely have studied either Job's language or the chapters before us today. One thought, and one only, is brought into the foreground. The world is full of mysteries, strange, unapproachable mysteries, that you cannot read. Trust, trust in the power, and in the wisdom, and in the goodness of Him, the Almighty One, who rules it. "Turn from the insoluble problems of your own destiny," the voice says to Job, and says to us. "Good men have said their best, wise men have said their wisest. Man is still left to bear the discipline of some questions too hard for him to answer. We cannot solve them. We must rest, if we are to rest at all, in the belief that He whom we believe to be our Father in heaven, whom we believe to have been revealed in His Son, is good, and wise, and merciful; that one day, not here, the riddle will be solved; that behind the veil which you cannot pierce, lies the solution in the hand of God." (Dean Bradley.) Parallel Verses KJV: Moreover the LORD answered Job, and said, |
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