1. The Ordeal of Despair (Job 1:20-21)
Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.
Facing facts as they are produces despair, not frenzy, but a real downright despair. The man who thinks must be pessimistic; thinking can never produce optimism. The wisest man that ever lived said that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” The basis of things is not reasonable, but wild and tragic, and to face things as they are brings a man to the ordeal of despair. Ibsen presents this ordeal, there is no defiance in his presentation, he knows that there is no such thing as forgiveness in Nature, and that every sin has a Nemesis following it. His summing up of life is that of quiet despair because he knows nothing of the revelation given of God by Jesus Christ.
“Blessed are they that mourn.” Our Lord always speaks from that basis, never from the basis of the “gospel of temperament,” When a man gets to despair he knows that all his thinking will never get him out, he will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God, consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God that which he cannot gain for himself.
2. The Inherited Baffling (Job 3:23-26)
The sense of being baffled is common, and Job is feeling completely baffled by God’s dealing with him.
Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? … I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.
(Job 3:23, 26)
We may not experience the sense of being baffled by reason of any terrific sorrow, but if we really face the teachings of Jesus Christ in the Sermon on the Mount honestly and drastically, we shall know something of what Job was going through. The teachings of Jesus Christ may produce despair, because if He means what He says, where are we in regard to it? “Blessed are the pure in heart”—blessed is the man who has nothing in him for God to censure. Can I come up to that standard? Yet Jesus says only the pure in heart can stand before God. The New Testament never says that Jesus Christ came primarily to teach men: it says that He came to reveal that He has put the basis of human life on Redemption, that is, He has made it possible for any and every man to be born into the Kingdom where He lives (see John 3:3). Then when we are born again His teaching becomes a description of what God has undertaken to make a man if he will let His power work through him. So long as a man has his morality well within his own grasp he does not need Jesus Christ—“For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners,” said Jesus. When a man has been hard hit and realizes his own helplessness he finds that it is not a cowardly thing to turn to Jesus Christ, but the way out which God has made for him.
There is a passion of pessimism at the heart of human life and there is no “plaster” for it; you cannot say, “Cheer up, look on the bright side”; there is no bright side to look on. There is only one cure and that is God Himself, and God comes to a man in the form of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ’s Redemption the way is opened back to yesterday, out of the blunders and blackness and baffling into a perfect simplicity of relationship to God. Jesus Christ undertakes to enable a man to withstand every one of the charges made by Satan. Satan’s aim is to make a man believe that God is cruel and that things are all wrong; but when a man strikes deepest in agony and turns deliberately to the God manifested in Jesus Christ, he will find Him to be the answer to all his problems.
3. Agnosticism (Job 9-10)
Pour forth and bravely do your part,
O knights of the unshielded heart!
Forth and forever forward!—out
From prudent turret and redoubt,
And in the mellay charge amain,
To fall but yet to rise again.
R. L. Stevenson
Agnosticism is not always the deplorable thing it is imagined to be. An acknowledged intellectual agnosticism is a healthy thing; the difficulty arises when agnosticism is not acknowledged. To be an agnostic means I recognize that there is more than I know, and that if I am ever to know more, it must be by revelation.
[…]
Look at the world through a microscope or a telescope and you will be dwarfed into terror by the infinitely minute or the infinitely great; both are appalling. When you touch the cosmic force, apart from the blinkers of intellect, there is a wild problem in it. Nature is wild, not tame. No man is capable of solving the riddle of the universe because the universe is mad, and the only thing that will put it right is not man’s reason, but the sagacity of God which is manifested in the Redemption of Jesus Christ. A Christian is an avowed agnostic intellectually; his attitude is, “I have reached the limit of my knowledge, and I humble accept the revelation of God given by Jesus Christ.
4. The Rehabilitation of Faith in God
As the Source and Support of All Existence
Then Job answered the Lord, and said, I know that Thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from Thee. (Job 42:1-2)
To rehabilitate means to reinstate, to restore to former rank. The problem all through the Book of Job is that the teaching of the creed and Job’s implicit faith in God do not agree, and it looks as if he is a fool to hang on to his belief in God. In this last chapter we see everything rehabilitated, put back into rank, by means of Job’s personal relationship to God. That is what will happen as the result of this war—many a man’s faith in God will be rehabilitated. The basis of things must always be found in a personal relationship to a personal God, never in thinking or feeling.
Job says, “I cannot find any rest in your reasonings or in my own, and I refuse to blink the facts in order to make a rational statement.” Job had perfect confidence in the character of God though he did not understand the way He was taking. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” We sometimes wrongly illustrate faith in God by the faith of a business man in a cheque. Faith commercially is based on calculation, but religious faith cannot be illustrated by the kind of faith we exhibit in life. Faith in God is a terrific venture in the dark; I have to believe that God is good in spite of all that contradicts it in my experience. It is not easy to say that God is love when everything that happens actually gives the lie to it. Everyone’s soul represents some kind of battlefield. The point for each one is whether we will hang in, as Job did, and say “Though things look black, I will trust in God.”
5. Disguise of the Actual (Job 42:7-17)
That man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here—should he need the next
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed,
Seeking shall find him.
~Robert Browning
Our actual life is a disguise, no one expresses what he really is. Job could not express actually, either before or after his suffering, what he really was. The “great Divine event” to which we look forward is when the earth will actually express itself as the work of God, and saints will actually express themselves as the sons of God. Meanwhile, actual appearances do not express the real things.
All through Job has maintained his belief that God is honorable; he declares that the friends’ credal statement of God was not adequate because they have said things he could disprove from his own experience. “Why I am suffering, I do not know; but your explanation does not satisfy me. Though He slay me, though I am knocked to pieces really, I believe that God is honorable, a God of love and justice, and I will wait for Him, and one day it will be proved, that my faith was right.” That is the sublime reach of Job’s faith. Now God takes it in hand to deal with the friends.
The Scourge of Reality
The Lord said to Eiphaz 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. (Job 42:7)
[…] If the Reality of God is a scourge to a man who has never pretended to be religious, it must be ten times more so to a man who has been a religious teacher, who has said to people, “I can tell you why you suffer.” “I can tell you why God has allowed this war, and what He is doing with the British Empire.” When such a man comes up against eternal realities and hears God say, “You have not spoken the thing which is true of Me,” the scourge must be appalling (cf. John 15:2-6). Eliphaz had spoken the truth abstractly, but he had misrepresented God all through. God is not an abstract truth; He is the Eternal Reality, and is discerned only by means of a personal relationship.
When one is found out by Eternal Reality the danger is to become defiant or despairing. When the friends were scourged by God they took the right attitude and did not get into despair. If the scourge of Eternal Reality comes, see that it leaves you face to face with God, not with yourself.
The Surgery of Events Reaction
Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to My servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and My servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept. (Job 42:8a)
We only see along the line of our prejudices—our evangelical or un-evangelical prejudices, the prejudices of our belief or of our agnosticism; we cannot see otherwise until events operate on us. The surgery of events is a most painful thing. It has taken a devilish thing like this war to root up the prejudices of men who were misrepresenting God to themselves. A prejudice is a foreclosed judgment without having sufficiently weighed the evidence. Not one of us is free from prejudices, and the way we reveal them most is by being full of objection to the prejudices of other people. If we stick obstinately to any line of prejudice, there will come the surgery of events that will shift us out of it. Watch that you do not make an issue with God; it is a dangerous thing to do.
The surgery of events brought the friends out of their prejudices. All along they had said to Job, “You are wrong, we can prove it, you are a bad man, and it is a wonder to us that God does not strike you dead.” But the surgery of events brings them to their knees in utter humiliation. “Go to my servant Job,” God says, “and he shall pray for you.” “Go through the issue, or you will never get to Me.” Think of the humiliation of it!
*Excerpted from
Baffled to Fight Better in
The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishers, 2000), pp. 43-86.
