Job to God: the progress of the third controversy: 3. An old complaint renewed.
I. A GREAT MERCY DESPISED. Life. "Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb?" (verse 18). Job here announces an important truth, that the extraction of an infant from the womb is practically God's work (Psalms 22:9; Psalms 71:6), but likewise commits a sin in regarding as an evil fortune what, rightly pondered, should have been esteemed a valuable blessing. Life, as God bestows it, is a precious gift; though frequently, as man makes it, it proves a dreadful curse. Job's ingratitude was all the more reprehensible that in his case life had been crowned with mercies—with great material wealth, with true domestic enjoyment, with immense social influence, with rich spiritual grace, with palpable Divine favour.
II. A SINFUL REGRET INDULGED. That he had not been carried from the womb to the grave. "Oh that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me!" (verse 18). Job's regret was:
1. Sinful; inasmuch as it undervalued a Divine gift.
2. Unnatural; since it contradicted the instinct of love of life which the Creator has implanted in all his creatures.
3. Foolish; for though Job might have thereby escaped bodily pain, he would also have missed much happiness and many opportunities of glorifying God by doing good and enduring affliction.
4. Mistaken; as though Job had been carried from the womb to the grave, his expectation," I should have been as though I had not been," would not have proved correct. The child who opens its eyes on earth simply to shut them again does not return to the wide womb of nothingness when its tiny form is deposited in the dust. The fact of its being horn into Adam's race constitutes it an immortal. The doctrine of annihilation, if not absolutely unphilosophical, is certainly unnatural and unscriptural.
III. A PASSIONATE ENTREATY OFFERED. For a brief respite in the midst of his sufferings. "Are not my days few? cease then, and let me alone, that I may take comfort a little."
1. The prayer. "Let me alone." Job craved a momentary alleviation in his troubles. Few sufferers are without such interludes of ease. God mercifully mitigates human sorrow by granting brief periods of relief; otherwise men would be crushed, and the end of affliction defeated.
2. The purpose. "That I may be cheerful a little." Job could not brighten up while tormented by incessant pain and haunted by continual fear (Job 9:27). Only the lifting of God's hand would remove the load from his heart and the cloud from his brow. And this he felt was desirable before he went to the under world. Most men will sympathize with Job in desiring a brief period of freedom from pain before passing into the eternal world, to enable them to calm their spirits, to collect their thoughts, to prepare their souls for the last conflict and the great hereafter.
3. The plea. "Are not my days few?" Job thought himself upon the brink of the grave. In this, however, he was mistaken. Most men deem themselves further from the unseen world than they really are (1 Samuel 20:3), but occasionally sufferers judge themselves nearer the close of life than they eventually prove to be. If the first is a sin of presumption, the second is an error caused by feeble faith. If the first is peculiar to youth and health, the second is not infrequent to suffering and age.
IV. A DISMAL FUTURE DEPICTED. Hades. The melancholy region, into which Job anticipated almost instantaneous departure, was not the grave, which was, properly speaking, only the receptacle of the dead body; but Sheol, the abode of departed spirits. As conceived by Job and other Old Testament saints, this was not a place where the disembodied spirit either found annihilation or sank into unconsciousness, but a realm in which the spirit, existing apart from the body, retained its self-consciousness. Yet the gloom which overhung this silent and impenetrable land was such as to render it unattractive in the extreme. It was a land of:
1. Perpetual exile. "Before I go whence I shall not return" (verse 21); "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns" ('Hamlet,' act 3. sc. 1).
2. Thick darkness. "A land of darkness, as darkness itself" (verse 22). Four different terms are employed to depict the gloom of this dismal world; the first (used in Genesis 1:2) probably depicting a condition of things upon which light has not yet arisen; the second representing this lightless region as death's shade, i.e. the veil which death draws around the eyes of men; the third setting forth this darkness as that which covers up or encircles all things; and the fourth pointing to the complete shotting off of light, the deepest and thickest gloom. This horrible picture the poet finishes by adding, "and the light is as the thick darkness," meaning that in that doleful region the daylight or the noontide is like the midnight gloom of earth: "not light, but darkness visible" (Milton, 'Paradise Lost,' bk. 1.).
3. Complete disorder. A land "without any order" (verse 22); meaning either without form or outline, every object being so wrapt in gloom that it appears devoid of shape, or without regular succession, as of day and night; a realm without light, without beauty, without form, without order; a dark subterranean chaos filled with pale ghosts, waiting in comparative inactivity during that "night in which no man can work," for the dawning of the resurrection morn. Contrast with all this the Christian Paradise, where the spirits of just men made perfect are now for ever with the Lord; not a laud of exile from which one shall no more return, but a better country, even an heavenly, from which one shall go no more out (Revelation 3:12); not a region of darkness, but a bright realm of light (Revelation 21:23); not a chaos of confusion, but a glorious cosmos of life, order, and beauty (Revelation 21:1).
Learn:
1. The danger of unsanctified affliction.
2. The power of Satan over the human heart.
3. The short-sightedness of sense and reason.
4. The propriety of ever being ready for our departure into the unseen world.
5. The value of the gospel, which has brought life and immortality to light.
6. The advantage possessed by those who live under the gospel dispensation.
7. The greater responsibility of those who enjoy greater light than Job did.
HOMILIES BY E. JOHNSON