Chapter
2 - THE BOOK OF REPENTANCE
"Ye have
heard of the patience of Job, and have seen
the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very
pitiful, and of tender mercy" (James 5:11).
If asked to give the primary theme of the
Book of Job in one word, I should reply,
"Repentance." As Genesis is the book of
Election, Exodus of Redemption, Leviticus of
Sanctification, Numbers of Testing, and
Deuteronomy of the Divine Government, so Job,
possibly written by the same human author and at
about the same time, is distinctively the book
of Repentance. I know all will not agree with me
as to this. Most, perhaps, will insist that the
outstanding theme of this ancient drama is, Why
do the godly suffer? or something akin to this.
But they mistake the secondary for the primary
theme when they so insist. Unquestionably this
book was divinely designed to settle for all
time -- and eternity too -- the problem of why a
loving and all-wise God permits the righteous to
endure afflictions such as those from which the
wicked are ofttimes shielded. But behind all
this there is another and a deeper problem; it
is the evil in the hearts of the best of men and
the necessity of judging oneself in the light of
the holiness of God; and this is repentance.
To illustrate this theme in such a way as to
make evident to every man the importance and
necessity of repentance, God takes up the case
of Job, the patriarch of the land of Uz, and
gives us in detail an account of the process
that led him at last to cry, "I abhor myself and
repent in dust and ashes."
How different is God's method from the one we
would naturally follow! If I had to write a book
on repentance, and I wanted a character to
illustrate properly this great subject, I fancy
I would select a very different man from Job. If
searching through the Holy Scriptures for such
an illustration I might possibly think of David
-- so highly exalted, so greatly blessed -- yet
who in a moment of weakness and unwatchfulness
fell into so grave a sin and afterwards repented
so bitterly. The sobbings of his heartfelt
penitence and self-reproach, as breathed out in
the divine ear in the language of Psalm 51, is
indeed the classical passage on the repentance
of a child of God who has failed.
Or I might select Manasseh, the ungodly son
of a most pious father, whose horrid vices and
unmentionable wickednesses dragged the name of
Hezekiah into the dust and brought grave
reproach upon the honor of the God of Israel.
And yet Manasseh was brought at last to
repentance and humbled himself before God, and
was eventually saved in answer probably to that
dishonored father's prayers offered so long
before. What a fine picture of a truly repentant
soul does Manasseh present as he bows low before
the throne of God confessing his manifold
transgressions and seeking forgiveness for his
scarlet sins.
Or I might turn to the New Testament and
endeavor to tell again the story of Saul of
Tarsus, blameless indeed outwardly before the
Law, but a bitter persecutor of the church of
God until the risen Christ appeared to him, as
he fell stunned and blinded by "the glory of
that light," on the Damascus turnpike, crying
when convinced of his error, "Lord, what wilt
thou have me to do?" His after life proved the
sincerity of his repentance and the depth of his
contrition.
Or if one turned from the pages of holy writ
to those of history and biography, he might cite
the repentance of the man of the world as seen
in Augustine of Hippo or Francis of Assisi, the
genuinely changed profligate, or as in the cases
of John Bunyan, Ignatius Loyola, John Newton,
or, in our own times, of Jerry McAuley, the
river thief. In each of these men, when brought
into the presence of God, we have a change of
attitude indeed that lasted through life.
But if any or all of these were cited as
illustrations of the necessity of repentance,
how many there would be to say: 'Yes, we quite
realize such men needed to repent. Their sins
were many, their wickedness great. It was right
and proper for them to repent in the agony of
their souls. But I, thank God, am not as they. I
have never gone into such depths of sin. I have
never manifested such depravity. I have not so
far forgotten what is right and proper. I am a
just man needing no repentance.' Do you say that
none would literally use such language as this?
Perhaps not, yet the spirit of it, the inward
sense of the words, has often been uttered in my
own hearing, and I am persuaded in the ears of
many others of God's ministers.
Now, in order that none may so speak, when we
turn to this ancient book in our Bibles, we find
that God searched the world over, not for the
worst man, but for the best, and He tells us his
strangely pathetic story and shows how that good
man was brought to repentance -- that thus
"every mouth might be stopped," and all the
world of men might be brought in guilty before
Him. For if a man of Job's character must needs
repent, what shall be said of me, and of you,
who come so far behind him in righteousness and
integrity and have sinned so deplorably and come
so far short of the glory of God? Can you not
see then the wisdom of Jehovah in selecting such
a man to show forth the need that all men should
repent?
Consider then the case of Job. A wealthy
Oriental sheik, apparently, he lived in the days
before the knowledge of God had been lost,
though it is evident that idolatry, particularly
the worship of the heavenly bodies, already had
supplanted in places the older worship. For, be
it remembered, paganism is not a step upward in
the evolution of religion from the lowest
fetichism to pure monotheism. It is rather a
declension, as Romans 1 shows us. Men turned
from the living and true God to these vain
idols, and "for this cause God gave them up" to
all sorts of unclean practices. But Job had
escaped all this. He was perfect in his
behavior, upright in all his ways, one who
reverenced God and detested iniquity.
In the first and second chapters we get a
remarkable revelation of things in the unseen
world. Job is the subject of a conversation
between God and Satan, the accuser of the
brethren who accuseth them before our God day
and night. The Lord challenges Satan, asking,
"Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there
is none like him in the earth ... one that fears
God and eschews evil?" Remark, Job was all that
God said he was -- a saint, a man of faith, a
true child of God. This book gives us, then, not
the repentance of a sinner, but the repentance
of a saint.
