THE SHORT COURSE SERIES

Edited by Rev. John Adams, B.D.

The Divine Drama of Job

By Rev. Charles F. Aked, D.D.

Chapter 2 THE RESTORATION OF FAITH

The author permits us to see the restoration of faith in a fourfold vision.

1. God in the Soul of Man.

In Job we have a picture, without question the noblest in literature, of a tried and suffering man who, in defiance of poverty, torture, and death, in defiance of all the thought and all the belief of all his world, and in defiance of Almighty God, will hold on to the integrity of his soul.

In defiance of God Himself! — that is the point. The martyrology of every nation is crowded with stories of men and women who have laughed to scorn the throned tyrannies of the world. It is crowded with the records of men and women who have opposed their death-defying "Credo" to the orthodoxies of the ages, backed by thumbscrew, rack, and gallows, by the legions and the gods and all the powers of hell. But these heroic souls had God on their side — and they knew it I Though for His purposes He suffered the forces of darkness for a time to wreak their will on the bodies of men and women who believed in His name, their souls were at peace with Him; and age by age they suffered the last pang of physical pain intensified to agony, and went to their God with a sigh of relief which was a prayer of faith, "Father, into Thy hand I commend my spirit."1 Job has his martyrdom to endure unconsoled by any such faith. He opposes himself to the thought of his world as the martyrs of the Christian Church have done. He opposes himself to the leaders of the Church of his day as the martyrs have done. But, as they have not done, he nerves his soul to be true to the truth he knows is true, in defiance of what he yet believes is God!

The key-note of this heroic mood is found in one of the most famous passages in Job, one of the most famous in any literature and in any language of the world. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him," the passage used to read, falsifying the thought of Job and obscuring the greatest utterance of the poet. When the Revised Version gave a better translation devout persons read it with a sense of loss. "Foolish men, and slow of heart" — the new reading lights up the whole story of Job:

"Behold, He will slay me; I have no hope:

Nevertheless will I maintain my ways before Him."

He may slay me: God Himself may make war upon me. But this one thing God cannot do, He cannot make right wrong nor with the universe to back Him coerce me into a confession of a guilt I do not feel!

Seneca puts upon the lips of a pilot a sentiment only less noble: "O Neptune, you. may save me if you will; you may sink me if you choose; but whatever happens I shall hold my rudder true." Remember that this pilot believed in Neptune and in his power to sink or save; that he felt himself to be at that moment and throughout his life at Neptune's mercy; then seek to measure the immeasurable daring of this high resolve.

There is one spirit in these two brave sentences. It is the assertion of a reality more important and more lasting than what men call life, greater and more commanding than what men call God. In the Pilot it is proud loyalty to duty; in Job proud loyalty to truth. In both it is the assurance of a somewhat beyond all known and knowable things, something which is spirit and which is life.

Tennyson, in one of his shorter pieces, tells the story of a man who had lost faith in religion. His disordered mind had fed upon the crudest presentations of Calvinism and the cheapest utterances of Atheism until he had come to hate the very thought of God. With his wife he seeks to drown himself. She is lost, he is rescued; and he wails out his anguish in blasphemies too sincere and despairing to be blasphemous. And even then he conceives of the possibility of God, the true God, the God whom Jesus called Father, the God of Love in whom we live and move and have our being.

"What! I should call on that Infinite Lore that has served us so well?

Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting hell,

Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what He will with His own;

Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan!

Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told,

The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn for his gold,

And so there were hell for ever! but were there a God as you say,

His love would have power over hell till it utterly vanish'd away.

And yet — I have had some glimmer at times, in my gloomiest woe,

Of a God behind all — after all — the great God for aught that I know;

But the God of Love and of hell together — they cannot be thought.

If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to nought!"2

When Tennyson wrote this he had eighteen centuries of Christian thinking in his blood, and for eighteen centuries the Spirit of Christ had been modifying the air he breathed. The author of Job conceived of this God, behind all, after all, the great God whom he did not know, long ages before the only begotten Son who was in the bosom of' the Father declared Him. Flesh and blood did not reveal this unto him. But the Spirit of the living God gave him understanding. And he appealed away from the God of all the orthodoxies upon earth to the God enthroned within his soul.

