Bible Commentaries

Memorable Sights in Life

Job 5:3

How many passages are there in Scripture that begin with "I have seen"? Probably no man has counted the number. Let us keep, however, to that formula; it is interesting and useful to deal with a personal witness, to have a man so to say face to face and in your very grip. How many voices we shall hear if we listen well—the solemn voice, the monotone that has not heart enough to vary its expression, a gamut in one note, and then the lightsome tone of youth and the cheeriness of the early days when all things were dripping with dew and all the dew shot through and through with morning light. These days are gone, but there is a joy in melancholy, there is a species of festival in misery. All that some people now have is their grief; that grief is their wealth, their Job 5:6-7

Prince Louis de Rohan is one of those select mortals born to honours, as the sparks fly upwards; and alas also (as all men are) to trouble no less.

—Carlyle, The Diamond Necklace, chap. IV.

Job 5:17-18

So long as any fault whatever seems trifling to us,—so long as we see, not so much the culpability of as the excuses for imprudence or negligence—so long, in short, as Job murmurs, and as providence is thought too severe,—so long as there is any inner protestation against fate, or doubt as to the perfect justice of God,—there is not yet entire humility or true repentance. It is when we accept the expiation that it can be spared us; it is when we submit sincerely that grace can be granted to us. Only when grief finds its work done can God dispense us from it. Trial then only stops when it is useless; that is why it scarcely ever stops.

—Amiel.

Reference.—V:17-27—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Job 5:21-23

In the fourth volume of Modern Painters Ruskin speaks of the repose amid the wild, torn crags of the Alpine valleys. "It is just where "the mountain falling cometh to naught, and the rock is removed out of his place" (XIV:18), that, in process of years, the fairest meadows bloom between the fragments, the clearest rivulets murmur from their crevices among the flowers, and the clustered cottages, each sheltered beneath some strength of mossy stone, now to be removed no more, and with their pastured flocks around them, safe from the eagle's stoop and the wolf's ravin, have written upon their fronts, in simple words, the mountaineer's faith in the ancient promise—"Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh"; "For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field; and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee"."

Job 5:26

Lord Jeffrey said in his old days, which were some of the gentlest and most affectionate that could be passed: "It is poor wine that grows sour with ye"... And now her latter days embodied a storehouse of all that had gone before, with the latest and ripest fruit added. She had deeply studied the successive lessons of life, and met the last and gravest with reverence and thankfulness. She grew gentle and tender, at no sacrifice of courage and brilliancy. She clung more and more to her friends and to her kindred, and became a centre, round which gathered the tenderest deference and affection.

—Lady Eastlake on Mrs. Grote.

Pass through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.

—Marcus Aurelius.

The spectacle of an old man with his intellect keen, with his experience bitter, with his appetites un-satiated, with the memory of past enjoyment stinging him, and deprived of the physical power to enjoy it, is so familiar that we accept it as one of the commonplaces of life. Scarcely anyone of us remembers that he will in turn live on into such an old age, if he does not sacrifice daily to the invisible powers.

—C. H. Pearson.

The Parable of Harvest

Job 5:26

This text is a perfect vision of the closing days of harvest. Every harvest-field is a place of reconciliation between God and man.

I. The first parable of harvest is that harvest is God's memorial, and the parable of His love. His promise is that while the bow is in the heaven, springtime and harvest shall not fail.

II. The order of the world is use first and beauty second. Christ never illustrates Himself by a superfluity. He is bread, water, light, life; He never says that He is fragrance, or colour, or luxury. He is something we all need.

III. Harvest is the parable of life itself. Youth is wedded to age as spring is wedded to summer and springtime to harvest, and that which a man sows in youth he likewise reaps in manhood.

IV. Harvest is again the parable of death. Nothing perishes, because there is no waste in nature.

V. The purpose of life is use. That is the great lesson of nature from first to last.

—W. J. Dawson, Harvest and Thanksgiving Services, p50.

References.—V:26.—H. Woodcock, Sermon Outlines, p240. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i. No43. V:27.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi. No2175.