Bible Commentaries

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"... full of trouble."— Job 14:1

This is one of the exaggerations quite pardonable to men in hours of agony.—There have been bright minds that have found more joy than sorrow in the world.—Unquestionably there is a diversity of temperament, and that ought to be taken into account in every consideration of the whole subject of human discipline.—It certainly seems as if some lives were left without the brightness of a single gleam of hope; one trouble succeeds another like cloud coming after cloud, until the whole horizon is draped in blackness.—Consider the many sources and springs and occasions of trouble in human life.—Take the individual constitution: some men seem to be born utterly wanting in all the conditions of health; from infancy upward they are doomed to depression, weakness, pain, and all the influences which contribute towards settled melancholy; others, again, seem to be wounded every day through their children; the hard-hearted, the ungrateful, the impenitent, the selfish, the thoughtless; others again have no success in business; whatever they do perishes in their hands; they are always too late in the morning; they always feel that some other man has passed by them in the race of life, and plucked the fruit which they intended to enjoy; others, again, are beaten down in the conflict for the want of physical strength, or mental energy, or rational hopefulness: they think it is no use proceeding further; they say the fates are against them, and so they sink into neglect, and pass away without leaving any traces of successful work in life.—We must distinguish between the trouble which is external, physical, and traceable more or less to our own action, and that mysterious heart-trouble which comes from solemn moral reflection, from the reckoning up of sins, and from a thoughtful calculation of all the actions, thoughts, and purposes which have deserved divine condemnation.—There is no trouble to be compared with the trouble of the mind.—He is not poor who has left to him an estate of thought, reflection, contemplation, and the power of prayer.—In talking of trouble we should also talk about its mitigations. Is it possible that there can be a life anywhere on which some beam of sunshine does not alight? We are not now talking about the insane, or those who suffer from increasing and continued melancholy, but about the general average of human life; and, so speaking, surely we can always find in the hardest lot some mitigation of the burden, some compensation for extra darkness and difficulty.—We should look out for the mitigations.—Instead of arguing from the difficulty we should argue from the strength which is able to bear it in some degree. All this is never easy to do, and he would acquire no influence over men who sought to drive away their burdens, their difficulties, and their fears.—Better look at them seriously, add them up as to their real value, and so acquire standing-ground in the estimation of the hearer as to be enabled to proceed to enumerate mercies, blessings, alleviations, and the like, so as to mitigate the horrors of the actual situation.—Then, whatever trouble we may have, we must remember that it is not to be compared with the distress of him who said, "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death."—We think of him, and justly Job 14:4

The answer is correct, and incorrect.—Everything depends upon the limits within which it is treated.—As regards man, it is impossible for him to change causes or to upset the laws of the universe.—With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.—This is the very thing that God is constantly doing: he is bringing strength out of weakness, purity out of impurity, life out of death; this is the eternal miracle of the divine administration.—It is of infinite importance, however, that man should realise his own helplessness in this matter, otherwise he will never look in the right direction for guidance and succour.—It is something to know that men have discovered beyond all question that to bring a clean thing out of an unclean is impossible.—The text is more than an inquiry; it is also a verdict.—Great importance attaches to these incidental intimations of the results of human inquiry and experience.—If any man had brought a clean thing out of an unclean it would be known, and the example would have been held up as pointing to a law, at least to an occasional possibility, and therefore perhaps to a reality which could be established upon the broadest bases.—But the very inquiry has in it a tone of helplessness.—When, therefore, man is done, God must take up the case, and, let us repeat again and again, it is his glory to do what man cannot do, and to show us that that which is sown in corruption is raised in incorruption, and that which we sow cannot live until it has died.—The Bible is continually upsetting the so-called laws of nature and laws of sequence.—It would seem to be the delight of the spirit of the Bible to make the last first, and the first last, and to confuse all the thinking of the craftiest minds.—The Church of Christ is a clean thing brought out of an unclean.—Every renewed heart is a clean thing brought out of an unclean.—Every generous and noble deed is likewise a clean thing brought out of an unclean.—But the first motive was never in the unclean: as water cannot rise above its own level, neither can depravity: anything, therefore, that is now pure, wise, noble, true, and useful must be credited to the almighty grace of God.—That innumerable hard questions gather around this view of life is evident enough; still we have to deal with the practical end and issue of things, and there we find that even the man himself who does the good deeds is unwilling to ascribe them to the action of his own depraved motive and thought, but willingly accepts the solution that this is the Lord's doing and marvellous in his eyes.—Here the great gospel of salvation may be preached in all its unction and fulness and power.—God makes the tree good, and thus makes the fruit good.—He purifies the fountain, and thus he cleanses the stream.—God does not begin to work from the outside, cleansing the hands; but from the internal life, purifying the heart; then all the rest becomes morally sequential, and illustrative of the miracle that has been wrought within.