Bible Commentaries

Comforters and Flatterers

Job 17:1); and then in another place he says, "When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return" ( Job 16:22). Throughout the whole of his speech he feels a sense of self-disgust A strange and beautiful thing is that in the development of the history of a soul. Man cannot be satisfied with himself; he says, There are lines of beauty, and lines of strength; there are qualities not to be denied; but oh, the monotony of myself! Why, it is Job 17:6-7).

Who cannot sign this with his own name, saying, That is my experience; the letters may have been changed a little, but the spirit and the substance represent an actual fact in the spiritual life? Then we have again Invention. Man will invent something; he will build some altar to a forbidden god; he will invent a superstition; he will create a new arrangement and adjustment of social relations and responsibilities; he will try to cure himself, only to end the trial in the conviction that self-cure is impossible. Observe, self-cure has been attempted. It does not lie amongst the untried suggestions of human thought and human history. From the beginning, when fig-leaf was attached to fig-leaf, man has been trying to hide his sin, to cover his transgression, to conceal his shame; having fallen out of heaven, he has been building a kind of staircase back again to the sky; and, lo, in the very midst of his venture, the whole edifice has collapsed, and he has returned to the dust. This is the deep conviction of Christian faith and Christian experience, and this is the reason of Christian activity. We do not build churches for the purpose of beautifying landscapes; we do not put on church-roofs for the birds to build in; we build the sanctuary because our souls need it—not always in the same degree of consciousness. Sometimes we are hardly aware that we have souls; it would seem as if now and again we passed into the kind of unconsciousness which is mistaken for satisfaction; we are merry, we can sing and play and dance, we admire the beauties of nature, and say, with a sigh that has no deeper meaning than the words it utters, the world is very beautiful, call it a vale of tears who may. When a man is full of strength, when fortune goes well with him, then he needs, to his own immediate consciousness, no great sky of thought and hope, no God judging one day and redeeming another, and conducting all the mysterious process of human education: the man thinks he has attained the summit of human desire. But the day has changed; the year is not all June; the east wind blows, the frost seals up the fountains, the winter dismisses the labourer from the field, and darkness suddenly blots out the day, and death comes after affliction has fought a great fight against human strength—then grim, ghastly, pitiless, all-devouring death comes; then they who were so glad in June, when they thought themselves part of the great: system of bird and flower and light, begin to inquire for comfort, for Christian inspiration, for the strength which looks death in the face and bewilders the power of the tyrant. We must take an all-round life as the circuit of our judgment, if we would deal gravely and justly with this solemn subject.

Job found himself surrounded by flatterers.

"He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail" ( Job 17:5).

This is the position of affairs today: we are surrounded by comforters,—that is to say, by men who do not understand us, and whose words have no relation to our experience. Hence oftentimes the empty church. The world knows that what the man of "words" is talking about has no relation to the killing pain, the intolerable sorrow, the unutterable agony of life. So the fool often beats the preacher herein, that he can at least often excite, or intoxicate, and create a momentary illusion apt to be mistaken for a permanent satisfaction. And we are surrounded by flatterers, men who tell us that after all we are not so bad. Look at your conduct: you pay your way, you keep your word, you are faithful to your marriage, you are known in the neighbourhood as an upright citizen—why, where will they match you? And the heart all the time says, Such talk is flattery, such talk is falsehood. I know all they say, but it was done by the hand; it is a trick of mine. I keep my clock right by putting the hands backwards and forwards just as the general time requires, and they think the clock keeps its own time; all my morality is etymological, and really a manner, an attitude; I pay my bills punctually because I have an object, which I will not disclose: but they are telling lies all the time, they are not touching my soul with any comfort; in my soul I despise their flattery, and I blow out the candles of hope which they would set in the window of my soul. Do not believe the flatterers. They will tell you that if you attend to sanitary discipline, to all personal rule and self-subjection, if you store your intellect, if you cultivate your taste, you will pass through the world honourably. Let your soul speak; ask it at midnight what it thinks of all the flare and garish ness held before it in the vulgar day. Let your conscience speak; speak to yourself. Do not make a noise in the ear,—that is not talking to yourself—but hold your soul to an exercise of spiritual attention, and the soul will tell you that everything that addresses itself to fancy, to manner, to custom, to bondage, is a lying deity, a false angel, a worthless gospel.

Observe how, without the right conception of God, all proverbs and maxims as quoted so fluently by the man of yellow hair from the land of pleasantness, Zophar and Naamathite, are turned upside down: they are quoted, but the old music does not come back with them:—

"The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger" ( Job 17:9).

The words are quoted as if they ought to be true, as if once they had been known to be true: but now that I repeat them, Job might have said, They seem to mock me, because whilst the words are being uttered by my lips they are being contradicted by the facts which I embody. I am righteous, I have clean hands, I cannot hold on my way, I cannot get stronger and stronger; I am getting weaker and weaker: the proverb ought to have been right; it must have come down from heaven, this is not a flower grown in our gardens, it was a flower from heaven; but I am contradicting it,—I, the most reputable righteous man of my time, am lying here self-disgusted: my breath is corrupt, my whole flesh is a burden of fire, and as for my hope, it is put out, like a candle by a cross-blowing wind. Thus we cannot get comfort from the old maxims and commonplaces of history. Even the old wine of truth does not taste as it once did. An enemy hath done this; let him be named, described, set forth in every frightsome detail, that men may know him, and resist him when he would approach.

