約伯倫理 第 199 章

Verse 3. 'Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said: A man is conceived.' 24. Day is prosperity, night is tribulation. Day is the delight of sin, night the blindness of the mind. It is as though a certain day, when the prosperity of this world smiles. But this day ends in night, because often temporal prosperity leads to the darkness of tribulation. This day of prosperity the prophet had scorned, when he said: 'The day of man I have not desired, Thou knowest' (Jeremiah 17:16). This night of tribulation the Lord announced that He would suffer at the last, at the time of His incarnation, when through the Psalmist He said as though of the past: 'Even unto night my reins have chastened me' (Psalm 15:7).

But by the day can be understood the delight of sin, and by the night the blindness of the mind, through which a man suffers himself to be laid low in the committing of a fault. He desires therefore that the day perish, so that everything which is seen to flatter through fault may be destroyed by the intervening vigor of righteousness. He desires also that the night perish, so that what the blinded mind perpetrates even by consent, it may extinguish by the retribution of repentance. 25. Scripture calls man by three ways. Man is snatched by the voluntary darkness of the mind from the delight of sin. But we must ask why in the day man is said to be born, in the night conceived?

Holy Scripture calls a person 'man' in three ways: sometimes with respect to nature, sometimes with respect to fault, and sometimes with respect to weakness. For man is named from nature, as it is written: 'Let us make man to our image and likeness' (Genesis 1:26). Man is named from fault, as it is written: 'I have said, You are gods, and all of you the sons of the Most High; but you shall die like men' (Psalm 81:6-7). As if He plainly said: You shall perish like transgressors. Whence Paul also says: 'Since there is among you envy and contention, are you not carnal, and walk according to man?' (1 Corinthians 3:3). As if he said: You who bear discordant minds, do you not still sin from a blameworthy humanity?

Man is named from weakness, as it is written: 'Cursed be the man that puts his hope in man' (Jeremiah 17:5). As if He plainly said: in weakness. Man therefore is born by day, but conceived by night, because he is by no means carried off by the delight of sin unless he is first weakened through the voluntary darkness of the mind. For first he becomes blind in mind, and afterward he lays himself beneath a reprobate delight. Let it therefore be said: 'Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, A man is conceived' (Job 3:3): that is, let the delight perish which carried man off into fault; let there perish the heedless weakness of the mind, which blinded him even unto the darkness of a depraved consent.

For when a man does not carefully perceive the allurements of delight, he even rushes into the night of the most wicked deed. We must therefore watch skillfully, so that when a fault begins to allure, we may recognize into how great a ruin the mind is being dragged. Whence it is also fitly added: