This blog today is a departure from sharing a chapter of the Bible each blog. I started this blog because I was so excited for what I was learning about Creator God – Father, Son, Spirit. And I am no theologian or pastor! Today I’m sharing a sermon by George MacDonald who wrote over a hundred years ago. In the introduction to the book, Creation In Christ Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald, edited and abridged by Rolland Hein, Hein quotes MacDonald: “Of all things, turn from a mean, poverty-stricken faith.” The sermon I’m sharing is titled, The Voice of Job. It’s very long but so worth reading:

“Oh that thou wouldest hide me in Sheol, that thou wouldest conceal me until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my release should come. Thou wouldest call, and I would answer thee; thou wouldest long for the work of they hands (Job 14:13-15).

The book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems: from a position of the most vantageless realism, it assaults the very citadel of the ideal! Its hero is a man seated among the ashes, covered with loathsome boils from head to foot, scraping himself with a potsherd. Sore in body, sore in mind, sore in heart, sore in spirit, he is the instance-type of humanity in the depths of its misery – all the waves and billows of a world of adverse circumstance rolling free over its head.

I would not be supposed to use the word humanity either in the abstract, or of the mass concrete; I mean the humanity of the individual endlessly repeated: Job, I say, is the human being – a center to the sickening assaults of pain, the ghastly invasions of fear. These, one time or another, I presume, threaten to overwhelm every man, reveal to him to himself as enslaved to the external, and stir him up to find some way out into the infinite, where alone he can rejoice in the liberty that belongs to his nature.

Seated in the heart of a leaden despair, Job cries aloud to the Might unseen, scarce known, which yet he regards as the God of his life.

He cannot, will not believe Him a tyrant; but, while he pleads against His dealing with himself, (he) loves Him, and looks to Him as the source of life, the power and gladness of being. He dares not think God unjust, but not therefore can he allow that he has done anything to merit the treatment he is receiving at His hands. Hence is he of necessity in profoundest perplexity, for how can the two things be reconciled?

The thought has not yet come to him that that which it would be unfair to lay upon him as punishment, may yet be laid upon him as favor – by a love supreme which would give him blessing beyond all possible prayer – blessing he would not dare to ask if he saw the means necessary to its giving, but blessing for which, once known and understood, he would be willing to endure yet again all that he had undergone. Therefore is he so sorely divided in himself. While he must not think of God as having mistaken him, the discrepancy that looks like mistake forces itself upon him through every channel of thought and feeling. He had nowise relaxed his endeavor after a godly life, yet is the hand of the God he had acknowledged in all his ways uplifted against him, as rarely against any transgressor!

He does not deny that there is evil in him; for – “Dost thou open thine eyes upon such an one,” he pleads, “and bring him into judgment with thee?” but he does deny that there is any guile in him. And who, because he knows and laments the guile in himself, will dare deny that there was once a Nathanael in the world?

Job’s Child-like Attitude

Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran, the book of Job would have been very different. His perplexity would then have been – how God being just, could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if his sin were that of a perfect being who chose to do the evil of which he knew all the enormity. For me, I will call no one Master but Christ – and from Him I learn that His quarrel with us is that we will not do what we know, will not come to Him that we may have life. How endlessly more powerful with men would be expostulation grounded, not on what they have done, but on what they will not do!

Job’s child-like judgment of God had never been vitiated and perverted, to the dishonoring of the great Father, by any taint of such low theories as, alas! we must call the popular. Explanations of God’s ways by such as do not understand Him, they are acceptable to such as do not care to know Him, such as are content to stand afar off and stare at the cloud whence issue the thunders and the voices; but a burden threatening to sink them to Tophet, a burden grievous to be borne, to such as would arise and go to the Father. Job refused the explanation of his friends because he knew it false; to have accepted such as would by many in the present day be given him, would have been to be devoured at once of the monster. He simply holds on to God – keeps putting his questions again and again, ever haunting the one source of true answer and reconciliation. No answer will do for him but the answer that God only can give; for who but God can justify God’s ways to His creature?

From a soul whose very consciousness is contradiction, we must not look for logic; misery is rarely logical; it is itself a discord; yet it is nothing less than natural that, feeling as if God wronged him, Job should yet be ever yearning after a sight of God, straining into His presence, longing to stand face to face with Him. He would confront the One. He is convinced, or at least cherishes as his one hope the idea, that, if he could but get God to listen to him, if he might but lay his case clear before Him, God would not fail to see how the thing was, and would explain the matter to him – would certainly give him peace. The man in the ashes would know that the foundations of the world yet stand sure; that God has not closed His eyes, or – horror of all horrors – ceased to be just! Therefore would he order his words before Him, and hear what God had to say. Surely the Just would set the mind of His justice-loving creature at rest!

