Commentaries:
Adam Clarke
We count them happy which endure - According to that saying of our blessed Lord, Blessed are ye when men shall persecute and revile you - for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Matthew 5:11, Matthew 5:12, etc.
Ye have heard of the patience of Job - Stripped of all his worldly possessions, deprived at a stroke of all his children, tortured in body with sore disease, tempted by the devil, harassed by his wife, and calumniated by his friends, he nevertheless held fast his integrity, resigned himself to the Divine dispensations, and charged not God foolishly.
And have seen the end of the Lord - The issue to which God brought all his afflictions and trials, giving him children, increasing his property, lengthening out his life, and multiplying to him every kind of spiritual and secular good. This was God' s end with respect to him; but the devil' s end was to drive him to despair, and to cause him to blaspheme his Maker. This mention of Job shows him to have been a real person; for a fictitious person would not have been produced as an example of any virtue so highly important as that of patience and perseverance. The end of the Lord is a Hebraism for the issue to which God brings any thing or business.
The Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy - Instead of , which we translate very pitiful, and which might be rendered of much sympathy, from , much, and , a bowel, (because any thing that affects us with commiseration causes us to feel an indescribable emotion of the bowels), several MSS. have , from , much, , easily, and , a bowel, a word not easy to be translated; but it signifies one whose commiseration is easily excited, and whose commiseration is great or abundant.
Other Adam Clarke entries containing James 5:11:
Job 42:17
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