Post by Lee on Dec 31, 2014 3:21:42 GMT
Job, “Perfect,” Yet “Vile”: a Paradox
The recent re-reading of the book of Job and of the Sunday Morning, by brother Roberts, has caused us once again to ponder the wonderful illustration that God gave so long ago in Job’s case of the ways of His providence in the perfecting of the sons of God. On the face of it it seems strange to read that God said to the Satan: “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil” (Job 1:8: 2:3); and then to read that “Job answered the Lord and said, Behold I am vile . . . I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 40:4: 42:6). What is the explanation of the phenomenon? This: that Job was so perfect and so conscious of his innocence and uprightness before God, that he was in danger of maintaining his perfection and uprightness even to the extent of reflecting upon God as concerning the righteousness of the tribulation that had come upon him. And this he actually did; until, perceiving the gravity of his fault, he broke out in the strain indicated. There is no mistake about this construction of the case. When his three friends had done misconstruing his case, almost to the breaking of Job’s heart, we read: “So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes” (ch. 32:1). Then Elihu intervened on another plane altogether. He was angry with all the parties concerned—with the three friends, and even with Job, “because he justified himself rather than God.” Neither the three friends nor Job himself could say a word against this man, and this new construction of the case (22:15, 16: 23:31–33). And Elihu “desired to justify Job.” His argument in brief was this, that though it was a great mistake on the part of the “friends” to suppose that Job’s unexampled sufferings argued divine retribution in this life for proportionate iniquity; it was equally a mistake on Job’s part to fail to recognise sufficiently that the sons of God must “learn obedience through the things they suffer.” It is here that Jesus so greatly outshines Job; but then, he was more than man, even “the Son of Man made strong” by the Eternal for the execution of His purpose. He never had to say, “Behold, I am vile; . . . I have uttered that I understood not, things too wonderful for me, which I knew not . . . Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes!” But he did say, “I do always the things that please the Father.” Job was a type of Jesus, and a beautiful one in many ways; but his “perfection” was relative and not absolute; it was but the shadow of the substance that remained to be revealed in Christ. When the Lord Jesus brings forth Job from sheol, “turning his captivity” in the last and most glorious sense, Job will be satisfied with the sight of his “Redeemer” (ch. 19:25), and will understand perfectly in the glory of the divine nature those divine principles which were so strikingly foreshadowed in his own case nearly two thousand years before Christ. Only one of the very best of men could have made Job’s mistake, and then only under the stress of a false philosophy applied to him by “miserable comforters” in circumstances of great affliction. But with Job and Jesus before us, the very best of men ought not to do it now.
(1917). The Christadelphian, 54(electronic ed.), 73–74.