As Job is beginning to understand, God may indeed have a purpose in his suffering which does not fit with Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar’s insufficient grasp of the situation. As the dialogue progresses, Job’s heart is now stirred and moves him to confess his faith in a coming redeemer, even through tears of pain, doubt, and fear! Job knows that his redeemer lives! Job knows his redeemer will one day stand upon the earth. And Job knows that he will see that redeemer with the eyes of a resurrected body! In the midst of his terrible circumstances, the suffering prophet nevertheless confesses “for I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.”

Job’s Faith Is Re-Kindled
Despite all appearances to the contrary, and despite the cruel counsel coming from his friends (most recently Eliphaz), Job still expects vindication. Job knows that God is good, keeps his promises, and that some how and in some way, his ordeal will end and it will be clear to all that Job is not hiding some secret sin.
As the dialogue between Job and his friends continues to unfold, in Job 16:18-17:3, the glowing embers of Job’s faith reappear. With this hope arises, as Job calls out his erst-while friends for their cruel and self-righteous counsel. He calls them “mockers.”

O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place. Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and he who testifies for me is on high. My friends scorn me; my eye pours out tears to God, that he would argue the case of a man with God, as a son of man does with his neighbor. For when a few years have come I shall go the way from which I shall not return. `My spirit is broken; my days are extinct; the graveyard is ready for me. Surely there are mockers about me, and my eye dwells on their provocation. Lay down a pledge for me with you; who is there who will put up security for me?’

Job now realizes that the answer to the “why?” question (which he has asked of YHWH), along with his personal vindication before his friends, might not come until after his own death. But yes, Job will get his answer. He will be vindicated—if not in this life, then certainly in the next. His friends do not understand nor, apparently, do they care to.
Because of this glimmer of hope and because Job still has faith in the God of the promise (however, weak that faith may be under the circumstances), Job knows his friends cannot help him. He sees their efforts are futile, if not cruel. There is nowhere else to go. Job’s only hope is in God. Yet, his mood still swings wildly, bringing him right up to the point of despair. But in the balance of Job 17, Job possess enough of his prior faith to continue to call out his friends for their faithless response.

My spirit is broken; my days are extinct; the graveyard is ready for me. Surely there are mockers about me, and my eye dwells on their provocation. `Lay down a pledge for me with you; who is there who will put up security for me? Since you have closed their hearts to understanding, therefore you will not let them triumph. He who informs against his friends to get a share of their property— the eyes of his children will fail. `He has made me a byword of the peoples, and I am one before whom men spit. My eye has grown dim from vexation, and all my members are like a shadow. The upright are appalled at this, and the innocent stirs himself up against the godless. Yet the righteous holds to his way, and he who has clean hands grows stronger and stronger. But you, come on again, all of you, and I shall not find a wise man among you. My days are past; my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart. They make night into day: ‘The light,’ they say, ‘is near to the darkness.’ If I hope for Sheol as my house, if I make my bed in darkness, if I say to the pit, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worm, ‘My mother,’ or ‘My sister,’ where then is my hope? Who will see my hope? Will it go down to the bars of Sheol? Shall we descend together into the dust?

Not only is Job giving back as good as he is getting from Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, but only a man who has done nothing wrong will fight so hard to be vindicated–as Job is now doing.
Bildad’s Second Speech—More “Belly Wind”
As Bildad makes his second speech one thing is becoming clear–Job, the suffering prophet, is longing to probe deeper into the mysteries of God’s providence, while Job’s friends focus entirely on the their distorted views regarding the suffering of the wicked. Bildad is clearly resentful of Job’s low estimate of his three friends’ theological abilities.[1] Whereas Eliphaz tried to moderate his second speech, Bildad is much more cantankerous. In verses 1-4 of Job 18, Bildad responds to Job with words which reflect the former’s growing frustration and anger. “Then Bildad the Shuhite answered [Job] and said: `How long will you hunt for words? Consider, and then we will speak. Why are we counted as cattle? Why are we stupid in your sight? You who tear yourself in your anger, shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place?” Bildad’s challenge is that if the law of divine retribution is immutable (God must punish wrong-doing), and if Job refuses to repent, he will foolishly continue to throw himself against the fixed law that God must punish all sin.[2] How dare Job think that he is above the fixed laws of YHWH’s sovereign will!
As Bildad sees it, the moral order of the universe is set in stone. Since God will punish the wicked for their sins, in the balance of the chapter, Bildad recites a catalogue of the troubles of the wicked, all designed to appeal to Job’s conscience so that he is convicted of sins. The problem with Bildad’s speech is that Job’s conscience is clean. Says Bildad,

Indeed, the light of the wicked is put out, and the flame of his fire does not shine. The light is dark in his tent, and his lamp above him is put out. His strong steps are shortened, and his own schemes throw him down. For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks on its mesh. A trap seizes him by the heel; a snare lays hold of him. A rope is hidden for him in the ground, a trap for him in the path. Terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels. His strength is famished, and calamity is ready for his stumbling. It consumes the parts of his skin; the firstborn of death consumes his limbs. He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the king of terrors. In his tent dwells that which is none of his; sulfur is scattered over his habitation. His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above. His memory perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the street. He is thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. He has no posterity or progeny among his people, and no survivor where he used to live. They of the west are appalled at his day, and horror seizes them of the east.

