Job 14:14-15

Job 14:14

It was one of the accurate adjustments of God's dealings that the man whose body was the most humiliated by suffering of all mankind was also the man who of all the Old Testament saints received the clearest revelation of the body's future beauty and loftiness.

I. Job considered that even in its intermediate state the body would be precious to God. "Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands." Of that separate state we know but little. (1) That it will be a state of consciousnessis evident, both from universal instinct and from the nature of spirit. Spirit can only exist in motion, and therefore the ancients called spirit perpetual motion. It is evident also from the general necessity that a creature once made to glorify God can never cease to glorify Him. (2) In the intermediate state the spirit must be happy.How can it be conscious and with Christ, and not happy? So that our Saviour doubly proves it when He says, "To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."

II. Consider that broad foundation thought on which the patriarchs rested for everything, having the resurrection as its base, "Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands." It is upon this principle that we at once see the unspeakable comfort there is in the full, simple recognition of the doctrines of grace. Once let any part of the work of grace have man in it, and in the same degree it has uncertainty in it. Man does notreturn to his own designs. Man does notfinish his own work. But God does. If therefore the beginnings are entirely God's, "the ends" are perfectly sure.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,10th series, p. 265.

Reference: Job 14:15. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2161.