Job 6
EDTJob 6:1-30
Job 6:1 * f
The sixth and seventh chapters are molten from end to end, and run in one burning stream…. Everything which can be said by a sick man against life is in these chapters. The whole of a vast subsequent literature is summed up here, and he who has once read it may fairly ask never to be troubled with anything more upon that side.
Mark Rutherford, * The Deliverance,* p. 13 f.
‘When He does smite,’ wrote General Gordon to his sister from the Red Sea in 1879, ‘His arrows are almost too sharp for one to bear: I will not say * too* sharp, for He tempers His wind to the shorn lamb, but it is a wearisome life, and I am tired…. The spite in my own heart and in those round me fills me with hatred of any human being. A more detestable creature than man cannot be conceived, and yet you and I are cased, or sheathed in man. But do not fear for me, for, even if He multiplies my woes a million times, He is just and upright, and will give me the necessary strength. What * enrages* the flesh is, that I am in a * cul de sac,* a road which has no * débouche,* a hole out of which I see no exit. * Everything* I do will be * misconstrued.* This shows I have not faith. I do care for what man says, though, in words, I say I do not. I have not overcome the world. Read Job 6:4 ; that is the bitter feeling I have. Job was a scoffer * vide* chap. 12:2, 3 and so am I in heart and tongue.’
Reference. VI. 6. Spurgeon, * Sermons,* vol. xxix. No. 1730.
In describing Dr. Donne’s grief after his wife’s death, Izaak Walton writes: ‘How grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy. If it did, it was a joy to be alone, when, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself, without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction: “Oh that I might have the desire of my heart! Oh that God would grant me the one thing that I long for!” For then as the grave is become her house, so would I hasten to make it mine also, that we two might then make our beds together in the dark.’
Reference. VI. 10. Spurgeon, * Sermons,* vol. xxv. No. 1471.
‘I have many friends and many enemies,’ Swift wrote to Stella, ‘and the last are more constant in their nature.’
Never man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had; but I expressed my own feeling as to the mode in which I had gained them, in this very year 1829, in the course of a copy of verses. Speaking of my blessings, I said, ‘Blessings of friends which to my door * unasked, unhoped,* have come’. They have come, they have gone; they came to my great joy; they went to my great grief.
Newman, * Apologia,* chap. 1.
References. VII. Spurgeon, * Sermons,* vol. xlvi. No. 2705. VII. 1 * . * W. F. Shaw, * Sermon Sketches,* p. 89. G. Brooks, * Outlines of Sermons,* p. 286. Spurgeon, * Sermons,* vol. xxi. No. 1258.