Beloved, I am pleased to share with you today the above theme from Job 17:1 and following. Indeed, Job, in his pain, sees no other way out than death and calls him to his rescue. This should have proved to his friends that he did not have a bad conscience. If he had been guilty as they accused him, would he not have feared appearing before God? His words become ever more heartbreaking: “I have become a man who is spat in the face” (v. 6). This heinous and infamous outrage was inflicted on our Savior (Isa 50:4-6; Mark 14:60-65 and Mk 15:15-21). Man has shown all the baseness of which he is capable by insulting so cowardly the One who was defenseless and already in the deepest voluntary debasement!
“Righteous men will be stunned,” Job continues in v. 8. What an incomprehensible thing indeed, to see “the just abandoned”! (ps. 37:23-26). Such a spectacle risked overturning the faith of many in the righteousness of God (Ps. 69.6-13). “My plans are destroyed – cries Job – so-called plans of my heart”(v. 11). Sometimes God gets in the way of us to probe our hearts and discover projects that we caress but did not have His approval (Pr 16:9; Pr 19.21). And let us tell ourselves that when he closes a door in front of us, it is because he knows that there is nothing good for us behind it. If it was comforting to hear about misery and misfortune, to hear the fate of the insolent evildoers described time and time again in various terms, then Job should have been comforted. But his friends had lost sight of their race, and he had to call them back.
“I’ve heard many such things: The grieving Comforters are all of you. Will empty words have an end?” He would like them to consider that the perpetual harp on a single string is only a sober accomplishment! Returning one after the other to the wicked man, the ungodly sinner, cunning, rebellious, sensual, authoritarian, and his certain destiny of disaster and extinction, they are both stubbornly unsightly and in the mind of Job pitifully inept. He is not willing to argue with them again, but he can’t help but express his pain and even his indignation that they offered him a stone for bread. Apologizing, they reproached him for his indifference to “God’s consolations.” All he had been aware of was their “joined words” against him with many nods. Was it divine consolation? Everything, it seemed, was good enough for him, a man under the influence of God.
Even so: the courteous and superficial speech of men who said: Friend, you are only accidentally afflicted; there is no blow from God in this: wait a little while for the shadows to pass, and in the meantime let us encourage you with stories of yesteryear: – such a speech would have served Job even less than the serious attempt of friends to solve the problem. It is therefore with a somewhat reckless irony that he reproaches them for not having given what he would have refused with contempt if they had offered it. The passage is all along ironic. No change in tone occurs in Job 16:5, as the opening word is meant to imply. Job means, of course, that such consolation they offered, he never would have offered them. That would be easy, but abhorrent. So far in sad sarcasm; and then, the feeling of desolation falling too heavily on his mind for the joke or the remonstrances, he returns to his complaint. What is he among men? What is it in itself? What is he before God?
But it is God, not men, of whom he has the most bitterness to speak of the strange work. Words almost lack him to express what his all-powerful enemy has done. Number after number expresses the feeling of persecution by a resourceful person who cannot be resisted. Job declares himself physically bruised and broken. The stings and wounds of his disease are like arrows shot from all sides that gnaw at his flesh. It is like a fortress besieged and stormed by an irresistible enemy. The whole story is a persecution, undeserved. He suffers, but always protests that there is no violence in his hands, so his prayer is pure. Let neither God nor man think that he hides sin and cunningly appeals. Sincere, he is in every word. At this point, where one might expect Job’s passionate language to lead to a new explosion against heaven and earth, one of the most dramatic turning points in the patient’s thinking suddenly brings him to a minor harmony with creation and the Creator.
To this new and most pathetic effort to arrive at a benevolent fidelity in God that all his cries have not yet awakened, previous speeches have prepared. Rising from the thought that everything was one for God whether he lived or died since the perfect and the wicked are also destroyed, mourning the absence of a man of the day between him and the Most High, Job in the tenth chapter touched the thought that his Creator could not despise the work with his own hands. The God he worshipped then heard his prayers, accepted his offerings, made him happy with a friendship that was not an empty dream.
Now, in the present stage of being, before the expiration of the years that lead him to the grave, Job implores the justification that exists in the annals of heaven. As the son of man, he pleads, not as a person with a particular right, but simply as a creature of the Almighty; and he pleads for the first time with tears. And in God’s heart too, there must be a testimony of His faithful servant, although in the meantime something interferes with the testimony that God could give. Job’s call is for the sun to shine beyond the rolling clouds. It is there; God is faithful and true. It will shine. But let it shine now! Human life is brief and the delay will be disastrous.
As for the fulfillment of my trust in God, who will see it? The effort once made to keep hope even in the face of death is not forgotten. But he now wonders if he has the least ground in fact. His spirit still needs to be put to the test before rising to the magnificent affirmation: Without my flesh, I will see God. The tides of trust come and go. There is a low reflux here. The next breakthrough will mark the spring of resolute belief. How difficult is the thought that must fight against the grave and corruption! The body in its weight loss and decay, doomed to fall prey to worms, seems to drag with it into the lower darkness the greedy life of the spirit. Those who have a Christian vision of another life can measure themselves against the oppression that Job must endure the value of this revelation of immortality which is the gift of Christ.
The following verses have been compiled for your edification and grouped together for your better understanding.
I have no hope:
- Fragility of man, general references
Ps 49:13 But the man who is in honor has no duration, He is like the beasts that are slaughtered. Ps 78:39 He remembered that they were only flesh, A breath that goes away and does not return. Ps 103:14 For He knows what we are formed of, He remembers that we are dust. 1 Pet 1:24 For all flesh is like grass, and all its glory is like the flower of grass. The grass dries, and the flower falls;
- Contempt for saints
Jb 12:4 I am to my friends an object of mockery, when I implore god’s help; The just, the innocent, an object of mockery! Ps 119:141 I am small and despised; I do not forget your ordinances. 1 Cor 1:28 and God has chosen the vile things of the world and those that are despised, those that are not, to destroy those that are, 1 Cor 4:13 slandered, we speak with kindness; we have become like the sweeps of the world, the waste of all, until now.
- Spiritual progress, characteristics of the righteous
Jb 17:9 The righteous nevertheless remain firm in his way, the One who has pure hands becomes more and more strengthened. Ps 84:8 Their strength increases during the walk, and they present themselves before God to Zion. Ps 92:13 The righteous grow like the palm tree, They rise like the cedar of Lebanon. 1 Tim 4:15 Take care of these things, give yourself entirely to them, so that your progress may be obvious to all.
- Stay of the dead
Jb 17:13 It is the sojourn of the dead that I await for abode, It is in darkness that I will raise my laying down; Ps 49:16 But God will save my soul from the sojourn of the dead, for He will take me under His protection. Hos 13:14 I will redeem them from the power of the sojourn of the dead, I will deliver them from death. O death, where is your plague? Stay of the dead, where is your destruction? But repentance slips away from my gaze! 1 Cor 15:55 O death, where is your victory? O dead, where is your sting?
From all of the above, we note that itis not by mistake, nor out of disbelief, that a man like Job fought with a sinister death, strove to keep it at bay until his character was exonerated. There was no recognized doctrine of the future on which to base it. Out of sheer necessity, every overwhelmed soul had to seek its own Apocalypse. He who had suffered with a bleeding heart a sacrifice of a lifetime, he who had striven to free his fellow slaves and had finally sunk dominated by a tyrannical power, the brave vanquished, the good betrayed, those who sought through pagan beliefs and those who found in revealed religion the promises of God – all stood in painful ignorance before the inexorable death, contemplated the shadows of the underworld and struggled individually for hope in the midst of the growing darkness. The feeling of the crushing disaster of the death of one whose life and religion are condemned with contempt is not attributed to Job as a particular trial, rarely mingling with human experience. The author of the book himself felt it and saw the shadow on many faces. “Where,” as one asks, “were the tears of God as he pushed back into eternal calm the hands stretched out to him in dying faith?” There was a religion that gave a broad and elaborate answer to mortality questions. The broad intelligence of the author of Job can hardly have missed the creed and ceremonial of Egypt; he could not fail to remember his “Book of the Dead.” His own work, throughout, is both a parallel and a contrast with this old vision of future life and divine judgment. It has been claimed that some of the forms of expression, especially in the nineteenth chapter, have their source in the Egyptian scriptures, and that the “Book of the Dead” is full of spiritual aspirations that give it a striking resemblance to the Working Book. Without a doubt, the correspondence is remarkable and will merit examination. The soul comes before Osiris, who holds the shepherd’s leadership and the penal scourge. Thoth (or Logos) breathes a new spirit into the embalmed body, and the dead plead for himself before the assessors: “Salute to you, great Lord of justice. I’m coming close to you. I am one of those consecrated to you on earth. I reach the land of eternity. Our prayers are with you all.
PRAYER OF ACCEPTANCE OF JESUS CHRIST AS LORD AND PERSONAL SAVIOR
I now invite every person who wants to become a new creation by walking in the truth, to pray with me the following prayer:
Lord Jesus, I have long walked in the lusts of the world ignoring your love for humans. I admit to having sinned against you and ask your forgiveness for all my sins, because today I have decided to give you my life by taking you as Lord and personal Savior. I recognize that you died on the cross of Calvary and rose from the dead for me.
I am now saved and born again by the power of the Holy Spirit. Lead me every day to the eternal life that you give to all who obey your Word. Reveal yourself to me and strengthen my heart and faith, so that your light may shine in my life right now.
Thank you, Lord Jesus, for accepting me into your divine family, so that I may also contemplate the wonders of your kingdom as I walk in your ways.
I will now choose a nearby waterpoint to baptize myself by immersion, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
All adoration, power and glory are yours, now and forever and ever. Amen!
I would be happy to respond to any questions and comments you may have, before sharing with you tomorrow “The light of the wicked will go out. (Jb 18)
May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you abundantly.
David Feze, Servant of the Almighty God.