Homily for the New Year
Job 32:7
I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom.


Time should be educatory. Every day has its lessons divinely arranged which we are expected to learn. The "days" by their educational processes should throw brighter light on the great problems of life, and make the pathway to the hidden world less ghostly and shadowed. There may be age without wisdom, and there may be wisdom without a "multitude of years." There is a wisdom which is only born of experience; and experience can only come with the silent growth of years. What is wisdom? The right application of means to ends. Wisdom is knowledge reduced to practice. But there may be worldly wisdom and advanced age without "understanding." Men may be intellectually cultured and wise, yet morally fools in their attempts at interpretation of questions and problems in the higher realm of the spiritual and divine. The mental can never of itself interpret the spiritual, the metaphysical, the Divine. Moral revelations come to none but such as are in heart prepared and waiting to receive them. This is the secret of the errors which our clever scientists are making today in their interpretations of the hieroglyphs of the spiritual universe, — they read them, spell them out, in the light of the intellectual, and guess at their meaning through the medium of secular knowledge, mere cultured reason. There must be the child spirit of humility, receptivity, submissiveness, and love, or God will remain a hidden, impalpable, unrealised mystery, and the spiritual universe a sealed volume, a dumb oracle, a dread uncertainty. The mysteries of life are plain only in the light which is born of Divine "inspiration." Elihu, spirit taught, saw beneath the apparent, the real design of Job's sufferings. They were "moral discipline," not "judicial visitation." Both parties looked at the same object, but the three philosophers saw it through the medium of their philosophy, and Elihu through the medium of sonship — filially; hence the difference! The heart sees farther than the head, and its Christian love interprets with accuracy what the dictionary confounds and philosophy contradicts. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

(J. O. Keen, D. D.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom.

WEB: I said, 'Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom.'




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