James 5:11

HUMAN SUFFERING AND DIVINE PITY

‘Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.’

James 5:11

Human suffering and Divine pity; how may these be reconciled? This is the question to which Job’s story gives an answer.

I. An apparent contradiction.—The sufferings of the man seem to contradict the mercy of God. As we consider ‘the patience of Job,’ how hard to see ‘that the Lord is very pitiful and of tender mercy.’ Two things make the difficulty very great.

(a) The extent of the suffering. Distresses come upon him from all quarters. As we remember that this awful transformation has been accomplished by the direct permission of the Most High, it seems the bitterest irony to write beneath that sad spectacle of human woe, ‘that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.’

(b) The character of the sufferer. ‘There is none like my servant Job in all the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil.’ Job’s friends imagined that because he was a great sufferer he must therefore be a great sinner, and this belief coloured all their speech. When a man’s prosperity is attended with hurtful result to him in his character and life, we can recognise its downfall as a necessary chastisement. But having God’s own testimony to this good man’s excellence we find it hard to say as we look upon him, ‘The Lord is very pitiful.’

II. The reconciliation.—‘Ye have seen the end of the Lord.’ We cannot see the end of the Lord in our distresses. This is our trial. In Job’s case the end is visible, and as we see it, we learn to acquiesce in the Divine action, and can understand and believe that the end of the Lord in all subsequent cases will reveal the Divine mercy. The expression is capable of two meanings. It may mean—

(a) The design of sufferings: the object towards which suffering is directed. One end of Job’s distresses was— the overthrow of evil. This man was God’s chosen champion, not a sinner found out in his sin, but the best and bravest of God’s warriors, called to go where the fight between good and evil was hottest, that he might baffle and defeat the evil one himself. The instruction and consolation of mankind. The good accomplished by him in the days of health and prosperity is little and limited beside that conferred upon the world by him through his sorrows. Sorrowing humanity throughout many generations has come to his side to hear his words, and to find in them light and comfort. His story is the mirror into which the desolate and distressed gaze, that they may trace their own features and find relief. The higher knowledge of God. The deep longing of the afflicted soul is to see God, to hear God’s voice. And God did appear to him, filling him with humility, with an overwhelming consciousness of his own impurity, but at the same time removing all his dark misapprehensions and filling his soul with light and peace. As we consider these objects realised by suffering we can declare, ‘The Lord is very pitiful.’

(b) ‘ The end of the Lord,’ simply in the sense of termination. There is a Divine limit to suffering. The end with Job was not simply deliverance from all his sorrows, but also abundant compensation. The Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning.

III. The human condition.—‘The patience of Job.’ In order that suffering and pity may be reconciled and the Divine end realised, there must be patience. We must bear without murmuring, without resentment and rebellion, the sufferings that come, and wait ‘the end of the Lord.’ It may not come soon. It may not come here. But it will come. We must, taught and inspired by this example, calmly, humbly, hopefully wait until it is seen.

Illustration

‘The book of Job has made a very profound and lasting impression upon mankind. Not due to its dramatic power, its high antiquity, its surpassing literary merit, but to the solution it furnishes of the darkest problem of human life; the light it throws upon the purposes and ways of God; its depth of human feeling. There is a Divine voice that speaks to us in it, and there is a great human heart beating beneath its pages. Men will never cease to hear of the patience of Job, so long as sorrow, and loss, and pain have to be borne; so long as death is here, and we have to stand beside open graves.’