Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold Never ignore the things that cannot be explained, put
The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers 75
The "shadows" depict what Job is describing, viz., the things in human history and in personal experience that are shadowed by mystery and cannot be explained by reason or religious creeds, but only by belief in God who will make all plain in His own way. Job is saying that there is nothing in life you can reckon on with any certainty. We may say that if a man has been well brought up and has developed his own integrity and lived rightly, success will be sure to attend him, but you cannot calculate along that line. Never ignore the things that cannot be explained, put them on one side, but remember they are there and have to be reckoned with. There is a gap and a wildness in things and if God does not step in and adjust it, there is no hope; but God has stepped in by the Redemption, and our part is to trust confidently in Him. Either the pessimist is right when he says we are autumn leaves driven by the blast of some ultimate power without mind, or else the way out is by the Redemption of Jesus Christ.
every way and have lost everything: therefore you must be a bad man." If Job had been of the Ugo Bassi stamp with a hypersensitive mind and not the robust spirit he was, he would have said, "Oh, well, I must be much worse than I imagined; and I must be guilty." But he stuck to it, "No, I have not been dishonourable and bad, you may say of me what you like, but that is not the reason why I suffer."
3. God and the Sublunary ( Job 28) Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone. ( Job 28:1–2)
Careful examination of every reference Job makes to geology or meteorology reveals that there is no significant or insignificant blunder in all he says; every reference is a piece of consummate accuracy. This in passing.
Every common-sense fact requires something for its explanation which common-sense cannot give. The facts of every day and night reveal things our own minds cannot explain. When a scientific man comes across a gap in his explanations, instead of saying, "There is no gap here," let him recognise that there is a gap he cannot bridge, and that he must be reverent with what he cannot understand. The tendency is to deny that a fact has any existence because it cannot be fitted into any explanation as yet. That "the exception proves the rule" is not true: the exception proves that the rule won't do; the rule is only useful in the greatest number of cases. When scientists treat a thesis as a fact they mean that it is based on the highest degree of probability. There are no "infallible" findings, and the man who bows down to scientific findings may be as big a fool as the man who refuses to do so. The man who prays ceases to be a fool, while the man who refuses to pray nourishes a blind life within his own brain and he will find no way out that road. Job cries out that prayer is the only way out in all these matters—
5. God and the Scurrilous ( Job 30) And now I am their song, yea, I am their byword. . . . They flee far from me, and spare not to spit in my face. ( Job 30:9–10)
Jesus Christ was in the case Job is describing, He was placed alongside the most scurrilous immorality of His day—"Behold, a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!" And He was put to death between two malefactors. It is impossible to calculate on the line that virtue will bring a man to honour, and that uprightness will escape the punishment which falls on men who are not upright. Any explanation at all leaves a gap which cannot be bridged as yet.
6. God and the Scrupulous ( Job 31) If I have walked with vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; let me be weighed in an even balance that God may know mine integrity. ( Job 31:5–6)
Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding? . . . Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom: and to depart from evil is understanding. ( Job 28:20, 28)
Job examines the statements of the creed and its moral findings, and then disputes it from his own experience—"Do you think I am trying to make out before God that I am what I have not been? would I talk to God with what would be blatant insolence if I had not the facts to back me up? The inference from the facts of my life is that I have been beyond reproach, and in my approach to God I will not say I have been guilty of what I know I have not been. I stand clear before God on every one of these lines, and though I do not see Him or know Him, I will stick to it that He is other than you say, and that when I do see Him He will not say that I deceived myself when I spoke the truth."
4. God and the Shadows ( Job 29) Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; when His candle shined upon my head, and when by His light I walked through darkness. ( Job 29:2–3)
Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the throne,—Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown. Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
James Russell Lowell