Sermon 17, Job 4:20-5:2
Wow! I wasn’t feeling it this morning. Had a tiring, but good, day yesterday. So I awoke questioning what I am doing here.
This sermon is off the hook good! Sermon 17. Write that down. This, to me, shows Calvin at his most “Calvin-y”.
There are so many good points. I will read this one at least once more today!
First of all, Calvin calls us all “dumb animals” four times in this sermon. Four times! And there are other great epithets to describe just how bad we are. And it only gets worse. Not only are we dumb animals, but we are going to die. Not only are we going to die, but we are not even inclined to think about that. In summary we are totally depraved and we don’t even know, can’t even grasp if we tried, just how depraved we are. The third paragraph of page 199 is amazing.
This is all prompted by Eliphaz’s oracle or dream in which he relates to Job that angels aren’t good in God’s eyes and so what chance do we have?
Here are some great lines:
We “live in this world in corruptible flesh and are so bound to this world that they [we] do not consider are own welfare.”
“Let us come now to men. Where do they live?… here in this transient hovel, for what else are our these bodies of ours but hovels? We live in graves, to tell the truth. Our bodies are also dark prisons to prevent us from looking upon God as though we were already under the ground.”
“What are we founded upon? Dust. And yet we do not consider that we are always in the process of decay, that death threatens us relentlessly. We do not consider that.”
“…mans only possession is poverty…”
“…we do not spend a moment of our lives without drawing nearer to death.”
“We are always moving toward death; it is always moving toward us, and we will eventually meet it.”
“…seeing that it is our condition to be decaying from morning till evening, we ought to be putting more of the time God gives us to good use… God has put us in this world to use us in his service.”
“…we all have to realise that the entire human race is assigned to die.”
“…we are laden with this burden, this corruptible clod, our body.”
“…men wander from the straight path of salvation when they follow their own thoughts…”
“So let us learn to despise everything men create in their heads and to hold firmly to the simple notion that we are to desire nothing but what God has declared to us with his own mouth.”
But there are two more interesting things from Calvin, and then I’ll close with the good news quotes.
On page 195, Calvin outlines his four stages of life:
Childhood, where we are not much different to “dumb animals” except that we take up more time and are more “mischievous and more troublesome”.
Adolescence, where our desires are so intense that no one can hold us back.
Adulthood, which is soon past. Which I interpret to mean that we don’t pay attention to the present correctly.
Old age, in which all that remains is for us to “be wearied by life and cause trouble and hardship for others”.
And then a side bar on anger and envy:
“…anger kills the foolish.”
“…what does such jealousy do but make them eat themselves up from the inside and having perished, be completely destroyed in the end.”
Lastly, is there any good news? Of course there is:
“So what we have to note is that when we realise we are less than nothing and so subject to death, we must run to him with all our might in spite of all we can do and also realise that God holds our hand in our great infirmity and upholds us by his power and conforms us to himself by his grace - that is what we rejoice in.”
“…God is fulfilling what he has promised us, namely, that after he has bought us low, indeed with kind rods, using such restraint that we will not be totally overwhelmed, he will again withdraw his hand from us and we will sense his graciousness and mercy in our Lord Jesus Christ, for it is in him that he has displayed the riches of his goodness and his fatherly love toward us.”