Job Chapter 30



Well, now, in the next chapter (Job 30) we have a totally different story. Job now says, "But now they that are younger than I have me in derision." You can suppose how very painful that was to a man that had been living a good deal upon the witness of these grand deeds and the high opinions of him, and the humbler classes, for once in a way, being entirely along with the grandees. For at times they do truly love to differ. "Whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock." Ah! Job, you can be cutting; you can strike deep if you are so disposed. He would not have set their fathers with the dogs of his flock! Just think of it. And he gives his reason. He says, "Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me?" Job was a wise man, and if he had servants he had servants that could do their duty. But as very often happens with the most miserable of the world, they are weak, and unable to do a good day's work, nor a good hour's work. Whatever they do, they do in a manner that is enough to provoke any person to look at them. And so he says, "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven forth from among men (they cried after them as after a thief)" - they were most disreputable, and Job would not have had one of them on any account to serve him. He would be very willing to give them food if they were hungry; and if they had no clothing he would surely have abounded even then. But he felt it very much that these men should mock him, and should do everything to deride his sufferings, and not only that with these men in general, but that the young men tried to trip up his tottering steps! For you know the soles of his feet were intolerable - from head to foot not only was every nerve, as it were, active, but the very worms were beginning to prey upon him while he was alive, through all the sores that were open. It was a most awful case.

Yet what is that compared with moral suffering? Do you suppose the apostle Paul did not suffer much more severely than with any bodily trouble? He suffered from false brethren a great deal. And I think he must have suffered from true brethren very often - perhaps even more, but in a different way. "To dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed." He will not allow that they talked - they brayed. "Under the nettles they were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children of base men" - i.e. of fathers that had not a name themselves - "they were viler than the earth. And now am I their song; yea, I am their byword. They abhor me." Think of that - these words were all true. "They flee far from me." They could not bear to look at him - at the agony, and the terrible effect of all these sores on his body. They could not go near him. "And spare not to spit in my face. Because he hath loosed my cord." There was after all what grieved the heart of poor Job more than anything. It was God. He does not mean the devil; it was not the devil. "Because He hath loosed my cord and afflicted me" (and so to end of verse 16).

You see there is no reference to his three friends now. He is looking really at this tremendous trial that afflicted his body, and that exposed him to all this disrespect and contempt of the very lowest creatures on the face of the earth. "My bones are pierced in me in the night season; and my sinews take no rest. By the great force of my disease is my garment changed; it bindeth me about as the collar of my coat." Look at the pain all that would occasion. "He hath cast me into the mire, and I am become like dust and ashes. I cry unto thee and thou dost not hear me." But God did hear him. There was a reason why He did not answer; but God did hear. "I stand up, and thou regardest me not. Thou art become cruel to me." There he was quite wrong. "With thy strong hand thou opposest thyself against me. Thou liftest me up to the wind: thou causest me to ride upon it and dissolvest my substance. For I know that thou wilt bring me to death" - there he was wrong again. God had good things in store for Job. "And to the house appointed for all living. Howbeit he will not stretch out his hand to the grave, though they cry in his destruction. Did not I weep for him that was in trouble? Was not my soul grieved for the poor?" - he goes back to that. "My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep."