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Job 22:21:
21Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee.
In the exhortation that we should accustom ourselves to our God, lies a reproach that shames. It is as though one should say to a child: "Accustom yourself to your mother!" This may be said of a stepmother, or of a stepfather or stepbrother, but we do not accustom ourselves to our own mother who has carried us under her heart. We love her with all the fidelity and affection of the heart of a child.
You can only accustom yourself to what was strange to you, or by estrangement has become strange. And therefore when you are exhorted that your soul, that your self, that your inner being shall accustom itself to your God, then it means that your Father Who is in heaven has become a stranger to you; that this estrangement still stands in the way of your fellowship, your converse with Him, and that, therefore, you should take pains, the sooner the better, to accustom yourself again to Him, that so this obstacle might be removed out of your way.
Now this becoming accustomed to the Lord our God has naturally not the same meaning as when among ourselves we speak of getting used to someone.
When for the first time you meet a man who acts somewhat strangely, who is strongly given to peculiarity of manner and is uninteresting socially, it is then required of us not to let ourselves be repelled by this, but by the happy faculty of making allowances, to cultivate acquaintance with him and adapt ourselves to his peculiarities. Or we may speak of accustoming ourselves to some one who either by a difference of education or social refinement stands far above us, or who by a wholly different position in life has a wholly different outlook upon life. There is then a difference in inclination and sympathies, a difference in activity of the mind and chosen purpose in life. He is interested in what does not interest you. And in the great drama of life you play in quite another act than he.
With all such meetings and occasions of contact, this accustoming of oneself to another, means that we should restrain ourselves to some degree, that we must smooth down the sharp edges of our own character, and that, constrained by the obligation of love and by the necessity of social intercourse, we should enter into his life, in order to understand him, to sympathize with him, and thus gradually give him a place in the circle of our good will.
But with the Lord our God this is of itself entirely different.
With Him, we have to do with our God and our Creator, with our Lord and our King, with our Father Who is in heaven.
Here, everything in Him that is strange to us is our fault, our sin, and is the sign and token that we are in the wrong, that we have become untrue in our sensations and feelings, and that we have gone astray in the deliberations of our heart.
Were we what we should be, there could be no mention of estrangement from Him, nor of our accustoming ourselves again to Him.
"Accustom now thyself to Him!" (Job 22:21) is a judgment that is pronounced upon us, a complaint against our inner manner of existence, and at the same time a holy admonition to become a child again in fellowship with our Father.
What in our days is unbelief? From what cause, even in believing circles, begins the wavering, with more than one, of the quiet restful confidence in what God has revealed to us?
In reply to this, one speaks first of impenetrable mysteries; then of problems which defy the understanding; gradually one comes to doubt whether what is revealed to us is accurate, and ends, at last by boldly assigning the human interpretation of life, as the only valid basis of truth, over against Scripture and experience.
And what does this come to except that as one feels himself a stranger to God and His Word he refuses to accustom himself to God, His doings and His Word, and on the contrary, demands that God shall change Himself, and shall show Himself to be conformed to our thought.
"Accustom yourself to Him" means that you should so change and reform yourself that at length you will be meet for Him; and what doubt and unbelief demand is, that our Creed about God shall so modify itself, that at length a God shall spring from it Who shall be meet for us.
Now this conflict was not so fierce and bitter even as much as a century ago, for the reason that the Scriptural interpretation of life, at least in its main lines, was also considered valid in science, valid in public opinion, and, therefore, valid in education and in the better forms of social intercourse. It was almost alone in the circles of scorners and of the godless that unbelief brutally presented itself.
He who believed was thus carried in those better days by the common tenor of life, and his heart was not challenged to resist. This was true, likewise, of the younger generation.
But now all this has become different. Every fundamental conception about God, the Creation, the Fall, the work of Atonement, the life after death and the Last Judgment, once common property, has been abandoned by science, has been brought to waver in public opinion, is banished from education, and tabooed as topics of conversation among the more serious-minded folk.
And not only this, but gradually an entirely different system of fundamental conceptions has been put in place of it. A wholly different creed has come forward, a wholly different catechism has found entrance. Broadly ramified, the interpretation of life on the part of unbelief now stands in public opinion over against the Creeds of Christendom.
