And Satan came also among them.
Spiritual agencies, good and evil, in sickness
This is one of those mysterious Chapter s of Holy Scripture wherein God hath graciously vouchsafed, for the strengthening of our faith and loving trust in Him, a brief glimpse of that which is continually going on, day by day, in regions mysterious to mortal vision, and in which, could we but at all times feel it, we are so greatly concerned. Scripture is consistent in its testimony throughout--that there is a prince of darkness, a fallen angel, whose constant aim it is to effect our eternal ruin. In this case the evil messenger is permitted by the Most High to afflict one of His own righteous servants with grievous losses and poverty and sore disease, for the trial and purification of his faith.
I. Satan is from time to time allowed to move the Lord to afflict even his most faithful people in various ways. The Lord’s ways toward His people, and indeed toward all men, are most mysterious, but from the analogy of His dealings with the patriarch Job we may safely conclude that they are full of secret love and mercy towards them, and designed to promote their everlasting happiness.
II. The Lord gives Satan only a limited power over His own people. As the Lord said, “He is in thine hand, but save his life,” so in your case He may have given him liberty to proceed just so far, and no further, with you.
III. Faith untried is faith not proved acceptable. Many a man deceives himself with the empty counterfeit of faith. Hence an ordeal is requisite in which numbers fall away, whilst the faith of others is brought out as pure gold refined from the furnace of affliction. God graciously keep you from falling away in this your season of trial.
IV. Satan is most frequently the Lord’s agent in the infliction of disease and other trials. But Satan defeats his own purposes in afflicting God’s people, because their faith, through God’s grace, is thereby strengthened. In order the better to strengthen his position in attacking believer’s faith, Satan will often incite his nearest and dearest relatives to seek to withdraw his heart’s allegiance from God. He did this in the case of Job. In the moments of his fancied triumph Satan moved Job’s wife to assist him in the deadly warfare. But God had not forsaken him. (J. C. Boyce, M. A.)
The afflictions of Job
In language of the most stately and beautiful kind there is set before us the mystery of Providence. This passage is but one step in the development of a sublime moral lesson, but it has nevertheless a certain completeness of its own.
I. The character of temptation.
1. God is not the author of it. In temptation there are three parts.
(1) The external conditions which tend to bring it about. God may be the author of these conditions.
(2) The state of heart which makes temptation tempting to us. God is not the author of this.
(3) There is the special thought in the mind, the suggestion to do the deed, which is the focusing of the pre-existing and undeveloped feelings of the heart. Satan is the author of this.
2. But God permits us to be tempted. He allows natural laws to work about us, and historical events to shape themselves, and persons and things to come into contact with us, in such ways that temptation arises. Whatever is, is by His permission.
3. God permits temptation for our good. In our lesson we see that it was permitted in Job’s case in order to bring out clearly the stability of his faith in God. God is not careless or thoughtless in His permission of our trial.
4. Our friends sometimes unwittingly make temptation harder to us. Job’s wife spoke to him in sympathy. “Renounce God and die” is not a fling of sarcasm, but a weak and honest attempt to give comfort.
5. Temptation is never necessarily successful. It was not so in Job’s case.
II. Bearing temptation. Job’s example gives some practical lessons.
1. See the solitude of the tempted soul. The barriers of the soul cannot be passed. There alone we each must confront temptation and have our fight with it.
2. Job rightly says to his wife that to renounce God would be foolish. If Job had renounced God he would have been irrational, because he would have given up the only source of help possible.
3. Job shows us that faith is the only reasonable attitude of man towards God. (D. J. Burrell, D. D.)
The afflictions of Job
The trial of Job, as it is portrayed, suggests three truths.
I. Satan is a personal being. That this is the old doctrine no one denies; but it is asked by many, whether such belief has not been outgrown with all our progress in theological thought. Over against all speculative opinion we have to set the plain teaching of God’s Word. The language here is figurative, but it must mean something. Satan is not an abstraction. Observe that Satan here is called the accuser. Milton’s story of the fallen angels is only a human invention. The interpretation which makes him a mere personification of evil would make Jesus Christ a mere personification of goodness.
II. God permits Satan to tempt believers. The great enemy of the soul in its race toward heaven is Satan.
III. God sets a limit to the power of Satan. “Behold, he is in thine hand; only spare his life.” The tempter could go no further than he was permitted to. But the mystery to Job was that such permission was given at all. If his troubles had come from an enemy, or even from his “miserable comforters,” he could have borne them more easily; but that they should have fallen from his Father’s hand, that puzzled him. That is the puzzle of human life. Our best relief is that Satan’s power has a limit; it cannot go beyond God’s permission. No soul needs to be under the control of temptation--it cannot hold the human will; it is not the supreme force in the world. One thing is stronger: the power of God in Jesus Christ, and that power is pledged to every soul in its fight with sin. (T. J. Holmes.)