Thou shalt call, and I will answer Thee.
God calling in death
Mr. Moody used to say, “Some day you will read in the papers that Dwight L. Moody is dead. Don’t you believe it. When they say I am dead, I shalt be more alive than I ever was before.” Now, it is very easy to say that when one is well and strong, but the last hours Mr. Moody had on earth he lay looking death right in the eye without a quiver. Early in the morning of his last day on earth, before daylight, his son Will, who was keeping watch beside his bed, heard him whispering something, and leaning over the bed, caught the words, “Earth is receding, heaven is opening, God is calling!” Will was disturbed, and called the other members of the family into the room. “No, no, father,” he said; “not so bad as that.” His father opened his eyes, and, seeing the family gathered round, said, “I have been within the gates. I have seen the children’s faces”--those of his two grandchildren who had died during the summer and spring. In a little while he sank into unconsciousness again, but again became conscious, and opened his eyes and said, “Is this death? This is not bad. There is no valley. This is bliss!--this is sweet!--this is glorious!” Then his daughter, with breaking heart, said, “Father, don’t leave us!” “Oh,” he replied, “Emma, I am not going to throw my life away. If God wants me to live, I will live; but if God is calling me, I must up and off!” A little while later, someone tried to arouse him; but he said faintly, “God is calling me; don’t call me back. This is my Coronation Day; I have long looked for it!” And so he went up for his coronation! (A. R. Torrey, D. D.)
Thou wilt have a desire to the work of Thine hands.--
Confidence in the Creator
The Book of Job seems to me the most daring of poems; from a position of the most vantageless realism it assaults the very citadel of the ideal. Job is the instance type of humanity in the depths of its misery. Seated in the heart of a leaden despair Job cries aloud to the might unseen, scarce known, which yet he regards as the God of his life. But no more than that of a slave is his cry. Before the Judge he asserts his innocence, and will not grovel--knowing, indeed, that to bear himself so would be to insult the holy. He feels he has not deserved such suffering, and will neither tell nor listen to lies for God. Prometheus is more stoutly patient than Job. Prometheus has to do with a tyrant whom he despises. Job is the more troubled, because it is He who is at the head and the heart, who is the beginning and the end of things, that has laid His hand upon him. He cannot, will not, believe Him a tyrant. He dares not think God unjust; but not, therefore, can he allow that he has done anything to merit the treatment he is receiving at His hands. Hence is he of necessity in profoundest perplexity, for how can the two things be reconciled? The thought has not yet come to him, that that which it would be unfair to lay upon him as punishment, may yet be laid upon him as a favour. Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran the Book of Job would have been very different. His perplexity would then have been--how God, being just, could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if his sin were that of a perfect being, who chose to do the evil of which he knew all the enormity. From a soul whose very consciousness is contradiction, we must not look for logic; misery is rarely logical; it is itself a discord. Feeling as if God had wronged him, Job yearns for the sight of God, strains into His presence, longs to stand face to face with Him. He would confront the One. Look closer at Job’s way of thinking and speaking about God, and directly to God. Such words are pleasing in the ear of the Father of spirits. He is not a God to accept the flattery which declares Him above obligation to His creatures. Job is confident of receiving justice. God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech. The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognising no one but God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that he implies, if he does not actually say, that God owes something to His creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all--that God owes Himself to the creature He has made in His image, for so He has made him incapable of living without Him. It is not easy at first to see wherein God gives Job any answer. I cannot find that He offers him the least explanation of wily He has so afflicted him. He justifies him in his words. The answers are addressed to Job himself, not to his intellect; to the revealing, Godlike imagination in the man, and to no logical faculty whatever. The argument implied, not expressed, in the poems seems to be this--that Job, seeing God so far before him in power, and His works so far beyond his understanding, ought to have reasoned that He who could work so grandly beyond his understanding, must certainly use wisdom in things that touched him nearer, though they came no nearer his understanding. The true child, the righteous man, will trust absolutely, against all appearances, the God who has created in him the love of righteousness. God does not tell Job why He had afflicted him; He rouses his child heart to trust. (George Macdonald, D. D.)
The believer’s confidence
It would seem as if in using these words Job had reference to the resurrection of the body. We may regard them, in a more general way, as an assertion of the patriarch’s confidence in God; of his assurance that he should be kept unto everlasting life. Believers are invariably witnesses that the more cause a man has to be full of hope and of confidence, the more diligent will he be in the use of appointed means of grace. The privileges of true religion have no tendency to the generating presumption. The man who has the strongest scriptural warrant for feeling sure of heaven is always the man who is striving most earnestly for the attainment of heaven. Never venture to appropriate to yourselves the rich assurances which are found in the Bible, unless you have good reason to believe that you are growing in hatred of sin, and in strivings after holiness. Fear not to take to yourselves all the promises made by God to His Church, so long as it is your honest desire, and your hearty endeavour, to become more conformed to the image of your Saviour.
1. The language of confidence. “Thou wilt call, and I will answer thee.” Remember in how many ways God calls. Job’s words indicate great confidence of final salvation. We should greatly rejoice to know that you had all been able to cast away doubt and suspicion, and to feel yourselves “begotten again to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled.” But we do dread your resting your assurance on insufficient grounds. These are two great features of genuine piety--the not being content with present acquirements, and the resting for the future on the assistances of God.
2. Job strengthens himself in the persuasion that God will have “a desire to the work of His hands.” Amid all the reasons which Job might have urged why God should watch over him, he selects that of his being the work of God’s hands. There is, however, a second creation more marvellous, more indicative of Divine love, than the first; and on this, probably, it was that Job’s thoughts were turned. The human soul was formed originally in the image of God, but lost that image through the transgression of Adam. So marvellous is its restoration, so far beyond all power but the Divine, that it is spoken of as actually a new creation, when reimpressed with the forfeited features. (Henry Melvill, B. D.)
The rights of creation
Such a chapter as this does not stand by any means alone in the Old Testament. Nature then, as now, lent but ugly dreams to the inquirer after immortality. For one hint from nature, which tells in favour of immortality, you may find a hundred from the same quarter which tell against it. In his search for a solid ground upon which to build some hope, however scanty, for the unknown future beyond death, the writer is driven at last to the simplest and most solid ground of all--the fact of creation, and what is involved in creation. Every chapter of his work is pervaded with the feeling of mystery, vastness, and awe, whenever he speaks of God. But he holds firmly by his faith in a Creator, whose creature--made in His likeness--he himself is. His argument is this--“The creature simply as a creature, by virtue of creation, has a Claim upon the Creator, which the Creator will be the first to avow.” It may, perhaps, sound bold to speak thus of creation, as giving a title to the Creator’s care. If the Creator were an unfaithful, an unrighteous Creator, there would indeed be no limit to the power of dealing with, and disposing of His creatures. It is our happiness to know that might is not right with Him; that the Almighty is also the All-righteous and the All-merciful. Every created thing or person has certain rights and claims as towards the Creator. These rights and claims are determined by his or its capacities. Man is capable of knowing and doing his Creator’s wilt He who is capable of fellowship with God will never be suffered by the Creator to perish in death. We are in the hands of a Father, a Creator, who knows what He would do with us, knows what we are capable of, knows what He created us for; and who assuredly will not leave us until He hath done that which He hath spoken to us of. Job’s confidence in God was justified to the uttermost. (D. J. Vaughan, M. A.)