Job 34:22

Job 34:22

The text marks a special circumstance in the character of "workers of iniquity," namely, that they are men who wish or will wish to hide themselves; that there is that in their dispositions and practice which they wish concealed from all knowledge and judgment. This wish to hide is the acknowledgment that there is justice over the creation, that there is a righteous and retributive Power inspecting everywhere, with the consciousness that there is something obnoxious to justice. But for this consciousness all would be "children of the light."

I. The text chiefly respects the impossibility of concealment from God and the wish that it were possible. But to a certain extent it might be truly said also with regard to human inspection and judgment. It is but imperfectly that the workers of iniquity can hide themselves even from human view. For there are innumerable vigilant eyes and minds exercising a keen inspection. Men are watching one another, in default of inspecting themselves. There is a never-sleeping suspicion. The wicked often betray one another.

II. Notice the different kinds of darkness in which sinners seek to hide themselves. (1) There is the darkness of profound dissimulation. (2) There is the darkness of deep solitude. (3) There is the darkness of night. (4) In a moral or spiritual sense, we may give the name of "darkness" to a delusive state of notions respecting religion. (5) In the grave, in the state of the dead, in the other world, there will be no hiding-place of darkness. No corner of the universe has a veil from the Creator. There is no recess into which a spirit can slide. The same all-seeing power and almighty justice are everywhere. And if we look forward through time, there is in prospect the great day of manifestation, of which the transcendent light will be such as to annihilate the darkness of all past time. It will be not only as "the light of seven days," but as the light of thousands of years all at once.

J. Foster, Lectures,vol. i., p. 167.

References: Job 34:29. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 62; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xiii., No. 737. Job 34:31; Job 34:32. Ibid.,vol. xxii., No. 1274; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p.132.