"And the Lord
turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for
his friends: and the Lord gave Job twice as much as he
had before" (Job 42:10).
There is a very striking
sequence about the arrangement of many of the Books in
the Bible; though chronologically it is all wrong to take
the order: Nehemiah, Esther, Job; spiritually it is all
right. Each of these books centres around, or emphasizes
at least, this matter of intercession. Nehemiah is the
work of prayer. Prayer is everywhere in Nehemiah; prayer
at all times, long prayers, short prayers, but it is all
prayer with the work, and work with the prayer. "In
everything by prayer and supplication" (Philippians
4:6) - I think that is Nehemiah. In Esther we strike a
deeper note: it is the prayer of love, sacrificial love,
in the one great moment of intercession of Esther's life.
And in the case of Job I think we go deeper still,
including, of course, those other two. Here we have not
somebody who is marked by what they do so much as
somebody whose doing comes out of what they are, the life
of prayer.
What Job went through!
This verse seems to me a kind of peak and climax of his
experience, as well as a turning point for him
personally. He prayed for his friends. What a prayer!
What a need! And what a man to pray it! We must not
regard prayer as one of those lesser activities of life.
It seems with Job that this is the culmination of all his
life. Now he can pray! You may say: 'Now he is rich.'
That is true. 'Now he is prosperous.' That is true. But I
would say, when we have got through to chapter 42: Now
he can pray. Not that he had not prayed before, but
something had been done in the man himself which gave a
quality to his prayer. We remember that in the case of
our Lord Jesus the fruit of His conflict with Satan, the
culmination of all His experience, is this very thing -
that now He lives to intercede. This is not just the fact
that we can pray, and the wonder that God answers prayer,
or that "more things are wrought by prayer than this
world dreams of", or that sort of thing; but
something far deeper. "He ever liveth to make
intercession" (Hebrews 7:25). How much we owe to His
praying! But how much His prayers owe to what He is! The
quality of the prayer comes from Him, of course, as the
Son of God, the perfect One; but also, as Hebrews tells
us, it comes out of a deep experience of discipline and
suffering which have made Him an able intercessor.
"The Lord turned
the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his
friends." You must put the 'friends' in inverted
commas. It is very easy to pray for your friends when
they are friends, but I think it is not straining this
story to say that when Job prayed, he was praying for his
enemies. I fail to see anything more that they could have
done to make life impossible for him than what they did.
The only thing they could have done was to leave him
alone, and he begged them to, but they would not. It was
not out of affection - that sort of feeling we have for
our friends that makes us want to pray for them. It was
the men who had caused him so much pain and grief, but
who so needed prayer. I wonder if we can see that! Here
are men: they know all about God. Some of the precious
things that are said about God in the Book of Job are
said, not by Job, but by his friends. Job's friends said
some of the passages you love. They were right, they knew
all about Him, and yet they were utterly different from
Him - hard, censorious, ungracious. That is a challenge
to us. You may know all about God, but be very unlike
Him.
It is very interesting
that Job's experiences were taken by the Lord to bring to
the surface and disclose, not only his own state and
need, but the state and need of his friends. How much may
circle round your experience, and mine, for other people
as well as for us! It was all coming to the surface; not
only what Job was, but what they were, and it was how
harsh and critical and unkind they were to him
personally. I may be wrong, but I always feel that when
Job began to curse his day, that was really caused by his
friends. When all the sufferings came, he blessed the
Lord and was patient. But these men came to commiserate
with him, and for seven days they sat there and did not
say anything; but seven days of a critical atmosphere,
seven days of eyes upon you, and you know what they are
thinking. It was too much for Job, and it is often too
much for us. And then they began to open their mouths,
and the second phase of their so-called friendliness came
in. What a painful experience it was for Job to have the
barbed arrows of their unjust interpretation of his
experience, their wrong judgments, all thrust into his
quivering, suffering flesh. They were the people
that needed prayer.
You do not think of them
like that. You think they need something else, but they
need prayer. When God revealed Himself, not only was Job
abashed, but these men were stricken. It is a new light
upon the harsh, hard, critical people that make life more
painful than it is. It is true that when Job saw
everything in the light of God's presence, he saw
himself, but he also saw the need of those poor men. They
needed prayer. Well, they were new men in that sense;
but what a new man Job was when he prayed for them.
New
Power in Prayer
As we have said, he
already, before these experiences, served in a priestly
capacity. You read about it in the first chapter. He
interceded for his family. Job could pray, and he did
pray, but this is a new Job, and there is new power in
his prayer. What is there that is new about it?
