Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance

wicked⁠ ⁠… the earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covereth the faces of the judges thereof; if not, who is it?” What is the use of debating with Him? “For He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both,” or as the Vulgate says, “Non est qui utrumque valeat arguere, etponere manum suam in ambobus”⁠—a saying which has in it a grandeur as of some mountain summit “holding dark communion with the cloud.” Nevertheless can God carelessly cast aside the work of His hands?⁠—so much care apparently has been bestowed upon it. “Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews. Thou hast granted me life and favour, and Thy visitation hath preserved my spirit. And these things hast thou hid in thy heart: I know that this is with Thee,” i.e., was intended by Thee. This book in a sense is terribly modern, for this is a question which is continually but resultlessly asked by us all. A woman of seven-and-twenty died the other day. She was German, and had been in England five or six years. She had applied herself with such diligence to learning English, that she spoke it without the least perceptible accent. She knew French just as well, and her general training, the result of years of most strenuous work, was most accurate. She was handsome, and had been married to an English husband two years. One child was born, and her friends rejoiced at the chances it would have with a German mother in England. It was a preternaturally bright child, and it was destroyed⁠—a year old. Three months before its death the mother began to show signs of consumption, and now she has gone. As I stood by her grave, the thought came into my mind⁠—His hands had made and fashioned her: why then did He kill her? Why was all this carefully, drop-by-drop collected store, precious beyond calculation, emptied on the ground? I know not. I cannot answer Him one of a thousand!

The example of Job protects us from the charge of blasphemy in not suppressing our doubts. Nothing can be more daring than his interrogations. There is no impiety whatever in them, nor are they recognised as impious in the final chapters of the book. The question is put to us directly by Him⁠—it is no creation of ours⁠—and shall we be thought irreverent because we hear it?

Zophar now ventures to express in plain words what before had been merely a hint. “God exacteth of thee less,” says he, “than thy iniquity deserveth.” What was observed to be true of Eliphaz is true of Zophar. He is made up of disjointed propositions accumulated from time to time, and now inappropriately vented on Job. For example: “Thou hast said, my doctrine is pure, and I am clean in Thine eyes. But oh that God would speak, and open His lips against thee; and that He would show thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are double to that which is (double thine own⁠—et quod multiplex esset lex ejus: Vulg.); know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth. Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” All this about the incomprehensibility of God is true and great, but what has it to do with the preceding assertion of Job’s sin? It is something gathered, something Zophar had been told, and something he has had the wit to feel and admire, but it is not Zophar himself.

Job holds fast to the evidence of his own eyes. “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you.” Zophar had appealed to antiquity. Job appeals to the beasts, “and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.” Of all that happens God is the cause. “With Him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver are His.” It is curious to see what the image of this book becomes after it has passed through the refracting glass of orthodoxy. In the heading to the twelfth chapter we are told, as a summary of the seventh and following verses, that Job acknowledgeth the general doctrine of God’s omnipotency, and so the texts, “the deceived and the deceiver are His,” “He removeth away the speech of the trusty” (i.e. of the confident), “and taketh away the understanding of the aged. He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way. They grope in the dark without light, and He maketh them to stagger like a drunken man”⁠—words tremendous and dangerous⁠—are smothered up under the decent formula of the general doctrine of God’s omnipotency. It is in fact a very particular doctrine, and not by any means the harmless platitude of the theologians. The difference is great between the preacher in gown and bands acknowledging the general doctrine of God’s omnipotency, and Job, who is forced to break away from the faith of his church, sacred through the testimony of ages of miracle and prophecy⁠—Job, who feels the ground shake under him as he is compelled to admit that He whom he worshipped holds both cheat and victim in His hand, smites the eloquent with paralytic stammerings, turns the old man into a melancholy childish driveller, and causes nations to swerve aside over precipices, under the guidance of leaders whom He has blinded. Job is the type of those great thinkers who cannot compromise; who cannot say but yet;