Sermons upon the Book of Job

Therefore let us all the time of our life learn to remember the said lesson and to inure our selves to it, until we have profited in it as we have need to do. But forasmuch as it shall be handled §20more at large hereafter: now I will no more but glance at the things as I pass by them. Let us come to that which is added in the text: that is too wit, that Jobs wife cometh to him to provoke him too despair. Howe now? (sayeth she) Continuest thou yet still in thy singleness? Bliss God and dye. The Devil findeth means enow to encumber us, without having any bellows to quicken up the fire. For we know there is so great sturdiness in our nature, as it is pity to see it. In stead of quiet submitting of our selves unto God and §30unto his holy spirit and will as we ought to do, we conceive wandering imaginations, and there is not any of us all, which hath not as it were a whole storehouse full of such dotages in his brain, where through he is as it were made drunken, according as we know that all the lusts of our flesh are enemies against God. So then, there is none of us which overshooteth not himself, though we have no enticers to provoke us against God, or to draw us unto despair. To be short, though Satan take no instruments without us to deceive us withal: he shall §40find enow within our own persons. Our enemies are already within us. For (as I have said) all our wavering fancies, are utter enemies to God: and all our affections are armed against him, to make us strive against his punishments when he sendeth them unto us. Therefore it was a double war unto Job, when besides the possibility of being tempted in himself, his own wife provoked him to despair: for that was the full measure of all misery. But God permitteth it to happen to his faithful ones, and that especially when he purposeth to try them §50to the quick. And this lighted not upon Job alone. But we see it most of all in David: yea and we see it also in our Lord Jesus Christ. Behold here two mirrors wherein God meant to represent the said kind of temptation unto us. For one of the grievousest complaints that David maketh, is that he was mocked, for putting his trust in God, insomuch as he became a laughingstock to every man, and men bleared out their tongues at him saying: O see la, he bare himself in hand that he sate in Gods lap: