Job 11
Butler1. THEN answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said,
2. Should not the multitude of words be answered?
And should a man full of talk be justified?
3. Should thy boastings make men hold their peace?
And when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed?
4. For thou sayest, My doctrine is pure, And I am clean in thine eyes.
5. But Oh that God would speak, And open his lips against thee;
6. And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom,
For he is manifold in understanding!
Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.
7. Canst thou by searching find out God?
Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?
8. It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know?
9. The measure thereof is longer than the earth,
And broader than the sea.
10. If he pass through, and shut up,
And call unto judgment, then who can hinder him?
11. For he knoweth vain men:
ONE after another, these officious friends take up their argument against Job; and one after another they repeat the same commonplaces of their creed. God is just, and, therefore, God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. If a man suffers, he suffers because he deserves it. If you do not concede this, they say you arraign the justice of God. Job may have been apparently moral, upright, religious, but he must have cherished some secret sin; and it is this which has called down upon him the vengeance of the Most High. This is their compendious system of theology. But it is not large enough to cover the facts. You cannot sum in little the mysteries of the universe.
He seeth iniquity also, even though he consider it not.
12. But vain man is void of understanding, Yea, man is born as a wild ass’s colt.
13. If thou set thine heart aright, And stretch out thine hands toward him;
14. If iniquity be in thine hand, put it far away, And let not unrighteousness dwell in thy tents;
15. Surely then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot;
Yea, thou shalt be stedfast, and shalt not fear:
16. For thou shalt forget thy misery;
Thou shalt remember it as waters that are passed away:
17. And thy life shall be clearer than the noonday;
Though there be darkness, it shall be as the morning.
18. And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope;
Yea, thou shalt search about thee, and shalt take thy west in safety.
19. Also thou shalt lie down, and none shall make thee afraid;
Yea, many shall make suit unto thee.
20. But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, And they shall have no way to flee,
And their hope shall be the giving up of the ghost.
You cannot still the anguish of beating hearts, crying out for God in their desolate misery, by giving them the dead, dry sand of some formula which you presumptuously label as the truth. It is all too little; the facts of God’s world are too broad for your system. “Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Neither did this man sin, nor his parents; but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” Perosene.
Zophar the Naamathite shows a more rude and less cultivated and proportionately a more heated character than the other two. He is the most inveterate of Job’s accusers, and he speaks wholly without feeling or pity. In substantial argument, he does little more than repeat what Bildad has already said; indeed, his speeches are made up rather of invectives and reproaches than of new ideas and reasonings. In his second speech—and he has one speech less than the others, probably because he could find nothing more to say—he betrays manifest signs of exhaustion of matter, without any abatement of wrathfulness; he again repeats with exaggeration what had already been said; and he certainly does himself justice in being the first to give over speaking, for it was his turn to answer Job, when it is stated, in 32:1, that “these three men ceased to answer Job.” In this first speech Zophar falls upon Job open-mouthed, with censures still less veiled than those of his predecessors. He sneers at him for his loquaciousness, denounces him for his lies, and explicitly charges him with the renunciation of God, or at least with gross impiety in daring to assert his own innocence, when the Lord’s righteous judgments so plainly declare what he is. They had heard enough of Job’s estimate of his own character; and Zophar much wishes that the Lord would disclose to him His estimate of it. But, indeed, He had already done so by these His judgments, and doubtless God had exacted far less from him than his iniquity deserved. Kitto.
2,3. Zophar’s indignation rises still higher than that of the others; being a narrower man, his views are correspondingly more intense and dogmatic. With no pretence of courtesy, he characterizes Job as a “man of lips,” whose words are mere babbling and mocking. J. F. G.
4. He charges him with saying, I am clean in Thine eyes. Job had not said so: he had, indeed, said, Thou knowest that I am not wicked (10:7), but he had also said, I have sinned, and never pretended to a spotless perfection. He had, indeed, maintained that he was not a hypocrite, as they charged him; but to infer thence that he would not own himself a sinner was an unfair insinuation. We ought to put the best construction on the words and actions of our brethren that they will bear; but contenders are tempted to put the worst. H.
