Sermons from Job - 7. The Substance of True Religion - Job 19,28

Extract

Sermons from Job
C. H. Spurgeon

7. The Substance of True Religion

“But ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the matter is found in me?” Job 19:28.

You will always understand a passage of Scripture better if you carefully attend to its connection. The habit of picking out portions from the Bible and separating them from their context may be carried a great deal too far, and in the process the reader may miss the mind of the Spirit, and force upon the words a meaning of his own. If we were to treat men’s books as we do God’s Book we should, probably, be judged to be insane. It is, indeed, a wonderful book to bear such mangling; every sensible person will see that it must always be wise to study the context, for it is likely enough to cast a light upon the passage in hand. Job in the verse before us is answering Bildad the Shuhite. Now, this Bildad on two occasions had described Job as a hypocrite, and accounted for his dire distress by the fact that, though hypocrites may flourish for a time, they will ultimately be destroyed. In the two bitter speeches which he made he described the hypocrite under the figure of a tree which is torn up by the roots, or dig down even to the root. In his first address, in the eighth chapter and the sixteenth verse, he says of the hypocrite, “He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden. His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones. If he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying, I have not seen thee.” Even the very root of the hypocrite was to be pulled up, so that the garden in which he once flourished should not remember that he had ever been there. Being much pleased with his metaphor, Bildad in the eighteenth chapter uses it again. He says in the fourteenth verse of the chapter, “His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it shall bring him to the king of terrors. His roots shall be dried up beneath, and above shall his branch be cut off.” This, then, was his mode of attacking Job: he set forth by the emblem of a tree the state and fate of the false hearted,—they might flourish for a time, but they would wither at last, even down to the very root, dried up and blasted by the justice of God. The …