Job 1:0 - Homilies By E. Johnson

On the general teaching of the book.

For all earnest readers; for all who can think seriously, feel deeply; all who have in their own persons loved and lost; who have known life in its brightest and its darkest moods; all, again, who have that fine gift of sympathy which makes the pain and woe of humanity their own;—this book has a most powerful attraction, a profound charm. Here we have suffering through all the scale of human being; suffering tuned to music most plaintive, which strikes some response from the chords of every human heart. Here, too, we have reflection upon suffering, intense thought bent without fear and without reserve upon the great questions of Life. Who has not, in some weary, desponding hour, at some time or other, sighed forth, "What is the meaning of it all?" It is a question which seems to answer itself joyously, or rather to require no asking, in the brighter days of life. Nature and the heart of man smile upon one another with the reflection of the gladness of the Creative Mind when he saw that all his works were very good. But in many a midnight hour of mental darkness the question that we thought answered and set at rest forces its presence upon us, and demands an answer of our reason. And Reason," from wave to wave of fancied misery driven," loses her bearings; ignorant of the latitude, she knows not whither to steer for a port. This is the mood of Job. And relief comes at length, in an unexpected way, from the Source whence alone it can come. We are taught the great lesson of suffering—to wait and to hope. He who tarries in patience until he beholds the "end of the Lord" shall find an abundant reward of his faith and constancy.

I. THE ENIGMAS OF LIFE . Pain, loss, disease, exchanged for pleasure, gain, health, and riches. Man cannot understand this process. And he cannot willingly submit to what he does not understand.

1 . He has an instinct for happiness, which he cannot deny without denying himself. He and all nature, he feels, and truly feels, were constructed for happiness. He is bound to work for this end, both in himself and others. The Creator (he is thus naturally taught to reason) must be a happy and happiness-loving Being, ever blessed, ever blessing. Thus, when a rebuff is given to these powerful and clear instincts, and their truth is suddenly extinguished, as it were, in the man's own bosom; when all the springs of natural joy are in a moment dried up like the summer torrent of the East;—what wonder that he should complain? Is he the victim of some radical deception? Are all his thoughts illusions? Whence came those instincts for happiness, which one

.

3 . But Job, on the other hand, dares, with all the independence of the just thinker, of the man who cannot be untrue to the clearest light of his self-consciousness, to deny the application of this judgment to his case. He denies that his present sufferings point back to previous sins. Whatever be the solution of the problem, that, he knows, cannot be the true one. No deluge of religious commonplace shall move him from his fixed position, his conscious integrity of soul. No agony can wring from him an echo to the shallow cant of men who prate about suffering without really having suffered. Despite all that wife and friends can urge, he will not, cannot, desert the side of truth, or what he feels to be the truth. And in this experience truth does not condemn him; on the whole it acquits him. This is one of the most instructive lessons the entire poem yields us—to be true to ourselves, to follow the light within, let others scold and rebuke as they will. More frequently, no doubt, we need to apply this lesson in an humiliating way. If we are true to ourselves, we shall have to admit that we have brought our troubles upon ourselves by our own faults. But sometimes it may be otherwise. The link may be wanting which unites the effect to its cause. If we feel this to be so, we must have the courage to say so; and on the same ground upon which we ought to have the honesty to acknowledge the sinful origin when we have detected it. Job is an example of that manly simplicity of heart, that faithfulness to self, without which we cannot be genuine men, nor fair and tolerant to others. It does not follow, because a man stands by what his conscience or consciousness tells him, that his conscience is necessarily in the right. St. Paul pointed out this ( Acts 26:9 ; 1 Corinthians 4:4 ). Still, a man must hold by conscience as the nearest oracle till he gets better light, which is certain in the end to come when needed.

4 . Equally important, on the other hand, is the rebuke to cant, which this book so powerfully supplies. Cant is the habit of repeating secondhand opinions, of taking certain things for granted because they are commonly asserted, although we have no sufficient ground in our own experience of their truth. It is the habit of pretending feelings which we have not, because they are considered to be the correct feelings under certain circumstances. It is imitation in thought and affectation in sentiment. It attends on genuine thought and sincere emotion, as the shadow on the sun. No one will deny that the religious world is full of it. There is a fine illustration of it in the discourses of Job's friends, and rebuke of it in the manifestation of the Almighty at the end.

5 . While we have a presentation of the great enigmas of life in the course of the poem, we have also an exposure of the perplexities of human thought and the vain attempts to solve them. The narrow dogma that all suffering is explained by guilt, on which, in one form or other, the friends of Job arc never weary of insisting, along with that grand principle, the strict justice of the Almighty, which, in their view, renders the dogma indisputable,—this is the only clue offered to guide the poor darkened sufferer out of the prison of his thoughts. But it fails to lead him to the light. And, indeed, how utterly inadequate are such partial principles, drawn from a very limited area of experience, when applied to measure the height, and depth, and length, and breadth of God's moral universe l Another great lesson, then, which this book reads us is that of modesty and silence—the need of the confession of failure and incapacity to penetrate the secrets of the Divine mechanism to the bottom. We see but in part and know but in part; cannot by searching find out God unto perfection. Higher than heaven this knowledge, what can we do? deeper than hell, what can we know? There are clear and undoubted revelations of his goodness which fill the heart with joy and stir the tongue to praise. There are other, mysterious, hints of himself in pain and sadness, which overwhelm the heart with awe and check the effusion of the lips. But since nothing can ever disprove, or justly be brought, on any pretence of reason, to the disparagement of his justice, wisdom, and love, let us adore in silence. Let our souls wait patiently for him, until he again appear, shining upon us with the brightness of noonday!

