I. Adversity tests the genuineness, the reality, of a man's religious life.
II. Adversity improves the quality of the religious life, so that all true believers are able to say, "It was good for me that I was afflicted." It renders our religious life (1) more thoughtful; (2) more robust; (3) more intense and prayerful; (4) more rounded and complete; (5) more tender and sympathetic.
III. Adversity promotes the permanence and growth of the religious life.
IV. Adversity gives effectiveness, capacity of service and usefulness, to the religious life. Neither the good servant nor the good soldier is trained in luxury for his work. They have both to "endure hardness" and to pass through discipline if they are to attain proficiency and be of real use.
J. C. Harrison, Congregationalist,vol. i., p. 653
I. Job's temptation came to him late in life.
II. Job is described as being perfect and pure, one that feared God and eschewed evil. The words of the text show that he had trust in God. He had got at two sides of trust in God's omnipotence trust in His positive and in His negative omnipotence. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away in His wisdom. It is not His will that we should possess all gifts; we have to realise our dependence upon one another. There are many who are tempted through feelings of despondency because they see how little they can do, how far others are before them, who are tempted not to do what they can do. We have not because God thinks it best for us not to have; we do not because God does not will us to do. The truer wisdom recognises the fact that it is God who gives, and God, equally omnipotent, equally powerful to give, who withholds. What He wants is a humble, intelligent, and diligent use of the gifts He has given. You must use that which God gives, otherwise you may lose that which you have. His will is not simply that we should accept heaven, but it is offered to our winning, to our acquisition. He would see every man using the talents given him, and the reward, we know, was given, not simply to the five, but to the fewer than five, of entering into the joy of the Lord.
Bishop King, Oxford Journal,Oct. 22nd, 1874.
The authorship and date of the book of Job are problems yet unsolved. This only is certain, that it presents a picture of a very early civilisation. It is not Jewish. Its teaching is unlocalised, and is of all time because it seems to be of no special time.
I. Hence it is that portions of this ancient book sound to us so strangely modern; and the verse before us is one in point.
It is a height of spirituality for which we are not prepared in a civilisation so remote. There is a ring of enthusiasm in the words, the spirit of a mind possessed with the reality of a Divine world above and beyond this.
II. The moral of the book of Job is that there are lessons in suffering or loss as true and precious as those which are learnt from regarding it as punishment, and this truth is one which we are still far from having mastered. In the problem presented here to Job was the dawn of that light which burst in all its fulness upon mankind in the Son of God. We have here a true foreshadowing of the Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, of Him who was made perfect by sufferings, not because of the Father's hate, but because of His great love.
III. The instinct of sonship which was so strong in Job we, blessed with the great heritage of Christianity, are often slow to attain to. For, however much the reason is convinced that suffering and sacrifice are necessary ministers of the kingdom of heaven, we, each for himself, have to make it our own by another path.
A. Ainger, Sermons Preached in the Temple Church,p. 52.
References: Job 1-2 S. Cox, Expositor,1st series, vol. iv., pp. 81, 161; Ibid., Commentary on Job,p. 22. Job 1-3 A. W. Momerie, Defects of Modern Christianity,p. 79. Job 2:3. F.4 W. Farrar, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 17. Job 2:4. Old Testament Outlines,p. 92; J. Robertson, Expositor,2nd series, vol. vi., p. 255; H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1526. Job 2:5. Parker, Fountain,July 4th, 1878.