Expositor's Bible: The Book of JobWatson, Robert A. (Robert Alexander)
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Book of Job
Watson, Robert A. (Robert Alexander)
Bible. Job -- Commentaries
But his integrity was clear to him. That stood within the region of
his own consciousness. He knew that God had made him of dutiful heart
and given him a constant will to be obedient. Only while he believed
this could he keep hold of his life. As the one treasure saved out of
the wreck, when possessions, children, health were gone, to cherish
his integrity was the last duty. Renounce his conscience of goodwill
and faithfulness? It was the one fact bridging the gulf of disaster,
the safeguard against despair. And is this not a true presentation of
the ultimate inquiry regarding faith? If the justice we know is not an
adumbration of Divine justice, if the righteousness we do is not
taught us by God, of the same kind as His, if loving justice and doing
righteousness we are not showing faith in God, if renouncing all for
the right, clinging to it though the heavens should fall, we are not
in touch with the Highest, then there is no basis for faith, no link
between our human life and the Eternal. All must go if these deep
principles of morality and religion are not to be trusted. What a man
knows of the just and good by clinging to it, suffering for it,
rejoicing in it, is indeed the anchor that keeps him from being swept
into the waste of waters.
The woman's part in the controversy is still to be considered; and it is
but faintly indicated. Upon the Arab soul there lay no sense of woman's
life. Her view of providence or of religion was never asked. The writer
probably means here that Job's wife would naturally, as a woman,
complicate the sum of his troubles. She expresses ill-considered
resentment against his piety. To her he is "righteous over much," and
her counsel is that of despair. Was this all that the Great God whom he
trusted could do for him? Better bid farewell to such a God. She can do
nothing to relieve the dreadful torment and can see but the one possible
end. But it is God who is keeping her husband alive, and one word would
be enough to set him free. Her language is strangely illogical, meant
indeed to be so,--a woman's desperate talk. She does not see that,
though Job renounced God, he might yet live on, in greater misery than
ever, just because he would then have no spiritual stay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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