5,6. The words put into Job’s mouth (v. 4) give rather Zophar’s brief summary of all the previous speeches of Job; since he, the person attacked, spoke more like a teacher than a repentant learner, it seemed to Zophar as if he considered both his doctrine and his life quite unimpeachable before God. Both assumptions, particularly the first, incense him (Zophar) so that he immediately desires the revelation of
God to convince Job, by the display of perfect wisdom and knowledge, that God still causeth much of his guilt to be forgotten—that is, punishes him for less than he deserves according to strict justice. Ewald.—Observe how the friends have gathered heat as they proceeded. Eliphaz was courteous and indirect, exhorting merely to repentance; Bildad spoke of the sons’ calamity as just; Zophar finds Job’s punishment less than his desert. J. F. G.
7-12. Panegyric on the Divine wisdom or omniscience. This wisdom cannot be fathomed by man (v. 7). It fills all things (vs. 8, 9). And this explains the sudden calamities that befall men, for God perceives their hidden wickedness (vs. 10, 11). But man is of no understanding (v. 12). A. B. D.—Zophar launches forth into a very noble declaration of the greatness of God and the unsearchable wisdom of all His ways, whence he argues not only the folly but the inexpressible presumption of questioning His dealings with man or of refusing to acquiesce in His appointments. This portion of Zophar’s discourse “forms one of the most noted Bible passages for reference and repetition in all ages.” It will be observed that in it Zophar makes no attempt to explain the equity of the Lord’s dealings with man, but he dwells on the greatness and sovereignty of God, and hence deduces the duty of man to submit with humbleness to His decrees. And certain it is that the more any one is enabled to realize to his own soul a sense of the Divine perfections, the less possible it will be for him to allow a rebellious sigh to arise, even under the severest pressure of the Lord’s afflictive dispensations. Kitto.—Nothing can be more beautiful or true than these words abstractly considered; and it is only Zophar’s point of view that makes them convict Job of presumption. Job has been trying to find merely what concerns him as a responsible being, something that he feels he has a right to know if he is judged on grounds of mere justice; but Zophar identifies this with presumptuous curiosity about God’s hidden ways. J. F. G.
7. The verse means, Canst thou fathom or conceive God? The special side of God’s being, which Zophar declares to be unfathomable, is His wisdom or omniscience. This is the point in question, for it is this which discovers Job’s heart and his sins; and Zophar desires to put this omniscience before Job to bring him to take a right place before it, just as Eliphaz brought the holiness of God before him. Literally the verse reads: Canst thou find the deeps of (or, that which has to be searched out in) God, canst thou reach to the perfection (the outmost, the ground of the nature) of the Almighty?
S. His wisdom is immeasurable, unfathomable. The words are an exclamation: heights of heaven! what canst thou do?—thou art impotent before it to scale it or reach it. A. B. D.—Literally, “heights of heaven; what doest thou? deeper than hell, what knowest thou?” i.e., The wisdom of God is as the heights of heaven, how canst thou reach it? deeper than Sheol, how canst thou comprehend it? Cook.
As there is a foolish wisdom, so there is a wise ignorance in not prying into God’s ark nor inquiring into things not revealed. I would fain know all that I need and all that I may; I leave God’s secrets to Himself. It is happy for me that God makes me one of His court, though not of His council. Bishop H.—To pry into the maze of His counsels, is not only folly in man but presumption even in angels; like us, they are His servants, not His senators; He holds no council but that mystical one of the Trinity, wherein though there be three persons, there is but one mind, that decrees without contradiction; nor needs He any; His actions are not begot with deliberation, His wisdom naturally knows what is best; His intellect stands ready fraught with the superlative and purest ideas of goodness; consultation and election, which are two motions in us, make but one in Him, His actions springing from His power at the first touch of His will. Browne.
