The Frontiers of despair - Chambers, Oswald

Job 16–17

Then as i weary me and long and languish,

nowise availing from that pain to part

desperate tides of the whole great worlds anguish

forced thro the channels of a single heart,

straight to thy presence get me and reveal it,

nothing ashamed of tears upon thy feet,

show the sore wound and beg thine hand to heal it,

pour thee the bitter, pray thee for the sweet.

F. W. H. Myers

Up till now we have seen job as a sane pessimist, but now we find him on the frontiers of despair. A man may get to the point of despair in a hundred and one different ways, but when he does get there, there is no horizon. In everything else there is hope that a dawn may come, but in despair there is no hope of anything brighter, it is the most hopeless frontier a human mind can enter without becoming insane. An insane person is never despairing, he is either immensely melancholy or immensely exalted. Despair is the hopelessness that overtakes a sane mind when it is pushed to the extreme in grief.

1. The revolt against pose ( job 16:15)

Then job answered and said, i have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all. ( job 16:12)

Job ironically takes on the pose which eliphaz adopted, the pose of the superior person. Eliphaz has scolded job and said that he is suffering because he is a bad man and a hypocrite. Job recognises that eli- phaz does not begin to understand his problem, and he revolts against pose. It is difficult to evade pose in religious life because it is of the nature of unconscious priggishness. If you have the idea that your duty is to catch other people, it puts you on a superior platform at once and your whole attitude takes on the guise of a prig. This too often is the pose of the earnest religious person of to-day. Of all the different kind of men one meets the preacher takes the longest to get at, for this very reason; you can get at a doctor or any professional man much more quickly than you can a professionally religious man. The religious pose is based, not on a personal relationship to god, but on adherence to a creed. Immediately we mistake god for a creed, or jesus christ for a form of belief, we begin to patronise what we do not understand. When anyone is in pain the thing that hurts more than anything else is pose, and that is what job is fighting against here. No one revolts against a thing without a reason for doing so, not necessarily a wrong reason, because revolt is of a moral order. If we come across a counterfeit, reality is sure to be found somewhere. Job is up against the religious pose of men who do not begin to under- stand where his sorrow lies.

2. The recapitulation of pain ( job 16:622)

jobs honesty and his freedom from cowardice come out very clearly; he would not say he was guilty of what he knew he was not guilty. He says, i am not suffering because i have committed sin; i do not know why i am suffering, but i know that is not the reason. The majority of us would have caved in and said, oh, well, i suppose i am worse than i thought i was. What looks like revolt against god may really be not against god at all, but against the presentation being given of him.

(a) the psychology of it ( job 16:68)

Though i speak, my grief is not assuaged: and though i forbear, what am i eased? But now he hath made me weary: thou hast made desolate all my company. ( job 16:67)

Many forms of grief find relief in expressionthe garment of words expressing the thing, but job says that he cannot get any assuagement of his grief through expressing it. Not one of his friends can endure him; they believe he is desolate because god has left him. Every line of jobs experience seems psy- chologically to justify their judgement of him, and yet job knows that what they say is not the explanation.

(b) the providence of it ( job 16:915)

God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder. ( job 16:1112)

These verses describe in oriental terms the provi- dence of jobs pain; everything has come out against him. God seems to have engineered everything dead against me; the inner circumstances and the outer are all the samegod has beset me behind and before like a wild beast; everything in my providential set- ting and my human life goes to prove that my pain is the outcome of my sin.

(c) the pathos of it ( job 16:1622)

O earth, cover thou not my blood, and let my cry have no place. . . . My friends scorn me: but mine eye poureth out tears unto god. O that one might plead for a man 66 baffled to fight better 8 the frontiers of despair job 1617

With god, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour! When a few years are come, i shall go the way whence i shall not return. ( job 16:18, 2022)

This is not the pathos of a whining beggar who puts it on in order to awaken sympathy. Jobs recounting of his suffering is not the expression of self-conscious pathos; he is stating for his own sake that he is sane, that he is in despair, and, so far as he can see, he is perfectly justified in being pessimistic. There are many things like this as the outcome of this war, and we have to be careful lest we take on the religious pose, or the evangelical pose, or the denominational pose, or any pose that is not real, when we come across suffering in which there is no deliverance and no illumination. The only thing to do is to be reverent with what we do not understand. The basis of things is tragic; therefore god must find the way out, or there is no way out. Human reasoning and a human diagnosis of things will do exactly what jobs friends did, viz. , belittle the grief.

3. The recognition of pre-destiny ( job 17)

If we look for understanding from a person and do not get it, the first feeling is one of revolt and indig- nation against him; but when we begin to examine things, we may find that after all he is not to blame for his density. It is this element that increases the suffering of job, while at the same time it clears him from condemnation. Everything at the back of his life and of his creed, goes to justify the conclusion he has come to.