(a) A
New Sense of Sin
First of all, strangely
enough, there is a new sense of sin. You would not think
that that would make you pray better, but that is just
what is needed. According to God, Job had said the things
that were right; but Job, according to Elihu (and he
seems to have spoken for God) was the man who justified
himself instead of God. Job was the man who said:
"My righteousness I hold fast" (Job 27:6). He
was self-righteous, and it was to disclose that fact that
the devil was allowed to do what he did to him.
Self-righteousness is a great hindrance to prayer. So the
Lord brought Job to the place where every shred of
self-opinion was utterly forsaken and repudiated. He had
a new sense of sin.
You know how the Letter
to the Romans makes the discrimination between sins and
sin, and it was something like that that was borne home
upon Job's heart. His friends were all the time saying:
'You must have committed sins'; and Job said: 'I have
not!' But they said: 'You must have done', and he
maintained: 'I have not'. When he saw God he did not
remember, after all, certain sins that he had committed.
Something much deeper came upon him - a conviction that,
though he could face his fellow men and hold fast his
integrity, when he came into the presence of the Lord it
was not so much that he had committed sins, but he was a
sinner; his very being was unclean before God.
If Job's friends had
prayed for him instead of talking to him, they might have
helped a little bit, but I expect they would have prayed
very much as they talked: 'Now, Job must have done this.
Show him he has done it.' If Job had been on that level -
and he might have been! - when the Lord said, 'Pray for
your friends', he would have fallen into exactly the same
trap. 'Lord, so-and-so said this, and Bildad said that,
and someone else something else.' But he came into a
realm where he was not looking at particular faults of
people, but was overwhelmed with the sense of the
holiness of God, and the deep, deep unholiness of man.
"I abhor myself."
'Well,' you say, 'the
man that is down in the dust abhorring himself will not
be much good for prayer.' He is the man! We are not much
good for prayer because we are not down. This sense of
personal unworthiness and sin that humbles us before God,
if it does its work in us, brings us to a place where we
are able to pray as we never could when we were strong
and self-confident. You notice that Job did not offer
himself to pray for them. God said to Job: 'Now, you are
the man to pray.' 'What me, Lord? But I am horrible! I
lay my hand on my mouth, I am unclean, I am a sinner, I
abhor myself.' The Lord said: 'You are the one to pray,
for you are the only one that can pray the kind of prayer
that I mean.'
(b) A
New Understanding of Suffering
A new understanding of
suffering. Job now knows, and we need to know, what God
means by suffering. "My servant, Job." How
these men must have opened their mouths and been
surprised! The Lord says - and you notice how often He
says it - "My servant, Job". If He had said:
'The man who used to be My servant', they could have
understood, but He says: 'He is My servant.' But what has
he been doing? He has been suffering. Is that all? Yes,
suffering. He suffered under the hand of God, suffered in
the will of God, and in that way he has been serving God.
He was God's servant before. God said to Satan:
"Hast thou considered My servant Job?" But
there is a sense, it seems to me, in which the end of
this book just concentrates on the fact that God says:
'This is the man that is serving. Not these preachers who
are going around telling people what is right and what is
wrong, what they ought to do, and all the theories of
God's dealings with men, but the man who has been through
the fire. He has been serving Me.' Everybody despised
him. 'He used to be a servant of God, but look at him
now, stripped of everything! He has nothing at all.' The
children mock him, and everybody despises him. God says:
"My servant", and the very people that mocked
him and despised him had cause to thank God from the
bottom of their hearts that Job was God's servant, for it
would have been a bad day for them if he had not been.
Then Job found much more
about suffering: how suffering brings you close to the
Lord if it is taken in the right spirit. How much nearer
to God Job was, and how much nearer to Job God was at the
end of the book! And all he had done was to suffer.
Suffering under God's hand brought that nearness, and it
made Job a different man. That was one of the things
Elihu said: "Who is a teacher like unto Him?"
(36:22). God had been teaching Job, and it is out of such
a background that he could pray.
(c) A
New Conception of God
But I think that most of
all it was out of a new conception of God that Job prayed
like this. That was the value of his experience. He had
known God before, and he had prayed before, but now he
had a new conception of God altogether. He had been apt
to treat God on equal terms. That comes out more than
once, and he is charged with it - with considering God as
though He were a man instead of realizing the utter
transcendence of the Lord: "Behold, I will answer
thee, in this thou art not just; for God is greater than
man" (33:12). You would not think that a man like
Job needed to be told that, but he did. The Lord took him
and said: 'Now, Job, you have got on wrong terms with Me.