His friends (were) good men, religious men, but of the pharisaic type – that is, men who would pay their court to God, instead of coming into His presence as children; men with traditional theories which have served their poor turn, satisfied their feeble intellectual demands, they think others therefore must accept or perish; men anxious to appease God rather than trust in Him; men who would rather receive salvation from God, than God their salvation. These his friends would persuade Job to the confession that he was a hypocrite, insisting that such things could not have come upon him but because of wickedness, and as they knew of none open, it must be for some secret vileness. They grow angry with him when he refuses to be persuaded against his knowledge of himself. They insist on his hypocrisy, he on his righteousness.

But let us look a little closer at Job’s way of thinking and speaking about God, and his manner of addressing Him – so different from the pharisaic in all ages, in none more than in our own.

Waxing indignant at the idea that his nature required such treatment – “Am I a sea or a sea monster,” he cries out, “that thou settest a guard over me?” “…Thou knowest that I am not guilty.” To his friends he cries: “Will you speak falsely for God? and speak deceitfully for Him?” Do you not know that I am the man I say?

Such words are pleasing in the ear of the Father of spirits. He is not a God to accept the flattery which declares Him above obligation to His creatures; a God to demand of them a righteousness different from His own; a God to deal ungenerously with His poverty-stricken children; a God to make severest demands upon His little ones! Job is confident of receiving justice.

There is a strange but most natural conflict of feeling in him. His faith is in truth profound, yet is he always complaining. It is but the form his faith takes in his trouble. Even while he declares the hardness and unfitness of the usage he is receiving, he yet seems assured that, to get things set right, all he needs is admission to the presence of God – an interview with the Most High. To be heard must be to have justice.

He uses language which, used by any living man, would horrify the religious of the present day, in proportion to the lack of truth in them, just as it horrified his three friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was “doctrine” and rebuke. God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech – He has always been seeking such as Job to worship Him.

It is those who know only and respect the outsides of religion, such as never speak or think of God but as the Almighty or Providence, who will say of the man who would go close up to God, and speak to Him out of the deepest in the nature He has made, “he is irreverent.” They pay court to God, not love Him; they treat Him as one far away, not as one whose bosom is the only home.

Job’s Rights

The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that he implies, if he does not actually say, that God owes something to His creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all – that God owes Himself to the creature He has made in His image, for so He has made him incapable of living without Him. This, His creatures’ highest claim upon Him, is His divinest gift to them. For the fulfilling of this their claim He has sent His Son, that He may Himself, the Father of Him and of us, follow into our hearts.

Perhaps the worst thing in a theology constructed out of man’s dull possible, and not out of the being and deeds and words of Jesus Christ, is the impression it conveys throughout that God acknowledges no such obligation. Are not we the clay, and He the potter? How can the clay claim from the potter? We are the clay, it is true, but His clay, but spiritual clay, live clay, with needs and desires – and rights; we are clay, but clay worth the Son of God’s dying for, that it might learn to consent to be shaped into honor.

We can have no merits – a merit is a thing impossible. But God has given us rights. Out of Him we have nothing; but, created by Him, come forth from Him, we have even rights towards Him – ah, never, never against Him! His whole desire and labor is to make us capable of claiming, and induce us to claim of Him the things whose rights He bestowed in creating us. No claim had we to be created; that involves an absurdity; but, being made, we have claims on Him who made us: our needs are our claims. A man who will not provide for the hunger of his child, is condemned by the whole world.

It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in the way of appeal to His righteousness. How should He be righteous without owing us anything? How would there be any right for the Judge of all the earth to do if He owed nothing? Verily He owes us nothing that He does not pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection and disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every act of His being He lays Himself under obligation to His creatures. Oh, the grandeur of His goodness, and righteousness, and fearless unselfishness! When doubt and dread invade, and the voice of love in the soul is dumb, what can please the Father of men better than to hear His child cry to Him from whom he came, “Here I am, O God! You have made me: give me that which You have made me needing.”

God is the origin of both need and supply, the Father of our necessities, the abundant Giver of the good things. Right gloriously He meets the claims of His child! The story of Jesus is the heart of His answer, not primarily to the prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children He has sent out into HIs universe.

Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, an adorable Creator, doing anything less than He has done for His children! that any other kind of being than Jesus Christ could have been worthy of all-glorifying worship! that His nature demanded less of Him than He has done! that His nature is not absolute love, absolute self-devotion – could have been without these highest splendors!

I protest, therefore, against all such teaching as, originating in and fostered by the faithlessness of the human heart, gives the impression that the exceeding goodness of God towards man is not the natural and necessary outcome of His being. The root of every heresy popular in the church draws its nourishment merely and only from the soil of unbelief. The idea that God would be God all the same, as glorious as He needed to be, had He not taken upon Himself the divine toil of bringing home His wandered children, had He done nothing to seek and save the lost, is false as hell. Lying for God could go no further.

As if the idea of God admitted of His being less than He is, less than perfect, less than all-in-all, less than Jesus Christ! less than Love absolute, less than entire unselfishness! As if the God revealed to us in the New Testament were not His own perfect necessity of loving-kindness, but one who has made Himself better than, by His own nature, by His own love, by the laws which He willed the laws of His existence, He needed to be! They would have it that, being unbound, He deserves the greater homage! So it might be, if He were not our Father. But to think of the living God not as our Father, but as one who has condescended greatly, being nowise, in His own willed grandeur of righteous nature, bound to do as He has done, is killing to all but a slavish devotion. It is to think of Him as nothing like the God we see in Jesus Christ.

It will be answered that we have fallen, and God is thereby freed from any obligation, if any ever were. It is but another lie. No amount of wrong-doing in a child can ever free a parent from the divine necessity of doing all he can to deliver his child; the bond between them cannot be broken. It is the vulgar, slavish, worldly idea of freedom, that it consists in being bound to nothing. Not such is God’s idea of liberty! To speak as a man – the more of vital obligation He lays on Himself, the more children He creates, with the more claims upon Him, the freer is He as creator and giver of life, which is the essence of His Godhead: to make scope for His essence is to be free.

If we dare, like Job, to plead with Him in any of the heart-eating troubles that arise from the impossibility of loving such misrepresentation of Him as is held out to us to love by our would-be teachers; if we think and speak out before Him that which seems to us to be right, will He not be heartily pleased with His children’s love of righteousness – with the truth that will not part Him and His righteousness? Verily He will not plead against us with His great power, but will put strength in us, and where we are wrong will instruct us. For the heart that wants to do and think aright, the heart that seeks to worship Him as no tyrant, but as the perfectly, absolutely righteous God, is the delight of the Father.

A Prayer In Truth

To the heart that will not call that righteousness which it feels to be unjust, but lifts pleading eyes to His countenance – to that heart He will lay open the riches of His being – riches which it has not entered that heart to conceive. “O Lord, they tell me I have so offended against Your law that, as I am, You cannot look upon me, but threaten me with eternal banishment from Your presence. But if You look not upon me, how can I ever be other than I am? Lord, remember I was born in sin: how then can I see sin as You see it? Remember, Lord, that I have never known myself clean; how can I cleanse myself? You must take me as I am and cleanse me. Is it not impossible that I should behold the final goodness of good, the final evilness of evil? How then can I deserve eternal torment? Had I known good and evil, seeing them as You see them, then chosen the evil, and turned away from the good, I know not what I should not deserve. But You know it has ever been something good in the evil that has enticed my selfish heart – nor mine only, but that of all my kind. You require of us to forgive: surely You forgive freely! Bound You may be to destroy evil, but are You bound to keep the sinner alive that You may punish him, even if it make him no better? Sin cannot be deep as life, for You are the life; and sorrow and pain go deeper than sin, for they reach to the divine in us: You can suffer, though You will not sin. To see men suffer might make us shun evil, but it never could make us hate it. We might see thereby that You hate sin, but we never could see that You love the sinner. Chastise us, we pray You, in loving kindness, and we shall not faint. We have done much that is evil, yea, evil is very deep in us, but we are not all evil, for we love righteousness; and are not You Yourself, in Your Son, the sacrifice for our sins, the atonement of our breach? You have made us subject to vanity, but have Yourself taken Your godlike share of the consequences. Could we ever have come to know good as You know it, save by passing through the sea of sin and the fire of cleansing? They tell me I must say for Christ’s sake, or You will not pardon. It takes the very heart out of my poor love to hear that You will not pardon me except because Christ has loved me; but I give You thanks that nowhere in the record of my gospel, does one of your servants say any such word. In spite of all our fears and grovelling, our weakness, and our wrongs, You will be to us what You are – such a perfect Father as no most loving child-heart of earth could invent the thought of? You will take our sins on Yourself, giving us Your life to live. You bear our griefs and carry our sorrows; and surely You will one day enable us to pay every debt we owe to each other! You will be to us a right jubilant, because You are what You are – infinitely beyond all we could imagine. You will humble and raise us up. You have given Yourself to us that, having You, we may be eternally alive with Your life. We run within the circle of what men call Your wrath, and find ourselves clasped in the zone of Your love!”

