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Job enlarges on the idea of his search for God and the efforts that he has vainly made to find him. God is still invisible; searching has not found him.

I. THE PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF SEEING GOD. There is more to be said for modern agnosticism than for eighteenth-century deism. Pure rationalism will not find God. Physical science cannot discover him. The animal is dissected, the metal is melted in the crucible, but the analysis reveals not Divinity. We sweep the heavens with the telescope, and can see no Deity enthroned above the stars. But we are very foolish if we expect to find God in any of these ways. He is neither seen by the bodily eye nor discovered by the scientific faculty. Science, indeed, points to causation, and reveals order and thought; but she does not say how these things came to be. Natural theology prepares the way for the revelation of God; or, if it may be said that it is a revelation of God, still this comes only in such a large and confusing idea that we cannot find in it what we need - the revelation of our Father in heaven.

II. THE MORAL DIFFICULTY OF SEEING GOD. Job's search was not in regions of science. He looked abroad on the great world, and he probed into the deep musings of his own heart, but not as a philosopher seeking for a scientific explanation of the universe. It was his deep distress that drove him to God. He missed God in life, in the providential control of human affairs. It is not always easy to see God in this strangely confused human world, where so many things go wrong, and where so little seems to be done to keep them right. In his perplexity and distress man cries out, "Where is God? If there is indeed a God, why does he not declare himself? why does he not put forth his hand and rectify the world that so greatly needs him?" Whatever may be the theoretical scepticism that gathers round problems of science and philosophy, the moral doubt that springs from the experience of injustice and misery is much more keenly felt.

III. THE SPIRITUAL CAPACITY TO SEE GOD. We cannot find him by means of our philosophy; we miss him in the dark struggles of man's world of action and suffering. But why? Because we are looking for him in wrong directions. The true vision of God is only to be seen by means of spiritual fellowship with him. Meanwhile, although this is hard to obtain, we may console ourselves with the know]edge that if he does indeed exist, his being does not become shadowy and unreal just because we do not see him. It is desirable that we should have a more intimate acquaintance with our Father, but even before we have attained to this, even while we are blundering and stumbling in the darkness, God is truly existing, and is ruling over all. Our ignorance does not limit God's being, our blindness does not cripple his activity. We cannot see him; we find it hard to trace his purposes among the tangled threads of life; all looks dark and aimless. Yet God is God, and therefore he will not desert his creatures.

"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world."

(Browning.) W.F.A.

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KJV: Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him:

WEB: "If I go east, he is not there; if west, I can't find him;