Job 12
RileyJob 12:1-25
JOB’S Job 12-14.THAT Job is an eager spokesman, this debate makes evident. He has it hard to abide his time. In fact, the text would indicate that he breaks in before his opponent has fully finished, and after we read the arguments of his opponents, we cannot seriously blame him.Eliphaz, the old man, was, of the three, the most reasonable. Time teaches lessons not otherwise to be learned. Holding, as he does, to false philosophy of the time, and of all time, that God is the author of affliction, he yet urges Job to trust God through it all, committing his cause to Him, and by an elaborate argument of forty-eight verses, he attempts to prove that if Job be righteous, God will bring him out beautifully in the end.Job doesn’t wait for the speech of the other two, but immediately answers Eliphaz. It is interesting to measure the length of the arguments on the part of these two old men.
Job requires fifty-one verses for his reply. Bildad, the second spokesman, and somewhat younger than Eliphaz, speaks more briefly (twenty-two verses), in defense of God’s sovereignty, and strongly intimates that only the hypocrite experiences the deepest chastisement.
When he leaves off with the statement, “They that hate thee shall be clothed with shame; and the dwelling place of the wicked shall come to naught”, Job can keep silence no longer and in the “torrent of words” (fifty-seven verses) he defends himself. Then Zophar, the youngest and altogether the shallowest and least respectful, makes his speech, and Job shortly shows his impatience with the prattle of the new theologian and at the end of twenty verses, a short chapter, breaks in upon him with an answer covering the whole case! He introduces his remarks with stinging sarcasm, as he sweeps with his aged yet keen eye, the three, and finally spits out the statement, “No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you”!It is easy to imagine this outstanding figure of the centuries who had once walked the earth, tall, erect, stately, honorable, commanding, consciously superior, as he now sits in ashes, covered with boils from head to foot, sick in body, bewildered in spirit, irritated by false arguments to the point where impatience and disease combine to make the false prattle of these men an unmeasured exasperation, and when he can endure no more, he answers in a justifiable heat, “I have understanding as well as you. I am not inferior to you”. In spite of outward appearances, physical suffering, disgusting boils, recent and terrific misfortunes, I am just as good as any one of you. You may mock and laugh if you like; you may in your physical comfort hold my condition to scorn; treat it with as much contempt as the man who at ease in his home treats the travelers’ limp.
You seem to forget that the world is full of evidences that your philosophy is wrong. “The tabernacles of robbers prosper; and they that provoke God are secure”; they are blessed with the world’s abundance. Even the beasts would teach you a better philosophy if you went to them.
The fowls of the air will tell you they have never sinned, but they sicken and die. The fishes of the sea will affirm the same fact, and everybody knows that God hath wrought this with them, God “in whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind” Your ear is made to try words and your mouth to taste meat. You should not forget also that age tests wisdom “and length of days understanding”.The old man has some sense. His counsel is worth attention and his understanding worthy of regard. He knows that God breaks down and it cannot be built, and shuts up and there can be no opening. He tries the heavens at His pleasure, or scourges it with a flood at His will.
He holds all in His hands—the good and the bad, the great and small. He knows all things, and He doeth according to His own pleasure.
Now, he says, I have seen all this and I know what I am talking about, and I know as much as you do, and am no more sinful than you are, and I wish you would keep silence while I have a chance to talk with God, for you make me tired.Once more, Zophar might charge him justly with a “torrent of words” and we can readily imagine all three of them sitting in silence, in open-mouthed wonder, that a man so sick and afflicted should speak after such a manner.Out of all this argument of Job’s, we find three distinct lines of defense; they relate not to himself, but to God.GOD’S WISDOMWisdom of the highest sort is not with men. That is the meaning of Job’s sarcasm, “No doubt but ye are the people and wisdom shall die with you”. I have as much understanding as you have. These things that you speak I knew before you said them.Everybody knows them. What is the use then of making me a mockery and laughing me to scorn when your knowledge is in no sense superior? You are simply playing the part of men who, being in physical comfort, forget the needs of the sufferer and who are speaking a philosophy that is false, namely, that my affliction is the proof of my iniquity, the evidence of hypocrisy!As before he met their charge of sinfulness by confessing it and including them with him in the just condemnation that rests upon all men, so again he meets their air of superiority by confessing his own ignorance and insisting that their vision is not superior.
