Job 6

Job 6:1-30

JOB—OR THE POWER OF MATTER OVER MINDJob 6, 7.THE power of mind over matter is one of the popular themes in modern discussions. It is generally conceded that that power is much greater than men of the past have ever imagined; and there is a definite science developing in this direction, and we may yet learn that the majority of ills, to which the flesh is heir, originate not so much with diseased blood as with a disordered brain!And yet the converse of this contains a great message of truth. Matter has a certain power over mind, body a certain control of the brain, and the Book of Job is a fair and a very faithful presentation of that fact. When in health, he was a man of remarkable poise, reputed progress and enviable position, and a man whose service to God had been of such an unusual character as to excite not only the observation of his fellows, but the attention of the great Adversary—the devil—and stirred in his fiendish mind a desire to discredit the good man of God.But no man knows himself, nor is he perfectly known by his fellows until he was experienced, at once, fortune and misfortune. Some men can remain extremely faithful while favored, and other men reveal greater faithfulness in the day of harrowing judgment; but the special depths of a man’s soul have not been sounded, and his spirit has known no perfect test until he has both flourished and failed.Paul, by the pen of inspiration, develops this idea when he insists that in all things we shall prove ourselves to be God’s servants,“in much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses,“In stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings;“By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned,“By the Word of Truth, by the power of God; by the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left,“By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true;“As unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed;“As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things” (2 Corinthians 6:4-10).These two chapters (Job 6-7) are a revelation of how the man who has been prospered sees things when the day of his calamity comes, and they present: The Weight of Human Affliction; The Infidelity of Personal Suffering, and The Inquiries of a Protracted Pain.THE WEIGHT OF HUMAN “But Job answered and said,“Oh that my grief were throughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!“For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea” (Job 6:1-3).His claim is, it eludes physical measure. This is no flippant speech!

For seven long days Job sat, as did his three friends, in awful silence. Sorrow and suffering had stricken him dumb, and I have little doubt that since Eliphaz finished his speech another great period of silence has intervened.

Many were the sobs preceding the sentences he now utters, and when at last the lips part it is not in eloquence, nor yet in that logic which presents a premise and reaches a conclusion; but it is in a passionate cry, a pathetic moan, if you please, which does not express the depths of his sorrow, but declares, rather, that no man can sound it; and the breadth of his suffering, no man can measure.Neither does, he attempt to make clear the meaning of it all, but argues that another cannot understand it. The rivers can be numbered and named, and so can the mountains; the valleys can be surveyed and parcelled out, and the seas enumerated; but the sands of the sea, who shall count them, and, when thought of together, who can weigh them? Their infinite stretch, their unmeasurable weight stood out for Job as a symbol of his sorrow, and by their employment he flings back at his friends the great thought that they did not understand his grief. No man ever had friends who did, if his grief was great. There are some things that can never be studied from the outside and understood; one must enter into them in order to know them.A few years since I was on the Galveston Bay when it was swept by an awful storm. From the time when the wind became a fury in the forenoon until darkness veiled the vision of the billows, I never took my eyes from them.

I saw the outward expression of that storm; but, standing as I was, in a comparatively safe and well protected spot, I never understood it as did the people who had been caught in the same, fifty of whom lost their lives that day, and hundreds of whose hearts failed them before the fury abated or help was at hand.Some experiences exceed the power of speech. Job’s was of that sort!

Therefore said he, “My words are swallowed up” (Job 6:3). When David was judged for his sin he was struck into silence. Writing of it he says, “I was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because Thou didst it”. And when he does speak it is an anguished cry, “Remove Thy stroke away from me; I am consumed by the blow of Thine hand” (Psalms 39:9-10).People sometimes say that it is good for the bereaved to weep; that in their very sobs there is relief. Doubtless there is much of truth in the claim. Speech also is a sign of a lightened load.

A man whose grief is so great that speech leaves him has little of hope. The whole world knows of Richard Baxter whose single volume, “The Saint’s Rest”, would have made his name immortal; but only a few are familiar with the experiences that made possible such a production—the experiences of poverty, of ignorance, of physical suffering, of medical maltreatment, and of such a multitude of discouragements as would have broken the heart of that man who had attempted to endure them in silence.

