Prejudice means a judgement passed without suffi- makes the preacher a "superior person," not that he
52 Baffled to Fight Better
Eliphaz takes his argument from Nature: "For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap"—that God does not punish the upright, and that the innocent do not perish. That simply is not true, and it is this preconception which distorted Eliphaz' point of view. Preconceptions exist in our own head; if we start out with the preconception that God will never allow the innocent to perish and then we see a righteous man perishing, we will have to say, "You cannot be a righteous man, because my preconception tells me that if you were, God would never allow you to suffer; therefore you are proved to be a bad man." When Jesus Christ came on the scene the preconception of the historic people of God was this—"We are the constitution of God, Judaism is God's ordination, therefore You cannot be," and they crucified Him. Our Lord said that His Church would be so completely taken up with its precedents and preconceptions that when He came it would be "as a thief in the night"; they would not see Him because they were taken up with another point of view.
Christ appeared to the prejudices of the Pharisees, and they said He was mad. To-day we are trying to work up a religious revival while God has visited the world in a moral revival, and the majority of us have not begun to recognise it. The characteristics that are manifested when God is at work are self-effacement, self-suppression, abandonment to something or someone other than myself, and surely there has never been more evidence of these characteristics than on the part of the men engaged in this war.
4. The Pedagogue of Priggishness ( Job 5:17–27) Eliphaz is not only certain what God will do, but he asserts that what Job is going through is chastisement at the hand of God— Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: for He maketh sore, and bindeth up: He woundeth, and His hands make whole.
—whereas chastisement is a much slighter thing than the real problem of Job's life. The chief ingredient in chastening is that it is meant to develop us, and is a means of expression. The greatest element in the suffering of Job was not chastisement, but the supernatural preface to his story of which he knew nothing. If Eliphaz is right his evidence would prove that Job was a hypocrite; his attitude is that of a pedagogue of priggishness. Beware of priggishness as you would of poison. The danger of pseudo-evangelism is that it makes the preacher a "superior person," not that he is necessarily a prig, but the attitude is produced by the way he has been taught. When Our Lord said to the disciples, "Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men," His reference was not to the skilled angler, but to those who use the drag-net—something which requires practically no skill; the point being that you have not to watch your "fish," but to do the simple thing and God will do the rest. The pseudoevangelical line is that you must be on the watch all the time and lose no opportunity of speaking to people, and this attitude is apt to produce the superior person. It may be a noble enough point of view, but it produces the wrong kind of character. It does not produce a disciple of Jesus, but too often the kind of person who smells of gunpowder and people are afraid of meeting him. According to Jesus Christ, what we have to do is to watch the Source and He will look after the outflow: "He that believeth on Me, . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" ( John 7:38). Who are the people who have really benefited you? They are never the ones who think they do, but those who are like the stars or the lilies, no notion
There are people who can silence you with their logic while all the time you know, although you cannot prove it, that they are wrong. This is because the basis of things is not logical, but tragic. Logic and reasoning are only methods of dealing with things as they are; they give no explanation of things as they are.
3. The Preaching from Prejudice ( Job 5:1–16) Prejudice means a judgement passed without sufficiently weighing the evidence. We are all prejudiced, and we can only see along the line of our prejudices. The way a prejudice works is seen clearly in Eliphaz: he knows God, and he knows how He will work— God will never allow the righteous to suffer, consequently when he sees the disasters in Job's life he passes judgement right off on Job and says he is not righteous. There is a saying of Bacon's to the effect that if prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the blessing of the New;9 and the apostle Paul says that "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution" (2 Timothy 3:12).
In every life there is one place where God must have "elbow room." We must not pass judgement on others, nor must we make a principle of judging out of our own experience. It is impossible for a man to know the views of Almighty God. Preaching from prejudice is dangerous, it makes a man dogmatic and certain that he is right. The question for each of us to ask ourselves is this: Would I recognise God if He came in a way I was not prepared for—if He came in the bustle of a marriage feast, or as a Carpenter? That is how Jesus
9. Essays (1625) "Of Adversity," by Francis Bacon.