This was both a true and a Scriptural reply, and when a man has the truth backed by the Book, who shall answer? “He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbour: but a man of understanding holdeth his peace” (Proverbs 11:12).Wisdom, in the truest sense, belongs alone with God. “With Him is wisdom and strength, He hath counsel and understanding” (Job 12:13). He is to wisdom what the sun is to our planetary system, the source of all light.
The match makes a light, but it must receive the powfcr to do so from the sun. The electric bulb makes a light, but it originated with the sun. Burning wood makes a light, but that is only the stored up rays of the sun. The moon and stars reflect light, but they also first receive the same from the sun.So with wisdom; God is its original and only source. The wisest man only has his wisdom because God gives it to him, and the man who lacks wisdom is deficient through faithlessness, for He has promised, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (James 1:5).The world is full of folly because men have no faith. I have seen the man poorly endowed so truly trust God as to make his whole course and conduct a brilliant success as compared with the wretched course and ignoble end of another man who, though talented by nature, was a fool to grace.Wisdom, Divine, is not destroyed by inscrutable ways.
Job practically admits that he cannot understand many of the ways of God, but in spite of that he trusts. It is very easy for a sophomore to say, “I wouldn’t do so!
We will believe nothing we cannot explain”. Then the realm of faith is frightfully limited! Shall the minnow refuse to believe in the sea because he cannot understand its extent or in the passing whale because he cannot explain his size?“With Him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are His.“He leadeth counsellors away spoiled, and maketh the judges fools.“He looseth the bond of kings, and girdeth their loins with a girdle.“He leadeth princes away spoiled and overthroweth the mighty.“He removeth away the speech of the trusty, and taketh away the understanding of the aged” (Job 12:16-20).But while all of this seems to involve contradictions in His conduct, one may be assured of the fact that through it all, God remains God and His conduct is forever consistent with righteous character, and in the end He will recompense the afflicted, enrich the poor, give health to the sick, liberate the enslaved, and show himself the friend of the faithful. All of which leads to the point ofGOD’S JUSTICEIn the judgment of Job, three things are certain:God’s child can afford to order his cause before Him. “Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God” (Job 13:3). “Ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value. O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom” (Job 13:4-5). Who can blame Job?
Some men talk so much they leave no time in which to talk to God, and they talk so falsely they leave no opportunity to get from Him the truth, and they voice so many prescriptions that you cannot get to the “Great Physician”; while the moment another wise good man becomes the subject of misfortune, the object of God’s pity, that very misfortune makes him the subject of man’s inhumanity, his criticisms, his mockery.If I am ever convinced of the truth of evolution, it will not be on the ground of similarity in embryos. If I am ever convinced of the truth of evolution, it will not be by the very foolish argument that though we can find no instance of one species becoming another, we cannot tell what the eternity of the past might have wrought or the eternity of the future may accomplish.
That is silliness palmed off in the name of science. If I am ever convinced of the animal origin of man, it is because there is so much of the brute remaining in him. It is a well-known fact that the finest wolf of the pack, the leader of all his fellows, if he be wounded by a shot from the enemy, instantly becomes their prey, and they will turn upon him and rend him.I do not know that I have ever known a man big enough and great enough to escape the teeth of his fellows when misfortune befell him. Job in the day of his prosperity was everywhere recognized as a prince. In his presence the noblest of men made obeisance, but now that he is poor, stripped, diseased, decrepit, they stand about him and mock him. They look him in the face and indict him with hypocrisy.
They point at his boils and cry, “Just judgment”. What a comment on human depravity!In that very circumstance I think we find an illustration of another thing, namely,God’s professed friends often and grievously misrepresent Him.
Throughout this whole Book of Job, these three philosophers hold tenaciously to the theory that God is the author of Job’s affliction. This is not only false to the fact of the record that the devil did this, but it is also a misrepresentation of God Himself. Our God is not in the business of sending Chaldeans and Sabeans to strip men of their wealth. They come, sharks of every sort, but not at His behest. They have their gold-brick schemes, their promotion enterprises, their oil stock, their pistols and robberies, but not by God’s will. Cyclones and earthquakes sweep the earth and destroy man and beast, and men say, “How strange for God,” forgetting that Satan is the god of this world at present, the “prince of the power of the air”.
