But man dies, and wastes away: yea, man expires, and where is he?
All Commentaries on Job 14:10 Go To Job 14
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
Now because Job’s words are clear according to the letter, we must refer the sense to the inward things and search how they are to be understood spiritually. Thus, in holy Scripture by the name of “tree” we have represented sometimes the cross, sometimes the righteous person or even the unrighteous person, and sometimes the Wisdom of God incarnate. Therefore, the cross is denoted by the “tree” when it is said, “Let us put the tree into his bread,” for to “put the tree into the bread” is to apply the cross to the body of our Lord. Again by the title of the “tree” we also have the just person, or even the unjust person, set forth, as the Lord says by the prophet, “I the Lord have brought down the high tree and exalted the low tree.” According to the word of the self-same Truth, “Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” Solomon also says, “If the tree falls towards the south or toward the north, in the place where the tree fell, there it shall be.” For in the day of their death the just person does “fall to the south,” and the unjust “to the north,” as both the just person favored by the Spirit is brought to joy, and the sinner, together with the apostate angel, who said, “I will sit also upon the mount of the testimony, in the sides of the north,” is cast away in his frozen heart. Again, the “tree” represents the Wisdom of God incarnate. As it is written, “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold on her.” And as she herself says, “If they do these things when the tree is green, what shall be done when it is dry?” And so in this text, whereas a tree is preferred above a man, what is man understood as but every carnal person? And what is denoted by the title of the tree but the life of the righteous? “There is the hope that a tree, if it is cut down, will be green again.” For when in a death of painful endurance the just person is hard pressed for the truth, in the greenness of everlasting life he is recovered again; and he who here proved green by faith, there becomes green in actual sight. “And his branches shoot,” in that it is most often the case that by the sufferings of the just person, all faithful persons are redoubled in the love of the heavenly country. They receive the greenness of the spiritual life, while they are glad for what he courageously did here in God’s behalf.
