The Almighty pauses. “Moreover the Lord answered Job and said, ‘Shall he who censures God contend with Him? He that reproveth God, let Him answer it.’ ” Job humiliates himself: “Behold, too insignificant am I; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” Jehovah again speaks from the storm: “Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto Me. Wilt thou also disannul my right? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like Him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency, and array thyself with glory and beauty! Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold everyone that is proud, and abase him! look on everyone that is proud, and bring him low, and tread down the wicked in their place! Hide them in the dust together, and bind their faces in secret! Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee?” The description of behemoth and the leviathan follows.
There are two observations plain enough but most important to be made upon the Divine oration. One is that God vouchsafes to Job no revelation in order to solve the mystery with which he was oppressed. There is no promise of immortality, nothing but an injunction to open the eyes and look abroad over the universe. Whatever help is to be obtained is to be had, not through an oracle, but by the exercise of Job’s own thought.
In the next place, there is no trace of any admission on the part of Jehovah that the well-meant theories of the friends are correct. On the contrary, His wrath is kindled against them. Jehovah does not admit for a moment that He has established any unvarying connection between righteousness and prosperity, sin and adversity.
What then is God’s meaning? It behoves us to keep close to the text in our interpretation of it. We have not to ascertain what we might imagine or wish Him to say. We have to find out what He did say. Most scrupulously are we to avoid foisting upon Him any idea of our own. It is much easier to impose a meaning upon the Bible, written in an age so unlike our own, than to extract the meaning from it. God reminds us of His wisdom, of the mystery of things, and that man is not the measure of His creation. The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect of man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere. This is the burden of every verse, and is the secret, if there be one, of the poem. Sufficient or insufficient, there is nothing more. Job is to hold fast to the law within; that is his candle which is to light his path; but God is infinite. Job, if he is not satisfied, submits. Henceforth he will be mute—“once have I spoken, but I will not answer; yea twice; but I will proceed no further.” “I have uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” All his thinkings seemed like hearsay. This then was the real God. “Now mine eye seeth Thee.”
It is impossible to neglect the epilogue in which Job is restored to his prosperity. If we do neglect it, we may perhaps turn the book into something more accordant with our own notions, but the book itself we have not got. There is nothing really inconsistent in it. The Almighty has explained Himself, and the explanation stands, but there is no reason why Job should be left in such utter misery. The anguish which completely envelopes the sufferer does break and yield with time, and often disappears. On the other hand, we have no right to demand happiness, and we are not told that Job’s happiness returned to him because he demanded it. It is utterly to mistake the purpose of the last chapter to suppose that in it lies the meaning of all that has gone before, and that it teaches us that we have only to wait and God will reward us. God is great, we know not His ways. He takes from us all we have, but yet, if we possess our souls in patience, we may pass the valley of the shadow and come out in sunlight again. We may or we may not. If we had before us a statement of a nineteenth-century philosophy, there would undoubtedly have been no epilogue; but the book is not a philosophy, but a record of an experience.
What more have we to say now than God said from the whirlwind over 2,500 years ago? We have passed through much since that memorable day. We have had new religions which have overspread the world, and yet the sum total of all that we can add is but small. Scientific discovery—astronomy for example—contributes something. The earth is no longer the centre of the starry system, and with the disappearance of that belief much more has disappeared. Man has not become of less importance, but it is seen that all things do not converge to him. We have learned too more intimately God’s infinity. It is this which caused Job to put his hand on his mouth—the truth that even the dry clod and the desert grass are
