God was dealing with Job; but he had to learn himself. What makes Job so interesting is that the book is independent of all dispensations.
When I find what I am and cannot tell what God is, of course, I am in misery. When God is plowing up the ground, this is not a crop. Plowing comes before harvest. “In all this Job sinned not.” There was none like Job in all the earth, but he did not know himself: a spirit of self-righteousness had been creeping over him.
Supposing God had stopped there, what would have come of it? Job might have said, “In prosperity I was eyes to the blind; in adversity I was patient,” and the whole case would have been worse. He goes on till his friends come, and then, perhaps from pride, or because he could not bear their sympathy, he breaks down. The process was a trying humbling one. “O if I could meet God,” Job says, “He is not like you: there is goodness in Him.”
His friends stood on utterly false ground; they took this world as the adequate witness of the government of God. This only makes Job the more angry: the world is no adequate testimony of the government of God.
There you see a soul rising under that which is upon him, striving and wrestling, the flesh breaking out so that he should know himself. Job, having been thus wrought in and exercised and plowed up, passes through all the various considerations as to how he could meet God. Throughout there are certain true sayings, as “The righteous Lord loveth righteousness,” but are we righteous? This is another story. Are you in a condition, if you had to do with God this moment, to say “I am righteous” before Him? Many a one looks at the cross and says “I am a poor sinner, and I have no hope but the cross.” But can you say, “I am a poor sinner, and the judgment-seat just suits me?”
J. N. Darby