Bible Commentaries

Job 32:2

Job's friends kindly argued with him, "You are suffering, therefore you are guilty". And the argument was bad, because they only saw an exceptional accident in the life of a good man; but if that eternal life had been passed in continual residence on this globe, if notorious bad fortune had pursued him through eternity in the nineteenth generation, his descendants might well have said, "Oh, Job 32:4

"I speak not as claiming reverence for my own age and office," says Mr. Lyon to Felix Holt (Felix Holt, chap. v.), "not to shame you, but to warn you. It is good that you should use plainness of speech, and I am not of those who would enforce a submissive silence on the young, that they themselves, being elders, may be heard at large; for Elihu was the youngest of Job's friends, yet was there a wise rebuke in his words."

Job 32:7

If youth is the season of unrest, when change is welcomed for its own sake, and when orderly growth is despised, it is also the brooding-time of speculation, the maturing-time of adventure. Old men are probably best fitted for carrying on the mechanical and routine work of the world, but the artists, the poets, the explorers, the propagators of new ideas, are habitually to be found among the young. Of two great changes that have powerfully influenced modern society, it may probably be said that both the Reformation and the Revolution owed their impetus to the generation under forty.

—C. H. Pearson.

Job 32:8

Here it is that humanity culminates, or reveals the summit of its dignity; it Job 32:9

We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in today to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, "up and onward for evermore". We cannot stay among the ruins.

—Emerson.

In these days, what of lordship or leadership is still to be done, the youth must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature Job 32:10

"We once were lusty youths and tall:" one by the younger men, "we still are stout, come, try a fall"; and the third by the children, "but we"ll be stronger than you all".

—Plutarch (describing the Spartan festivals, at which three choruses were sung).

The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.... Man is timid and apologetic,—he is no longer upright; he dare not say, "I think," "I Job 32:21-22

Among all the Diseases of the Mind, there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery.... When there is not Vanity enough awake in a man to undo him, the flatterer stirs up that dormant weakness, and inspires him with Merit enough to be a Coxcomb.

—Steele in The Spectator (No238).

Villari, in the ninth chapter of his Savonarola, describes Lorenzo the Magnificent on his deathbed as unable to "believe in his confessor's sincerity. Accustomed to see his slightest wish obeyed, and all the world bow to his will, he could not realize that anyone would dare to deny him absolution. Accordingly the blessing of the Church was powerless to lighten the weight burdening his conscience, and he was more and more cruelly tortured by remorse. No one has ever dared to refuse me anything—he thought to himself, and then the idea that had once been his pride became his worst torment."

What is it we heartily wish of each other? Is it to be pleased and flattered? No, but to be convicted and exposed, to be shamed out of our nonsense of all kinds, and made men of, instead of ghosts and phantoms.

—Emerson on New England Reformers.

Reference.—XXXIII.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No2505.