LEAVE ME ALONE

‘Leave me alone,’ he pleads, ‘take your big staring eyes off me. Even in my dreams I feel your eyes on me and my dreams become nightmares. Am I as vast as an ocean or as hostile as an untamable beast? Am I your ancient enemies, the ones they tell about in the stories down the centuries? I know I spit out reckless and wild speech but, don’t you understand, I can’t bear the pressure you’ve put me under? I know it must make you mad at me, but what do you expect? I’m just another puny little human that isn’t worth crushing and yet it seems you can’t live without spying on me and making me a special target for your vindictive arrows. For pity’s sake, leave me alone! Leave me alone, do you hear? I’ve a few days left, let me live them in peace and then I’ll die and be out of your way, I won’t trouble you any more forever, you won’t be able to enjoy yourself at my expense anymore.’ So Job yells and sobs and pleads in 7:11-21.

His situation had its own peculiarities but you don’t have to be in his precise circumstances to know that feeling of pressure.

God help us, sometimes we feel the pressure of God’s eyes on us as we struggle with wickedness. Our conscience won’t let us alone and while we’re glad that we’re still sensitive to God’s voice there, sometimes we’re tired of the battle. A battle we aren’t sure we’re winning. We once thought if we came to God in Christ we’d gallantly charge against the wickednesses that had entrenched themselves in our lives, they’d crumble before the name of God and trouble us no more. Well, there’d be a mopping up campaign, of course, but that would simply be fine tuning, the real job would have been done.

Instead, as Arthur Gossip put it, we found ourselves knee deep in mud and ice and waiting a lot. No decisive charges, just day after day trench warfare, gaining one stretch of ground, consolidating our position there but losing in another part of the front-line. Having weeks when it seems we’re making steady gains in a forward direction, looking around and to our horror finding that the enemy has flanked us. ‘I didn’t expect this,’ we cry, growing tired of the indecisiveness of it all, ‘I thought since our cause was just and our Lord was Jesus Christ, that my genuine commitment and willingness to push forward would end in a complete rout of the forces of darkness. But in the light of my experience, I’m not even sure if the outcome of the war can be predicted.’

And so, growing weary in well doing we grow weary in trust and want to desert or, equally destructive, we want to live in a sort of truce with the enemy.

But here he comes, with those big dark eyes of his, looking steadily at us and urging us on. But we’re tired, we’ve done enough, tried hard enough. It isn’t as though we hadn’t tried, not as though we weren’t sincere. Look at our record of past front-line service, serving our King, capturing the enemy’s strongholds, look how long we’d been faithful. No, we gave it our best shot, we’ve had enough and when he comes saying, “Up, we have an enemy to engage,” he just doesn’t understand. And so, weary, we lay our discouraged heads down and try to sleep, telling him to leave us alone.

And while we try to sleep we feel those eyes, always understanding but never letting us off the hook, never leaving us alone—we feel them on us and we can’t rest. We pick ourselves up and not without some irritation we return to our place.

He does it of course! If it isn’t him, who then is it? He’s the one who won’t leave us alone. But it isn’t the way of the bully, it’s the way of a pure lover. He won’t give us up because he can’t give us up. Wasn’t it Hudson Taylor who tirelessly told people, ‘I’ve always known God wouldn’t forget me, but now that I have children of my own, I know God can’t forget me’?

And because he’s like that he won’t let us alone and because he won’t let us alone we can’t find peace or rest except in him. This is what Francis Thompson expressed in his ‘The Hound of Heaven,’ when he felt himself majestically pursued by God.

Still with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

Came on the following Feet,

And a Voice above their beat—

“Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”

In our agony or weariness we plead, “Leave me alone!”

And in his love he says, “Never!”