Job 24:12

Men groan from out of the city.

The groans of the city

The truth is, man as he walketh upon the surface of the earth, seeth but the surface of its inhabitants. Well is it that we see no more. Were we able to go under the surface, though it were but slightly, our knowledge might make us go mad. It ought to do so. The thought is terrible in its wonder, and astonishing in its terror of the knowledge which the “God of the spirits of all flesh” necessarily hath of the mighty aggregate of the earth’s depravities,--embracing in His boundless vision every iniquity that is, or ever was, meditated or executed, from the first entry of evil into the sphere of His dominions, to the last accent of defiance that shall be hurled at His throne. The shudder of such a thought sometimes affrighteth saintly souls. It seems here to have been laying hold of the patriarch. His plea is that, though men “groan in the city,” God, the judge of all, appears at present to be calling none of these to account for their misdeeds. With one of the moderns we might exclaim, “It is very startling to see so much of sin with so little of sorrow” (Dr. Arnold). But is Job altogether sceptical as to their punishment? Far from it. He is leaving Eliphaz to the inference, that if his reasoning be correct that a man must be guilty because he is afflicted, these evil-doers must be innocent because they are not afflicted. Did we, however, know the world as it is, not as it seems,--could we go under the surface of society, we might become acquainted with secrets of wickedness of which some of the wicked never dreamed, and with torments the existence of which the virtuous would scarcely believe. What misery would be revealed, where we see only the emblems of delight! Yea, what an empire of spiritual death in a universe of natural and artificial life! The patriarch’s description of the city is as true and as fearful in its truth at this hour as in the day that he uttered it. As true of London or Paris now as of Babylon or Nineveh of old. The city is a place “from out of which men groan, and the soul of the wounded cry out.” “The whole creation,” through the apostasy of man, is represented by the great apostle as “groaning”; but the city being ever a vast concentration of guilt, what is true of the whole earth is preeminently true of it. In the city, transgression is a species of item--an enormous sum, indeed, in its daily concerns. All great cities are guilty of great sins. Those who inhabit the city are denizens of a place in which every day and every night multiplied iniquities are all but sure to be perpetrated, as surely as night and day succeed each other. Dreadful in the city are the groans of conscience. True, the world looks gay and thoughtless. Bright eyes and merry lips offer their enchantments on every side. Notwithstanding, it will be found that the awful verities of the eternal state have a stronger hold upon the majority of men than is generally imagined. Amongst the groans of the city are the groans of such as have dishonoured a Christian profession by open offences; groans these which for years may be without response but their own echoes; wounds inconceivably painful, blushing as they do with the crimson tide of God’s Lamb “crucified afresh.” Among these groans of the city are the groans of saintly men and holy women for the sins of those around them. Think of the world as it is, and withhold from it a groan, if you can. Hence doth the Christian groan in spirit for the sins of the world; being afflicted for Christ, as Christ was afflicted for him. (Alfred Bowen Evans.)