This is full of blessing--and this is millennial blessing, shadowed here in this beautiful story. But there is more. There will be no question in the millennial heavens about the saints, as there was about Adam in the garden, and about Job in the beginning of this Book. The tree of knowledge tested the creature whom God had just made. But in the age of the resurrection, in the heavens where Job and all the children of the resurrection will be, there will be no such test. There will be no question about man. There will be silence in heaven as to man, for the great Kinsman has answered all questions, and man is glorified there.
Such are the changes which have arisen, ere we leave this divine, inspired story. Has not the trial of faith been precious, as St. Peter speaks, when we can talk of such changes? The enemy is gone. His ministers, or messengers, the wind and the fire, the Chaldeans and Sabeans, take their commission no more. Job, too, has changed his mind, and made his confession to God--his friends have changed their mind, and humbled themselves to him. But there is One who abides the same. He has no step to retrace, no word to recall, no deed of His hand, or counsel of His heart, to alter or repent of. Other scriptures tell of Him, that He is "the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever," and that with Him there "is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." And this precious tale about Him and His doings so illustrates and exhibits Him.
There is never entire calmness, or the absence of all haste and distraction, where we are not conscious that our strength is equal to our business, whatever it may be. Nor is there, when we are not equally conscious of integrity or righteousness in that business. The consciousness of both righteousness and strength is needed in order to fit the hand to do a deed, or the foot to take a step, with entire ease.
Now we know that this ease marks all the ways and operations of God. He is ever at work (to speak after the manner of men) in the full possession of this undistractedness of which we are speaking. We might judge this from the necessary glory of His godhead. But the ways of Jesus on earth always exhibited this, and He, as we know, was God manifest in the flesh. And this ease and calmness, in which all the operations of God proceed, tell us, that though they may to us appear strange and even wilful, as Job thought them, yet is He able to interpret them every one, so as to be justified in His sayings, and clear when He is judged. And this is happy. "The bud may have a bitter taste," and "blind unbelief is sure to err." These things are so. But "God is His own interpreter, and He will make it plain." We know how our Job was tried--deeply, variously, and, as might be thought, wantonly, needlessly; for he walked in the fear of God, and in the service of his generation. But "the end of the Lord" is more than vindication. It is display. The trial is found to be unto praise and honour and glory. The light of the coming day, rebuke what it may, will have only to set off and reflect the excellency of Him with whom we have to do.
Thus have we lingered, for a little, over these bright notices of millennial days, "the days of heaven upon earth," which shine at the close of this lovely as well as serious and instructive tale of patriarchal times. But there is more.
At the beginning, Job held all his blessings with reserve and suspicion. He was not in safety, nor at rest, nor in quiet; yet trouble came. "The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me," says he, "and that which I was afraid of is come unto me." It must needs be so. The instability with which departure from God has affected every possession and every profit here makes this necessary. But, at the end, there are no "fears within," any more than Chaldeans or "fightings without." No shadow crosses the settled sunshine that rests on all around him, or the calm light which fills all within.
And further--his kinsfolk and acquaintance, at the end, seek him again. They ought, indeed, never to have deserted him. For we deceive ourselves if we think that we must be right if we grieve those whom God is disciplining. This is often very far indeed from being the case. The Lord said in Zechariah, "I am very sore displeased with the heathen that are at ease: for I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the affliction." So also is Isaiah xlvii. 6--and so Obadiah 10-14, to the same effect. We are more commonly, perhaps, in God's mind, and act as the living vessels of the Spirit, when soothing such. And sure I am it was so in Job's case. Had his former friends known God's way, they would have dealt very differently with him. They would not have left him. The very fact that "the hand of God" had touched him, as he so deeply expresses it, would have been the occasion of "pity," as he further says, from his friends.
However, as part of the bright sunshine that gladdens his estate at the end, his kinsfolk and acquaintance again seek him. And they do so to congratulate as well as to compassionate him. And if they talk to him of past griefs, it is but to heighten his present joy--as Israel afterwards, in their triumphant feast of Tabernacles, might make booths and sit under them, in grateful remembrance of wilderness-days.
All these are happy reverses, and the latter end of our patriarch is twice as good as his beginning. But among all the gladdening anticipations which shine in the latter page of this history there is none which more captivates the heart than the reconciliation. The patriarch and his brethren, as the narrative largely tells us, and as we well know, had sadly fallen out by the way, as they walked along the high road of "this present evil world;" but as soon as they enter "the age to come," the strife of tongues and stir of war are heard and seen no more.
This is truly welcome to the heart. For what joy will it be to be delivered of selfishness and pride, and many other workings of an ungenerous and perverted nature. How are the pleasures of the heart spoiled by such robbers continually! What a thing a page of history is! What a record of the agitations of envy and ambition and revenge! Is it not misery thus to see men "hateful, and hating one another," and then to remember that we are still alive and active in the midst of the same elements? But another thing is in our prospect; and it is the way of the wisdom and grace of God again and again, in the progress of His Word, as here in the 42nd chapter of Job, to give us a mystic picture of it. Then man, as deceived by Satan, shall give place; and man, as anointed by God, shall prevail. Then shall be known the joy of getting out of such darkness into such light, of beholding the Sun again, after centuries of midnight gloom.