Circumstance Two: Conscientious Character
Job was blameless and upright. His character was endorsed by God, which is the highest commendation that mortal man can receive. “There is none like him in the earth” (Job 1.8.) Job offered sacrifices regularly on behalf of the members of his family just in case they might have sinned and cursed God in their hearts. That speaks of piety. He had made a covenant, even with his eyes: that he should think upon no maid; that is, with lust (31.1.) That speaks of purity, not to mention the practice of the spirit of the law that wasn’t even written yet (Exodus 20.14; Matthew 5.28.) What man is as watchful in worship as he was? What man can live up to the covenant that he made with his eyes? Job was not only blameless and upright, but he was like that in spite of being the wealthiest man in the East. Since wealth, upright conduct, and godliness are so seldom allied, we should take some time to examine this marvel.
We know from history that most people cannot maintain prosperity and rectitude together, much less prosperity and godliness. Empires are made of men; and they fall on account of vices that men of means can afford to debase themselves with. The Roman Empire is the quintessential example of this. But each Testament furnishes examples too. This prophecy against Tyre has been fulfilled: “And they shall make a spoil of thy riches, and make a prey of thy merchandise: and they shall break down thy walls, and destroy thy pleasant houses: and they shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy dust in the midst of the water” (Ezekiel 26.12.) It is the norm for merchants of the earth, after they have become rich, to commit whoredoms and to go in the way of Babylon: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird” (Revelation 18.2.) If nations and empires were made of men like Job, however, their hard times would be for purifying their faith instead of setting their world ablaze through unbelief.
Job was blameless and upright during uncommon prosperity. This is outstanding because even wise men and humble men go astray after they prosper. We may instance King Solomon, and before that, his father David. Prosperity can seduce the wise man; prosperity can seduce the humble man, even the one after God’s own heart. Spiritually, Solomon fared better during the early years of his reign, before he settled in. It was likewise with David, though he did much better generally than did his son. Failure to handle power and prosperity cut David down more than once. And he would have avoided committing the wickedness of adultery and murder if he had made a covenant with his eyes. The accusation that Satan brought before God against Job was that Job was blameless and upright only because God had blessed the work of his hands. The truth, however, is that Job was blameless and upright in spite of having been greatly blessed. Not only was Job wealthy, he was blessed with a large household, the adult members of which were rich enough to feast and to make merry on their own. His great wealth was helping to spawn him a dynasty. But Job did not fall into grievous sin like Kings David and Solomon would later do. He was neither incontinent nor idolatrous. And he did not become a hedonist; neither did he become a miser; he succumbed to neither extreme.
A rich man who is praised by God for his character must, of necessity, be also a generous man. Job shared his wealth: “I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy…I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame. I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out. And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth” (Job 29.12, 13, 15-17.) These verses show that Job acted the part of a righteous magistrate as well. He was practicing Old Testament statutes centuries before Moses was born and raised to give them. He practiced the moral religion that the Israelites would soon fail to live up to: “Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 1.17.) This, in effect, was the religion of Job. It is, as far as deeds go, the religion of James in the New Testament: “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (James 1.27.) Because he adored God, Job loved his neighbor. The sacrifices that he offered were not merely formal; they were sin offerings that bore witness to vital religion. His oblations were based on a sense of obligation and inability—a religion that stood on the ground of a perception of depravity. He loved God with his heart and his neighbor as himself in the way that a stellar Christian does: on the strength supplied by God through faith. His religion was of a degree, though, that perhaps has never met its match among fallen men. To be conscientious is to be guided by a sense of right and wrong. The conscience that is most sensitive to God is the one that does the most good and the least evil.
Job’s character is summarized in verse fourteen of chapter twenty-nine: “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a robe and a diadem.” This was not merely Job’s opinion. God affirmed Job’s character: “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?” (Job 1.8.) After his great wealth is taken away, after his servants fall victim to fire and sword, and after his children are all killed in a violent storm, his character goes on display in word and action: “Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshiped, and said, naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (1.20, 21.) This is a spectacle of eminent holiness. Religion of this degree is so exceptional as to seem mythical. Not one of us can point to a man this mortified. It’s as if Job’s ‘old man’ was crucified in the Pauline sense in the book of Romans (chapter 6.) In the person of Job, we have New Testament religion before the Old Testament was written. In him, we have the demonstration of faith, without and before, the law as a pedagogue to bring us unto Christ (Galatians 3.24.) To worship God aright after losing all that Job lost is, for almost any man on earth at any given time, undoable and unthinkable. Job’s piety was such that he worshipped God when it was hardest to do so; and he did it immediately and instinctively. This was a man for whom religion was life. When Job uttered his ‘blessed be the name of the Lord’ on the heels of his great losses, he showed that the sacrificial system that he practiced was more than a routine of rites. He therefore rendered the sacrifice of praise to God: the calves of his lips (Hosea 14.2), when almost everyone else would have cursed. His character was corroborated through calamity. After praising God for taking his belongings and his family, Job was stricken with boils and tempted by his wife to curse God. What answer did he give? “But he said unto her, thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips” (Job 2.10.) How different is this from the conduct of Adam after Eve committed her sin? Job did not go along with his wayward wife. He reproved her with a rhetorical question that stamped the word ‘fool’ on her forehead. To her everlasting mercy, her name is nowhere mentioned. Job’s response to his wife, as compared with Adam’s joining Eve in sin, shows that reformed religion is better than original religion; that the religion of grace is better than the religion of innocence; that man as fallen and saved is better than unfallen man.