Satan denies the truthfulness of the divine
estimate of Job and particularly declares that
Job does not love and reverence the Lord for
what He is in Himself, but for what Job received
at His hand. To prove the contrary, the devil is
permitted to wrest from the patriarch all that
he possessed. Instead of renouncing God, Job
exclaims, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath
taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
Thus far Satan is defeated, but he is
relentless.
On a second occasion he reiterates his
implication that Job does not love God because
of what He is, but because he really loves his
own life most and recognizes that he is indebted
to God for it. Permission is given Satan to put
his corrupting hand on Job's body, filling it
with a loathsome disease, so that death is
really to be preferred to life. In his dire
extremity, as he sits mournfully in the ash heap
scraping the horrid filth from his open sores
with a piece of pottery, when even his wife bids
him renounce God, he rises triumphantly above
his very great trial, exclaiming, "Shall we
receive good at the hand of God, and shall we
not receive evil?" He glorifies God in the
fires. Satan is defeated. Jehovah has made
manifest the fact that this man is loyal to Him
and loves Him for Himself alone, and not simply
for His gifts. It is a marvelous thing thus to
find one to whom God means more than all earthly
possessions, yea, than life itself.
Thus the first scene ends with Satan baffled
and defeated. In what follows we need to
remember that Job knew nothing of that which had
transpired in the unseen world. Had he done so,
he would never have gotten into the deep
perplexity that ensued after his friends came
with their bitter accusations against his
character.
In the next part of the book God has another
object in view altogether. Job was a good man.
He was altogether righteous, as God Himself knew
and declared. But Job knew it too -- knew it so
well that he did not realize the actual
corruption of his own heart. And after all, it
is what a man is by nature that counts, not
simply what he does. To repress one's nature is
one thing; to be free of inbred sin altogether
is quite another. Job's life had been such that
he had apparently forgotten that he was as
sinful in himself as any other, though
wonderfully preserved by divine grace. God
therefore designed to bring this good man to
repentance, to give him to realize that his
nature was vile, though his life had been so
well regulated, so that thus he might magnify
the loving-kindness of the One who had made him
His own.
So Job's three friends, all men of importance
like himself, came to condone with him. Each
proved true to his own clearly indicated
character. Eliphaz of Teman was distinctly the
man of experience. An observant student of
natural law, he again and again declares, "I
have seen." Bildad of Shuah was the typical
traditionalist. Ask the fathers, he says; they
are wiser than we. They shall teach thee. Zophar
of Naamah was the cold, hard legalist who
considered that God weighed out calamity in
exact proportion to man's sin, and dispensed
mercies only according to human desert.
For seven days and nights they encamped
around the stricken Job, their grief and his too
deep for words. But though they spake not, they
thought much. Why had these calamities befallen
their friend? Could they be other than
punishment for hidden sin? Was it not
inconceivable that a good God, a faithful
Creator, could allow such affliction to come
undeserved? Their accusing eyes uttered silently
what their lips at first refused to speak.
Job could not stand those eyes. His soul
writhed under their implied suggestions that he
was suffering for wickedness hitherto concealed.
At last he "opened his mouth, and cursed his
day," and vehemently declared his innocence and
besought the sympathy of his friends. Then came
the long debate. Again and again they charged
him with hypocrisy, with overindulgence toward
his children, which had brought their ruin, with
hidden sin of vicious character, which God was
dealing with. They begged him to confess his
iniquities and thus give God a chance to show
him mercy.
Sturdily, honestly, sometimes ironically, Job
answered them, denying their accusations,
assuring them of his confidence in God, though
admitting his sore perplexity. He even went so
far as to declare that, if their philosophies
were right, then God was unjust in His dealings
with him. At last they were silenced when by his
final speech he met all their accusations and
vigorously maintained his own righteousness. In
three chapters (29, 30, and 31) he used the
pronouns "I," "me," "my," and "mine" 189 times.
But this was before he saw the Lord.
Elihu, a younger man who had listened in
silence to the entire debate accepted Job's
challenge for some one to speak on God's behalf.
In a masterly address he showed that affliction
may be sent for instruction rather than solely
as punishment. He exalted the wisdom of God, who
is not obliged to reveal beforehand His reasons
for chastening. And he pointed out that the
bewildered soul is wise when he asks of God --
waiting for Him to instruct, rather than
attempting to understand His ways through human
reasoning.
As he speaks a thunderstorm startles the
friends. The vivid lightnings alarm. Then a
great whirlwind moves across the desert, and, as
it draws near, the voice of the Lord speaks to
the soul of Job propounding question after
question which the wisest of men could not
answer. He reproves Job for suggesting the
possibility of unrighteousness in His ways. And
as a sense of the divine wisdom and majesty
comes over the patriarch's afflicted soul, he
exclaims: "Behold, I am vile; what shall I
answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.
Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea,
twice; but I will proceed no further" (40:4-5).
But God was not yet through. He speaks again,
bringing before Job's soul a sense of His
greatness and power, of His glory and
omniscience. As Job contemplates it all he gets
a new conception of the holiness and the
righteousness of God. His own littleness is
accentuated. That God should look at all upon
sinful men now amazes him. "The end of the Lord"
is reached at last, and he cries out: "I have
heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now
mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself,
and repent in dust and ashes" (42:5-6). We know
the rest and need not dwell upon it here. The
great object of the Lord has been attained. Job
changes his mind -- his whole attitude -- both
as to himself and as to God. Humbled to the
dust, he condemns himself and glorifies the
Lord. And this is what God had in view from the
beginning. And it is what all must reach in one
way or another who are saved by His grace.
"That Thou shouldst so delight in me
And be the God Thou art,
Is darkness to my intellect,
But sunshine to my heart."
Self-judgment is the sure precursor to
blessing, and self-judgment is the work of
repentance wrought by the Spirit of God.
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