“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.” — Job 23: 3, 4.
In Job’s uttermost extremity he cries after the Lord. The longing desire of an afflicted child of God is once more to see his father’s face. His first prayer is not, “Oh that I might be healed of the disease which now festers in every part of my body!” Nor even, “Oh that I might see my children restored from the jaws of the grave, and my property once more brought from the hand of the spoiler!” But the first and uttermost cry is “Oh that I knew where I might find Him — who is my God! that I might come even to His seat!”
God’s children run home when the storm comes on. It is the heaven-born instinct of a gracious soul to seek shelter from all ills beneath the wings of Jehovah. “He that hath made his refuge God,” might serve as the title of a true believer. A hypocrite, when he feels that he has been afflicted by God, resents the infliction, and, like a slave, would run from the master who has scourged him; but not so the true heir of heaven. He kisses the hand which smote Him, and seeks shelter from the rod in the bosom of that very God who frowned upon him.
You will observe that the desire to commune with God is intensified by the failure of all other sources of consolation. When Job first saw his friends at a distance, he may have entertained a hope that their kindly counsel and compassionate tenderness would blunt the edge of his grief; but they had not long spoken before he cried out in bitterness, “Miserable comforters are ye all,” they put salt into his wounds, they heaped fuel upon the flame of his sorrow, they added the gall of their upraidings to the wormwood of his griefs. In the sunshine of his smile they once had longed to sun themselves, and now they dare to cast shadows upon his reputation, most ungenerous and undeserved. So the patriarch turned away from his sorry friends and looked up to the celestial throne, just as a traveller turns from his empty skin bottle and betakes himself with all speed to the well. He bids farewell to earth born hopes, and cries, “Oh that I knew where I might find my God!” Nothing teaches us so much the preciousness of the Creator as when we learn the emptiness of all besides, when you have been pierced through and through with the sentence, “Cursed is he that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm,” then will you suck unutterable sweetness from the divine assurance, “Blessed is he that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.” Turning away with bitter scorn from earth’s hives, where you found no honey, but many sharp stings, you will rejoice in him whose faithful word is sweeter than honey or the honeycomb.
It is further observable that though a good man hastens to God in his trouble, and runs with all the more speed because of the unkindness of his fellow men, yet sometimes the gracious soul is left without the comfortable presence of God. This is the worst of all griefs; the text is one of Job’s deep groans, far deeper than any which came from him on account of the loss of his children and his property: “Oh that I knew where I might find him!” The worst of all losses is to lose the smile of my God. He now had a foretaste of the bitterness of his redeemer’s cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” God’s presence is always with His people in one sense, so far as secretly sustaining them is concerned, but his manifest presence they do not always enjoy. Like the spouse in the song, they seek their beloved by night upon their bed, they seek him but they find him not, and though they wake and roam through the city they may not discover him, and the question may be sadly asked again and again, “Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?” You may be beloved of God, and yet have no consciousness of that love in your soul. You may be as dear to His heart as Jesus Christ Himself, and yet for a small moment He may forsake you; and in a little wrath He may hide Himself from you.
But at such times the desire of the believing soul gathers yet greater intensity from the fact of God’s light being withheld. Instead of saying with proud lip, “Well, if He leaves me I must do without Him; if I cannot have His comfortable presence I must fight on as best may be,” the soul says, “No, it is my very life; I must have my God. I perish, I sink in deep mire where there is no standing, and nothing but the arm of God can deliver me.” The gracious soul addresses itself with a double zeal to find out God, and sends up its groans, its entreaties, its sobs and sighs to heaven more frequently and fervently. “Oh that I knew where I might find Him!” Distance or labour are as nothing; if the soul only knew where to go she would soon overlap the distance. She makes no stipulation about mountains or rivers, but vows that if she knew where, she would come even to His seat. My soul in her hunger would break through stone walls, or scale the battlements of heaven to reach her God, and though there were seven hells between me and Him, yet would I face the flame if I might reach Him, nothing daunted if I had but the prospect of at last standing in His presence and feeling the delight of His love. That seems to me to be the state of mind in which Job pronounced the words before us.
But we cannot stop at this point. It appears that Job’s end in desiring the presence of God, was that he might pray to Him. He had prayed, but he wanted to pray as in God’s presence. He desired to plead as before one whom he knew would hear and help him. He longed to state his own case before the seat of the impartial judge, before the very face of the all-wise God; he would appeal from the lower courts, where his friends judged unrighteous judgement, to the court of king’s bench — the high court of heaven — there says he, “I would order my cause before Him, and fill my mouth with arguments.” In this latter verse Job teaches us how he meant to plead and intercede with God. He does, as it were, reveal the secrets of his closet, and unveils the art of prayer. We are here admitted into the guild of suppliants; we are shown the art and mystery of pleading. We have here taught to us the blessed handicraft and science of prayer, and if we can be bound apprentice to Job and can have a lesson from Job’s Master, we may acquire no little skill in interceding with God.