Job 36:2

Job 36:2

I. The wisdom put into the mouth of Elihu when the three friends had failed reminds us of what we are taught elsewhere in the Bible: that there are times when traditional authority must give way to truth, when he who is young may instruct those who are aged, when out of the mouths of babes and sucklings God has ordained that very strength which the world most needs. Each generation must learn not only from that which has gone before, but from that which is coming after, it.

II. The book of Job impresses upon us that there are problems beyond the power of man to exhaust, and that in the certainty of that uncertainty it is our privilege to rest. The human mind, it may be well said, may repose as calmly before a confessed and incontrovertible difficulty as before a confessed and discovered truth.

III. The third lesson is found in Job's words "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." He was called from dwelling on himself and his own virtue to feel that he was in the presence of One to whom all earthly intelligence and wisdom seem insignificant. Calamities bring us into the presence of Him before whom we must feel a sense of sin and infirmity. The self-abasement of Job is a necessary element of that perfect and upright character of which he is the type.

IV. This sense of the vastness of the universe, of the imperfection of our own knowledge, may help us to understand, not indeed the origin of evil and suffering, but something of its possible uses and purposes. Distrust of ourselves, self-abasement before the Judge of all mankind, charity for others these are the gifts which often are the best results of distress, of doubt, and of difficulty.

A. P. Stanley, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiv., p. 289 (see also Addresses and Sermons in America,p. 133).

References: Job 36:2. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxiv., No. 1403.Job 36:5. Ibid.,vol. xxiii., No. 1380; Ibid., Evening by Evening,p. 12.