Job 13:26 For you write bitter things against me, and make me to possess the iniquities of my youth. Job is perplexed. He cannot see what he has done to merit such terrible troubles as he is now experiencing. It certainly seems to him that no recent conduct of his can be deserving the punishment from which, according to his friends, he is suffering. Can it be that long-forgotten sins of his youth are brought up against him, and that he is suffering from those old offences? I. THE SINS OF YOUTH ARE NOT TO BE LIGHTLY IGNORED. 1. Because they were done in haste. Youth is thoughtless; still it has moral responsibility. 2. Because youth is inexperienced. Youth will not be judged by the standard of more enlightened years, but by its own light, which is sufficient to warn from sin. 3. Because of their distant past. Though they were committed long ago, if they have never been repented of, they stand in the record against us still. Time does not condone guilt. 4. Because of subsequent amendment. This is the strongest plea. Yet it will not stand. For the subsequent conduct was no better than it ought to have been. There were no "works of supererogation" in it that could serve as an atonement for past offences. II. THE SINS OF YOUTH BEAR FRUIT IN AFTER-YEARS. They do so in this life. Disease and early decrepitude are the bitter fruits of youthful dissipation. If the golden opportunities of youth are wasted, the after-life must suffer. If opportunities of educational improvement are neglected in youth, it is impossible to make up for them in manhood. The young man who spends the best years of his life in idle pleasure-seeking instead of laying the foundation of his future work, is sure to come to a day when he will bitterly repent his folly. There is a unity in life. We cannot slice it into detached periods, having no connection with one another. The present is a product of the past, and the ultimate future will be a result of our whole life, not of the last moments of it. Future judgment deals with the deeds of the life, not with the mood of the death-bed. III. SINS OF YOUTH MAY BE FORGIVEN. They cannot be undone. Some of their consequences are inevitable. Therefore the hope of pardon is no encouragement for folly and wickedness. Still, when a man repents and seeks the grace of God, his case is never treated in Scripture as hopeless. Though a certain loss and suffering may remain, God forgives and heals the repentant soul. Therefore it is foolish to forget or to defend a misspent youth. The only hopeful thing is to own it before God, and to show ourselves heartily ashamed of it. It is far better to give to God every hour of life; but if the early hours have been misspent - miserable as is the thought of them - it is possible to mend our ways, and enter the vineyard even at the eleventh hour. The right use of reflection on the sins of youth is to make a man humble, and to had him to sympathize with young men, and to try to warn them, lest they make the sad mistake which has thrown a shadow over all his subsequent life. For who that is converted in later age would not give all he has to go back and begin again, and so avoid the ugly, unchangeable past? - W.F.A. Parallel Verses KJV: For thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth.WEB: For you write bitter things against me, and make me inherit the iniquities of my youth: |
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