As he himself says, “I am of no University, but self-educated; weakness and pain helped me to study how to die, and that sent me on to study how to live. Beginning with necessities I proceeded by degrees, and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied.” The allusion of Baxter to “weakness and pain” brings out the life-long struggle he had with ill-health. He was always in the hands of the doctors. Orme in his biography, says, “He was diseased literally from head to foot; his stomach flatulent and acidulous; violent rheumatic headaches; prodigious bleeding at the nose; his blood so thin and acrid that it oozed out from the points of his fingers, and kept them often raw and bloody.” And Orme then adds, “To be more particular would be disagreeable.” Speaking about one serious sickness, Baxter said, “I was restored by the mercy of God and the help of Dr. Michleth wait and the moss of a dead man’s skull.”But in the midst of his suffering Baxter was never silent. He wrote one hundred and fifty treatises, did the work of an army chaplain, fulfilled a long and arduous pastorate and put in no considerable time in imprisonment after his trial before Jeffries.If you are going to bestow sympathy on Job, the time in which he needs it most is this very experience when his words are swallowed up and every attempt at speech is only a fresh sob, and every effort at logic results in only a more prolonged silence.Job’s affliction is more spiritual than material.

Listen to his statement, “The arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me”. Matthew Henry says, “Herein he is a type of Christ, who in His suffering complained most of the suffering of His soul—’Now is my soul troubled’ (John 12:27); ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death’ (Matthew 26:38); ‘My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me’? (Matthew 27:46).”There are some experiences that pain us far beyond poverty, or disgrace, or bodily pain!

Troubles that are purely mental exceed in intensity and anguish those that result from some material failure or pain. “A wounded spirit who can bear”? writes the inspired penman. The soul of a man does determine whether the sun is shining or whether the day is darker than night; whether the landscape is fair or whether it is foul to the point of sickening. I have known a man who had his favorite haunt in a place of surpassing beauty; it was his delight to walk there. The green sward, the blooming flowers, inviting paths, waving waters, the sweet voiced birds, called him to that spot again and again. But in the course of time there came a change over the whole landscape; the very agony he had endured by what he knew of it as a trysting place, turned him from it forever, and he could not pass even the vicinity and restrain his tears. Agonies of body he had known, but none like this mental anguish, for physical suffering and pain that may rack one and rob him of all rest, and reduce him to flesh and bones, and push him into the grave, have in them no such curse of suffering as has the immortal spirit with which God has stamped every mortal man.But this weight of Job’s affliction results inTHE OF Job reaches the point where he doubts the compassion of God, where he disputes the generosity of men and, where he denies his own selfishness and sin.He doubts the compassion of God.

He makes his request that God would grant him the thing for which he longeth, that is, death—“that he would let loose His hand, and cut me off”; but he makes it in despair, evidently feeling that God will not hear him and answer this plea. But when uttering this conviction there seems to remain with him the thought that God is not altogether just in His denial, for he says, “Then should I yet have comfort; yea, I would harden myself in sorrow: let Him not spare; for I have not concealed the words of the Holy One”.In other words, a faithful man has a right to expect of that God to whom he has been loyal, a withholding of such affliction, but in case it does befall, the ending of it, if it need be by death—a philosophy which misses the whole point of suffering, so far as God appears at all in that experience.Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews speaks in a very different tone; quoting from the Old Testament Proverbs, he writes:“My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of Him:“For whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.“If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?“But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons.“Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection unto the Father of spirits, and live?“For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness.Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.“Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees;“And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed” (Hebrews 12:5-13).The truth is that a man’s day of suffering is not that in which he sees clearly either the Divine plan or his possible profit.

This is illustrated in the story of Jacob. Think of him on that day when his sons brought back to him Joseph’s coat, ragged and blood-stained, and the grand old Patriarch, his very heart broken, sobs out, “It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him: Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces. * * I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning” (Genesis 37:33; Genesis 37:35). Then hear him later as he talks about Benjamin when it is being urged that he be permitted to go with his brethren after corn, “Me have ye bereaved of my children: Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away; all these things are against me” (Genesis 42:36). But one day they bring him a wonderful message that Joseph is alive and is the lord of the South, but “Jacob’s heart fainted, for he believed them not”. Even when through evil God has wrought out good it is hard for the subject of it to see and accept the same.The same infidelity disputes the generosity of man. Job feels, without occasion, that his friends are unsympathetic and hard.

He says, “To him that is afflicted pity should be showed from his friend”; but “my brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks they pass away. Which are blackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid”, which is only a figurative way of declaring that they are not only hard but cold; they are not sympathetic but suspicious—“Did I say, Bring unto me? or, Give a reward for me of your substance? or, Deliver me from the enemy’s hand? or, Redeem me from the hand of the mighty”?Second to the day when the face of God is obscured for one, does darkness enshroud that time when a man loses confidence in his fellows and becomes convinced that the whole world is unsympathetic and treacherous.

The late Chauncey Depew was certainly a man of sufficient accomplishments to make it worth while to attend to his words, and he wrote: “Never let us lose faith in human nature, no matter how often we are deceived. I have lost twenty-five per cent of all I have ever made in lending money and indorsing notes, and have incurred generally the enmity of those I have helped because I did not keep it up. But every once in a while there is somebody who returns in such full measure the credit for the help which was rendered that faith was kept alive, and the beauty and goodness of our human nature were made evident. I have had appointed about a thousand men to employment which gave them support and a chance to climb to positions of greater responsibility and trust, if they had the inclination and ability. About nine out of ten of them threw stones at me because I did not do better, and keep pushing them; and yet there are a hundred or so who, by the exercise of their own ability, their own grasp of the situation, have gone on to the accomplishment of such high ambitions and successes, and have appreciated in so many ways the help extended to them by helping others, that again my faith in human nature remains undiminished.”It is a strange fact, and yet it is one often found, that the man who doubts the compassion of God and the generosity of his fellows, will deliver an eloquent self-justification.After having indicted his friends with an attempt to make merchandise of his professed friendship, he says,“Now therefore be content, look upon me; for it is evident unto you if I lie.“Return, I pray you, let it not be iniquity; yea, return again, my righteousness is in it.“Is there iniquity in my tongue? cannot my taste discern perverse things”? (Job 6:28-30).No man can rightly understand himself who hath misjudged the great Father of lights, and his fellows. There is perhaps no exception to the rule; the man who brings God from His throne by any form of infidelity, immediately attempts to exalt himself; and the man who puts God on the throne in his affliction, emphasizes His justice as well as His compassion, and who looks upon his fellows to feel that they are his friends, is the man from whose heart pride perishes and upon whose lips penitent speech is often found.

In other words a true vision of God’s holiness and love gives us correct estimate of human lust and sin.Finally, learn from these two chapters in Job something ofTHE OF THE LONG Pain turns every man into an interrogation point. Why?

It is a little word but it goes up before God and demands an answer. The Book of Hosea in the Old Testament Scriptures might be expressed in this one word of three letters—Why? As Joseph Parker sagely remarks, “Job’s tone is interrogative, involving more than twenty questions, and what do these marks of interrogation mean? They almost illustrate the speech, for he who asks questions after this fashion is as a man groping his way in darkness. A blind man’s staff is always asking questions. You never see a blind man put out his hand, but that hand is really in the form of an interrogation, saying, in its wavering and quest, Where am I? What is this? What is my position now?

Am I far from home? Do I come near a friend? The great speeches of Demosthenes have been noted for their interrogation; the marks of interrogation stand among the sentences like so many spears, swords, or implements of war; for there was battle in every question.” And grief, argues Parker, takes kindly to the interrogation form of utterance. Job wants to know if the old foundations are standing still, whether the sky is fallen, whether the sun has risen, whether sweet Mother Nature is making ready the table for her hungry children, or whether everything is gone since he fell into this trance of sorrow.We shall attempt no answer to twenty questions, but to a very few instead: Is there to be an end to the dark day? Is there not a limit to human endurance? Is not the death of the penitent desirable?Is there to be an end to the dark day?“Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? are not his days also like the days of an hireling?“As a servant earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for the reward of his work;“So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me.“When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? And I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day” (Job 7:1-4).The days were to him what they were to David when he cried, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but Thou hearest not” (Psalms 22:2); or when he wrote:“My days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.“My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.“By reason of the voice of my groaning, my bones cleave to my skin” (Psalms 102:3-5).It was of such days that Father Ryan was thinking when he wrote: “They come to ev’ry life—sad, sunless days With not a light o’er all their clouded skies;.And thro’ the dark we grope along our ways With hearts fear-filled, and lips low-breathing sighs.“What is the dark? Why cometh it? and whence? Why does it banish all the bright away?How does it weave a spell o’er soul and sense? Why falls the shadow where’er gleams the ray?“Hast felt it? I have felt it, and I know How oft and suddenly the shadows rollFrom out the depths of some dim realm of woe, To wrap their darkness round the human soul.“Those days are darker than the very night; For nights have stars, and sleep, and happy dreams;But those days bring unto the spirit-sight The mysteries of gloom, until it seems“The light is gone forever, and the dark Hangs like a pall of death above the soul,Which rocks amid the gloom like storm-swept bark, And sinks beneath a sea where tempests roll.”Is there not a limit to human endurance?“My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.“My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope.“O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good.“The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more: Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.“As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away; so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more” (Job 7:5-8).“When I say, My bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint; “Then Thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions; so that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life” (Job 7:13-15).Job little understands through what agonies a man might pass and not only live but be purified by the process. His life had known so much of favor and so much of ease that he is ill-adapted to poverty and pain, and his ideas of endurance were not those of the spirit educated by sorrow. It is reported that Napoleon Bonaparte, riding over a bloody field, saw his horse’s hoof go through the flesh of a man that he supposed to be dead, and the poor fellow started from his comatose condition in a cry of mortal pain, whereupon the, great iron-hearted fellow said, “My, God! What agonies a man may suffer!” And yet that anguish was light beside what many another has endured. As Louis Albert Banks once wrote, “When the books are opened it will be found that many of the greatest victories of the Christian Church have been won by those who were wounded most deeply, and many of her grandest enterprises carried to success by those whose tracks were marked by blood.” And when Jesus Christ at last places the crowns of rejoicing upon the brows of the conquering hosts it will be discovered that those that wear the bestudded diadems of righteousness are the very ones that once felt the anguish of the thorns.Is the death of the penitent desirable? Why dost Thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and Thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be” (Job 7:21).

You can stand before the most sorrowful soul the world knows and when the speech of anguish is finished, when they go back to that of intelligence and sobriety, and forget their impetuous desire to leave the world; when the few days of sorrow are passed, and the sober second thought takes place, they will acknowledge sin and call upon God for pardon, knowing that not even the grave holds any peace for the impenitent; and yet perfectly understanding that in God there is a peace that passeth knowledge for every man who in contrition of spirit seeks His favor; that He is the soul’s refuge not only from the sorrows and anguish of life, but from the sweeping storms of sin. Once more I must appeal to the good Southern poet, Father Ryan, to illustrate my meaning; “Weary hearts! weary hearts! by the cares of life oppressed,Ye are wand’ring in the shadows—ye are sighing for a rest:There is darkness in the heavens, and the earth is bleak below,And the joys we taste today may tomorrow turn to woe.Weary hearts! God is rest.“Lonely hearts! lonely hearts! this is but a land of grief;We are pining for repose—ye are longing for relief;What the world hath never given, kneel and ask of God above,And your grief shall turn to gladness, if you lean upon His love.Lonely hearts! God is Love.“Restless hearts! Restless hearts! ye are toiling night and day,And the flowers of life, all withered, leave but thorns along your way:Ye are waiting, ye are waiting, till your toilings all shall cease,And your ev’ry restless beating is a sad, sad prayer for peace. Restless hearts! God is Peace.“Breaking hearts! broken hearts! ye are desolate and lone,And low voices from the past o’er your present ruins moan!In the sweetest of your pleasures there were bitterest alloy.And a starless night hath followed on the sunset of your joy. Broken hearts! God is Joy.”