2. The God Above All.

Job's appeal is not in vain. It is to -carry him far. It is to bring him within sight of the reality to which he cries, and here, as everywhere, wisdom is justified of her children. "I will not believe," says Sir Oliver Lodge, "that it is given to man to think out a clear and consistent system higher and nobler than the real truth. Our highest thoughts are likely to be nearest to reality." The man of science in the twentieth century re-phrases the conviction which our oldworld poet voices in undying tones. The modern thinker shapes and formulates the instinctive reaching out of the spirit of this prophetic man. The author of Job first conceives of the possibility that such a God might be, and on this God he calls. Then he comes to feel that this possible, conceivable God is God, the true God, and that God will do him right.

More than once Job utters this personal, deathless faith in a personal, changeless God. Twice he pours out the passion of his soul in matchless words which the world will never let die. From the abysses of despair, when it seems to himself that he has been ** broken in pieces," he rises upon the wings of hope to heights of unsurpassable 'assurance which are to this day the crown and climax of believing prayer, and which must remain the joy of faithful hearts for ever.

"But as for me I know that my Vindicator liveth,

And at last He will stand up upon the earth:

And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed,

Then without my flesh shall I see God;

Whom I, even I, shall see on my side."3

If he cannot abide permanently on these heights, if the impious piety of his friends drags him down from them, his dauntless spirit seeks them again, and again ascends them. He cannot see God, but he longs for Him, and he is sure of Him.

"Oh that I knew where I might find Him!

That I might come even to His seat!

I would set my cause in order before Him,

And fill my mouth with arguments.

I would know the words which He would answer me,

And understand what He would say unto me.

Would He contend with me in the greatness of His power?

Nay; but He would give heed unto me.

There the upright might reason with Him;

So should I be delivered for ever from my judge.

Behold, I go forward, but He is not there;

And backward, but I cannot perceive Him;

On the left hand, when He doth work, but I cannot behold Him;

He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him.

But He knoweth the way that I take;

When He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold."4

3. The Real Rewards or Righteousness.

One great truth slowly emerges as the drama of Job unfolds. The rewards of righteousness are not to be found in material things, not in flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, and droves of camels, not in stocks and bonds and bank balances, and they must not be sought there. From this point of view the epilogue adds nothing to the grandeur of the poem, and it represents only a lower conception of dramatic completeness. The rewards of righteousness are in these convictions which we have been discussing, the integrity of the soul, the conscious appeal from earth to heaven, and the realised presence of God our Saviour. You shall not translate "Good" as "Goods"; you shall not measure by the stature of material things nor by the standard of the market, for this is a standard which God has rejected.5 But the sense of work well done, and a heart at rest with itself, and the answer of a quiet conscience, and the love of men and women you have served and saved, and the smiles of little children, and joy and peace in the Holy Spirit, these are the rewards of righteousness, and these cannot be taken from you by any force or fraud, by fire or calamity or death. And this is why Luther's words, done by Carlyle into English as mighty as Luther's German, are true and righteous altogether —

"And though they take our life,

Goods, honour, children, wife;

Yet is their profit small,

These things shall perish all;

The city of God remaineth."

4. Ultima Veritas

But the last of these great truths which are interwoven with the very fabric of the Book of Job remains to be stated. And how simple it is, how elementary — yet how profound, overwhelming, eternal! When we cannot know, it is enough to trust, and when we cannot understand we shall be saved from darkness and despair if we can only love. We must all be agnostics somewhere, if only we will put our agnosticism in the right place. A little insight into the character of God may be infinitely more helpful to us than much foresight of His purposes. In the hour when terrors threaten we have but to stand still and see the glory of the Lord. And when the clouds are so thick that no glory can break through the gloom, all the wisdom of all the ages is in the counsel to trust in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. What availed the speculations, protestations, and fulminations of Job in the end? They had but darkened counsel by words without knowledge. Job had heard of Jehovah by the hearing of the ear. But when his heart saw the living God he was content. This is the truth of truths, the first truth and the last, that