Job 12:25

REFLECTIONS

READER! you and I shall go over this sweet and interesting book of Job to very little good, if we do not, as we read it, look up for the teaching of the HOLY GHOST, and seek from it to search our own interest in what we meet with in the several Chapter s. Our own life is the most important of all lives to be well versed in: and depend upon it, what we meet with in the history of Job and his friends, may, in numberless occasions, under the SPIRIT'S teaching, be made profitable to our own. It was a blessed command the man of GOD had in commission to give the church, when he said, 'thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy GOD led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no'. Under this idea, is there nothing in what we have already reviewed of Job's history, applicable to ourselves? is not Satan accusing us as he did Job? Hath our gracious GOD permitted him to harass us with his devices? Have we the unkindness of friends, or the malice of open enemies, to grapple with also? Hath the LORD brought us under any bereaving providences; any bodily or spiritual afflictions? How are we exercised on any of these occasions! Pause, Reader! look into your own heart, as I pray GOD to search mine. How are we dealing with GOD; and how is the LORD dealing with us? Oh! Sir, depend upon it, that is ever a sweet mercy, however harsh it may at first seem, which, in the close, brings the soul to JESUS. The medicine we take may be nauseous, but its effect is salutary. Job was stripped of all his earthly comforts: but Job lost not his GOD. This brought him up. Let our bodies be ever so poor, ever so sickly, ever so sore, yet, if we have JESUS formed in our souls, the hope of glory, here is enough to sing Hallelujah in the whole. And if the trials the LORD sends come with a commission to lead to JESUS, surely love was at the bottom, and by and by our praises will be called forth in acknowledgment. LORD, I would say for myself and Reader, give us both grace to be ever on the lookout, for the LORD'S manifestations to us, and our proper and wise use of them; and then we shall assuredly find that at evening time it will be light. Mercy and goodness have been following us all the days of our life, until we come to dwell in the house of our GOD forever.