Can the rush grow up without mire? can the flag grow has in reality come off "more than conqueror." Jesus
The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers 57
5. The Point of "Can" ( Job 8:11) Can the rush grow up without mire? can the flag grow without water?
time in a logical argument, and yet you know that He has in reality come off "more than conqueror." Jesus Christ lived in the moral domain and, in a sense, the intellect is of no use there. Intellect is not a guide, but an instrument.
Bildad uses an argument from Nature and he tries to make his argument consistent with his illustration. We are apt to run an illustration to death in logical sequence; the Bible never does. An illustration should simply be a window which does not call attention to itself. If you take an illustration from Nature and apply it to a man's moral life or spiritual life, you will not be true to facts because the natural law does not work in the spiritual world. In the first place, a law is not a concrete thing, but a constructive mental abstraction whereby the human mind explains what it sees. God says, "And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten . . ."; that is not a natural law, and yet it is what happens in the spiritual world. In the natural world it is impossible to be made all over again, but in the spiritual world it is exactly what Jesus Christ makes possible. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" ( John 3:3). What is true is that as there is a law in the natural world so there is a law in the spiritual world, i.e., a way of explaining things, but the law is not the same in both worlds. Bildad takes his illustration from the rush and the flag and applies it to Job, but he is more concerned about being consistent with his illustration than with the facts of Job's experience. If you are a logician you may often gain your point in a debate and yet feel yourself in the wrong. You get the best of it in disputing with some people because their minds are not clever, but when you get away from your flush of triumph you feel you have missed the point altogether; you have won on debate, but not on fact. You cannot get at the basis of things by disputing. Our Lord Himself comes off second best every
6. The Practice of Piousness ( Job 8:12–22) Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will He help the evil doers. ( Job 8:20)
Bildad is cultivating the margin of his eyesight, so to speak. This is a trick of the piousness not based on a personal relationship to God. Bildad is apparently speaking of an abstraction while all the time he is criticising Job—it is Job who is the hypocrite and the fraud. It is not meanness in Bildad that makes him do this, but "limitedness"—he is "all replete with very thou." Bildad has never seen God, while Job is getting near the place where he will see Him. All the god Bildad has is his creed; if he had known the real God he would have prayed to Him, and would have recognised the facts that were too big for him. Whenever we put belief in a creed in place of belief in God, we become this particular kind of humbug. To "imply wrong by my right" is the trick of every man who puts his creed before his relationship to God.
During this war many a man has come to find the difference between his creed and God. At first a man imagines he has backslidden because he has lost belief in his beliefs, but later on he finds he has gained God, i.e., he has come across Reality. If Reality is not to be found in God, then God is not found anywhere. If God is only a creed or a statement of religious belief, then He is not real; but if God is, as the Book of Job brings to light, One with whom a man gets into personal contact in other ways than by his intellect, then any man who touches the reality of things, touches God.
——————— 8 ———————
agnostIcIsm
Job 9–10
Pour forth and bravely do your part, O knights of the unshielded heart! Forth and forever forward!—out From prudent turret and redoubt, And in the mellay charge amain, To fall but yet to rise again.
means I recognise that there is more than I know, and that if I am ever to know more, it must be by revelation.
1. The Cosmic Refraction of God ( Job 9:1–12) If you accept Jesus Christ's presentation of God and then look at the present order of the material universe you will find what is meant by the phrase, "the cosmic refraction of God." Whenever God presents Himself in the present order of things, He appears refracted, that is, distorted to our reason; we cannot understand Him. When a man comes face to face with Nature, God seems to be almighty against all
R. L. Stevenson
Agnosticism is not always the deplorable thing it is imagined to be. An acknowledged intellectual agnosticism is a healthy thing; the difficulty arises when agnosticism is not acknowledged. To be an agnostic