1^ST CATEGORY NT

QUESTION 118. ON JOB. — How great, my dear brothers, is the love of Almighty God for mankind; when it is well understood it serves to lead men into the kingdom of heaven; for want of understanding it, on the contrary, we go down into the underworld. God wants His graces to be pleasing and fruitful to us; he wants us to find our advantage and to satisfy his desire to have mercy. It is therefore because of his goodness and that will that he has all men saved that he has given us an example of perfect justice in the person of his servant Job, as you are taught by the reading we have just done. By imitating this example we will be freed from evil, and we will be able to attain the highest good, and not only be delivered from punishment, but obtain eternal rewards. How admirable is this holy patriarch Job, who even before the written law, shows in his works an accomplished example of the observance of the law, and who, without having been to the school of any master, under the inspiration of nature in which God has engraved the first principles of justice, has preserved for his Creator a religion full of devotion and obedience. What praises is he not worthy, and by what words can we celebrate the works of this man, of whom we cannot find the like, neither before nor after the law? A man can walk in his footsteps, but he cannot enter into comparison with him, nor can it be said that he is like him, for he did not open the way this way first, he only follows the one who preceded it. The holy man Job, on the contrary, has shown himself such without ever having seen, having never read anything of the kind; he did not imitate the conduct of others; it is he, on the contrary, who becomes their model and gives them the example of those admissible actions in which God Himself finds his complaisance. So the Lord himself gave him this glorious testimony: "Have you noticed my servant Job," he said to Satan? “that there is not a servant of God like him on the earth. (Job 1:8.) Who could have deserved the extraordinary privilege that the Lord bore witness to him, except he who did not imitate the example of another, but who walked first in the way he entered? Then we conclude that he worshiped God in truth. There is no semblance of truth as such in the one who has not been preceded by no one in the way he walks. Any man who wants to pretend the fact in things where he is only imitator. And yet what remains to be said is far superior to these first merits. In these virtues so praiseworthy, we do not see the trials of tribulations, but a soul inviolably attached to the service of God, and a loyalty to any test in the observance of his law. The tempter did not find that the measure was full enough to obtain the crown which rewards the merits; he therefore asked God to subject Job's virtue to various temptations, to enslave him and embarrass him in the bonds of misfortune and drag him beyond the bounds. As no man can bear the weight of all the torments together, the guilty are subjected to separate tortures to extract from them the confession of their crimes. God therefore allowed the tempter to destroy all that belonged to his servant, and to destroy everything to his children. The devil hoped that if Job bore the loss of his oxen without complaining, he would not bear the loss of his flocks of sheep, or at least the loss of his camels, of his servants, of all his riches; or, finally, that if he had a soul large enough and a religion so pure as not to succumb to these calamities, his soul would be overcome by paternal tenderness and broken heart when he learned that all his children had died as victims by the same disaster. But as before even the proclamation of the written law, he carried the law engraved in his heart, none of these flames, none of these losses did not weaken the deep feeling of religion which he professed for God, and he thus gave to all men the example of loving God with all their heart above all things. What glory, then, is not he who, before the law, observed the law faithfully, and who, before this law was given to men, taught them not by his words, but by his actions, how they should observe him? Now the tempter pushed his boldness so far as not to find sufficient for the glory of this just man, so many misfortunes united; he therefore wished to subject him to a more terrible trial, which he knew to be above the forces of man; he asked God again that he allowed him to strike Job with a frightful ulcer from head to foot. (Job 2:5) God allowed him; but as this spirit of malice must not be trusted, he commanded him to respect Job's soul, and not to use violence against him whose reason he could not overcome. No sooner had he received this power than by a more violent excess of cruelty he struck this just man with a horrible disease, so that his whole body was not a wound, which could never have been borne another than Job, who won a complete victory over Satan. As this cruelty of the devil could not snatch from this holy man the slightest murmur against God, Satan remembered the trick he had used formerly to deceive Adam; he tried to shake Job's loyalty with his wife, for one is generally more accessible to the seductions that come from within. But none of these means succeeds in this spirit of boldness; he found there only a new and shameful defeat; but the servant of God alone remained steadfast, but he kept a school of virtue. In this end of all evils, he did not content himself with persevering in the fear of God, but he severely reproved his wife, who wished to inspire him with contrary sentiments, and showed him that we must bear with courage all the events which only arrive by God's permission. It was a double punishment for Satan who was thus deceived in his predictions; he could not shake Job's loyalty as he wished, and his envy only led him to teach others what the devil did not want him to know himself. Indeed, this story fully teaches us how much temptation is useful to the servants of God, and fatal to the devil. While he hopes to be able to harm them, he makes the faith more brilliant, and the example of one persecuted by him becomes for many an eloquent exhortation to virtue. The protection of God, who surrounds the righteous in the midst of his trials, gives him a great number of imitators. The devil loses by wanting to win. Always his fury is harmful to him. He persecutes the righteous to make them lose their crown, and he only makes them more fortifications. Envy excites him against the holy man Job, and he only doubled his reward in heaven and on earth. God more than ever filled Job with all good things, and gave him a place in heaven by the Savior. Thus all these trials turn to the glory of the saints and to the punishment of the devil.