Thereby in addition to the estrangement from God that is occasioned by our sin, a second estrangement has now come, which entices us to accept an interpretation of life which is in open conflict with the counsel, the doing and the wisdom of God, as these are revealed to us in His Word.
Thereby to many everything, yea, everything in their God has become strange to them. They feel themselves in no single respect any more at home with Him or in His Word. The child no longer recognizes his Father.
And for this reason the exhortation: "Accustom thyself to Him!" has now obtained a doubly serious significance.
"Accustom thyself to Him!" now means: Loosen the tie that binds you to the wisdom of the world, and enter again with all your senses and your ponderings into the counsel, into the most holy thoughts of your God.
Do not understand this in a philosophical sense, but take it practically with respect to life, especially with respect to the mystery of suffering, to which Eliphaz also applied it in argument with Job, even though he did it mistakenly.
Suffering amid the trouble of this world would be no mystery to us if constantly, with true balance, it were weighed out to every individual on earth, in accordance with his misdeeds against God or men. There would then become evident in suffering nothing else than righteous retribution measured out according to strict justice, and then everyone's lot in life would be alike.
And in this thought there certainly lies this unchangeable truth that there shall be an eternal retribution, and that this retribution shall be in accordance with every man's deeds, whether they be good or evil.
But the mistake, the fault here is that this punishment and this retribution of the eternal justice are confused with the mystery of suffering here on earth. This suffering thus taken individually and tested by each personal character and walk in life, stumbles on the hard fact that we are constantly offended at the godless man who prospers, and that we are even more sore at heart when we see a devoted child of God, a noble character, a faithful servant in Christ who, as we would say, did nothing wrong, swallowed up by the waves of affliction.
That men can do so, we can understand. When a tyrant honors the godless and oppresses devout children of God, we think it dreadful, but it is always God Who allows it; and we can submit to this. But that God Himself does this with sickness, in His disposition of our lot in life, and by cruel death, that is a stone of offense which one can not get over, and one that has killed already so much rootless faith.
What accounts for this, save that God's thoughts are so altogether different from our thoughts, and that we, instead of accustoming ourselves to His counsels, stubbornly maintain our interpretation of suffering in contradiction to His?
In the mind of God, individual retribution has its accounting in the Last Judgment and not in the sentence imposed by an earthly judge, and far less yet in the suffering which He brings upon us.
According to the teaching of Scripture, sin is not an evil that cleaves to a few individuals, but a poison that has infected the whole human race. The creation of man was not individual either, for we are created a race. All mankind, therefore, through all ages and among all nations form one whole. We are not a great number of people, who only afterwards by laws and other means are counted as one whole, but we are a human race from which individuals spring, and to which they belong as twigs and leaves to a tree.
In order to save this race of men which He created, God brought suffering into our world to counteract this poison of sin. He regards this suffering as a cup of holy medicine, which He administers not to the individual person but to our race, in order to counteract the working of the poison of sin. And now He Himself elects the priests and priestesses, who are called for His sake, to administer the sacrament of suffering to the world.
If to this end He chose only the godless, they would harden themselves against suffering, and the godly would pride themselves on being spared. The medicine would do no good. Spiritually it would cause petrifaction. Bring loss for gain.
No, to bear that suffering, He calls first of all the best, the most godly, the most noble—His Prophets and His martyrs. Thereby the medicine produces its holy effects and accomplishes that whereunto it has been appointed.
The Cross provides the explanation.
So God loved the world that He gave it His only begotten Son. Personally Jesus stands altogether outside of sin. He is not only the most godly, the most noble, the best among all the children of men, but He is the Son of Man, and the woe of suffering comes down upon Him as never any man has borne it. And never has there gone forth from any suffering among the children of men a power unto salvation as from His Cross.
And therefore in that Cross lies expressed the thought of God, the counsel of God and the wisdom of God.
Every one who would understand his own sorrow and the suffering of the world must accustom himself to this counsel, to this thought and to this wisdom of God.
And he who does this has heavenly comforting, yea, he can give thanks that the cup of suffering has not passed him by.
He feels that he himself is a priest, in order that following after the One High Priest, in the name of the Lord, he may be a server at the sacrament of suffering.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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