Earth Heaven's Theatre

      "Ye have heard," says the Apostle James, "of the patience of Job" (Jas.v.11), which remains, therefore, for the New Testament as for the Old, our supreme model in this particular grace; and in this ideal of lovely endurance, the one thing we do not know in all our experience of suffering - its clue, its key - is given to us once and for ever. "The sons of God came to present themselves before God, and Satan came also among them" (Job i. 6).  Earthly sorrow is a heavenly problem, and vastly more is at stake than our perfecting.  It is not merely that Satan, in sheer maliciousness, springs as a lion or a panther does on the noble stag of the forest, fastening on the loveliest reputations and dragging them down, wounded, into the dust: it is that, but much more.  God's wisdom, God's grace, God's love, God's power, in heaven itself - in all the wide universe-are being proved, or disproved, on earth: earth is the chemical laboratory in which the seething, hissing tests are proving, or disproving God, and the grace of God, and the wisdom of God, and the goodness of God.  The mystery of sorrow is unraveled here for the first time in the history of mankind: probably the oldest book in the Bible, possibly the oldest in the world, in it the Most High discloses, at once and for all ages, the secret of godly grief.

       For observe carefully that the whole train of Job's calamities is fired, not, primarily by the malice of Satan, but by the deliberate challenge of Jehovah. "Hast thou considered my servant job" - not casually, but pondering his character, and staying power - "a perfect and an upright man?" Satan counters with a practical challenge: - "Touch all that he hath -strip him completely, plunge him into absolute poverty - "and he will curse thee to thy face." In the Devil's utterances there is always more than meets the ear, and  in God's a wisdom no man can fathom.  Now this keen, acute cynicism of Satan has just enough truth in it to make it the acid test requisite for solving the problem.  Every outwardly good deed, every outwardly good life, admits of a twofold explanation, until the inside facts are known; and Satan is within his right in insisting that only the acts of the man himself, under severe testing, can really prove exactly what he is. Goodness is always something of a mystery to evil.  Love for God-simple, disinterested love for God - Satan doubts if it ever happens; and in the case of Job's wife, the Evil Spirit proves right. "Curse God," she said - the very word Satan had predicted for a bankrupt servant of God - and die" (Job ii. 9). So God accepts Satan's challenge. If Job's religion is hollow, all religion is hollow; for God Himself had said, there is none like him in the earth; and therefore if Job fails, grace fails, and God is, on earth, a bankrupt.  

      Job now reaches the meaning of his name - "persecuted - as one in whom the mystery of sorrow, among the people of God, was to find its eternal solution.  Blow after blow falls in rapid succession, so as to stun and overwhelm the victim.  While he was yet speaking; while he was yet speaking; while he was yet speaking: sorrows tread on each other's heels, until Job, striped of wealth, of authority, of home, finds himself in a ruin universal and (humanly) irreparable. After the first evil tidings, Job's instinct would be to exclaim "Thank God for what is left!" but when even his children are gone - all arrived at maturity, all prosperous and happy, all cut off without a moment's warning - Job is in the dust.  As a prominent English Christian said some years ago though without the perfection of Job: -"A Satanic tornado has struck me, and striped me of all but my faith in God." And the crowning sorrow and supreme mystery of Job must have been that in some at least of his awful devastations - the hurricane across the manless desert, and "the fire of God fallen from heaven" - it appeared undeniable that there was an alliance of God with Satan, a Divine compact with malignant, Satanic wickedness and cruelty.  

      Now the crisis has come.  Earth is heaven's theatre; an expression which Paul actually uses; " we [apostles] are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men " (i.  Cor iv. 9); and the angelic hosts, tier over tier-Satan's malignant eye in the midst-must have watched, as men would watch a chemical experiment on which hung the destiny of an empire.  Now or never goodness, supremely tested, must break or triumph: now or never it must be proved whether an ordinary man - not God incarnate - can stand in the face of all Hell.  This is a problem for Angels.  "To the intent that now unto THE PRINCIPALITIES AND POWERS IN THE HEAVENLY PLACES might be made known through the church the manifold" - the enormously complex - "wisdom of God" (Eph. iii. 10). Job, in absolute and utter ignorance of the heavenly drama, is crushed, as in a laboratory, utterly, unknowingly, to reveal whether or not grace is real, man sincere, God wise, salvation effectual.  "Which things angels desire" - bend eagerly forward for the purpose (Lange) to look into" (i.  Pet. i. 12): as young surgeons under training, bend over the patient in the operating theatre, so the suffering saint is watched by crowding angels.  Satan probably really expected-and with the wife he was right - to see Job clenching his fist heavenward and cursing God.

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