II. SOLUTION OF LIFE 'S ENIGMAS .

1 . The book appears intended to convey a solution of our mental trouble and doubt of mind, so far, that is, as any solution is possible. A complete solution is impossible; Scripture, philosophy, experience, all unite in declaring this. Could we know the secret of pain and evil, suffering and calamity, in all their forms, we should touch the very secret of life itself; and in touching that secret we should touch the secret of God's Being—nay, we should be as God. Humanity is another name for limitation; God is the Infinite. We live at points on the circumference of existence; he is the Centre. Is it not an absurdity when man refuses to learn and acknowledge once for all that in seeking to know too much he is travelling out of his bounds; in his impatience with enforced ignorance he is impatient of being what he is, and raises a quarrel against his Maker and against the scheme of things which can but end in his complete discomfiture and overthrow?

2 . But there is some solution, although not a complete, not a positive and all-explaining one. There is a negative solution, which is very comforting to every true and pious heart. All suffering has not its root in personal sin. There may be intense suffering in the very bosom of innocence, as a frost or blight may settle on the purest rose of the garden. This point is clearly established by the Divine vindication of "my servant Job." He has not been singled out as a mark for the arrows of the Almighty because he is a peculiarly bad man. Rather the opposite is true. It is the good who are reserved for trial. It is the beloved of the Eternal whom he chastens, in order that it may be seen what power has faith in the soul of man, what enduring constancy of virtue, like thrice-proved gold, has every man who confides in the eternal rectitude and love.

3 . Suffering is, then, consistent with the relative innocence of the sufferer. This is one result of Job's long trial. Suffering is consistent with the perfect goodness of God. This is another. He may give, and he is good; he may take away, still, blessed be his Name! He may replace blooming health by loathsome leprosy; cause the once soft-clothed, prosperous inmate of a wealthy home to sit in sackcloth, amidst ashes by a deserted hearth; yet still—

"Perfect then are all his ways,

Whom earth adores and heaven obeys."

Noble book! that gave, perhaps, to the ancient world the first hint of the solution of the mystery of pain, by detaching from it the hitherto inseparable association of a curse; which teaches men to believe that the Divine Author of all we suffer and all we enjoy is One ever-blessed God, and so dispels that dread Manicheanism so congenial to the natural mind; book, which contains in germ the gospel revelations concerning Divine chastisement and human sanctification, and the whole subjection of human nature to the mixed conditions of the present life in expectation of a glorious ultimate manifestation of the sons of God!

4 . The riddle of human suffering, then, is not to be read, as men often superficially read it, in the light of some assumption which itself requires justification. It is and will remain an enigma. And like the statue of Isis so carefully veiled, the book impresses silence, silence! chiding the explications and solutions of our babbling tongues. The enigma of pain, of all that we call evil, is essentially the enigma of life itself. The key that will unlock the one will open also the other, and it lies ready to no human hand. This solution will not content an atheist or a materialist, perhaps. It will not be of any service to men who have not yet made up their minds whether to believe in a Will of perfect intelligence and justice, in a personal Author of this scheme of things. It is, indeed, the fatal flaw in all systems of unbelief or no-belief, that they can make nothing of evil. They cannot get rid of it, they cannot explain it away. It remains a disturbing element m every optimist view of life. Better man as you may in body and in mind, it will not disappear. It is a leaden weight upon the feet of all but the believer in the eternally wise and just God. Extremes meet; and alike to the enlightened rationalist and the darkened devotee of superstition, pain is a curse. But to the believer in God it is a part of the revelation of God. It is an aspect of the Shechinah. It is the dark side of that cloud whose edges are silvered with the eternal splendour. Darkness and light, the evening and the morning, the week of toil and the sabbath of rest, pain and pleasure, sadness and gladness, death and birth, time and eternity, short sowing and long reaping, acute but brief-lived trials, unending fruitions,—these are the conditions of human existence. To reconcile ourselves to them in and through the Author of them; not to fight against them, but loyally to accept them, and see that the end and meaning of all is reflected in the soul itself;—these are the lessons of the Book of Job. For there is no strength without trial; no wisdom without experience of both good and evil; no refinement without pain; no progress without self-dissatisfaction; nothing permanent or real that costs us nothing; no fellowship with the Eternal except by the initiation of suffering, by the endurance of the cross. To all who believe that the latter end of their life is to be made better than their beginning through the will of One who calls, adopts, and sanctifies men for himself, this book will be full of light and help. They will turn to its pages to remind their hearts that their Redeemer, their Vindicator, ever lives; that "blessing, not cursing, rules above, and that in it we live and move."—J.