JOB 7

11 Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

12 Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?

The misery of being the subject of evil for ever is forcibly expressed by Job. When reduced to the deepest distress, he laments, saying,

13 When I say, My bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint;

14 Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions:

Extreme trauma and delusion often accompany serious physical malady

15 So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death rather than my life.

16 I loathe it; I would not live alway: let me alone; for my days are vanity.

But if Adam had eaten of the tree of life when reduced to such misery as this, he would have sought death, but it would have fled from him. He would have found no deliverance. This, however, would not have been the worst of it. He would have involved all his posterity in the same interminable calamity.

The earth would at length have become crowded with undying generations of sensual and devilish men, who, if any virtue should survive, would afflict it a hundred fold.

Elpis Israel 1.5.

Most men of capacity are liable to feel as Job said:

"I would not live always:"

for the reason that they experience the truth of what Solomon said, that "all is vanity and vexation of spirit." They find life a burden and a weariness in its unrealised aspirations, and in the prevalent abortiveness of the highest capacities in the overwhelming mass of the population. The constant pressure of care, the constant friction of endurance, the constant recurrence of inevitable and countless disappointments in the highest range of desire towards God and man.

The perpetual aimless marchings and countermarchings of life, bring at last a sense of futility that finds comfort in the thought that there are bounds to the individual experience of vanity, that the horizon is shortened ahead; that death awaits to administer a calm that will bear no ruffle.

This would be a poor comfort apart from the other fact that we have to look at. It would be a demoralising submission to the grim inevitable, which is about all there is in the lustreless philosophy of the natural man.

It is considered the highest attainment of virtue in one of the systems of the wise of this world-the system of Brahma, I think it is-when a man reaches the point of contemplating with comfort his absorption into the indistinguishable 'All' at death.

This is nothing more nor less than the weariness of the corruptible resigning a man to extinction. What else can be expected where the purpose of God to emancipate us from the corruptible is not known or believed? It is this purpose that gives death its greatest comfort to those who in life are but waiting

"All the days of their appointed time."

Seasons 2.14.