Jehovah’s End.
WE have now the second and closing answer of Job to Jehovah, while the three friends have not a word to say, as silent before His solemn intervention and appeal, as they had been silenced by the sufferer, and unable to speak with Elihu. Here is the moral solution of the book before formal sentence on the great controversy was pronounced in verses 7, 8, or the open mark of divine blessing followed, as in verses 10-17.
And Job answered Jehovah, and said,
I know that Thou canst do all things,
And no purpose is cut off from Thee.
Who [is] this darkening counsel without knowledge?
Therefore I declared what I understood not,
Things too wonderful for me, that I knew not.
Hear, I pray Thee, and I will speak:
I ask Thee, and make Thou me to know.
By the hearing of the ear I heard Thee;
But now mine eye seeth Thee:
Therefore do I loathe [myself], and repent in dust, and ashes.
The work is now effected in the sufferer’s soul. Sincerity there had been throughout; but the very consciousness of integrity had put off the lesson when taught, or rather turned aside, by the thorny suspicions of the three friends; and he who needed to learn his own nothingness before God, and absolute indebtedness to grace, was as much lifted up in spirit above their insinuations, as crushed by dealings of God, of which he could understand nothing. Elihu had brought in the blessed light of soul discipline, whether to make God known where utter darkness reigned., or to purge away hindrances to a better knowledge and a deeper faithfulness. But Jehovah’s intervention brought him into His presence, in a self-judgment which made him feel, not the glory of God only, as never before, but himself nothing but an object of His grace. How much more should this be true of us who now know Him in redemption, and behold His glory in the face of Jesus glorified on high!
The friends are silent; Job does not believe in his heart only but makes confession with his mouth. Ho murmurs, he resents, he questions no more, but frankly owns, as a thing realized in his soul, that Jehovah is able for all things, and no purpose withheld from Him. Evil in men or Satan, ruin everywhere in this fallen world, had touched Him in no wise. His own difficulties and reasonings were but the in submissiveness of heart of one who, as Jehovah had Himself said in His exordium, darkened counsel without knowledge. It was Job that proclaimed his own ignorance, declaring that he did not understand, things too wonderful for him that he knew not. Not a word now about his friends, or their lack of intelligence, as of candor and charity, however true. He judges himself before God; and uses the words which God had applied to him, the withering proof of his presumption, as the lowly expression of one who felt his need of learning from God, and of desire that it might be wrought in him. Finally, he acknowledges that anything he had previously known of God was but like a report from afar, compared with that near and deep sight of Him which made him loathe himself, so as to repent in dust and ashes. He humbles himself under God’s mighty hand, that he may be exalted in due time.
But God humbles the proud, and this meanwhile where He is more or less known, as He will for the ללmost stubborn in a day at hand. So He turns to those who had displeased Him in His dealings with Job:—
“And it came to pass that, after Jehovah spike these words to Job, Jehovah said to Eliphaz the Temanite, Mine anger is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends, for ye have not spoken to (or of) Me rightly as My servant Job. And now take unto you seven bullocks and seven rams, and go unto My servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering; and Job, My servant, shall pray for you—for surely his face I accept —that I may not deal with you [after your] folly, for ye have not spoken to (or, of) Me rightly as My servant Job. And Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, [and] Zophar the Naamathite, went and did as Jehovah had said unto them; and Jehovah accepted the face of Job. And Jehovah turned the captivity of Job in his praying for his friends; and Jehovah increased all that Job had two-fold. And there came unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all his former acquaintance, and ate bread with him in his house, and condoled with him, and comforted him over all the evil which Jehovah had brought upon him; and they gave him each a kesitah, and each a ring of gold. And Jehovah blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses. And he had seven sons and three daughters; and he called the name of the first Jemima, and the name of the second Kezia, and the name of the third Keren-happuch. And there were not found in all the land women fair as the daughters of Job; and their father gave them inheritance in the midst of their brethren. And Job lived after this a hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, four generations; and Job died, old and sated [with] days.”
