Job 40:4
“Behold, I am insignificant. How can I reply to You? I place my hand over my mouth.
BSB
ASV
Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee? I lay my hand upon my mouth.
KJV
Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.
I who have spoken lightly, what can I answer? 1. The higher holy men advance with God, in the dignity of virtues, the more accurately do they discover that they are unworthy; because while they become close to the light, they find out whatever escaped their notice in themselves, and they appear to themselves the more deformed without, in proportion as that is very beautiful, which they see within.
1834–1892
The New Park Street Pulpit, Sermon No. 83: “Indwelling Sin” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition) (1856)
SURELY, if any man had a right to say, I am not vile, it was Job; for, according to the testimony of God himself, he was “a perfect and an upright man, one that feared God and eschewed evil.” Yet we find even this eminent saint, when by his nearness to God he had received light enough to discover his own condition, exclaiming, “Behold I am vile.”
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread: the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The walk8
Follow this verse’s cross-references two steps out. Each card is a verse this one points to, and beneath it the verses that one points to in turn. Where several different paths arrive at the same place, that place is listed first: the text keeps returning to it. Every stop shows its own words, and every stop is a page.
Through
Ezra 9:6and said: “O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, because our iniquities are higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached the heavens.
leads to
For her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.
For my iniquities have overwhelmed me; they are a burden too heavy to bear.
Through
Job 42:6Therefore I retract my words, and I repent in dust and ashes.”
leads to
and said: “O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, because our iniquities are higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached the heavens.
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a violent man; yet because I had acted in ignorance and unbelief, I was shown mercy.
Then Job answered the LORD:
Through
Job 21:5Look at me and be appalled; put your hand over your mouth.
leads to
If you have foolishly exalted yourself or if you have plotted evil, put your hand over your mouth.
Reached by 2 independent paths from here.