Job’s Speech — He Knows His Redeemer Lives
With that, we come to one of the most remarkable speeches in all the Bible (Job 19:25-27). Job’s words inspired Handel when writing the Messiah, and they continue to profoundly move all who read them. Job’s speech is so profound because it is not as though Bildad’s words contain no truth. Yes, God will punish the wicked. But Bildad’s cold and formulaic “canned” answer does not fit the facts at hand. This may be true of the wicked when they suffer. But what about the righteous? They suffer too. Thus the issue is not what fixed moral law Job has broken. For Job, the issue is “why has God turned his back on him?”
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Scripture refers to a dynamic wind that is ever-present and permanent for the believer. The word “spirit” in both Hebrew and Greek means “wind” or “breath.” Both breeze and breath are appropriate images of the Holy Spirit. That wind or breath of air, first revealed in the creation (Genesis 2:7), arrived again in history on the Day of Pentecost.

It’s interesting how memories are aroused and brought to the fore. I was working a crossword puzzle online, and 9-down called for the name of a cold, dry European wind. Immediately, I typed in “MISTRAL.” How did I know the answer? I lived in France for five years—two in Montpellier and three in Marseille. In Marseille, Le Mistral blew in and often swept through the city. The French also called it le balai (the broom) as it blew down from the North to sweep the streets clean with its forceful winds.
Another wind blew northward from Africa’s Sahara, sweeping across the Mediterranean into and across France. Its name is Le Sirocco. This wind is known for its dry, hot, violent wind. When it blows, it sucks up Saharan sand and deposits it across the north African coast and into southern Europe. I first became acquainted with it when living in Tunisia, and also experienced its powerful effects in France. The African desert sand would blow across the Mediterranean Sea and reach France covering cars, buildings, and streets. Two fierce winds with names known to millions.
We name our intense winds, too, don’t we? El Nino and Nor’easter winds qualify. However, I confess that it’s Le Mistral and Le Sirocco that arouse more memories for me, especially memories of riding my moped on both continents in my younger and more daring years of my life. Besides the sights and experiences that they recall, they remind me of winds that buffet our lives—sometimes for good as refreshing and sometimes for ill as trials to contend with.
We can all remember the winds in our lives that rocked our world, battered self-esteem, or pummeled us into the reality that we aren’t as self-sufficient as we thought. They might have been harsh winds representing want or need. Perhaps our self-reliance faltered, an important relationship was broken, the loss of a loved one occurred, faith in the existence God was challenged, the loss of status in life, or dire health conditions. We can all agree that we have experienced strong and harsh winds in our journey through this life.
Nonetheless, such winds that came from either direction may have also brought refreshment, a breath of fresh, cool, soothing air in a very tense, hot period of our lives. Perhaps a friend or soul mate blew into our lives at just the right time, or God provided incredible, necessary help in a time of need, or we rose out of a spiritually dry period to experience renewed joy and hope, or someone spoke a word of encouragement when we couldn’t see light through our depressed, hopeless, clouded vision.
Such dynamic winds blow in and out and across our lives with mixed effects. One deposits something unwanted, like sand causing various problems. Another wind acts like a broom sweeping our lives clean of worry and concern, bringing refreshing clean, cool air. If an artist were to attempt to paint an image of these winds, one representation might be of one exhaling a strong breath across the earth. Le Mistral and Le Sirocco come and go. I’m happy to have experienced them both.
Scripture refers to a dynamic wind that is ever-present and permanent for the believer. The word “spirit” in both Hebrew and Greek means “wind” or “breath.” Both breeze and breath are appropriate images of the Holy Spirit. That wind or breath of air, first revealed in the creation (Genesis 2:7), arrived again in history on the Day of Pentecost. “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. . . All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit . . .” (Acts 2: 1-4). When Jesus spoke to Nicodemus on the need to be born again, he said, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” He explained to Nicodemus that the “wind blows wherever it pleases . . . you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So, it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3: 6).
But there is more. Christians are filled with a wind, a breath of air—the Holy Spirit—at their spiritual birth! This is a wind that will blow only good in our lives, that is, good as God intends for our welfare, His purposes, and His glory. It may be a broom (le balai) at times bringing cleansing from sin into our lives. It may be the force behind worshiping God in Spirit and in truth, or of deeds of compassion and mercy to others. At other times it will be that breath of fresh air that encourages us to be steadfast in faith as we complete our life’s journey. It surpasses Le Mistral and Le Sirocco in impact—both temporal and eternal, and I am thankful to God for making it known to me.
Thanks to a crossword puzzle for prompting these thoughts.
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.
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Even as magistrates are subject to the correction of ministers, ministers are subject to the governance of magistrates as to temporals (i.e., just laws and sanctions) as citizens. Contra the Papist position, ministers are not above or outside the law. But so too are ministers subject to magistrates as to their “function” per the religious interest of the magistrate. A magistrate cannot alter or dictate true doctrine, Scripture, or sacraments, but he may hold ministers accountable to their own standards, as it were, which implies a certain familiarity with and understanding of Scripture and church tradition and teaching by the magistrate.

Certain (hyper online) evangelicals continue to at least feign shock and concern­—they are so perpetually concerned that I wonder their brows are not permanently furrowed—at a resurgence of decidedly historical yet now intellectually foreign articulations of church-state relations. Albeit the impact of historical sources within the Protestant tradition seem to have exactly zero impact on the most obstinate and presentist of this crowd, that is no excuse to not perform our due diligence, recovering the diversity and continuity of the tradition on this front. Perhaps, one day, the cascade of sources demonstrably disagreeable to baptized post-war liberal assumptions held so tightly by mainstream evangelicals will envelop them, drowning out their ahistorical protestations.
To that end, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) and his Loci Communes (1576). The Loci was translated into English in 1583 as The Common Places, extending Vermigli’s posthumous influence. Along with Martin Bucer (1491-1551) (i.e., De Regno Christi), his impact on the long English Reformation was immense, including but not limited to political thought.
Vermigli’s clarity in expounding a model of relations between the ecclesiastical and civil powers—an historically representative model for Protestants—remains instructive for reconsideration of relevant liberal assumptions about the same found both within and without Protestant academe. What follows is commentary on and investigation and application of Vermigli’s model of what we would now call church-state relations. On offer from Vermigli is not merely mechanical and expedient, but metaphysical and nevertheless practical.   
Deacons, Ministers, Pastors
To get right to it: there are two powers appointed by God, two offices set up as God’s representatives on earth. In a sense both act as fathers and pastors, indeed, as gods. (Notice that Vermigli does not employ “two kingdoms” terminology.) There are spiritual pastors and fathers, and temporal pastors and fathers, though as it happens both are temporally situated and both possess spiritual and temporal interests, sharing the same spiritual end if by diverse means. We are talking about civil magistrates and church ministers (or civil ministers and church magistrates, if you like, the terminology itself overlapping and interchangeable which semantically demonstrates the point). Henceforth we will stick to magistrate (civil) and minister (church) as our terms. 
“Both of them nourish the godly, but diversly. The Magistrate advanceth them with honors, riches and dignities. The minister comforteth them with the promises of God & with the sacraments.” The magistrate works by outward means on the outward man, which does not itself disregard the inward man as such, nor is it agnostic toward inward means of the inward power of the ministers.
For “princes in the holy scriptures are not only called Deacons, or Ministers of God, but also Pastors.” Vermigli cites Ezekiel 34 and also Homer who referred to “Agamemnon the pastor of the people.”
Magistrates are also properly called fathers, “wherefore the Senators among the Romans were called Patres conscripti, that is, appointed Fathers.” He goes on,
“Neither was there a greater or more ancient honor in the Commonweal, than to be called, The father of the Country. Yea also a Magistrate by the law of God is comprehended under this commandment, Honor thy father and thy mother. Princes then owe unto their subjects a fatherly love, and they ought always to remember that they are not rulers over beasts, but over men, and that themselves also are men: who yet should be far better and more excellent, than those whom they govern, otherwise they are not fit to govern them. For we make not a sheep the chief ruler over sheep, but the Bellwether, and then the shepherd. And even as a shepherd excelleth the sheep, so ought they to whom the office of a Magistrate is committed, to excel the people.”
Magistrates can rightly be called pastors and fathers because they, ideally, exude excellence which confirms their distinction and authority. Both by example and just rule, they exercise a pastoral role insofar as they shepherd their people. Of course, even as men set apart for rule should distinguish themselves as truly excellent, such elevated status cannot be justified by a self-referential source of authority.
Natural and Appointed
When we say that magistrates are ordained by God, what do we mean?
Vermigli argues that even as human means of appointment are in operation, that conduit of election does not diminish the proper cause of magisterial authority, viz., God himself. But this does not itself imply some kind of mechanical dictation theory about how human means are employed by God inside of providence.
Vermigli attributes the divine authority of magistrates to a natural, embedded principle or impulse: “God kindled a certain light in the hearts of men, whereby they understand that they cannot live together without a guide: and from thence sprung the office of a Magistrate.”
(Thomas Aquinas says much the same in De Regno.) This is corroborated by Scripture. For if “God ordained that he which shedded man’s blood, his blood also should be shed, not rashly or by every man (for that were very absurd),” then a civil, magisterial authority is implied “that he should punish manquellers [i.e., killers of men].” Hence, “all powers whatsoever they be, are ordained of God. And Christ answered unto Pilate, thou shouldest have no power against me, except it had bin given thee from above.”
