Calvin repeatedly reminds his hearers that the aspiration of believers is both to fear (for the sake of discipline) and to love (for the sake of emulation) God’s revealed majesty by living out, with the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, his character and actions as demonstrated in the Lord Jesus. By contrast, the grave sin of believers, then, is to know that revelation and not respond by obediently, insistently, and persistently living in accordance with it. That failure Calvin calls ingratitude and declares it worthy of condemnation.

In his introduction to the new translation of John Calvin’s Sermons on Job (Banner of Truth Trust, 2022), Dr. Derek Thomas (author of Calvin’s Teaching on Job: Proclaiming the Incomprehensible God) points out that the then contemporary interest in Calvin’s work on Job was such that two French editions were published, both coinciding with the Civil Wars of Religion in France (1562-1598). There followed translations into German, Latin, and English. Three further editions of the English version appeared subsequently, making the Job sermons more popular than the Reformer’s Institutes of the Christian Religion! Latterly, however, Calvin’s work on Job has become a neglected part of his corpus, with no modern translations of his sermons available. Now, for the first time, Calvin’s 159 sermons on this enigmatic work of wisdom literature are available in modern English for the first time in a new edition published by Banner of Truth.

Dr. Thomas surmises that a study of Job’s trials must have seemed appropriate in the midst of the civil upheavals of the Wars of Religion. Calvin had access to earlier expositions on Job but does not seem to have been influenced by them. He “did not believe that the book of Job contained solutions to the great moral dilemmas of the universe,” but, considering the book as “a lengthy discourse about God… he sought to turn the congregation in Geneva, and his own soul, to the reality of God’s sovereignty and power in the contingencies of a seemingly disordered life. According to Calvin’s Institutes, ‘in The Book of Job is set forth a declaration of such sublimity as to humble our minds.’” Calvin, as Dr. Thomas points out, compares his role as a preacher expounding the Book of Job to medical doctors who “need to be sensitive to the radically different treatments that various diseases require. Likewise, ministers of the gospel need to be aware that trials that befall a Christian require different diagnosis and treatment.”

Dr. Thomas also extends a challenge to those who read these sermons:

“It is not only the content of the sermons that astonishes us today; it is the fact that they were weekday sermons, each one averaging just under an hour’s exposition of Scripture. It is hard to imagine such a thing in our own time. We live in an indifferent age, barely able to cope with one sermon a week. When we pray for revival (and surely we do!), what do we expect by way of an answer? For, should the sovereign Lord grant our request, our appetite for Scripture would change, our thirst for the Word of God would grow. It is earnestly to be hoped that, after reading these sermons, we shall be challenged to pray in such a manner that we might desire such a change to be wrought in us.”

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