Parables - Chambers, Oswald
Job 26–31
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rackd with pangs that conquer trust;
And time, a maniac scattering dust,
And life, a fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when i fade away,
To point the term of human strife.
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
Tennyson a parable is an earthly story which does not explain itself. Every one of us has an earthly story and the explanation of it is not to be found in its own expression, but only in the domain of the designer of life. Job says that the explanation his friends give of his earthly story is hopeless, they are nowhere near understanding it; god alone is the source from whence will come the explanation of all he is going through.
1. God and the sublimities ( job 26)
Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him? But the thunder of his power who can understand? ( job 26:14)
The sublime things in nature swamp our intelligent understanding of them; rugged mountain scenery, for instance, will awaken a sense of the sublime. The man who has never had the sense of the sublime awakened in him is scarcely born. The story of the earth itself is so full of sublimities that it requires god, not man, to expound it. If a man cannot expound the sublimities of nature, he need not expect to be able to expound the sublimity of the human soul. The sublimities of nature cannot be explained on the line of reason, but only on the line of the a-logical, that which goes beyond and underneath the logical. Job recognises this, and he implies, if you imagine you can explain the deeper sublimities of a mans soul, you have not pondered human life enough. The psalmist puts it in this way my god, thou art the god of the mountains and of the fathomless deep, the god of the early mornings and late at nights; but there are deeper depths than these in me, my god; more mysterious things in my soul, and i cannot fathom my own way, therefore search me, o god (see psalm 139). Job is on the same line. Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways: and how small a whisper do we hear of him! ( job 26:14 RV). In the book of job nature is always referred to as being wild; this is a point of view we have forgotten nowadays. We talk about laws and findings, we give scientific explanations of thunder and of a sunset, and come to the conclusion that there is no unexplained sublimity in nature at all. The wildness of nature has to be recognised, there are forces in the earth and air and sea which baffle attempts at explanation or of control; all we can do is to give a direction for thought along certain lines. Neither logic nor science can explain the sublimities of nature. Supposing a scientist with a diseased olfactory nerve says that there is no perfume in a rose, and to prove his statement he dissects the rose and tabulates every part, and then says, where is the per- fume? It is a fiction; i have demonstrated that there is none. There is always one fact more that science cannot explain, and the best thing to do is not to deny it in order to preserve your sanity, but to say, as job did, no, the one fact more which you cannot explain means that god must step in just there, or there is no explanation to be had.
2. God and the subtleties ( job 27)
Moreover job continued his parable, and said, . . . God forbid that i should justify you: till i die i will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness i hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as i live. ( job 27:1, 56)
God is never subtle in his revelations, but always elemental and simple. The simple gospel does not mean simple to understand, but simple in the way god himself is simple. Job says, i have no explanation as yet of what i am going through; your explanation on the line of your creed is irritating nonsense, because it makes you leave out the facts which i know, while you try to explain the one none of us can get at, viz. , god. Job is not speaking in spite, but in honestyif i were to justify you in your explanation i should sin against my conscience, and say that you have told the truth whereas in reality you have told a lie. There is a difference between the subtlety of eliphaz and the subtlety of job. Eliphaz sums up the history of the wicked man and says that god does all these things to punish him, whereas job recognises that the history of any man cannot be accounted for on the surface, and that god alone can explain his own dealings. The description eliphaz gives of the wicked man is a covert condemnation of job; he takes the facts of jobs present condition and puts them as the picture of a wicked man, while all the time he implies, thou art the man. That is not the way to comfort me, or bring me any help, says job. He does not brag and say he is a good man, but he does maintain that the reason he suffers is not because he is bad. You pretend to know the attitude of god to things, but all that you describe as the experience of a wicked man i can give as my experience of being a good man. The explanation of jobs suffering is the fact that god and Satan had made a battleground of his soul. It was not for jobs chastening or his perfecting, but for an ulterior purpose which he did not know, but his intuition made him stick to the fact that the only one who could explain the sublimities of nature was the one who could explain what he was going through. Though he slay me, though my creed goes and every- thing is destroyed, yet i will trust in him not trust him to deliver me, but trust that he is honourable and just and true, and that i shall yet be justified in sticking to my faith in his honour, though meantime it looks as if he is deliberately destroying me.
There is a lot of cheap-jack talk just now regard- ing the British empire, viz. , that god is punishing us for our sin sa hopeless misrepresentation. The cross of Calvary and the redemption have to do with the sins of the world. If god began to punish the nations for their sins there would be no nation left on the face of the earth. Job takes the right line, that the difficulties are produced by a conflict of wills.