But be it well understood that when I say rights, I do not mean merits – of any sort. We can deserve from Him nothing at all, in the sense of any right proceeding from ourselves. All our rights are such as the bounty of love inconceivable has glorified our being with – bestowed for the one only purpose of giving the satisfaction, the fulfillment of the same – rights so deep, so high, so delicate, that their satisfaction cannot be given until we desire it – yea long for it with our deepest desire.

But, lest it should be possible that any unchildlike soul might, in arrogance and ignorance, think to stand upon his rights against God, and demand of Him this or that after the will of the flesh, I will lay before such a possible one some of the things to which he has a right, yea, perhaps has first of all a right to, from the God of his life, because of the beginning He has given him – because of the divine germ that is in him. He has a claim on God, then, a divine claim, for any pain, want, disappointment, or misery, that would help to show him to himself as the fool he is. He has a claim to be punished to the last scorpion of the whip, to be spared not one pang that may urge him towards repentance. He has a claim to be sent out into the outer darkness, whether what we call hell, or something speechlessly worse, if nothing less will do. He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to be hedged in on every side; to have one after another of the strong, sharptoothed sheepdogs of the great Shepherd went after him, to thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain, nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living God within him; that nothing is good but the will of God; nothing noble enough for the desire of the heart of man but oneness with the eternal. For this God must make him yield his very being, that He may enter in and dwell with him.

That the man would enforce none of these claims, is nothing; for it is not a man who owes them to him, but the eternal God, who by His own will of right towards the creature He has made, is bound to discharge them. God has to answer to Himself for His idea. He has to do with the need of the nature He made, not with the self-born choice of the self-ruined man. His candle yet burns dim in the man’s soul; that candle must shine as the sun. For what is the all-pervading dissatisfaction of his wretched being but an unrecognized hunger after the righteousness of his Father?

The soul God made is thus hungering, though the selfish, usurping self, which is its consciousness, is hungering only after low and selfish things, every trying, but in vain, to fill its mean, narrow content, with husks too poor for its poverty-stricken desires. For even that most degraded chamber of the soul which is the temple of the deified Self, cannot be filled with less than God; even the usurping Self must be miserable until it cease to look at itself in the mirror of Satan, and open the door of its innermost closet to the God who means to dwell there, and make peace.

He that has looked on the face of God in Jesus Christ, whose heart overflows, if ever so little, with answering love, sees God standing with full hands to give the abundance for which He created His children, and those children hanging back, refusing to take, doubting the God-heart which knows itself absolute in truth and love.

God’s Answer to Job

It is not at first easy to see wherein God gives Job any answer; I cannot find that He offers him the least explanation of why He has so afflicted him. He justifies him in his words. He says Job has spoken what is right concerning Him, and his friends have not; and He calls up before him, one after another, the works of His hands. The answer, like some of our Lord’s answers if not all of them, seems addressed to Job himself, not to his intellect; to the revealing, God-like imagination in the man, and to no logical faculty whatever.

It consists in a setting forth of the power of God, as seen in His handiwork, and wondered at by the men of the time; and all that is said concerning them has to do with their show of themselves to the eyes of man. In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries in and concerning them.

The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things than they; we see in them, in a distant way, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. It is through their show, now through their analysis, that we enter into their deepest truths. What they say to the childlike souls is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it – just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work.

The argument implied, not expressed, in the poem, seems to be this – that Job, seeing God so far before him in power, and His works so far beyond his understanding that they filled him with wonder and admiration, beholding these things, ought to have reasoned that He who could work so grandly beyond his understanding, must certainly use wisdom in things that touched him nearer, though they came no nearer his understanding. Did he understand his own being, history, and destiny? Should not God’s ways in these also be beyond his understanding? Might he not trust Him to do him justice? In such high affairs as the rights of a live soul, might not matters be involved too high for Job? The Maker of Job was so much greater than Job, that His ways with him might well be beyond his comprehension! God’s thoughts were higher than his thoughts, as the heavens were higher than the earth!

