約伯倫理 第 309 章

Chap. VI. Vers. 2, 3.—Oh that my sins, by which I have deserved wrath, and the calamity that I suffer, were weighed in a balance: it would appear heavier, as it were, than the sand of the sea (Job 6:2-3). The typical sense. 2. Christ is the balance in which both what we deserve and what He suffered for us are weighed. He made known to us the gravity of our punishment. Who else is expressed by the name of the balance but the Mediator of God and men? who came to weigh the desert of our life, and brought with Himself justice and mercy together; but, weighing down on the scale of mercy, He lightened our faults by sparing. For in the hand of the Father, being made as it were a balance of wondrous poising, He suspended on this side our calamity, and on that our sins.

But by dying He made known the calamity of grievous weight, and by remitting He showed that with mercy sin is light. He conferred this first upon grace, that He made our punishment knowable to us. For man, created to contemplate his Author, but by the exaction of his merits cast down from inward joys, rushing into the misery of corruption, enduring the blindness of exile, both bore the punishments of his fault and knew them not; so that he believed exile to be his homeland, and thus under the weight of corruption rejoiced as though in the liberty of salvation. But He whom within man had forsaken, having assumed flesh, appeared outwardly as God;

and when He showed Himself outwardly, He recalled to inward things the man who had been cast out; that he might now see his own losses, now lament the punishment of his blindness. The calamity of man therefore appeared grievous in the balance, because the evil he had endured he acknowledged only in the presence of the Redeemer; for, not knowing the light, he had been enduring with pleasure the darkness of his own condemnation. But after he saw what he might love, he understood also what he might grieve for; and he felt grievous what he had endured, because sweet became known what he had lost. Let the holy man therefore, shaken from the enclosures of silence by the sentences of the friend conversing with him, and filled with the affluence of the prophetic Spirit, speak his own things, let him speak with the voice of the human race:

Oh that my sins, by which I have deserved wrath, and the calamity that I suffer, were weighed in a balance: it would appear heavier, as it were, than the sand of the sea. As if he openly said: The evil of our condemnation is thought light, because it is weighed while the equity of the Redeemer is not yet known. But oh that He would come, and suspend the misery of so great an exile on the scale of His mercy, and teach what we are to seek after exile. For if it becomes known what we have lost, He intimates that grievous is what we endure. [Old Vulgate II] And well is this same calamity of our pilgrimage compared to the sand of the sea. For the sand of the sea is driven outward by the surge of the waves, because the sinning man too, since he unstably endured the floods of temptations, went outside himself from his inmost parts.

Now the sand of the sea is of great weight; but the calamity of man is called heavier than the sand of the sea, because the punishment is shown to have been hard, while the fault is lightened by the merciful Judge. And because whoever acknowledges the grace of the Redeemer, whoever loves the return to the homeland, being instructed, groans under the weight of his pilgrimage, after the desire for the balance it is rightly subjoined: