New Park Street Pulpit · Sermon No. 326
Delivered on Sabbath Morning, July 29, 1860, by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon, at Exeter Hall, Strand
Job 12:9,10.
THESE verses occur in Job’s answer to Zophar the Naamathite. Job had his failings, but certainly he appears less faulty in this dialog than those three men who sought to reprove him and convict him of error. Zophar the Naamathite had the very highest opinion of his own personal wisdom. He addressed Job as though he had been an inferior. And all in the 11th Chapter he used language which though extremely beautiful, must have been very grating upon the ears of such a sufferer as Job; for it is a lecture full of high-flown language, abounding in poetry, and noble images, but containing little solid sense and less sympathy. Job, being exceedingly irritated both with the style and with the matter of Zophar’s speech, begins at once to pluck off his plumes and to pull to pieces his fine language. In biting irony Job cries from his dunghill—“No doubt but you are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you; yes, who knows not such things as these?” You have put into flowery language things which an ordinary observer might discover! You have pointed to the Heaven above and to the depth beneath, to prove a truth which the creeping insects of the earth could tell you, and which the fishes of the sea might proclaim! “Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach you; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell you—or speak to the earth and it shall teach you—and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto you. Who knows not in all these that the hand of the Lord has worked this?”
There is much temper here, but there is also very much of good common sense. I wish we had another Job to chastise the high-sounding language of modern theologians. There are starting up in our midst, men, who if they are not heretics in doctrine, are aliens in speech. They are men described by the old preachers who say, “Mark!” but there is nothing to mark; and who shout, “Observe!” but there is nothing to observe, except the lack of everything that is worth observing! We know ministers who cannot speak in the common language of mankind, but must adopt the jargon of Carlyle, who sets language on its head, and puts the last word first! These men must make the English language a slave to the German—the glorious grand old Saxon must buckle to their heresies and conceal the depths of their lies! I pray God the time may come when some man may unmask them; when all these wind-bags may be torn, and all these bladders may be pricked—when teachers have anything to tell us, if they will deliver themselves so that all can understand. If they cannot use plain language, let their tongues go to school till they have learned it! There is something so enticing and yet so flimsy in the modern theological school, that I feel compelled to warn you constantly against it—its mystery is absurdity and its depth is pompous ignorance! There is no theology in it; it is a futile device to conceal the need of theological knowledge! A man with an education that may be complete in every department except that in which he should excel, stands up and would teach Christians that all they have learned at the feet of Paul has been a mistake; that a new theology has been discovered—that the old phrases which we have used are out of date—the old creeds broken up! Well, what shall we do to this wiseacre and his fellow sages? Serve them? Wherever you meet them or their disciples, as Job did Zophar—laugh at them, dash their language to pieces, and remind them that the best things they tell us are only what the fishes of the sea, or the fowls of the air knew before them, and that their grandest discoveries are but platitudes which every child has known before, or else they are heresies that ought to be scouted from the earth!
The Truth of God upon which Job spoke was this—he wished to show that the fact of the Presence of God in all things was so clearly discernible, that men need not borrow the eagle’s wing to mount to Heaven; nor need they enter into the heart of the Leviathan to find a chariot wherein to enter the depths of the sea. “No,” he said, “no! The present Deity the beasts proclaim.” The actual existence and the constant working of the Eternal God is sung by the very fowls of
Heaven, and the mute fishes of the sea leap up, and in their joyous reaping, seem to say, “The sea is His and He made it!” This Doctrine I wish to bring out this morning. Or, rather, thus would I speak of it. First, the present hand of God everywhere in the universe. Secondly, our present and complete dependence upon that hand of God. And then let us learn some useful lessons from the whole subject of Divine Providence. I. The first Doctrine is THE PRESENT HAND OF GOD.
1. That there is a God you need not that I should prove—that God is here, and there, and everywhere, you also firmly believe. But, alas, it is one thing to believe this Truth of God and quite another thing to hold it in perpetual remembrance! We may write it down far more easily upon the tables of our creed than upon the tablets of our memory. In fact, this is one of the Doctrines which all men are constantly forgetting; and even the righteous may often check themselves because they begin to degenerate into the fools who say in their hearts, “There is no God here.” Strange is it that the name of the Lord should be written everywhere so clearly, that even the blind might see it; and yet man is so doubly dark, that he does not observe his God even where God is most manifest and visible! I think, my Brothers and Sisters, this forgetfulness of God is growing upon this perverse generation. Time was, in the old Puritan days, when every shower of rain was seen to come from Heaven, when every ray of sunshine was blessed, and God was thanked for having given fair weather to ingather the fruits of the harvest. Then, men talked of God as doing everything! But in our days where is our God? We have the laws of matter. Alas, alas, that names with little meaning should have destroyed our memory of the Eternal One! We talk now of phenomena, and of the chains of event, as if all things happened by machinery—as if the world were a huge clock which had been wound up in eternity, and continued to work without a present God! No, not only our philosophers, but even our poets rant in the same way; they sing of the works of Nature. But who is that fair goddess, Nature? Is she a heathen deity, or what? Do we not act as if we were ashamed of our God, or as if His name had become obsolete?