(a) in the density of men ( job 17:14)

For thou hast hid their heart from understanding. ( job 17:4)

When we look for our friends to understand, and find they do not, we accuse them of being dense. In grief the sufferer frequently declares that no one on earth can assist him. This is sometimes a pose, but job is seeing that his friends density does not lie with them, but with the fact of predestination. There are some kinds of suffering and temptation and sorrow no one can sympathise with, and by means of them a man gets on to the solitary way of life. It is not the suffering of a man who has done wrong and knows it; it is an isolation in which no one can sympathise, god alone can come near. The suffering of job is accounted for by the fact that god and satan had made a battleground of his life, and he is beginning to discover that it is god who has closed up the understanding of his friends. Satan

Has declared that job does not love god for him- self, but only for his blessings, and now everything in the way of shelter and comradeship and sympathy has been completely stripped from job, and he sees that god must have allowed it. This is the deepest line job has come to as yet, but he still clings to it that god is honourable. I have lost my family, my wealth, my friends, the consolation of my creedi have lost everything to which a man can at all look for comfort; yet, though he slay me, i will trust in him. This is supreme despair, along with extraordinary confidence in god who meantime looks like a moloch.17

(b) in the discretion of men ( job 17:510)

upright men shall be astonied at this, and the innocent shall stir up himself against the hypocrite. . . . But as for you all, do ye return, and come now; for i cannot find one wise man among you. ( job 17:8, 10)

Job is recounting the fact that his experiences of sor- row and difficulty have so come about that the wise element of discretion in men must make them pass judgement against him. Everything seems against him: not only his creed, but the ordinary sagacity of men. There is nothing more agonising to a man who knows his own integrity than to find that the best people leave him alone, not because they do not know why he suffers, but because they are sure he is more in the wrong than he says, and their view is backed by their own discretion and knowledge. As in the case of the density of men, this discretion must not be laid at the door of men, but at the predestiny of the way human wisdom is fixed. The predestiny of human wisdom is rationalism. Any number of things happen which are not reasonable, and human discre- tion is apt to say that the man who suffers unreason- ably is to blame; and when it is pointed out that the basis of things is without reason, men say that is only a passing difference. The bible reveals that the basis of things is not reasonable, but tragic. When a man is driven to the bottom board, he gets to the tragedy, not to the reason; he is alone with god, and if god does not see him through, despair is the only place for him. The more deeply and earnestly and directly a man thinks, the more he finds what solomon says is truehe that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. It is not jobs humour 18 that brings him to a pessimists point of view, but his plain sanity; he refuses to say that his pessimism is a mood; optimism is a mood. If god does not see job through, satan has won his wager; if god does not come on the scene somewhere, it is a forlorn hope, and satan will have proved that no one loves god for his own sake.

Everything a man can rely upon has disappeared, and yet job does not curse god; he admits that his former creed is not right, neither are his friends right, yet he declares steadily that in the end god will be justified.

(c) in the despair before men ( job 17:1116)

Job cannot hide his despair. For unfathomable pathos, verse 11 is unequalled in any language under heaven: my days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the possessions of my heart. ( job 17:11 rv mg)

A certain type of religious hypocrisy makes men hide what they feel, but job has come to the place where he cannot hide iti cannot pretend that i am com- forted of god, he says. If only job could have taken on the pose that he had the comfort of god, his friends would not have challenged him, but he says, i have no comfort; i do not see god, neither can i talk to him; all i know is that my creed and former belief must be wrong. I do not know what to accept, but i am certain god will prove that he is just and true and right, and i refuse to tell a lie in order to help him out. This attitude of religious faith is finely expressed by the psalmistthen will i go unto the altar of god, unto god my exceeding joy(psalm 43:4). This is sublime faith, the faith that jesus demanded of john the baptist. . . . And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. Will i stick to it, without any pretence or humbug, that god is righteous, although everything in my actual experience seems to prove that he is cruel? Most of us are hypocrites, we are too afraid to state the thing as job did. We say right out, god is cruel to allow me to go through this, and i refuse to believe in him any more. Job stuck to his point that when everything was known it would not be to gods dishonour, but to his honour. Because of this war, a great number of men in lesser degree have arrived at the place job has got to, their creeds about god have gone, and it would be the height of absurdity to pretend that their for- mer beliefs of god are true as they see him now. It does not follow because a man has lost belief in his beliefs that therefore he has lost faith in god. Many a man has been led to the frontiers of despair by being told he has backslidden, whereas what he has gone through has revealed that his belief in his beliefs is not god. Men have found god by going through hell, and it is the men who have been face to face with these things who can understand what job went through. All the impatience and irritation against the religious life, so called, is accounted for on the same line as jobs revolt against religious poseif they would only stop their pose and face facts as they are; be reverent with what they dont understand, and assist me in my faith in god. Jobs friends were in the right place when they sat with him dumbfounded for seven days; they were much nearer god then than afterwards. Immediately they took up the cudgels for god,19 they took on a religious pose, lost touch with the reality of actual experience, and ended in being bombastic.