Saintly men fall on sickness, and glorious, godly women are bound in body and tortured in flesh, and men, observing, remark, “How strange are the ways of God,” when God is not in any of it. His friends have so long misrepresented Him and maligned Him, that there is a revolt, and when men revolt they go to an opposite extreme and indulge a foolish reaction, and Christian Science is the expression of it, a philosophy that tells you truly that “God is love”, and denies foolishly that sin, sickness, sorrow and death, and even the devil, have any existence.
But who can blame them? So-called orthodox preaching repeats this old lie that “God is back of the world’s afflictions and sufferings,” and is equally responsible for the new lie that “there are none such”. They tell us it used to be taught that there were “infants in hell not a span long,” and this was done by devoted ministers who held to the eternal sovereignty of God, and to the doctrine of election, with a vengeance. It was a misrepresentation and without a single Biblical text for its base. No wonder Job says, “Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for Him”? (Job 13:7).The professors who deny God altogether or who would substitute falsehoods for the heavenly faith, and Nature’s laws for His Divinely wise regulations, make infidels of the students who sit at their feet; but not much more than do those supposedly orthodox ministers who preach an unbiblical sentimentalism and who present God after a manner unknown to His true character, and unjustified by Biblical teaching. We sometimes say we need to be delivered from our fool friends.
The Heavenly Father is not exempt from the same remark. We grow so impatient with such misrepresentations that we are tempted with Job to say, “Hold your peace”. “Let come on me what will”, I prefer affliction to the voice of such folly. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him”.God’s ears are never closed to the sincere appeal.
Job proceeds further, “Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know that I shall be justified” (Job 13:18). That is the language of the man who truly trusts. He believes that God has heard his cry and that God will consider it. It is the confidence of the man who truly prays. Christ Himself justified and encouraged such confidence. The importunate widow prayed, and was not relieved, but ceased not on that account. She repeated her petition again and again and again, until even an unjust judge acceded to her request. “Men ought always to pray, and not to faint”; “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right”?“Zion’s Herald” says truly, “The church is in danger of getting to believe nothing at all. We need not less preaching about humanity but more about God.
If the church is to have no firmer foundation than moral idealism of humanitarian cults, confusion and disaster await us! The church, in its haste to save the world, may be confounded by the world. The church of today needs a Pentecostal revival of power that never comes unless the church believes something and believes it tremendously.”There is a place for doctrine in the Christian church, and of all the doctrines, the chiefest is the doctrine of GOD. Tell me what sort of a God you have, and I need know nothing else about your religion; I can measure it accurately and record it correctly, for in a religion, God is everything. You can say, “God is love,” and be a one-sided sentimentalist; you can say, “God is justice,” and be an autocratic fatalist; you can say, “God is wisdom,” and be a scientific fool; you can say, “God is grace,” and be a libertine; you can say, “God is mercy,” and multiply your iniquities, but the man who has a truly complete God, such as the God of the Bible, will find his whole character and life influenced by that fact, and will take on in character what he attributes to the great Being before whom he bends his knee in prayer and adoration.But to conclude:GOD’S MERCYMan is the subject of both sin and sorrow. “Man that is born of woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not” (Job 14:1-2).This testimony from Job has an unusual value.
Had he been wretchedly born, badly bred; had he known the grind of poverty and discomfiture and defeat of ignorance; had his business enterprises been a failure and his name a hissing and a by-word, we could not blame him for talking after this manner. But for one so well born, so splendidly trained, so eminently successful, so universally honored, as Job had always been until now, to speak this way sounds strangely indeed, and yet what man is exempt?Take Solomon, the son of the king, the favorite of the people, the elect of God, the richest of the earth, the mightiest monarch living; the man whose glory astounded other potentates and forced from their lips the speech, “The half hath not been told”; and yet if you read the Book of Ecclesiastes you will find that he had all the things the natural heart commonly craves; wisdom was his inheritance, wine was his custom, women were at his command, wealth with him was unmeasured; work was according to his own pleasure and appointment; personal winsomeness was his favor from the Lord, but he sums it all up and declares it is “vanity and vexation of spirit”.These are lessons not learned from the grade studies nor the high school class recitations, nor the college curriculum, nor by correspondence.
