Sermons from Job - 5. Out of Nothing Comes Nothing - Job 14,4

Extract

Sermons from Job
C. H. Spurgeon

5. Out of Nothing Comes Nothing

“Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? not one” Job 14:4.

Job considered himself to be unclean in the sight of God; yet, if we speak the plain truth about him, we must say that he was as clean as any man who lived in that age, or, indeed, in any other. We have the witness of the Holy Spirit, in this very Book, that he “was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.” We have also the practical confirmation by the devil of the same fact; for, when the Lord said to him, “Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?” he could not deny it, but could only insinuate that there was an evil motive at the back of the patriarch’s uprightness: “Doth Job fear God for nought?” Sometimes, the unwilling acknowledgment of an enemy is a stronger proof than the hearty declaration of a friend, and it was so in Job’s case. He was one of the best, truest, sincerest, cleanest men to be found throughout the whole world; yet he called himself unclean, and probably he did so because, just in proportion as a man becomes really pure, he discovers his own impurity. The impure man has a very low standard of what true holiness is, and possibly he thinks that he comes nearly up to it; or, if not, he tries to lower his standard down to his own level; but the man who is really pure in heart has a very high ideal of what truth is, and uprightness is, and holiness is; and because his ideal is so high, he feels that he has not yet attained to it; and he thinks more of the distance between his present condition and his idea of perfection than he does of all that he has as yet attained. Such a man says, with the apostle Paul, “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

It is always a bad sign when a man begins to think exceedingly …