I want intimacy, yes, but not familiarity.' And that is
the danger with us all. We mistake familiarity for
intimacy. So the Lord suddenly turns on Job and says:
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the
earth?" (38:4). That is a question. But Job had been
treating God as if he had been there. That is one of the
dangers. I know prayer has its realms - realms of
executive prayer, realms of fellowship with God, but they
are dangerous realms unless we realize, and have brought
home to us in ever fresh power, how transcendent God is.
This is the man who prayed: the man who sees how great
God is.
When he used to pray he
treated God as though he were more or less equal, telling
Him what He had done and what He ought to do. Now he can
only bow in utter worship and wonder. That is the kind of
man who can pray. He knows how omnipotent God is. "I
know," he says at the end, "that Thou canst do
all things" (42:2). In a sense, he is answering all
his own questions. It seems to me as though God
deliberately baffled Job. You see, if you know everything
that God is doing, somehow it has a bad effect on you. So
God took hold of His choicest servant and took him
through experiences that so baffled and perplexed him
that in the end he did not know anything. "Oh that I
knew..." (23:3). His friends, of course, knew it all
- or thought they did. Poor Job says: 'I do not know; oh,
that I did know!' And God has done that on purpose
because Job, by all this, comes to realize the supreme
power and wisdom of God.
If we knew all about
Him, He would not be any greater than ourselves. But we
see just the hem of His garment, the fringes of His ways,
and the vast realms of His Divine counsels and His
sovereign power we only glimpse here and there, and we
say: 'How wonderful the Lord is! I do not know what He is
doing, but I know He can do everything; I do not know why
He is doing it this way, but I am sure He knows.' That is
the man who can pray, the man with a new sense of God in
all His greatness, His transcendence, His power, and,
above all, His grace.
(d) A New
Understanding of the Grace of God
I suppose we are apt to
think of Job as reinstated, for he has everything back
and more than he ever had, and feeling rather good and
magnanimous, so he says to his friends: 'Do not say
anything more about it.' Nothing of the sort! Job had
nothing at this stage. This was the turning point. He was
still as stripped, as poor, as low as ever he had been.
What had he got, then, that made him pray, and able to
pray like this? He had a new understanding of the grace
of God, and that is the richest thing you can have. He
knew how gracious God is. He could not have prayed for
his friends properly if he had not known. He knew how
gracious God is in terms of personal experience. God was
gracious to him, and God had been merciful to him. Oh,
the things that he had said and thought about God, and
all the time love was planning and grace was being poured
out upon him, so out of a new heart-overflowing sense of
the wonderful grace of God, he could pray.
All this is surely for
us, too, for if, as a people, we feel we have one thing
more than another which is our essential ministry, surely
it is prayer. The Lord calls us to prayer again and
again. Perhaps the Lord is dealing with us so that we can
pray. That is what He did with Job - and see what
happened when Job prayed! His friends were delivered from
their danger and their need, and the prayer was answered.
But the whole point of the verse is, not that the prayer
was answered, but that Job came into new fullness because
he prayed. "The Lord turned the captivity of Job,
when he prayed for his friends." So often we feel
that if we could come out and be strong and prosperous,
we could pray. But the Lord says: 'If you will pray, I
will bring you out.' It is not, of course, a sort of
catch arrangement that we make with the Lord - 'I will
not pray for myself. I will pray for others and then You
will help me.' It was not that. Job, I am sure, was not
thinking of himself, but, out of this new sense of God,
and of sin, and of the command to pray for these poor
needy men who had been so hard to him, but who, he now
realized, were in such a parlous state themselves, he
prayed for them. We must be content to pray for the
Lord's will far beyond our own interests and our own
borders. We must make our supreme prayer for the needy
among the Lord's people and among mankind everywhere. Let
Him fit us in where He will to the meeting of that need,
but our first thing is to pray for the need.
That is just what Job
did. He did not say: 'Make me a great man again so that I
can serve You.' He said: 'Lord, have mercy upon these
men, who ought to be Thy servants, but who are in need
and have been revealed in all the nakedness of their
spurious profession of spirituality. Have mercy upon
them!' When Job began to pray for them like that the Lord
gave him double.
Some of us may be
seeking fullness and not finding it because we are
critical of the Lord's people, because we are watching,
because we have summed them up, because, like Job's
friends, we can tell them where they are wrong. Perhaps
we do not dare to, but we could if we had the chance. We
are finding our emptiness, our leanness along that line,
and we shall! Job found his fullness when, out of a deep
sense of the grace of God, he prayed for his friends.
May the Lord make us
those who have such an experience with Him that we are
constituted able intercessors! Then we shall find our
fullness; the Lord will give us double.
Harry Foster