Bible Commentaries

Job 23:3

"I remember one day in the early springtide," Tolstoy writes in his Confessions, "I was listening to the sounds of a forest, and thinking only of one thing, a thing of which I had thought for two years on end—I was again seeking for a God.... I remembered that I had lived only when I believed in a God. As it was before, so was it now; I had but to know God, in order to live; I had but to forget Him, to cease believing in Him, and I died. What was the meaning of this despair and renewal? I do not live when I lose faith in the existence of a God; long ago I should have killed myself, had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I only live in reality when I feel and seek Him. "What more then do I seek?" a voice seemed to cry within me. "This is Job 23:4

The Book of Job and the Prometheus of Æschylus may be placed side by side as the two protests of the ancient world against Divine oppression—the one the protest of monotheism, the other of polytheism.... Just as Prometheus at the outset maintains silence—one of those eloquent Æschylean silences—so too Job held his peace "seven days and seven nights"; and then, like Prometheus, reviews his own life, proudly proclaiming his own innocence.

—S. H. Butcher.

References.—XXIII:6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No108. XXIII:8-10.—Ibid. vol. xlvii. No2732.

The Gospel of the Left Hand

Job 23:9

There is great insight in that idea. It is no mere casual remark. Why did the Spirit of the Lord inspire Job to make that impressive allusion? Surely it was to tell us, to our great and endless comfort, that there is a gospel of the left hand. On the unfortunate side of things we may expect to find the operation of God. Job is describing his unsuccessful quest of God. "Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him. On the left hand, where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him. He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him."

It means much that Job so emphatically asserts that God works on the left hand of things. "I go—on the left hand," says the troubled patriarch. We all do, and we often do. But we shall find that God doth work there. This is the gospel of the left hand, and we greatly need it. It is easy to find a gospel of the right hand. But much of life is spent on the left hand, and a gospel of the left hand is precious as rubies.

I. God Works on the Undesired Side of Things.—

"The left hand" has always and everywhere typified what is undesired. "The left" is the term by which the Opposition is described in the Parliaments of the Continent of Europe; and I have not observed that statesmen and politicians are eager to be numbered among "the left".

In temporal matters we often discover the operation of our loving God where all is adverse. Sinister experiences prove to be Divine experiences. When we are where we deprecate being we behold the handiwork of God. When health fails, when business deteriorates, when friends cast us asunder, when sorrow darkens our home, when causes languish which we dearly love—on the left hand God doth work. What a grateful gospel this! How sanguine it should make us! Here is a fountain of sanest optimism. We need not dread being driven to the left hand of life, if there we meet our redeeming God. The undesired is desirable if there the Father worketh.

And this is equally true in spiritual things. Our soul is too often on the left hand. But even there God works. He is ready to pardon. Mercy is His supreme delight. And our grateful song shall presently arise, "He restoreth my soul".

II. God Works on the Awkward Side of Things.—"The left hand" is the popular parable of the awkward. It is a dictionary's definition of the word "awkward" that it is "not dexterous". A child knows that dexterity is right-handedness. So the right hand speaks of what is graceful, facile, and the left hand of that which is awkward. How strange the persistent ill-repute of the left hand! The "left-handed man" is the awkward, clumsy, resourceless man. Many of our current phrases illustrate this idea of the left hand as the symbol of the awkward.

We are ever apt to be called to the awkward experiences of life. Many of us are, perhaps, at this moment, most awkwardly situated. Our location is "on the left hand". But God is located there too! It is "where He doth work". Life's awkward spheres would be unendurable but for this. The redemption of the left hand is the active presence of Jehovah.

III. God Works on the Neglected Side of Things.—The left hand is the abiding symbol of the inauspicious. Who goes to the left hand if he can help it? It is a region shunned of all. No sphere is so unpopular. Avoid it, pass it by, is the general counsel; and it is a counsel thoroughly well acted upon.

But on the left hand "He doth work". He loves to cultivate a neglected land. No man's land is His Paradise of Delights. Whom man forsakes the pitiful God assists. Where others are wanting, and when others are wanting, He is sweetly in evidence. The country that is not watered with the foot the Lord waters out of His chambers.

IV. On the Unsuccessful Side of Things God Works.—From the beginning believers in "luck" have deplored and denounced the left hand. They have always described it as unlucky. When the Roman augur found his birds appearing on the left hand they were unlucky omens to him. The left hand Job 23:9

A World without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and enable no Son of Man to discover that he is a Son of God. But for the suspended plot that is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as after.... There is no Epic of the certainties; and no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the sigh of fear.

—Martineau.

References.—XXIII:10.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No2098. XXIII:11 ,12.—Ibid. vol. xxvi. No1526. XXIII:13.—Ibid. vol. vii. No406. XXIV.—Ibid. vol. xlvii. No2732.