The blessedness of returning to God.
Zophar draws a beautiful picture of the joys and blessings of restoration to God, and, though its implied background must have spoilt it for Job by suggesting that the patriarch was a great sinner needing repentance, in itself the picture is true and helpful.
I. THE PROCESS OF RETURNING TO GOD.
1. By a right condition of the heart. The heart is first to be set right. We can only return to God with our heart. The heart wandered; the heart must come back. Going to church is not necessarily going to Cod. Beginning to attempt good works is not always entering the kingdom of heaven. We must begin with inward and deeper things.
2. By a personal approach to God. The hands are to be stretched out to him. This is the posture of a suppliant. It is the attitude of prayer, but it signifies more than the offering of a petition; it suggests that the helpless man is stretching out to God for deliverance, that the penitent child is trying to get near to his Father. We cannot be saved while we remain at a distance from God as our sin and ruin consist in our departure from God, so our restoration is accomplished in our personal return to him.
3. By a repentant renunciation of sin. Sin must no longer dwell in our tabernacles. We cannot recover God while we retain sin. The repentance must not only consist in confession and sorrow. The sin itself must be cast off. Until we are willing to do this in heart and life no restoration is possible. It was wrong and unfair of Zophar to assume that Job needed to come to God as a penitent, for the suffering man had done this long before his troubles, and he was already a redeemed and honoured servant of God. But till we have thus actively repented we cannot be restored. Zophar's principle applies to all who have not yet forsaken their sins.
II. THE HAPPY RESULTS OF THUS RETURNING. Zophar must be blamed for the narrowness, the unspirituality, and the conventionalism of his picture. Restoration to God brings higher blessings than Zophar dreamed of naming, and, on the other hand, it does not always bring the swift and visible rewards which he portrayed with sympathetic eloquence. Yet we may gather some hints of the blessings of restoration even from the partial lights of his picture.
1. Freedom from guilt. The restored penitent will "lift up" his "face without spot." The old stain has gone. Confidence takes the place of the shame of sin.
2. Fearless steadfastness. "Yea, thou shalt be steadfast, and shalt not fear." An evil conscience is timorous. The cure of sin brings strength and stability.
3. Forgetfulness of the sad past. It will go like the waters of the winter torrent, that disappear and leave their stony course dry in the summer heat. The sorrow seems to be eternal while we have it. But not only is time a healer; forgiveness and restoration hasten the process.
4. A bright reputation. This was Job's old possession, but he seemed to his friends to have lost it. Sin tarnishes a good character. But forgiveness and restoration prepare for a new Christian character. The darkness gives place to bright daylight.
5. Perfect security. The restored man can lie down in peace, fearing nothing, for God is with him.—W.F.A.