These are human words, but are they not too strong, too rhetorical, to be true?
No! For who can mechanize the rhetoric of woe?
“Why is life given to the miserable, and to one who would be blithe to find a grave? I have no quiet, no repose, for trouble on trouble came, and my sighs gush out like waters long dammed back.”
No doubt the rhetoric is lofty, yet with a strange familiarity it touches with happy expressiveness all that is most vivid in our remembrance of woe.
“I loathe my life. I will give loose to my complaint. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. To God I will say: ‘Condemn me not. Show me why Thou contendest with me. As the clay Thou hast fashioned me, and to dust Thou causest me to return. Thou hast poured me as milk and compacted me as cheese. As a fierce lion Thou huntest me; then Thou turnest again and showest Thyself marvelous.’”
Job has found fit words for all mourning souls. So they borrow of him when their own words fail like a stream which the Sun has dried up. What woe the poor little heart can feel! Herein is its greatness. It is, in its own way, as the heart of God.
“Truly, now, He hath worn me out. Thou hast made all my household desolate, and Thou hast shriveled me up. God giveth me up to the ungodly, and flingeth me over into the hands of the wicked. He seized me by the throat and shook me. He breacheth me with breach on breach. He rusheth on me like a man of war.”
In what good man’s sick chamber is not Job welcome? Welcome because he can utter the whole gamut of human woe. He can find words for the heart that is ill at ease, and prayers for lips which have been chilled and silenced by unbelief. His woe belongs to the whole world. All other woe is as the dripping of an icicle compared with the rush of stormy waters.
In the case of Job the internal is proved to be greater than the external. When the trials came one after another like shocks of thunder, “in all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”
But did he speak? That is the point. If he did not, perhaps he was dazed. He felt a tremendous blow on the forehead, and he reeled, and was not in a condition to bear witness about the matter. If he said any thing, let us know what he did say. Could he speak in that tremendous crisis?