The tortures incident to this curious oscillation between believing and seeing are set forth in the most trenchant way in the Book of Job.  Job, placed in an agonizing situation, condemned without hope to the death of sinners, and yet conscious of his godliness, demands vengeance for his blood unjustly shed.  But the vengeance is to be executed on God, and in such a case who can be the avenger?  There is no one but God Himself, and thus the striking thought arises, that God will be the champion against God of his innocence, after having first murdered it.  From the God of the present he appeals to the God of the future; but the identity between these two is yet maintained, and even now the God who slays him is the sole witness of his innocence, in which the world and his friends have ceased to believe.  God must be this now if He is to avenge him in the future.  An inner antinomy is in this way impersonated; the view of the friends is one of which the sufferer himself cannot divest himself; hence the conflict in his soul.  But, supported by the unconquerable power of his good conscience, he struggles till he frees himself from the delusion; he believes more firmly in the direct testimony of his conscience than in the evidence of facts and the world’s judgment about him, and against the dreadful God of reality, the righteous God of faith victoriously asserts Himself.

Job in the end reaches the conclusion that he cannot understand God’s ways.  This is a negative expression of the position that he holds fast, in spite of all, to himself and to God; that is to say, that not outward experience, but inner feeling, is to decide.  This inner feeling of the union of God with the godly meets us also in some of the Psalms, where, in spite of depression arising from untoward circumstances, it maintains itself as a reality which cannot be shaken, which temptations and doubts even tend to strengthen.  It was a momentous step when the soul in its relations to God ventured to take its stand upon itself, to trust itself.  This was an indirect product of prophecy, but one of not less importance than its direct product, the law.  The prophets declared the revelation of God, which had authority for all, but along with this they had their own personal experience, and the subjective truth of which they thus became aware proved a more powerful solvent and emancipator than the objective one which formed the subject of their revelation.  They preached the law to deaf ears, and laboured in vain to convert the people.  But if their labour had produced no outward result, it had an inner result for them.  Rejected by the people, they clung the more closely to Jehovah, in the conviction that the defeated cause was favoured by Him, that He was with them and not with the people.  Especially with Jeremiah did prophecy, which is designed primarily to act on others, transform itself into an inner converse with the Deity, which lifted him above all the annoyances