How the Divine Being Himself exists in an essential and eternal nature of His own, without beginning as well as without end; how He can be present at the same moment in every point of illimitable space, without excluding any one of His creatures from the room it occupies; how, unseen, unfelt by all, He can maintain a pervading and intimate acquaintance and contact with all parts and portions of the universe; how He can be at once all eye, all ear, all presence, all energy, yet interfere with none of the perceptions and actions of His creatures—this is what equally baffles the mightiest and the meanest intellect; this is the great mystery of the universe, which is at once the most certain and the most incomprehensible of all things—a truth at once enveloped in a flood of light and an abyss of darkness! Inexplicable itself, it explains all besides; it casts a clearness on every question, accounts for every phenomenon, solves every problem, illuminates every depth, and renders the whole mystery of existence as perfectly simple as it is otherwise perfectly unintelligible, while itself alone remains in impenetrable obscurity! After displacing every other difficulty, it remains the greatest of all, in solitary, unsurmountable, unapproachable grandeur! R. Hall.
Does the aspect of nature contradict this doctrine? Who will presume to deny that the incomprehensible materialism about us, to say nothing of the more incomprehensible spiritualism within us, is just what one would expect to find issuing from the hands of an incomprehensible Creator—a being mysteriously without a beginning, mysteriously self-existent, mysteriously able to make the greatest and noblest things out of nothing by simple volition, mysteriously all-knowing, mysteriously unfettered in the application of His power and knowledge by all conditions of space and duration and personal presence, mysteriously three in one—in short, a being enveloped in a terrible pomp and majesty of sunset-clouds, whose broken lines never permit the orb that glorifies them to appear, even for a moment, in clear and golden contour on our rapt sight. Such a being, setting out to create, would be likely to give us the present enigmatic universe—nay, would be sure to give it. If a Jehovah build the temple of nature at all, He will found it on mysteries, frame it with mysteries, cover and dome it with mysteries, pave and ceil it with a mosaic of mysteries—surely He will. And when I am told of a being whose own nature is an overwhelming problem; whose attributes have no horizon, no zenith, and no nadir; whose ends respect all possible objects and interests, and spread themselves out in plans of boundless vastness whose merest corners and differentials only are visible to men of the widest scope; when I am told of Him, and I then place myself out under nature’s open dome, amid its protean inscrutableness of leaf and star, of whole crowded earth and circumventing heavens—the peopled heavens where sweep in inextricable maze the hurricane hosts of advancing and retreating orbs; and open my soul candidly to all their silent suggestions and magnetisms—I feel myself drinking in faith, as the fleece spread out under the stars drinks in the dew—I feel that the facts give embracing arms to the doctrine; that the actual universe, instead of swearing with decisive voice and hand uplift to heaven that there is no inscrutable God, significantly asks with panting whisper and color that comes and goes, “Is there not such a being?” Burr.
If the longer man stretches his line, the deeper this awful ocean of life becomes; if the farther his telescope penetrates the heavens, and his microscope the earth, the more entirely are all his speculations distanced by the magnificence and wisdom of the scene; if the more searching his analysis into principles and second causes, he utterly fails to see through them—he always finds back of all researches a mysterious power which it is utterly impossible for him to grasp or comprehend; if he finds that there is a limit to his knowledge, not from the shallowness of the subjects but from the nature of his own mental faculties, and that the smallest flower that springs up at his feet hath that within it which eludes the most intense vision of the most vigorous intellect; if he sees this to be true, not in one or two instances, but in every instance, that there is a plastic power which ascends from stones to stars, and pervades all creation in its wondrous subtility and influence, then he is obliged to believe—then he is brought face to face with an infinite being, whom by searching it is impossible to find out unto perfection; and so the tendency—the uncounteracted force of these material studies is to bear him onward to a sublime faith in the eternal Creator, and prepare his mind for the reception of whatever further light He may see fit to shed upon his soul. Thus the “unlocking of the gates of sense” is made ultimately to unlock the gates of the spirit to the entrance of the grandest views of the infinite Lord. The march of science, other things being equal, will be the triumph of a lofty and intelligent faith. Who have been the famous patriarchs of infidelity, the grand masters in this temple of nightshade? Were they Copernicus and Galileo, the Bacons and Kepler and Newton, and a host of such bright names; the naturalists to whom all eyes at once turn with reverence, whose amazing toils created a new world of science, and gave an upward impulse to the human mind, and set in motion that train of causes whose results are our daily wonder and thanksgiving? Or were they not such men as Bolingbroke and Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire and Paine, the speculators, the moral and political philosophers; men who set reason above facts, or made the facts bend to their logic? And in these latter days, whence sprang that mystic rationalism which spirits away Christianity in a fog of doubts, of myths and fables, and degrades the chief revelation of the Infinite to a level with the Iliad of Homer and the theogony of Hesiod? Came it from Davy and Herschel and Cuvier and Humboldt, the grandest naturalists of their day? or came it not from the brains of a Kant, a Hegel, a Strauss, and others of like character, the men who spin their theories not out of the heavens and the earth, but out of their own benighted intellects? What form of infidelity at this day is most rampant, insinuating, plastic, and intractable? Comes it from natural philosophy, or astronomy, or geology? or comes it not from a false philology which misinterprets Scripture, and a false philosophy which misinterprets life and its great ends? Eng. Rev.