Beware of the subtleties which twist facts. It is possible to torture a man with a delicate type of mind, as in the case of ugo bassi,21 torture him not physically, but by suggesting that he has been guilty of base motives and deeds. The sensitiveness of ugo bassis mind was such that after a while he began to believe he had been guilty unconsciously of the things he was accused of. Jobs friends said to him, we have all these facts about you, and they are only explainable along the line that you are a bad man; you may not be conscious of your badness, nevertheless you are a hypocrite, because our creed says that if a man trusts god, god will bless him; and instead of being blessed, you have been cursed in
Every way and have lost everything: therefore you must be a bad man. If job had been of the ugo bassi stamp with a hypersensitive mind and not the robust spirit he was, he would have said, oh, well, i must be much worse than i imagined; and i must be guilty. But he stuck to it, no, i have not been dishonourable and bad, you may say of me what you like, but that is not the reason why i suffer.
3. God and the sublunary ( job 28)
Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone. ( job 28:12)
Careful examination of every reference job makes to geology or meteorology reveals that there is no significant or insignificant blunder in all he says; every reference is a piece of consummate accuracy. This in passing.
Every common-sense fact requires something for its explanation which common-sense cannot give. The facts of every day and night reveal things our own minds cannot explain. When a scientific man comes across a gap in his explanations, instead of saying, there is no gap here, let him recognise that there is a gap he cannot bridge, and that he must be reverent with what he cannot understand. The tendency is to deny that a fact has any existence because it cannot be fitted into any explanation as yet. That the exception proves the rule is not true: the exception proves that the rule wont do; the rule is only useful in the greatest number of cases. When scientists treat a thesis as a fact they mean that it is based on the highest degree of probability. There are no infallible findings, and the man who bows down to scientific findings may be as big a fool as the man who refuses to do so. The man who prays ceases to be a fool, while the man who refuses to pray nourishes a blind life within his own brain and he will find no way out that road. Job cries out that prayer is the only way out in all these matters .
whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? . . . Behold, the fear of the lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from evil is understanding. ( job 28:20, 28)
4. God and the shadows ( job 29)
Oh that i were as in months past, as in the days when god preserved me; when his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light i walked through darkness. ( job 29:23)
Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne, yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown. Standeth god within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
James russell lowell
The shadows depict what job is describing, viz. , the things in human history and in personal experience that are shadowed by mystery and cannot be explained by reason or religious creeds, but only by belief in god who will make all plain in his own way. Job is saying that there is nothing in life you can reckon on with any certainty. We may say that if a man has been well brought up and has developed his own integrity and lived rightly, success will be sure to attend him, but you cannot calculate along that line. Never ignore the things that cannot be explained, put them on one side, but remember they are there and have to be reckoned with. There is a gap and a wildness in things and if god does not step in and adjust it, there is no hope; but god has stepped in by the redemption, and our part is to trust confidently in him. Either the pessimist is right when he says we are autumn leaves driven by the blast of some ultimate power without mind, or else the way out is by the redemption of Jesus Christ. 5. God and the scurrilous ( job 30) and now i am their song, yea, i am their byword. . . . They flee far from me, and spare not to spit in my face. ( job 30:910) Jesus Christ was in the case job is describing, he was placed alongside the most scurrilous immorality of his day behold, a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! And he was put to death between two malefactors. It is impos-sible to calculate on the line that virtue will bring a man to honour, and that uprightness will escape the punishment which falls on men who are not upright. Any explanation at all leaves a gap which cannot be bridged as yet.
6. God and the scrupulous ( job 31)
If i have walked with vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; let me be weighed in an even balance that god may know mine integrity. ( job 31:56)
Job examines the statements of the creed and its moral findings, and then disputes it from his own experience do you think i am trying to make out before god that i am what i have not been? Would i talk to god with what would be blatant insolence if i had not the facts to back me up? The inference from the facts of my life is that i have been beyond reproach, and in my approach to god i will not say i have been guilty of what i know i have not been. I stand clear before god on every one of these lines, and though i do not see him or know him, i will stick to it that he is other than you say, and that when i do see him he will not say that i deceived myself when i spoke the truth.
It is foolish to say that this chapter refers to a past dispensation and that we are in advance of it. We are in another dispensation, but not necessarily a better one. What man among us can come anywhere near the standard of integrity of job? That kind of statement comes from accepting principles for guidance instead of a personal relationship. If i worship god from fear or superstition, then i am wrong, my heart has been secretly enticed. Jobs point of view is that if i do anything in order to appease god, i am committing iniquity. The only reason for my approach to god must be that he is what i believe him to be, a god of honour and justice, not a god of coercive necromancy who demands that we do things without any reason. To-day we are dealing with the very thing for which the friends have pulled job to pieces. There are people who say, i will not, i dare not, accept the god you are presenting because he is not a moral god; there is something wrong in such a presentation, my whole being cries out against it, i cannot go to such a god as a deliverer.
In these chapters job is insisting that god must be other than his former creed said he was, and that it must be acknowledged that there are facts which the creed had not taken into account. Thank god for theology, but theology is second, not first; if we put it first, we will do what the friends did, refuse to look at facts and remain consistent to certain ideas which per- vert the character of god. In the final run god will not have us say an untrue thing for the sake of his honour.