Bible Commentaries

Sunny Memories

Job 29:2-5).

The patriarch did not feel that the loss of religion was the gain of liberty; he does not testify that in proportion as he got away from religious centres and religious obligations he got into freedom and light and enjoyment. Let this man's experience go for something. There is a common sophism that if we could only get rid of religion we should all be free and happy, unbeclouded by a fear, undeterred by a single menace. Granted that that may be our opinion, yet we must set side by side with it the testimony of men who have lost religious consciousness and gone away into more or less of melancholy, depression, gloom, and religious solitude. Who would not have expected Job to say, Now I have entered upon the real meaning of life: up to this time I have been superstitious, spending my reverence where veneration was not valued, throwing my best faculties away; but now, having abandoned the book and the altar and the religious vow and the whole spiritual life, why, I am a man? Job bears no such testimony. Rather he says—I want the old days back again; they rose in brightness, they increased in glory, and when they went down at sunset the death was as precious as the birth, for it held within it all the hope of a new morning: once I could pray, and heaven seemed to meet me half-way when I said I will supplicate the throne that is unseen; my mouth was full of song and sacred laughter, and my heart pulsed like music, and all things bore testimony to the benediction of God. Is it so with us? It will be one day if we live a neglectful life and so forfeit our religious privileges. Now and again it does seem that if we could destroy the Bible, obliterate the Sabbath, forget the Cross, escape the Church, we should spend the remainder of our lives in green pastures, in drinking wine that would exhilarate us, and in dwelling under fruitful trees, the very produce of which would drop into our open mouths and melt there and nourish us, without trouble or effort. But men come to a better mind; they long even for the old familiar tunes; they desire but one vision of the ancient times when they assembled with the people of God in the sanctuary, and kept: holy-day with the great multitude, and were interested in all holy services and sacrifices. What would the flowers say, if they could speak, did the sun not come back punctually to them with his blessing? Hanging their heads on the second day they would say—Oh that it were with us as it used to be but a few hours since! We are cold, we are heart-struck, we are without joy: Oh that the sun would come back again and bless us, and. we would answer his light with all our love! What would the picture say in the Royal Academy if the sun did not go before any other visitor went? Suppose he should tarry—a day, a week—and leave them there on their decorated walls? Could they speak, what would they say? Surely they would say, We are nothing without the light; we cannot be seen, we cannot show ourselves, we are not self-illuminating: oh that it were with us as it used to be! Then we could see one another; we could look across the hall, and salute one another in all the enthusiasm of mutual appreciation: we were modestly proud of our colour: but what are we without the sun? Nothing. We are not pictures; we might as well be empty canvas; it might as well be with us as if the hand of genius had never touched us; we seem now to see what the sun really is; the sun is more than mere light; light is the artist, light is the revealer, light is the great medium, the holy messenger: oh that it were with us as when the sun filled these rich halls and made every wall eloquent with colour and suggestion!—so it is with the soul. Man cries out for the living God. For a time he is joyous enough without him in a superficial way; presently we shall hear a voice saying, "As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God." We were made for God. It was meant that we should love him, and live in him, and be his sons and daughters evermore. Under any other thought we are not ourselves: we are wild men, we are decentralised, we are cut off from the mountain spring, we shall soon be dried up and withered; let us cry mightily for the days that have gone.

A wonderful thing Job says, almost incredible indeed to modern readers. We find this singular expression in the fourth verse, "As I was in the days of my youth." Who can utter that prayer? Tell us where youth has not been misspent. Point out a man who has found in his youth all that was pure, lovely, and beautiful, and given his heart to it, and has not grown away from that youthhood which was nearly heaven. Other men have said they have been made to reap the sins of their youth: Job desires to be in his older age as he was in his early days. A sweet memory that! We are not now speaking of childhood—innocent, prattling, trustful, musical, happy, all-holiday childhood, but of a more advanced youth. Are there not some men who would evermore forget their youth if they could? It is a blot, a wound, a shame, a blasphemy. Let others take heed, and live their youth well, so that when old age comes it may return in sweet and tender memory to make old age green, vernal, flowery.

When Job lost religious consciousness he lost something that was vital, he lost companionship. He says, "The days when the Almighty was with me." He complains of loss of light, loss of communion, loss of the divine "secret"—"when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle,"—when God hung the key upon my tabernacle wall, the key of all things,—that mysterious, marvellous, beneficent secret which is with them that fear the Lord: call it by what name you please; sympathy will do, so will insight, prevision,—that prophetic power that sees over the intervening hills of time away into fruitful plains and gardens far beyond, yea, into millenniums. Now the secret has gone, and Job becomes a common Job 29:8-10).

He was a great man then. Now everybody sees that providence is against him. It is precisely the same in modern days. Given, a man rich, prosperous, influential, quite a noble figure in the social sphere, and it is easy to think that he is a favourite of heaven. Let him come to ill-health and poverty and abandonment of a social kind, and there will not be wanting those far-sighted owls who think that they see that God has turned from the man in anger because of the man's wickedness. But Job was not only a great man socially; he was a great man amongst the poor as well as amongst the princes—

"When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me: because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.... I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out. And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth" ( Job 29:11-17).