The true child, the righteous man, will trust absolutely, against all appearances, the God who has created in him the love of righteousness.

God does not, I say, tell Job why He had afflicted him: He rouses his child-heart to trust. All the rest of Job’s life on earth, I imagine, his slowly vanishing perplexities would yield him ever fresh meditations concerning God and His ways, new opportunities of trusting Him, light upon many things concerning which he had not as yet begun to doubt, added means of growing in all directions into the knowledge of God.

But all that Job was required to receive at the moment was the argument from God’s loving wisdom in His power, to His loving wisdom in everything else. For power is a real and a good thing, giving an immediate impression that it proceeds from goodness. Nor, however long it may last after goodness is gone, was it ever born of anything but goodness. In a very deep sense, power and goodness are one. In the deepest fact they are one.

Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say, all he thought he would say if he could but see Him. The close of the poem is grandly abrupt. He had meant to order his cause before Him; he had longed to see Him that He might speak and defend himself, imagining God as well as his righteous friends wrongfully accusing him. But his speech is gone from him; he has not a word to say. To justify himself in the presence of Him who is Righteousness, seems to him what it is – foolishness and worthless labor. If God does not see him righteous, he is not righteous, and may hold his peace. If he is righteous, God knows it better than he does himself. Nay, if God does not care to justify him, Job has lost his interest in justifying himself. All the evils and imperfections of his nature rise up before him in the presence of the One (who is) pure, the One who is right, and has no selfishness in Him. “Behold,” he cries, “I am of small account; what shall I answer thee? I lay my hand on my mouth.”

Job had his desire: he saw the face of God – and abhorred himself in dust and ashes. He sought justification; he found self-abhorrence. Was this punishment? The farthest from it possible. It was the best thing – to begin with – that the face of God could do for him. Blessed gift is self-contempt, when the giver of it is the visible glory of the Living One.

Oh the divine generosity that will grant us to be abashed and self-condemned before the Holy! – to come so nigh Him as to see ourselves dark spots against His brightness! Verily we must be of His kind, else no show of Him could make us feel small and ugly and unclean! Oh the love of the Father, that He should give us to compare ourselves with Him, and be buried in humility and shame! To be rebuked before Him is to be His. Good man as Job was, he had never yet been right near to God; now God has come near to him, has become very real to him; he knows now in very deed that God is He with whom he has to do. He had laid all these troubles upon him that He might through them draw nigh to him, and enable him to know Him.

Final Prosperity

For the prosperity that follows upon Job’s submission is the embodiment of a great truth. Although a man must do right if it send him to Hades, yea, even were it to send him forever to hell itself, yet, while the Lord lives, we need not fear: all good things must grow out of and hang upon the one central good, the one law of life – the Will, the One Good. To submit absolutely to Him is the only reason. Circumstance as well as all being must then bud and blossom as the rose. And it will! What matter whether in this world or the next, if one day I know my life as a perfect bliss, having neither limitation nor hindrance nor pain nor sorrow more than it can dominate in peace and perfect assurance?

I care not whether the book of Job be a history or a poem. I think it is both – I do not care how much relatively of each. It was probably, in the childlike days of the world, a well-known story in the east, which some man, whom God had made wise to understand His will and His ways, took up, and told after the fashion of a poet. What its age may be, who can certainly tell! – it must have been before Moses.

The poem is for many reasons difficult, and in the original to me inaccessible; but, through all the evident inadequacy of our translation, who can fail to hear two souls, that of the poet and that of Job, crying aloud with an agonized hope that, let the evil shows around them be what they may, truth and righteousness are yet the heart of things. The faith, even the hope of Job seems at times on the point of giving way; he struggles like a drowning man when the billow goes over him, but with the rising of his head his courage revives. Christians we call ourselves! – what would not our faith be, were it as much greater than Job’s as the word from the mouth of Jesus is mightier than that he heard out of the whirlwind! Here is a book of faith indeed, ere the law was given by Moses. Grace and Truth have visited us – but where is our faith?

Friends, our cross may be heavy, and the via dolorosa rough; but we have claims on God, yea the right to cry to Him for help. He has spent, and is spending Himself to give us our birthright, which is righteousness. Though we shall not be condemned for our sins, we cannot be saved but by leaving them. Though we shall not be condemned for the sins that are past, we shall be condemned if we love the darkness rather than the light, and refuse to come to Him that we may have life. God is offering us the one thing we cannot live without – His own self; we must make room for Him; we must cleanse our hearts that He may come in; we must do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father and the way to Him.”

********************************************************************************