Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up; It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes; there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, “Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more pure than his Maker?”
Here is the threshold of the unseen. Before he sees or hears anything, the Temanite has the sense of fear—the fear of something more than human. The unknown weighs upon him and presses him down, all the life and energy in him are at low ebb—he feels as though the tides of life were running out. A spirit passes before his face. It is like a breath of scarcely moving air out of the night. The hair of his flesh (mark the psychological and physiological fact), the hair of his flesh stood up. It was as if a current of electricity had passed through him. Then the spirit stands still. It is as though this breath of air out of the night were no longer moving. He cannot discern any form. There is nothing fixed or stable enough for him to perceive. An image is before his eyes. He makes no vulgar attempt to describe it—it is indescribable. There is a great silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice—not a loud and jarring voice—but a voice low, soft, still; and yet! the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power what authority and dignity—the dignity of infinite integrity: “Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more pure than his Maker?”
How the night is full of a sudden law of proportion. Mortal man and eternal God. You feel the distance widening and widening between them there in the stillness of the night. The justice of man! man! the unjust—the law breaker; man, who is of yesterday and is gone to-morrow—mortal man, more just than he of whom it is said, “Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne.” Fallen man, man full of iniquity, shall he be more pure than he who made him; he who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and made him a living soul; he whose name is holiness and righteousness and very truth? As the question lingers man shrivels and sinks into the dust, and the whole night is filled with stillness—with the stillness and immensity of the all-pervading and holy God.
Read the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters.
They record the highest reaches of human language, so great that our own version cannot dim their splendor. Nothing ever written surpasses them, not only in the felicity of expression, but in the sense of deity pervading them. Each succeeding verse sustains the other and, at the last, you feel that God, very God, indeed, has spoken.
The Almighty answers the complaining Job.
He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, unbroken calm, but out of the whirlwind; and yet, from the centre of that mighty vortex of unlimited force and energy and power, the voice comes forth with the calmness of one who knows himself superior to the whirlwind and the storm.
“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”
This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is the fitting question of him who knoweth the end from the beginning. In the very asking of it all the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self-consciousness and vanity of man fade away, and man himself is as nothing—God alone remains upon the vision—all knowing—all wise—supreme.
This Bible is a book of history.