There is no saint too high, too mature, too advance to fall into serious troubles. Neither is there any saint too weak to recover, who cannot prove the grace of God. But as soon we leave off looking to him, we fall. We are so fleshly. Our tendency is to use someone else as a crutch, and to depend too much on even good people – creating a spiritual hero – instead of the Lord, when fellow believers are not able to bear such a burden. We are almost inviting devil to bring that person down in order to hurt you. We must not build up any believer too much in our minds. We all need to watch ourselves and not to think we cannot fall into small or large problems. God may even take away your grace for a while if he sees you swaggering. Job doesn’t deny the Lord, but he has a whole lot of bad responses short of this. No one is too mature to fall. In fact when a believer thinks he is mature and strong, he is in danger of falling.
Calvin makes the following comments: ‘Here we need to consider what the state of a poor man is when God scourges him and makes him feel such misery that it seems to him that God is against him. There is no power in men that can hold out when in this situation. It is true that Job was never utterly overthrown so that he had no patience at all, and yet it was not without much difficulty that he gathered his wits and found some comfort. We have to see in what anguish mortal man is, when God shows himself as his adversary. It is very profitable for us to bear this lesson in mind because we are too negligent, yes, and there are too few who think about this kind of temptation. For when we are spoken to about suffering any misery or about being patient in adversity, we become fleshly and rise no higher than our sensuality is able to comprehend: that is to say, that we may endure diseases, we may face some troubles, and this or that may happen to us. But the greatest trouble of all which completely overwhelms men is when God presses them and makes them to feel his wrath, as if he was utterly against them and said, “Why have you offended me so?” When therefore God shows himself to be so against men, it is a temptation which passes all that we may ever endure in our body’ (Calvin – English updated).
‘It is true that sometimes the same thing happens to reprobates also. But when careful consideration is made, it is a special grace which God gives to his own children when he pierces them through and makes them feel his vengeance in their hearts so that they are almost swallowed up by it, and their hearts are consumed by it. This will be very hard for us, and we will flee from it if we can, but by this God works for our good, and it is much better that we should experience this than that we should be blockheaded to push away all the lessons which he sends us when he scourges us for our sins to make us feel how terrible a thing it is to have him against us. See what profit we should gain by such afflictions, knowing that God intends to humble us, in order that we should not be like scorners who do nothing but mock at his judgements’(Calvin – English updated).
Why does Scripture record these things about Job? Not to give us the impression that he is a man full of misery, a pathetic believer. No, here is a man of stature. But if weakness is found in him, what about us? This is not said to train us to think ill of Job, or to despise him. The Bible often does this: it exposes the weakness of the judges and of believers such as King David, and yet they are commended in the New Testament. It does this because the same sins are found in us, and we are shown what we are capable of through other believers.