When Job lived, presumably around 2000 B. C., there were not many saints on the earth. Soon after the dispersal at the tower of Babel a few hundred years prior, the knowledge of God became more obscured and misunderstood than ever before since the time of the Flood. Widespread ignorance led to wholesale idolatry, from which milieu Abraham was eventually called out to give birth to a nation through whom the revelation of God’s word would come. When piety seems nearly extinct, a holy man appears here and there, as in the times of Noah and of Daniel. “Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the LORD God” (Ezekiel 14.14.)
Job was blameless and upright in both his prosperity and adversity, worshipping God through it all. His moral strength helped him to suffer through. But it is just as certain that the man’s goodness made his trials seem unfair. His conscientiousness was a circumstance that made his tribulations intolerable. Job’s character aggravated his misfortunes because he knew that he was a good man who feared God. His calamity therefore bewildered and angered him: “I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself? And why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away my iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be…I will say unto God, do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me. Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, that thou shouldest despise the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel of the wicked?” (Job 7.20, 21; 10.2, 3.) Has God become Job’s enemy? Why? And why do Job’s pleas for pardon fall on deaf ears? Why is there no forgiveness and return to favor? The poor man is beside himself trying to figure out what God has to do with how things have lately turned out. It’s as if he’s been found guilty of idolatry: “If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, thou art my confidence; if I rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because mine hand had gotten much; if I beheld the sun when it shines, or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: this also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I would have denied the God that is above” (31.24-28.) Similar statements cover the whole of this lengthy chapter. He thinks back; he searches himself; and he cannot find that he has been guilty of idol worship. The worship of the sun was the first form that idolatry took. It was carried out, first as the worship of the true God through the sun as his image. After this the sun became an idol unto itself, as in the following words in Egypt’s Ritual of the Dead: “…Hail! O Sun, Creator! self-created!...Glory to thee, shining in the firmament….” (W. R. Cooper, The Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt, pp. 4, 35.) That shining orbs in the sky had been placed there by God ‘to rule over the day and over the night’ (Genesis 1.18) was knowledge passed down to Noah, from whom it passed down orally to subsequent generations: “Remnant knowledge of the creation of the sun and moon to rule the day and night” was “deeply embedded in the human consciousness” (John Owen, Biblical Theology, p. 264.) It was natural that the first form idolatry took was the worship of lights in the sky. Greeting the sun as a god with a kiss to one’s hand was no doubt customary in Job’s day, which custom was carried along even to the advent of Jesus Christ: “In our adoration,” said Pliny the Elder in the first century, “we bring up the right hand to the mouth, as we turn our whole bodies around” (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 28, chapter 2.) This is the sort of worship that Job, in his part of the dialogue, denies having done. In an interesting but digressive book called An Essay Towards a Natural History of Serpents, Charles Owen tracks the primitive worship of the sun practically around the world. It has been practiced by the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Ammonites, for example, and in such diverse regions as Persia, Spain, China, Peru, and the Philippines. This form of idolatry was, without a doubt, the norm in Uz in Job’s day. And, incidentally, was it not against this form of idolatry that these inspired words were written down in Psalm 2.12?—: “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry.” Instead of blowing kisses at the sun, Job kissed the Son of God by proper worship; and he did it no matter what his fellows were doing. Imagine living in a world of practicing Roman Catholics. What character would it take to resist the peer pressure to make the sign of the cross beside everyone else doing it! Job’s inner strength was on that level. Not only did Job have faith, he possessed that strength of faith which stands while everyone else bows down to the popular god. Was it not for this distinction that he was criticized and scorned when his life of plenty was leveled?
Though chapter 31 is Job’s rebuttal to his friends’ accusations, he weaves into it his vindication by self-examination. He searches through every facet of his conduct prior to his calamity in order to prove himself. Search as he might, he cannot find any reason for being so sharply treated. And at least once, in chapter 23, his anger nears the borders of irreverence. He longs to speak to God because he is desperate to present his case: “Will he plead against me with his great power? No; but he would put strength in me” (Job 23.6.) His character haunts him. He wonders what he might have done to deserve such punishment. He examines and reexamines himself. He defends himself. Like a person gone mad, he craves an actual meeting with Almighty God. His frustration becomes so unbearable that he comes close to accusing God of blame.
Job’s goodness increased his torment significantly. Who today could lay claim to such character as he had? How confounding to be the most upright man on earth and to be treated as the most wicked! What is it like to be as upright as he was but to be treated like an ungodly man deserving punishment? This is a circumstance that none of us face because not one of us is as distinguished as Job was for character. Maybe we might find a man who worshipped God immediately after his house burned down. Maybe we might find someone who worshipped God immediately after being diagnosed with cancer. But where is the man who worshipped God right after losing his millions, his family, his health, his looks, the bracing of his wife, and his reputation and good standing? Can we discover a man who acted half as patiently as Job did after losing the half of what Job lost?
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