Thus did the Supreme Arbiter of all moral relationship decide in Job’s favor, not because of his patience, great as it was proverbially, but because, in spite of the most severely searching trial—and not least from those who should have helped on the work of grace, instead of judging him ruthlessly according to appearances, which made them unjust to the sufferer, and left them wholly ignorant of God’s mind—he had at length submitted absolutely to God, and vindicated Him in the recognition of his own worthlessness; while his friends failed to own their error, not to Job only or Elihu but even to Jehovah, preserving to the last the sullen reserve of pride, not judged but wounded. No repudiation of themselves did they manifest, no repentance in dust and ashes, like Job, any more than a real and thorough magnifying of Him who thus deigned to make known His decision for the profit of faith throughout all time here below. It is clear and certain that all done in the body, yea, that the counsels of the heart, with the hidden things of darkness, are yet to stand out in the day that is coming; but God reveals this to act on our souls now, in promoting, to the highest degree, both self-judgment and the refusal of censoriousness. No notion can be more false, or less holy, than putting all off till then. Faith seeks and finds the blessing of it now; but if of faith, it is by grace, which judges self in God’s light, and abhors all hasty and acrimonious judgment of others. In that day shall every true soul have praise of God, who may, as in this case before us, vindicate one, and rebuke another, even now. But then, and only then, does the Christian look for it absolutely, which keeps him peaceful and dependent while waiting till the Lord come.
Here the reversal was complete. Jehovah intimated to Eliphaz His anger against himself and his two companions: they had not spoken to Him rightly, like His servant Job. They must needs therefore approach Him by sacrifice through the very one they had so grievously misjudged, Godward and manward, persecuting him whom, we may perhaps say, God had smitten, and certainly talking to the grief of one whom He had wounded. And His servant Job, whose prayers they had contemned, would pray for them, lest they should be blotted out of the book of the living, for indeed they had wrought folly, in their thoughts and words at least, and Jehovah otherwise must deal with it on them, for they had not vindicated Him like Job. They therefore had thus to bow; while favor and blessing more than ever crowned Job, Jehovah turning his captivity when he prayed for his friends. How gracious, as well as righteous, are His ways! How holy and wholesome! So He proved Himself then; and so He is still, when far more fully, yea perfectly, revealed in Christ. And as we see then the form of pious confession by burnt-offering, so follows, in accordance with that day, the outward seal of earthly blessing in divinely marked abundance. Men may point to the twofold increase with wonder, and compare job’s household and stock at the end of his trial with its account before the trial began. Do they think God cannot act as He will, or count, or write? What senseless unbelief! He is Sovereign, and nothing could be more suitable or impressive then, in itself to be a lesson for man always; and if He does not so bless now, it is because other and higher ways of grace are in accomplishment, in harmony with the cross of Christ on earth, and His glorification in heaven. But He is the same God, ever good and ever wise, and His end then, as also His beginning now, is, that He is very pitiful and of tender mercy.
Nor does it seem to me uninstructive that the daughters are singled out by name, especially in a quarter, and before the days, where men are all, and women but playthings or upper slaves. Not such was God’s mind, even for, those who feared Him, outside the privileges and polity of Israel. How contrasted the imposture of man more than two thousand years after! The days of Job, confirmed by all else in the book, fall in with the patriarchal condition; as the style of the book seems to point to Moses. The use of the divine names would perfectly suit in this case; as it also furnishes a very striking demonstration of their folly, who, following a strangely shallow notion, construe them into evidence of different writings separated by a long interval of time. The Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets alike refute the notion as opposed to facts and displaying ignorance of their distinctive design under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the same writer.
May the believer humbly, happily, and holily enjoy the wisdom and goodness of God in His word, nowhere more conspicuous and withal profound than in that which unbelief misreads to its sin, darkness, misery and ruin; as credulous of its own conceits, as ready to sit in judgment on God and His word.