William H Green
Job has now come to the end of the third stage of the temptation, the last and most fearful. The struggle has been tremendous. It has been a long and a wearisome conflict, desperately contested. But the issue is glorious. The forces of the enemy are not merely driven back, and left to rally and return to the charge; they are not merely routed and put to an ignominious and disordered flight. They are positively annihilated and the victory is complete and final.
Sublime as was Job’s resignation in the first and second stages of his afflictions, it is more sublime now. When his property and his children were all swept from him at a stroke, Job still blessed the name of the Lord, mindful of the fact that the Lord had given what He now took away. When, in addition, his own person was visited with a dreadful and incurable malady, he meekly received the evil at the hands of the Lord, mindful of the good which He had previously bestowed. His constant trust in God rooted itself each time in the past, in the abundance of former mercies; his grateful sense of these was not effaced by all the severity of his present trials. He put his trials in the scales over against the benefits which the Lord had so bountifully conferred upon him, and the latter still largely outweighed the other.
Yet each infliction of evil was an opposing weight, acting with whatever force it possessed in a contrary direction from God’s mercies, and to that extent detracting from his sense of His goodness and love. This laid him open to the temptation of Satan. It created the possibility that if weight enough could be accumulated on the side of affliction, it might at length turn the scales the other way. And if this takes place, Job has fallen and Satan has gained the victory. During the most terrible period of his sorrows, when Satan seemed to have summoned every possible influence to depress the scale, Job was indeed hard pressed by his wily and unscrupulous foe and was put to the greatest straits. It was as much as he could do, by straining his strength to the utmost, to maintain the balance on the right side. It was only by the strenuous efforts of a faith which took hold of the unseen, brought to its aid the world of the future and laid its grasp upon the immutable attributes of God Himself – thus pinning the scale down to the everlasting rock – that he could keep the balance on the side of God and piety, against a pressure too great for nature to sustain.
Thus there was, to this extent, some foundation for Satan’s malignant sneer, “Doth Job fear God for nought?” The enemy had detected a crevice in the structure of Job’s faith, into which he hoped to drive a wedge that should cleave the edifice asunder and bring it crumbling down into ruins. Job’s sense of God’s goodness rested on the benefits received from Him, instead of the divine goodness being itself the fixed foundation and everything received from the hand of God being for that reason counted a benefit. He judged of God by his own partial and defective notion of His dealings, instead of judging of those dealings by his knowledge of God. Job had, in the fierce conflict which Satan had waged against him, been driven by sheer necessity to base his faith on the irremovable foundation, notwithstanding the darkness and confusion of mind which still rested upon the mysterious subject of his sufferings.
But now that Elihu had, as God’s messenger of instruction, pointed out to him the gracious ends of affliction, and the Lord had revealed Himself to him in the true glory of His nature, the previous flaw in Job’s faith is closed up. The perfections of God have now become his first presupposition, independent of any support to be derived from His particular dealings with him.
Heaven and earth may pass away. All things seen and temporal may fluctuate and change. But the perfections of God abide, incapable of mutation or decay. This is the one fixed point, the basis of all certainty and of all correct judgements. It is, in mathematical phrase, the origin to which everything is to be referred, and from which everything is to be estimated. God must ever act like Himself. Whatever He does must be consistent with His glorious attributes; it must in fact be the outflow of those attributes. The orderings of providence have their spring in the perfections of the ever-blessed God. Sense cannot discern this. But faith affirms it and persistently adheres to it, whatever the outward appearance of things.
This is the lesson which Job has now learned, and hence he retracts all his murmuring words and all that was reproachful to his Maker. He abhors himself for having uttered them; he repents in dust and ashes. He would not now ask as before, “Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” There is no evil, there can be no evil, from the hand of the Lord. Evil is good when it comes from Him. He no longer puts the benefits received from God in one scale and afflictions in the other; afflictions are put in the same scale with benefits. They too are benefits when God sends them.
Thus, instead of tending to create a counterpoise, they add their weight to that of the obligation previously existing. The nerve of Satan’s temptation is now cut completely. Every weight goes henceforth into the scale of God’s goodness, and there is no possibility of disturbing the existing predominance. He who has learned to place his sole and undivided trust in God, and to estimate all things by the standard of His perfection, is beyond the reach of any serious attempt to detach him from the Lord’s service. To such a faith Job has risen under the felt power of God’s immediate presence. His position is now perfectly impregnable, and Satan can assail him no longer. His spiritual deliverance is complete.
The Lord’s purpose in permitting these dreadful sorrows is at length fully accomplished. There is therefore no further occasion for them to continue. Accordingly the Lord now removes them. And first he pronounces in Job’s favour and against his friends. “The Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath.” They had really accused the providence of God when they professed to defend it. By disingenuously covering up its enigmas and seeming contradictions, they had cast more discredit on it than Job by honestly holding them up to the light. Their denial of its apparent inequalities was more untrue and more dishonouring to God’s administration, as it is in fact conducted, than Job’s bold affirmation of them.
Even the most startling utterances wrung from him in his bewilderment and sore perplexity were less reprehensible than their false statements and false inferences. In averring that God was treating Job as a gross offender, they indirectly charge Him with injustice and cruelty to His faithful servant. Job’s impatient outcries under his sore distress were less offensive to God than these unwarrantable misrepresentations. And now that, humbled and penitent, he had retracted all that he had rashly spoken, everything was forgiven. And everything was forgotten except his present noble confession in which, stricken as he was in the dust and bleeding at every pore, he had placed God upon the throne and submitted without a murmur to His holy will.
The friends of Job, who had thought him an outcast from God’s favour, can only be restored to that favour themselves through the intercession of their maligned and injured friend. This intercession is not withheld, for he bears no malice toward them and no resentment for all their ill-treatment. The bitterness that had sometimes broken out in his former speeches is entirely gone. He forgives them as God has forgiven him. And with this renewed evidence of the profit which he has derived from his afflictions, his captivity is turned and his former prosperity is renewed and doubled.
Job is now entirely extricated from Satan’s snare and released from his burden of woe. And the riddle is at length solved. The explanation of the sufferings of God’s dear children, as suggested by the case of Job, may be embraced in the following particulars. They afford to all gainsayers a palpable test of their integrity. The very intensity of the struggle develops their faith and other graces, and leads them on to clearer views of heavenly truth. These sorrows are sent on the part of God with a gracious design, and afford the occasion of His revealing Himself to chastened souls with new fulness and power. In consequence of this they are brought nearer to Him than ever before, and their happiness and welfare are proportionally promoted. “Behold,” says the Apostle James (5:11), “we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.”
1Taken, with editing, from The Argument of the Book of Job Unfolded. An extract from an earlier part of this book appeared last month.