13. chattermagging: jabbering; spouting off; rambling on.
56 Baffled to Fight Better
not understand, as they did during the first seven days, they would have been a great sustaining to him, and they too would have approached the place Job ultimately reached and would not have been rebuked by God.
It would have been much more to the point if the friends had begun to intercede for Job; if they had said, "This is a matter for God, not for us; our creed cannot begin to touch it"; but all they did was to take to "chattermagging"13 and telling Job that he was wrong. When God emerged, He put His imprint on what Job had said of Him, and His disapproval on what the friends had said.
The "gospel of temperament" works very well if you are suffering only from psychical neuralgia, so to speak, and all you need is a cup of tea; but if you have a real deep complaint, the injunction to "Cheer up" is an insult. What is the use of telling a woman who has lost her husband and sons in the war to "Cheer up and look on the bright side"? There is no bright side, it is absolute blackness, and if God cannot come to her help, truly she is in a pitiable condition. It is part of the role of a man to be honest enough to know when he is up against cases like this. A gospel based on preconceived notions is merely an irritant. Bildad had his creed and his notion of God: Job does not fit into these, therefore it is a bad look out for Job—"My point of view of God cannot be wrong, therefore you must be."
If Redemption is not the basis of human life, and prayer man's only resource, then we have "followed cunningly devised fables." Over and over again during this war men have turned to prayer, not in the extreme of weakness, but of limitation; whenever a man gets beyond the limit he unconsciously turns to God. Eliphaz claimed to know exactly where Job was, and Bildad claims the same thing. Job was hurt, and these men tried to heal him with platitudes. The place for the comforter is not that of one who preaches, but of the comrade who says nothing, but prays to God about the matter. The biggest thing you can do for those who are suffering is not to talk platitudes, not to ask questions, but to get into contact with God, and the "greater works" will be done by prayer (see John 14:12–13). Job's friends never once prayed for him; all they did was to try and make coin for the enrichment of their own creed out of his sufferings. We are not intended to understand Life. Life makes us what we are, but Life belongs to God. If I can understand a thing and can define it, I am its master. I cannot understand or define Life; I cannot understand or define God; consequently I am master of neither. Logic and reason are always on the hunt for definition, and anything that cannot be defined is apt to be defied, Rationalism usually defies God and defies life; it will not have anything that cannot be defined on a rational basis, forgetting that the things that make up elemental human life cannot be defined. There are teachers to-day who play the fool on these elemental lines; they declare that they can give guidance, but they only succeed in doing a fathomless amount of harm. A man is a criminal for knowing some things, he has no right to know them. The primal curse of God was on Adam when he ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam was intended to know good and evil, but not by eating of the fruit of the tree; God wanted him to know good and evil in the way Jesus Christ knew it, viz., by simple obedience to His Father. None of us by nature knows good and evil in this way, and when we are born from above we have to take care that we deal with reverence with the elemental things underlying life.
4. The Pose of Platitude ( Job 8:7–10) For enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself to the search of their fathers: . . . shall not they teach thee, and tell thee, and utter words out of their heart?
The line Bildad takes up in these verses is like a man telling the inmates of an asylum that it is better being sane than mad—but meantime they are mad! Bildad denies that Job is facing a problem never faced by his fathers. We are apt to forget that there is always an element in human suffering never there before. Tennyson puts this finely in "In Memoriam":
One writes that, "Other friends remain" That "Loss is common to the race"— And common is the commonplace, And vacant chaff well meant for grain That loss is common would not make My own less bitter, rather more: Too common! Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break.
There is a great deal in both joy and sorrow that is similar in everyone's case, but always one element entirely different; the platitudinarian evades this. On the human side the only thing to do for a man who is up against these deeper problems is to remain kindly agnostic. The biggest benediction one man can find in another is not in his words, but that he implies: "I do not know the answer to your problem, all I can say is that God alone must know; let us go to Him."
13. chattermagging: jabbering; spouting off; rambling on.