Job — Chapter 24

Ab Omnipotente non sunt abscondita tempora

On the mystery of divine providence and the apparent prosperity of the wicked: "Since times are not hidden from the Almighty, why do those who know him never see his days?" Corderius treats this as one of the deepest theological questions in the book — the non-appearance of divine justice in temporal events. He notes the distinction between "times are not hidden from the Almighty" and "why do those who know him never see his days" — the former asserts omniscience, the latter expresses the human experience of divine hiddenness. He cites Lessius (De Perfectionibus Divinis IV) on God as the "ancient of days" (Dan. 7:9): God is before all time and duration, and contains all time within his eternal present. On vv. 2-12: the catalogue of oppressive behaviors tolerated by divine patience — moving boundary stones, seizing livestock, depriving the poor of their donkeys, exploiting widows and orphans, murdering the poor at dawn — Corderius reads as Job's evidence against the friends' simple retributive theodicy. These things happen; the wicked prosper; the framework of immediate retribution is therefore empirically inadequate.

Ab Omnipotente non sunt abscondita tempora

On divine providence and hidden timing: Corderius develops the theology of the divine eternity as the ground of perfect providential knowledge. God is called "antiquus dierum" (the Ancient of Days) in Daniel 7:9 — not because he is merely very old, but because he is before all time. Corderius cites Dionysius (De Div. Nom. ch. 10): God is the cause of all ages and time, before all days, before all ages, before time itself. He was before any finite temporal imaginability — accumulate in thought as many ages as there are grains of sand on the seashore, then multiply by ten thousand: God was before all of this. Corderius develops an argument from creation: because God created time, he is not within time but above it; divine providence therefore sees all events — past, present, future — in a single eternal present (cf. Boethius, De Consolatione V, prosa 6). This omniscient divine vision of all temporal events is why "times are not hidden from the Almighty," even when divine justice is not immediately visible to human observers.

Alii quasi onagri in deserto egrediuntur

On the social critique of injustice: "Like wild donkeys in the desert, the poor go out to their toil, seeking game; the wasteland yields food for their children. They reap in a field not their own, and they glean in the vineyard of the wicked man." Corderius uses this passage to develop an extensive commentary on social justice. The poor of Job's world — landless workers gleaning in others' fields, those stripped of clothing, those without shelter sleeping in the mountains — are the objects of both Job's compassion and God's attention (v. 12: "from out of the city the dying groan, and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God charges no one with wrong"). On the apparent divine indifference to injustice in this life: Corderius follows Gregory and Augustine in explaining that God's apparent tolerance of injustice is not complicity but patience — the patience that awaits the moment of fullest revelation of guilt before the definitive sentence. The cries of the oppressed "are heard" even when divine response is delayed.

Ipsi fuerunt rebelles lumini nescierunt

On sinners as enemies of the light: "There are those who rebel against the light, who are not acquainted with its ways, and do not stay in its paths. The murderer rises before daylight to kill the poor and needy, and in the night he is like a thief. The eye of the adulterer also waits for the twilight, saying 'No eye will see me'; and he veils his face." Corderius develops this as a rich moral typology of the three archetypal sinners who prefer darkness to light: the murderer, the thief, and the adulterer. He draws on John 3:19-20: "men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." The sin of choosing darkness over light is a kind of practical Manichaeism: treating God's creation (light) as an enemy. He cites Chrysostom on the psychology of sin: sinners know what they do is wrong (they work in darkness to hide it), so their guilt is doubly compounded — they sin and they know they sin, choosing sin deliberately.