We may pardon a man some egotism who had done this all. He might remind himself of how the princes stood and bowed down to him, when he remembered that he was the friend of the poor, and that whenever he met oppression on the high road he rent it in twain, and left the two sundered pieces to come together again if they could. Now what Job says he was personally, religion, as represented by Christ, ought to be influentially. We cannot indeed be all these in the letter, for every man is not a Job in mental capacity or in material possessions; but the Church can be what Job was in its unity. The Church must play the Job of this twenty-ninth chapter of his book. Religion should be the greatest figure in society: it should be the great voice in council; it should represent what we find Job was in the twenty-fifth verse—"I... dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners." The Church that is not all this is not Christ's Church, or if it be Christ's Church it is ungrown, undeveloped, unaware of its privileges and responsibilities. Do not let us lose the golden thought of the occasion by imagining that there was but one Job 29:20-23).

There is a career for the Church! The Church is to be a friend of the poor and the helpless and the destitute; the Church is to be the terror of oppression; the Church is to be the chief figure in all the social economy. Not the Church as a piece of mechanism and organisation and institution, but the spiritual Church, the Christ-loving Church, the Church born at the cross and crowned in heaven. Where is the Church now? Meek with modesty! Where is she? She ought to be at the front. She begs to be permitted to live! She spends her life in elaborate apologies! She is edged out by all manner of rivals and competitors. We wrong the Church if we deny her the first place, and she wrongs herself if she does not claim it. Now she has to go behind, when she ought to go before; she has whispered where she ought to have thundered; she has kissed the hand of the oppressor, when she ought to have smitten his cheekbone. There is no Church! She is indeed not dead, but she sleepeth. The time of her awakening must come. Lord Jesus, come and awake her out of sleep! If she had not a public holiday in the week called Sunday she would die utterly. She lives on the advantage of a public holiday! The people have then nothing else to do, or they weary in the doing of it, so they make the Church a kind of recreation: but if the Church had not this Sunday she would be swallowed up in the muddy river of the common times. She lives upon this holiday! She does not live in the week-time; she could not live then: Art, Business, Pleasure would laugh her to scorn; the theatre could outshine the sanctuary, and the reciter of poems would put the preacher down. We cling now to this one little day in the week, and that is fast going. When that goes the Church will go, and the pulpit, and all religious organisation. Lord Jesus, thou still dost work miracles—oh, work a miracle in thine own Church! Arouse her; vitalise her; quicken her. She ought to be first in music, in art, in literature, in science; she ought to pull down her walls, and extend her boundaries, and heighten her roof, and kill the fatted calf, and bring forth the gold ring, and the best robe, and all good things, and make her house a place of feasting and banqueting. She is getting old, and economical, and poor, and toothless, and fearful, and decrepid, and men are laughing at the ancient heroine that struggled with the lion and beat him, that lived on the mountain and grew strong on the air of the hills, that found home in the fissures of the rocks and in the caves of the earth. Now she has been brought into the city, and she is giving way under the blandishments of civilisation, the seductions of luxury and fashion. May she not be recovered from the error of her way? Then come thyself, O Christ, and "dwell as a King in the army, and as one that comforteth the mourners"!

Note

In Psalm 88:5). In Job 29:15

This may lead us to consider the subject of self-multiplication.—No man liveth unto himself.—We hold all our faculties and properties, not for ourselves alone but for others also; in this respect we have all things in common.—No man is at liberty to say, when there is a blind man to be helped, that his eyes are wholly his own, and that he must devote them to his own occupations and interests.—In this way it lies within the power of every man to do good: without money, without genius, without influence, he can yet conduct a blind child across a thoroughfare, or speak a kind word to the dispirited traveller, or offer to do some deed of love to the friendless man.—Beneficence does not confine itself to one line. Unhappily, in many instances, it is so confined, and thus it is in danger of falling into a mere trick or habit. Some men will give money largely who will not give any time to the promotion of good causes; others do not grudge their time, but it is next to impossible to persuade them to contribute of their substance.—Each man will be judged according to his faculty and opportunity.—All that some men can do is to lead the blind, cheer the lonely, advise the perplexed; these services to humanity are never set down in the subscription-lists of society; it would seem as if it was only money that could be recorded, and not service of a still richer kind. Many are sitting in darkness and desolation who do not need money; they need sympathy, counsel, encouragement.—Let every man consider what his particular power of serving society is. We must not judge ourselves by one another, but must inquire into the gift which gives us individuality; that is the gift which is to be stirred up; that is the gift which indicates the line of our service.—Some men have ten gifts, others two, others one, and each man must examine himself and work according to his particular endowment.—Blessed are they who live in others.—The blind who are helped ought not to forget the man who helped them. They should remember the touch of his kind hand, the cheerfulness of his generous voice, and by their thanks they should inspire him to continue his benevolent services to all who need them.—The man who has the word of wisdom has the key of many a prison.—Even services of the humblest kind should be rendered with tender grace, for thus their value may be doubled.—Many persons never see the blind because they never look for them.—There is other blindness than that of the eyes of the body—blindness of mind, of conscience, and even of affection.—What if a man should see well with his bodily eyes, but should blind the vision of his soul? What if the eyes of imagination should wander through eternity, feasting themselves upon the riches of the universe, if the eyes of conscience and responsibility and social trust should be put out, so that those who are round about us needing our help should escape our observation.—Many persons are quick to see the faults of others, but blind to their own.—Let us remember that sympathy, counsel, encouragement, prayer, religious exhortation, may all come under the designation of that large and generous service which gives eyes to the blind.