They are the product of experience. It is said, “Experience is the best teacher.” One thing is sure and that is that its lessons of sorrow are not shortly forgotten, and what day brings none? Man comes into the world with a cry and leaves it with a groan and struggle, and cries and groans and struggles mark the path from the cradle to the grave.In one’s personal life there are so many opportunities of mistake and so many pitfalls into which one can land with a single step, and so many unforeseen circumstances by which one may suffer, and so many “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that may enter one’s flesh; in his business life there are so many investments that return less than they promised, and so many adversities one did not anticipate and so many financial crashes by which one may be caught; in his moral and spiritual life there are so many insidious temptations, so many conscienceless enemies, so many fateful neglects, and frightful iniquities that one is compelled, reviewing it all, to say concerning life, “A few days and full of trouble”.One’s grief is not limited to his own life, labor, fortune or family. The griefs of others get in on him, the sins of others sadden him, the misfortunes of others weigh him down. I confess very frankly that just at this present moment and in the midst of the battle with modernism, my greatest single burden is that of my loyal brethren who hold positions dependent upon the good will of the ecclesiastical machine, and whose refusal to sell conscience and speak the shibboleth of infidelity is the repeated occasion of their crucifixion.If one were more Christ-like his greatest burden would be not martyred saints but unsaved sinners— the thoughtless throngs that press their way to the pit, the mighty multitudes who make a mockery of life itself, live and end it in sin and go to an eternal judgment!But who shall draw a map of the realms of sorrow; who shall lay limits upon the experience of trouble? Who shall measure man’s misery? “All his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in the night.
This is also vanity” (Ecclesiastes 2:23).His life and death involve insoluble problems.“He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.“And dost Thou open Thine eyes upon such a one, and bringest me into judgment with Thee?“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one.“Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with Thee, Thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass;“Turn from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as a hireling, his day.“For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.“Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground;“Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.“But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?“As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up;“So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.“Oh that Thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that Thou wouldest keep me secret, until Thy wrath be past, that Thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me”! (Job 14:2-13).Job here admits what every man knows full well; namely, that you can’t explain all of human experience. You can’t explain why the greatest of all God’s creatures should be the most sorrowful.
You can’t explain why he should be cut down permanently, whereas the tree, when cut down, is able to reproduce itself from the stump and bring forth boughs. Even man’s death involves a question about which he would never be clear if it were not for God’s revelation, namely, “If a man die, shall he live again”? (Job 14:14). And yet, that there is an eventual objective in all nature who can question? When the sun sets it is that it may rise again. When the stars fade out we know they will reappear. When the floods come and devastate the earth, we know they are leaving rich deposits behind.
When the earthquake is past, we know that the earth will settle into new form. When the storms are over, we know the sun will shine and the rainbow itself will blaze into the heavens in fresh testimony of God’s pledge that never again shall all nature be submerged.
When the trees die, we know God will enrich the earth with them and bring out of their very decomposition a greater foliage and more abundant fruit.As to the intermediary steps between life and death, no man can explain them all; no man can understand them all; but that we journey to an objective is hardly to be questioned. Job at least held a positive conviction, “All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shalt call, and I will answer Thee: Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands” (Job 14:14-15).This Scripture with what follows to the end of the 14th chapter indicates another thought—Eternity is the promise of correction for the mistakes of time. The change Job anticipated he elsewhere discusses. He believed in life after death and a life of such harmonies as to make plain the present insoluble problems, and of such victory as to justify all battles.One cannot interpret this language aright without anticipating the more positive declaration to which Job will later give himself,“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:“And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” (Job 19:25-26),a translation which, if accepted at its face value, means the blessed doctrine of the resurrection of the body, a confirmation of Paul’s teaching—“It is sown in corruption;, it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory: It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44).If, on the other hand, one prefer the revised version, “Then without my flesh shall I see God”, then it is an equal confirmation of the Apostle’s teaching and another proof of the falseness of the doctrine of soul-sleeping, and is attested by the teaching of the same Apostle, “To be absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord”, an explanation of the same Apostle’s desire to depart and to be with Christ which he declares far better; an expression of the hope that he penned to the Hebrews, of access to “the City of the Living God, the Heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, To the general Assembly and Church of the firstborn which are written in Heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect” (Hebrews 12:22-23); so that by either translation, either interpretation, Job confidently awaited the great change that should bring him to God and holiness and Heaven with its eternal felicity. How blessed a faith!