Continual Burnt Offering: Daily Meditations, March 26 (42:5-6)
“I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” — Job 42:5, 6.
“YE have heard of the patience of Job,” writes the Apostle James (James 5:11), “and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” That “end” was to give to Job such a realization of the greatness, the majesty, the power, and the goodness of God, that it would produce in His servant such a sense of his own nothingness as to bring him to repentance (Job 42:2-6). But it was the repentance of a saint, not of a sinner; for God’s children need to see their own good-for-nothingness as truly as the unregenerate. No matter how careful our walk or how consistent our behavior, we are ever to say with Paul, “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing” (Rom. 7:18). Hence it is that when God would write a book on repentance, He searches the world over, not for the worst, but for the best man He can find, and then He shows how He brought that good man to an end of himself.