If I may thoroughly know God, I must cease to worship Him. I cannot adore what I can measure. If His plans are within my comprehension, they are finite. If there is nothing in God which I cannot find out by searching, then God is finite and is not God. He lets me feel the touch of His hand, He daily compasses me with His love, He draws sharply for me the great outlines of His character, He restrains and forms me by His law, He teaches me by His providence, guides me by His wisdom, upholds and saves me by His power. But while there is thus a side of revelation in contact with me and daily available for me, I must never forget that it is only a side; that God’s revelation is not God, but, as it were, a line of light on the verge of a narrow horizon, beyond which lie depths and glories of Divine Being unconceived and inconceivable by the heart of man. V.
Well may the prudent consideration of what hath been said concerning the depth of Divine omniscience put the wisest of men in mind of their nescience; keep them from leaning to their own understandings, and give them just occasion to think of an answer to Zophar’s question: “What canst thou know?” If the secrets of nature do so puzzle thee, what canst thou know concerning those much greater secrets of grace and glory of which Luther very excellently says: “Philosophy receives them not, faith doth. The authority of Scripture is greater by far than the capacity of our wit; and the Holy Ghost than Aristotle”? Well may the depth of Divine understanding, which the Psalmist saith is infinite—“Great is the Lord, and of great power; His understanding is infinite”—cause us to reflect upon the shallowness, the infiniteness—yea, the folly of our own knowledge. Arrowsmith.
10-12. God’s mode of trial is summary, because infallible. He knows altogether the people who disguise their moral nothingness, and sees the falseness of those who persist in their worthlessness. He knows and sees this moral wretchedness at once, and need not first of all reflect upon it. Delitzsch.—He needs no lengthened observation, He seeth at once into the ground of the heart, His wisdom is direct intuition, absolute and perfect. Cook.
13-19. Zophar still treats Job as wicked, but lets it appear that he does not regard him as hopelessly reprobate, and assures him that by repentance and prayer he may yet reconcile himself to God, and through His blessing be restored to a prosperous state. Then, he says,
‘Thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away’—forget it, or have that unpainful recollection of it which is a species of forgetfulness. Kitto.—The condition—sincere repentance and confession—must be immediately and afresh more emphatically conditioned by another one which is, in point of fact, earlier—the removal of all previous unrighteousness (restitution). As the happy consequences of the fulfilment of these conditions appears a new, confident, and cheerful courage; and, afterward, increased prosperity, with a rest not to be disturbed by danger. Ewald.
The picture which Zophar draws of Job’s restored prosperity is beautiful. Trouble shall be forgotten, or remembered as waters that are passed away; and the memory of a past trouble that cannot recur, but makes the present happiness greater (v. 16). And the future shall rise brighter than noon; or, it may be, shall increase toward brightness more than the noon does, showing an ever-growing clearness; and if it be at any time clouded, as in any life, however clear, there are clouds, the darkness shall only be a lesser light, like that of the morning; or, as the words may mean, the darkness shall only be like the fixed changes of nature, and shall give place, like the night, to a fair and hopeful morning (v. 17). Thus restored to the fixed order of a life with God, he shall be trustful, because there is hope, and he shall look about, surveying all things, and finding nothing to dread, shall lie down in confidence (v. 18); and when lain down, he shall rest peacefully. And his security and prosperity shall draw to him the homage of many, who (as before) shall seek his favor (v. 19).
