Job 32:9
It is not only the old who are wise, or the elderly who understand justice.
Sermons
The Voice of Juvenile Self-ConfidenceR. Green Job 32:1-22














Elihu here utters a great and daring thought. He turns from the dogmas of the ancients to the present Divine inspiration; from the teaching of authority to the voice of truth in the heart of man.

I. THERE IS A DIVINE INSPIRATION OF MAN. Elihu affirms its existence. The old men had grown stiff in thought, worldly, and dim-sighted. If ever they had quivered beneath the touch of inspiration this was in bygone days, and they had forgotten the experience. But the young, enthusiastic Elihu is alive to spiritual influence. Here we are at the root of religion, which does not spring from man's worship of God, but from God's touching man.

II. THIS INSPIRATION IS FOR ALL MEN. Elihu is not thinking of the special and rare vision of the seer which Eliphaz had described as so awe-inspiring (Job 4:12-16). He is thinking of something more simple, more natural, and more common. God does not only teach us indirectly by means of prophets and intermediate messengers. He has not left himself without witness in the heart of man. Conscience is the voice of God in the soul. Reason in man is a spark from the Logos, the great Word and Reason of God. Whenever men read truth they are in contact with the ever-present Spirit of truth. We do not live in a God-deserted world, nor in one that is only visited at rare intervals by Divine influences. God is nearer to us than we suspect. Job has been crying out for God; Elihu shows that God is not far off'

III. THE COMMON INSPIRATION OF MAN IS SEEN IN VARIOUS FORMS. It does not make every man a prophet, much less does it always confer the gift of infallibility. In Bezaleel it was a faculty for artistic workmanship (Exodus 35:30-35). Samson found it a source of physical strength (Judges 13:25). God gives his Spirit in science, leading men to truth; in art, teaching what is beautiful, and helping men to discriminate between meretricious, hurtful art and true, fruitful art; in daily life, affording guidance in perplexity and strength in difficulty; in religion, not only under the Jewish and Christian dispensations, where indeed it is most gloriously developed, but in every truly religious life. God has not abandoned India, nor did he abandon Greece or Egypt. Even amidst the monstrous delusions and the gross corruptions of heathenism the still small voice of God may be detected. Whatever is good and true in the world is an inspiration of God.

IV. CHRISTIANITY DEEPENS AND QUICKENS THE INSPIRATION OF MAN. Joel predicted the time when God's Spirit should be poured out on all flesh (Joel 2:28), and St. Peter claimed that that time had come on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:16-18). St. Paul tells us that all Christians together constitute a temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 6:19). If the Spirit of God is felt in the world, much more must the gracious Divine presence be enjoyed in the Church. Every Christian is, indeed, an inspired man. He is not infallible. But he has a Guide to truth, a Comforter in distress, a Strength for service, and a Grace for holiness. - W.F.A.

But there is a spirit in man.
We can define "spirit" only by negations, but the negations are positive, inasmuch as it is the limitations and imperfections of matter that they deny. Spirit, though it uses material organs and implements, is distinct from them, their owner and master. Modern science derives man's parentage from what we have been accustomed to call the lower order of beings. I confess a strong preference for the genealogy whose two connecting links are, "which was the Son of Adam, which was the Son of God." Man has the same material conditions, surroundings, and necessities with his humbler fellow beings. But is there in man an immaterial, supra-material consciousness, in which he differs from the brutes, not in degree alone, but in kind, something into which: instinct could never grow, occupying a range of thought, knowledge, and aspiration which to the brute is and ever will be an unexplored region? This question we attempt to answer.

1. Note man's power of progress, as manifested both individually and collectively. The swallow builds as good a nest the first spring of his life as he will ever build. But man's antecedents and surroundings do not furnish the first elements for calculating his orbit, which may intersect the outermost circle of the material system to which he belongs, and stretch on unto the unmapped region beyond, as the comet wings its flight into depths of space remoter than the planet's round. Man, also, alone of all animals, grows collectively, and from generation to generation. Each generation of men mounts on the shoulders of that which preceded it. Facts are epitomised into principles! knowledge is condensed into general truths, and the acquisitions of a thousand years are carried by the child from the primary school. There is no physical peculiarity in man that can account for this power of progress. Is it ascribed to speech? The human hand cannot account for man's progress. Man's power of progress is due to causes wholly unconnected with his physical development, and with the possibility of material consciousness. We have no proof that other animals have any knowledge, except that which comes to them immediately through the senses. They evince no apprehension of principles, of multitudinous, comprehensive facts, of general truths. Man's superiority consists in his capacity for super-sensual ideas, and these cannot be elaborated by any conceivable material apparatus. Man with his mental vision sees a class or a law as distinctly as the eye discerns an individual object; and still further, by higher stages of abstraction and generalisation, he resolves clusters of classes into more comprehensive classes, fascicles of laws into single laws of a broader scope, till in every department he seizes upon some one unifying principle under which all the classes may be grouped, or to which all the laws may be referred. He then, from these principles, deduces inferences which the senses never could have discovered. And man's entire imaginative apparatus is super-sensual.

2. The phenomena of man's moral nature cannot be derived from his material organisation. Of all beings on the earth, man alone cognises the distinction between right and wrong. The first question in ethics, whether theoretical or practical, concerns the nature of moral distinctions — the essential difference between right and wrong. Material philosophers see the origin of this distinction in the differing sensations of pleasure and pain; and that conscience results solely from the observation of what is approved and what disapproved. But materialism cannot account for either a man's moral or a man's religious nature. We conclude that natural science cannot detach man's hold upon the ancestral tree which traces his parentage from God. In Jesus Christ Himself we find the strongest of all arguments against the theory of material evolution as applicable to the higher portion of man's nature.

(A. P. Peabody, D. D.)

Read text thus, "There is a spirit in man, and the in-spirit-ing of the Almighty giveth them understanding." The spirit in man is that special apartment of his nature which has been contrived and fitted for personal intercourse between him and God. The spirit in man is to the great inbreathing of God what the lungs are to the circumambient air. It is the element of our being that establishes in us religious possibilities. "There is a spirit in man," and like every other instinct of our being, it stands to us authoritatively, and lays its mandate upon us imperiously. We are religious by nature. It is just this faculty divinely wrought upon, and this string divinely played upon, that really composes the strength and tenacity of our religious convictions. The inspiration here has to do, in a purely general way, with God's own personal communication of Himself to us, and, at the spirit point of our being, imparting unto us the energies of His own wisdom, holiness, and power. It is not our concern to understand how this is done. The first office work of inspiration is to create in us fresh personal vigour and new spiritual animation. Character cannot be constructed. It cannot be put together. It needs first of all a principle that is animated, and one, therefore, that is animating. It was an impulse more glowing, determined, and passionate than anything we are possessed of naturally. We need nothing so much as a determining life force at the core of character, an impulse from out the very soul of God, that shall hold us in its warm, steady, and irresistible grip, and impel us with a momentum that has the very pressure of Jehovah in it. And all of this is a draft upon the Divine inspiration. This may seem to be what theologians call "regeneration." The new man, the new life, is only another name for character wrought out at the determining impulse of a Divine inspiration. What we need first of all is not to act like Christ, but to have exactly the same Divine Spirit working at the core of our lives that worked at the core of His, and then acts will take care of themselves. All true manliness grows around a core of divineness. Virtue is safe only when it is inspired. Another office work of inspiration is to create in us fresh and vivid perceptions of the Divine truth. We need as much inspiration to read the Bible as its authors needed to fit them to write it. No Christian creed is ever constructed. It is the form in which a man shapes his own experiences of the things of God, and of his own soul. As we go on to know the Lord, our creeds will change. Christian thinking will continue growing better, deeper, truer, so long as Christians, along the luminous path of God's self-revelation to them, continue getting into the deeper things of God and the closer intimacies of God. And further, the inspirations of the Almighty are suited to become to us qualification for all kinds of holy doing. We make toilsome work of being good, because we do not let the inspirations of God work in us: and we make irksome work of doing good because we do not let the inspirations of God work through us...Our common and comprehensive need is of the inspiration of the Almighty, the direct breathing into us of the breath of God, with all the wisdom, holiness, and power which such a Divine afflatus involves, that whether we speak, be it by word or act, we may speak as the oracles of God; and whether we minister, we may do it as of the ability which God giveth: that God in all things may be glorified through Christ Jesus.

(Charles H. Parkhurst, D. D.)

