But now they that are younger than I have me in derision.
Job’s social disabilities
Man’s happiness as a social being is greatly dependent upon the kind feeling and respect which is shown to him by his contemporaries and neighbours. The social insolence from which he suffers, and of which he complains, was marked by the following circumstances:--
I. It came from the most contemptible characters. He regarded them as despicable in their ancestry. “Whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.” “They were driven from among men, and people cried after them as after a thief.” “Among the bushes they brayed.” These were the creatures amongst whom the patriarch now lived, and whose insolence he had to endure. They had no faculty to discern or appreciate his moral worth, and so utterly destitute of any power to compassionate distress that they treated him with a heartless cruelty and revolting insolence. Men may say that a man of his high character ought not to have allowed himself to have been pained with the conduct of such wretches. But who has ever done so? Even Christ Himself felt the reproaches of sinners, and was not indifferent to their revilings and their sneers. “He endured their contradictions.”
II. It was manifested in personal annoyances. “Now I am their song,” he says, “I am their byword.”
III. It was shown to him on account of his providential reverses. Not because he had become contemptible in character, or morally base and degraded. Only because his circumstances were changed, great prosperity had given way to overwhelming adversity. Learn--
1. The worthlessness of mere social fame. What is it worth? Nothing. Its breath of favour is more fickle than the wind.
2. The moral heroism of the world’s Redeemer. Christ came into a social position far more heartless and insolent than that which the patriarch here describes. “Of the people there was none with Him, He was despised and rejected of men.”
3. The importance of habitual reliance on the absolute. Do not trust in man. (Homilist.)