20. Zophar concludes by setting in opposition to this picture another, the fate of the wicked. A. B. D.—Their hope will perish and expire as a man does when he gives up the ghost; it will fail them when they have most need of it, and when they expected the accomplishment of it; it will die away and leave them in utter confusion. They shall not avoid the evil which sometimes they frighten themselves with the apprehension of; they shall not escape the execution of the sentence passed upon them; can neither outbrave it nor outrun it. Those that will not fly to God will find it in vain to think of flying from him. H.—Foolish self-love makes men unwilling to know the worst of themselves, and so causeth them to presume and keep up false deceiving hopes that they may be saved. They know that all is not well with them, but they hope God is merciful, that He will not condemn them; or they hope to be converted some time hereafter; or they hope that less ado may serve their turn, and that their good wishes and prayers may save their souls; and in these hopes they hold on till they find themselves to be past remedy, and their hopes and they be dead together. I speak not this without the Scripture (Prov. 11:17; Job 27:8, 9; 11:20). There is scarcely a greater hindrance of conversion than these false, deceiving hopes of sinners. Baxter.
Verse 7. Sound doctrine is the fruit of righteousness. Christ so puts it. “If you do My will, you shall know of the doctrine.” Obedience comes before knowledge in the school of Christ, as in every other. “Canst thou by searching find out God?” No, you never will. Those who intellectually seek Him lose Him. But “I am found of them that sought Me not,” He says. Simple obedience is the guide-board to God and to heaven. We can learn more about God in one hour, by bowing at His feet and receiving the benediction of Divine forgiveness through Christ, than by a lifetime of poring over tomes of divinity. Interior.
The effect of this discourse could only be to exasperate Job; it states in the most distinct and offensive form what the other two had suggested or insinuated, and far from admitting the possibility of Job’s purity and uprightness, asserts that his guilt has not yet been fully punished. His hands are supposed to be full of iniquity, his tent of ill-gotten spoils, his face spotted with ignominy. (See v. 15.) The hope which it seems to suggest is nugatory, since it could only be realized after a change which implies previous guilt of the deepest dye, of which Job’s conscience acquitted him. Cook.
Like the others, Zophar regards the retributive justice of God as the principle on which alone the Divine government of the world is exercised, and to which every act of this government is to be attributed. This limited view which the friends take in the matter readily accounts for the brevity of their speeches in comparison with Job’s. This one common ground is their only theme, which they reiterate constantly in some new and modified form, while the mind of Job is an exhaustless fountain of thought, suggested by the direct experience of the past. Before
the present dispensation of suffering came upon Job he enjoyed the peace of true godliness, and all his thoughts and feelings were under the control of a consciousness made certain by his experience that God makes Himself known to those who fear Him. Now, however, his nature, hitherto (in the absence of any severe strain upon his faith) kept in subjection by Divine grace, is let loose in him; the powers of doubt, mistrust, impatience, and despondency have risen up; his inner life is fallen into the anarchy of conflict; his mind, hitherto peaceful and well disciplined, is become a wild, chaotic confusion; and hence his speeches, in comparison with those of the friends, are as roaring cataracts to small confined streams. The new truth, the solution of the mystery, springs from this spiritual battle which Job has to fight, and from which, although not scathless, he shall come forth as conqueror. On Zophar’s side it is maintained that God always acts in accordance with justice, and Job maintains that God does not always so act. The maxims of the
friends (while fundamentally correct) are false in the exclusiveness with which they maintain them, (but) the exclusiveness to which they are urged gives evidence of the fallacy of the premises; they must condemn Job, and consequently become unjust, in order to rescue the justice of God. Job’s maxim, on the other hand, is true, but it is so unconnected as it stands (in what he says) that it may be turned over any moment and changed into a falsehood. For that God does not act solely as the Just One, that He does not exercise His justice without respect to His other attributes, is a truth; but to say that He sometimes acts unjustly is blasphemy. Job’s steadfast consciousness of his innocence proves to him that God does not always act simply as the Just One; shall he therefore suppose that God deals unjustly with him? From this blasphemous inversion of his maxim Job seeks refuge in the absolute power of God, which (he assumes) makes that just which is unjust according to the clearest human consciousness. Delitzsch.