Professor Morse, the renowned electric telegraph inventor, was once asked, "Professor, when you were making your experiments yonder in your rooms in the university, did you ever come to a stand, not knowing what to do next?" "Oh yes; mere than once." "And at such times, what did you do next? I may answer you in confidence, sir," said the professor, "but it is a matter of which the public knows nothing. Whenever I could not see my way clearly, I prayed for more light." "And the light generally came?" "Yes. And I may tell you that when flattering honours came to me from America and Europe on account of the invention which bears my name, I never felt that I deserved them. I had made a valuable application of electricity, not because I was superior to other men, but solely because God, who meant it for mankind, must reveal it to someone, and was pleased to reveal it to me." The inventor's first message — "What hath God wrought" — intimated in no uncertain way the inspiration which gave his work longevity, and made it a light to the world.

The inherent excellence of our nature. Consider man —

1. As a rational being. How are we otherwise to account for that superiority which man has acquired over all the other inhabitants of this world? In the lowest conditions of human society there is always a marked preeminence in man over the other animals. In man there are at all times signs of a mind possessing in some degree a creative and inventive energy. The effects of this power in man are by no means small and insignificant. While he is yet remote from what we call civilisation, the native grandeur of the human mind shows itself in bold exertions of genius; and as he proceeds in his career, man constantly discovers new resources. What is this power? Is it not what the text declares it to be, "a spirit in man, the inspiration of the Almighty"? Going on the principles of natural reason, — what, indeed, is it that produces in our minds a belief of the existence of the supreme God, but the perception that the world which we inhabit bears strong indications of design and intelligence having been employed in its formation? Our connection with God is impressed on our minds by the very proofs which bring us a knowledge of His existence, and we could not know that there was such a Being unless we tried His works by the scale of our own reason.

2. The same great truth will appear if we consider man as a moral being. Other animals follow blindly the impulse of appetite. There is impressed on the mind of man a rule by which he judges himself, — a sense of right and wrong in conduct, by which he becomes conscious that he is the object either of love and esteem, or of contempt and hatred. Reflect on the very high dignity and importance of this part of our constitution; how much it elevates us above the other creatures; how close a connection it forms between us and the Almighty. How can we derive, except from God Himself, except from the spirit which He has breathed into man, any feeling of those excellencies, any love for, or any aspiration after that goodness which indisputably constitutes His own greatest attribute? Is not our relationship to the Divine nature apparent in this, that we alone, of all the creatures breathing upon earth, are capable of having any relish of those perfections which alone render God Himself the object of worship and love?

(J. Morehead, M. A.)

Man has not only received understanding from the inspiration of the Almighty, but he knows that it is so; and he is prompted by nature to lift up his thoughts to the contemplation of that great Being who conferred upon him so high a preeminence. This principle it is which distinguishes us from the lower animals, even more than our reason or our moral perceptions. He alone of all creatures thinks it not presumption to address himself to the unknown God. Wherever man exists, therefore, you will find religion. By collecting together all the follies of superstition, it has been attempted to show that the religion of man is rather a proof of the weakness than of the loftiness of his nature. It must be owned that the vices and follies of man have shown themselves as frequently in the midst of his religious sentiments as in any other part of his character. Yet the perversions of religion ought never to be treated in a light and careless strain; they are rather objects of pity. But even these superstitions prove that man is by nature a religious being. Man is a spirit, clouded and obscured, struggling with darkness, and fettered by sin, yet aiming at lofty things, and striving to regain some glimpses of the Divine form, which was accustomed to walk with man while yet in the garden of primeval innocence.

1. Let students pursue their inquiries with a becoming reverence for the nature to which they belong.

2. Value Christianity which has brought immortality to light.

(J. Morehead, M. A.)

Homilist.
There is a spirit in man — a rational, accountable, undying personality. This spirit has been called "the world within," and truly of all worlds it is the greatest and most wonderful, Like the outward world of nature, it has its own orbit, and its own revolutions, and its own centre. Souls create their own centres. The Bible everywhere teaches the distinction between the soul and matter. This world is the greatest world.

1. It is a world whose existence is complete in itself.

2. It is a world that has a self-multiplying power.

3. It is a world conscious of its own existence.

4. It is a world that can make use of the outward.

5. It is a world that can devoutly recognise its Maker.

6. It is a world which its Maker has made extraordinary efforts to restore.

7. It is a world that can shut out its Maker.Conclusion —

(1)Consider the sad moral state of this "world within."

(2)Profoundly study this world within.

(3)Earnestly cultivate this world within.

(Homilist.)

People
Barachel, Elihu, Job
Places
Uz
Topics
Abundant, Aged, Always, Discern, Elders, Full, Judgment, Justice, Multitude, Understand, Wise
Outline
1. Elihu is angry with Job and his three friends
6. Because wisdom comes not from age, he excuses the boldness of his youth
11. He reproves them for not satisfying Job
16. His zeal to speak

Dictionary of Bible Themes
Job 32:9

     5727   old age, attitudes

Job 32:6-9

     3050   Holy Spirit, wisdom
     5903   maturity, physical

Library
"For they that are after the Flesh do Mind,"
Rom. viii. s 5, 6.--"For they that are after the flesh do mind," &c. "For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." There are many differences among men in this world, that, as to outward appearance, are great and wide, and indeed they are so eagerly pursued, and seriously minded by men, as if they were great and momentous. You see what a strife and contention there is among men, how to be extracted out of the dregs of the multitude, and set a little higher
Hugh Binning—The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning

Whether Prophecy Pertains to Knowledge?
Objection 1: It would seem that prophecy does not pertain to knowledge. For it is written (Ecclus. 48:14) that after death the body of Eliseus prophesied, and further on (Ecclus. 49:18) it is said of Joseph that "his bones were visited, and after death they prophesied." Now no knowledge remains in the body or in the bones after death. Therefore prophecy does not pertain to knowledge. Objection 2: Further, it is written (1 Cor. 14:3): "He that prophesieth, speaketh to men unto edification." Now speech
Saint Thomas Aquinas—Summa Theologica

The Sinner Arraigned and Convicted.
1. Conviction of guilt necessary.--2. A charge of rebellion against God advanced.--3. Where it is shown--that all men are born under God's law.--4. That no man hath perfectly kept it.--5. An appeal to the reader's conscience on this head, that he hath not.--6. That to have broken it, is an evil inexpressibly great.--7. Illustrated by a more particular view of the aggravations of this guilt, arising--from knowledge.--8. From divine favors received.--9. From convictions of conscience overborne.--10.
Philip Doddridge—The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul

Its Meaning
Deliverance from the condemning sentence of the Divine Law is the fundamental blessing in Divine salvation: so long as we continue under the curse, we can neither be holy nor happy. But as to the precise nature of that deliverance, as to exactly what it consists of, as to the ground on which it is obtained, and as to the means whereby it is secured, much confusion now obtains. Most of the errors which have been prevalent on this subject arose from the lack of a clear view of the thing itself, and
Arthur W. Pink—The Doctrine of Justification

Concerning Salutations and Recreations, &C.
Concerning Salutations and Recreations, &c. [1273] Seeing the chief end of all religion is to redeem men from the spirit and vain conversation of this world and to lead into inward communion with God, before whom if we fear always we are accounted happy; therefore all the vain customs and habits thereof, both in word and deed, are to be rejected and forsaken by those who come to this fear; such as taking off the hat to a man, the bowings and cringings of the body, and such other salutations of that
Robert Barclay—Theses Theologicae and An Apology for the True Christian Divinity

Tit. 2:06 Thoughts for Young Men
WHEN St. Paul wrote his Epistle to Titus about his duty as a minister, he mentioned young men as a class requiring peculiar attention. After speaking of aged men and aged women, and young women, he adds this pithy advice, "Young men likewise exhort to be sober-minded" (Tit. 2:6). I am going to follow the Apostle's advice. I propose to offer a few words of friendly exhortation to young men. I am growing old myself, but there are few things I remember so well as the days of my youth. I have a most
John Charles Ryle—The Upper Room: Being a Few Truths for the Times

Job
The book of Job is one of the great masterpieces of the world's literature, if not indeed the greatest. The author was a man of superb literary genius, and of rich, daring, and original mind. The problem with which he deals is one of inexhaustible interest, and his treatment of it is everywhere characterized by a psychological insight, an intellectual courage, and a fertility and brilliance of resource which are nothing less than astonishing. Opinion has been divided as to how the book should be
John Edgar McFadyen—Introduction to the Old Testament

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