Then all life bears downwards:—

"My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart. They change the night into day: the light is short because of darkness. If I wait, the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness. I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister" ( Job 17:11-15).

This is the course of human nature without the divine sanctification and guidance. Do not quote appearances as against the philosophy. What can be more deceptive than appearances? "Things are not what they seem." Do not say that the world is well dressed. We know it. But a corpse may be shrouded in silver-cloth. We are not asking about fortune, property, display, appearances. We know a cripple by his lurch, whatever purple may be upon his shoulders. Byron, the poet of fire, the seer of perdition, knew he was lame, though he was a lord. You cannot cover up the evil, in the sense of extinguishing it. For a time it subsides; then it heaves. Oh, that initial heave! under whose influence the soul says, It is all coming back again. It is like poor Mary Lamb's intermittent insanity. She would say to her brother, almost in tenderness an apostle of Christ, I feel it coming on again! She would have her little arrangements made whilst she could make them, because tomorrow the great darkness might settle upon her mind, and she would have to be led away to an appropriate place. The feeling of its coming on! So it is with conscience, with the presence of evil in the soul: a passion is lighted, an instinct is awakened, an old appetite begins to feel a burning thirst; the soul says—O my God. it is coming on again! corruption, thou art my father: worm, thou art my mother and my sister! This is part of human experience, and sometimes an appointed part; because it may be that God has withdrawn himself that we might feel our need of him. He has taken a time for withdrawment, but he himself has measured it; his sweet words are—"For a moment I have forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee." Thus he blots out our moments of darkness; thus he extinguishes our sensations of sin; "where sin abounds, grace doth much more abound." God pours the Atlantic of his blessing or grace over the black pebble of our iniquity: it is lost; it is at the bottom of the sea.

Then Job looks round and says, "And where is now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it?" ( Job 17:15.) Thus he talks with a strange incoherence; thus he is true to the working of an intermittent insanity. Even the bad man looks round sometimes for his hope. Even the atheist tries to pray; he may have his own form of words, and may disdain all Christian formulas of worship, but the soul, label it atheist or theist, must sometimes say to all other powers within. Let us pray. What, then, is needed amid all this riot and tumult, this darkness, this storm of night? What is needed? The gospel is needed; the glorious gospel of the blessed God; the speech of blood. What is needed? A man is needed, beautiful as God, complete as the Father, holy as the eternal deity. A Lamb without spot and without blemish is needed. Bethlehem, Nazareth, Golgotha, are all needed. Son of God, we need thee! Blessed Jesus, Son of Mary, Son of Job 17:7

The children of God need not hide the extremities to which they are put.—Whilst in one sense they are called upon to make the best of their circumstances, in another they are expected to realise all the discipline through which God is causing them to pass.—In any book invented for the purpose of deceiving the world, expressions of this kind would not have been found, for they are enough to turn away the reader from faith in the God who could permit such heavy distresses to fall upon his chosen children.—In the Bible, however, the utmost frankness is used in describing the reality of life.—Christ said, If any man will come after me, let him take up his cross.—Christianity means crucifixion.—Looking upon the sufferer in the text, who would say, Let me also be as Job is: let me believe in God; let me follow him in all the travail and sorrow of his life; for surely the God who permits such chastisement is merciful and tender in spirit? No man could make any such speech. Looked at, as he sits in sorrow and in dust and ashes, uncrowned, desolated, and abhorred, Job is rather calculated to turn men away from God, than to allure them to him.—Christians have suffered more than any other men have ever endured.—The higher the life the more susceptible is feeling: the nearer we are to God the more wicked does every sin appear to be.—It is not to be supposed that when a man lives and moves and has his being in God that he is exempt from loss, or pain, or want: but the case is not confined within the limits of such experience; the error which we are always tempted to commit is the error of supposing that we see everything, and grasp the whole case of life in all the variety of its detail. We forget such comforting words as "What thou knowest not now, thou shall know hereafter;" "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid;" "Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations."—that is, trials or tests of character.—When the eye is dim by reason of sorrow, the eye of the soul is often made brighter and keener, that it may look further into all the mystery of love.—The real slate of the life does not depend upon the tearless eye of the body; when the eye of the body is brightest the eye of the soul may be dimmest It is in the darkness that we see the stars.—The eye of the body is meant to be extinguished, and all our members are intended to be but as a shadow; no uncommon thing has happened to us when we are in tears, or when we are beclouded by great apprehensions, or crushed under heavy burdens;—all that belongs to the present state of life and the present system of nature, as we now stand related to them in our character as transgressors.—When my heart and my flesh do fail, then the Lord will take me up.—It is in our extremity that God can best show the riches of his grace—

Many men would never have known Christ in all his dignity and tenderness, but for the sufferings they have undergone; they have been made acquainted with him in the companionship of affliction. We see more of Jesus Christ in Gethsemane than in any other place in all his history.—One day we may have reason to exclaim, "It is good for me that I was afflicted."—There are not wanting children of God who would not on any account surrender the trials they have undergone, because of the rich issues of wisdom and grace which they have realised in their hearts.