Abusus Non Tollit Usum
Now, an important question is in order:
“If all Magistrates be of God, then must all things be rightly governed: But in governing of public wheels we see that many things are done naughtily and perversely. Doubtless, under Nero, Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, and Heliogabalus, good laws were despised, good men killed, and discipline of the City was utterly corrupted. But if the Magistrate were of God, such things had never happened.”
In other words, Vermigli asks whether tyranny negates the legitimacy of the magistrate’s claim to be of God, for his power to be derived either mediately or immediately of God? There are those that say “The wicked acts of Tyrants are not of God, yet doe those things spread abroad into kingdoms and Empires: Therefore Empires and kingdoms are not of God.”
Even today, holders of this position wield it to legitimate so-called classical liberal ends in millenarian, progressivist fashion. That is, government and governance predicated on the limitation of power via its endless bifurcation, as the chief goal of politics. The effects of regimes are translated through liberal political assumptions—liberatory and egalitarian—to legitimate or illegitimate regimes. It is a fundamentally shortsighted and materialist analysis, overly moralistic and chained to an immanent frame.
Vermigli rejects this posture as a false syllogism insofar as it absolutizes the occasional and accidental. It would be equally valid, in this reasoning, to say that because some governments are not tyrannical and therefore legitimate, all governments are legitimate. Those suffering from tyraniphobia essentialize accidental occurrences. Just because the power of a magistrate is from God does not mean that everything in the magistrate is from God, or that the office cannot be separated from the occupant.
Vermigli’s position is simultaneously realist and providentialist. “[K]ingdoms and public wheels, may be called certain workhouses, or shoppes of the will of God. For that is done in them which GOD himself hath decreed to be done, although princes oftentimes understand it not.”
“[T]here are certain tyrants, which destroy public wheels. I grant it, but our wickedness & sins deserve it. For there be oftentimes so grievous sins, & so many that they cannot be corrected by the ordinary Magistrate, and by a gentle and quiet government of things. And therefore God doth then provide Tyrants to afflict the people.”
Vermigli identifies an ebb and flow to the rise and fall of good and bad governments. Whenever there is a bad one, it is a sign of judgment and correction. Whenever there is a good one, it is an indication of blessing. If all power is of God then no other explanation makes sense. Even Nebuchadnezzar was God’s servant. Historically, “for the most part [God] tempereth & qualifieth his punishment in placing among them good and godly princes.” In any case, as Vermigli later explains, stripping the magistrate of discretion and judgment proper and essential to his office via mechanistic, proceduralist, and positivist methods is no solution. In fact, arguably, such a limited regime invariably corrupts the magisterial office and degrades into managerialism, a certain form of inhuman technocratic tyranny wherein ius is detached from iusticia, or rather lex envelops both.
Up from Boniface
Returning to our main inquiry, to fail to subscribe to 1) the direct ordination and distribution of power by God to civil magistrates, and 2) to uphold the legitimacy of magistrates on this basis regardless of outcome, is to fall into late medieval papal confusion, argues Vermigli.
Pope Boniface’s Unam Sanctum is, for Vermigli, the source code of said error. Boniface located both swords or powers originally in the church which, in turn, delegated the temporal sword to civil authorities but thereby retained a certain purview and right of reverter over the temporal sword. The civil authority, then, was to, when necessary, be directed by the spiritual power. “The Church (saith [Boniface]) hath two swords, but it useth not them after one and the selfesame manner. For it exerciseth the spiritual sword, but the temporal sword ought to be drawn only at the becke & sufferance of the Church.”
Vermigli explains the import of this doctrine:
“The sword of the Emperor ought to be drawn only at the will and pleasure of the Pope: That when he commandeth, he must strike: and by sufferance, that is, he must go forward in striking, so long as he listeth and will suffer it. These things therefore must be in order: and the order is, that the temporal sword be reduced unto God by the spiritual.”
Through a winding digression, Vermigli shows how the Roman position yielded “all ecclesiastical persons are exempt from the civil Magistrate.” More basically, the problem was a confusion of the relation and interplay between the ecclesiastical and political powers, their jurisdiction and competency.
Interchangeable Arts: Shared Interests and Mutual Subjection
In a narrow sense, the ecclesiastical is to be more favored and stands above the civil or political. This is because “the word of GOD is a common rule, whereby all things ought to be directed and tempered.
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