Until here, God did not get through to Job: Is the message that He will also not get through to us without making it personal? Not because of any lack of God’s power or goodness, but because our sense of entitlement for our efforts to live righteously hardens the heart? If not by a sense of merit, how else would a zeal for being righteous become a hindrance to submit to the righteousness that is from God, cf Ro 10:3? If God would not effectively intervene in due time as He did for Job, what would stop us from becoming estranged from Him in like manner, or as callous as Job’s friends, cf Mt 23:37?*
As discussed in the preceding chapter, Job’s grudge was that God sustains the oppressors of the poor with a prosperous long life while the righteous suffer (24:1-12), and that the wicked don’t even know the light and therefore are not free to choose light over darkness (24:13-17). The closing statement of Bildad in chapter 25 rejects this view out of hand by simply re-iterating the dogma of free will:
- 25:1-3 God is rightly feared, because his host of armies cannot be numbered and are deployed to establish peace (hebr. shalom) in heaven, and to shine their light on every man on earth.
- 25:4 Being so enlightened makes everyone guilty of choosing evil by their own free will. The reason why men can only beget evil maggots is that they are all born by women.
Accordingly, when John, Paul and Peter in the New Testament preach like the Old Testament that God predestines some to be saved and others to be hardened, according to His will and not depending on ours (e.g. Jn 1:13; Ro 9:16; Eph 1:5; 1Pet 2:8-9), all mankind protests in disbelief to this day: “Why then does he still find fault? For who would then be free to resist his will?” (Ro 9:19).
- 25:5-6 “Behold, since nothing in God’s creation is pure, how much less the sons of men who are only maggots?”
That Bildad led the charge against Job for also questioning how God can be perfect is not without irony either: For what can more profoundly question the Creator than the theory of an impure creation? Bildad was neither the first nor the last with such a seared conscience, though, so that they condemn what God created for our enjoyment with thanksgiving (15:14-15, cf 1Tim 4:3).
Job 26-31: Job’s frustration with the false religion of his ‘friends’
- 26:1-4 “Your theology is from hell and serves no one but the self-righteous”.
- 26:5-6 Even hell trembles before God, but your moralism does not know, let alone teach, proper fear of Him.
- 26:7-14 The whole universe is only “the outskirts of his ways”. But while “His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived,…” (Ro 1:20), you are guilty of hearing even this thunder only as a whisper, because you shut your ears.
[While ESV and KJV insert in v14 the word “but…”, this seems unjustified: Job didn’t blame God for whispering. He blamed his adversaries for being oblivious even to God’s thundering general revelation.]
Job 27:
- 27:1-4 Although God deprived me of my rights, I resolve to never give in to intimidation by you to compromise.
- 27:5-6 Never will I put up with your false doctrine.
- 27:7-10 For your hope is vain, a house built on sand that will fall when your time comes.
- 27:11-12 I am telling you, so that you will have no excuse.
- 27:13-23 That you have become so vain, this is God’s judgement for your kind. For this is your lot: That you live without sorrow, but all in vain, i.e. without any lasting fruit.
Job 28: What the law cannot do
Job’s remaining speeches (chapters 28-31) seem to no longer answer his accusers. Instead, he shares his final lamentations with the reader, starting with how concealed and hidden God’s wisdom is from even the brightest of mankind:
- 28:1-19 Mankind never ceases to perfect science and technology in the pursuit of wealth. However, God’s wisdom is priceless and cannot be purchased with any treasure of this world.
- 28:20-28 Not only did God conceal His wisdom from all the living (v21, cf 1Pet 1:12), but even the way to it (!) is known to Him alone, v23: So much for “free” will and its “freely” available choices!
- But by hearing and beholding this, we may come to properly fear God as our only help to turn to: There is no other way to turn anyone from evil (v28).
Job’s growing awareness that God’s wisdom is hidden to everyone, including the teachers of the law is reminiscent e.g. of Isa 29:14 (cited by 1Cor 1:19) and Jer 8:8. Morality itself (including a notion of God as the law giver) is known to all mankind and preached by every philosophy (such as Kant’s categorical imperative), also by Job’s adversaries who were no Israelites, 2:11 (cf Ro 1:32). Being anything but hidden, the law thus cannot be God’s wisdom that Job was talking about! What then can it be other than the gospel (Mt 11:25; 1Cor 2:6-7), the preaching of how we can be made right – not by laws and precepts, but by being made new?
Job 29: Why must believers share also in Christ’s sufferings?
- In 29:1-6, Job describes his longing for restoration with a “Rock that poured out streams of oil” (v6b), a plain metaphor for Christ. Evidently, he enjoyed Christ while there was no severe trial involved in the form of sufferings such as the contempt by lesser men than himself (30:1ff):
- 29:7-20 To be an instrument in God’s hand for the deliverance of others, literally and spiritually, and to be blessed by them and to enjoy their love. One wonders, though, where those loved ones were in the days of Job’s affliction, cf 42:11? Measured by how unanimously they had abandoned him, it seems they learned from Job less (or only later) than he had thought.
- 29:21-24 To take captive all thoughts and arguments that are raised against faith, also by his supposed friends who became the worst of his adversaries (cf Mt 22:46; 2Cor 10:5): So what then was Job still lacking that he needed to be hammered on the anvil of God’s refinery during another 14 chapters to follow?
Job 30: Why must believers suffer the contempt by unbelievers?
All of Job’s acquaintances by now only despised and ridiculed him. No wonder, since:
- 30:1-8 A senseless generation is in charge, a nameless brood. They have no spiritual food to give, only poison (saltwort), because they themselves only gnaw on dry earth and dust (sic).
- 30:9-15 Despising Job’s sufferings as self-inflicted, they were not satisfied with pushing him out. They also had to discredit him (v15).
- 30:16-23 Behind it all, Job saw God’s hand. What he could not yet see, though, is how God was in it to overcome evil with good (Ro 12:21).
- 30:24-31 Yet, preserved by grace, Job trusted that he was not forsaken, and therefore still cast himself on God for help.**
Job 31: God’s hidden wisdom does not mean the Law, but how it is fulfilled by the Gospel
Until here, during 25 chapters, Job increasingly questioned God’s justice, because the humble suffer while the wicked thrive. To his opponents, this was blasphemous antinomianism, undermining all efforts to live holy if there is no reward in this life (Job 15:4). But Job’s description of the desire of his heart proves that he was most certainly no antinomian:
- 31:1-12 Job affirmed in the strongest terms that sin deserves condemnation. He never complained that there is judgement, but that judgement falls on the righteous, whereas the wicked get away.
- 31:13-28 Same for idolatry: Job starts here with the tenth commandment to end with the first. And not for their outward observance only, but in spirit and truth, even refusing to rejoice about the ruin of his enemies, v29.
- 31:29-40 Since Job was so above reproach that he had such a clean conscience, was this his problem, cf Lk 7:47? Was his peace with God shattered in adversity because his confidence was still based on his own merits?
* Knowing a standard of right and wrong that is written on every heart, they demand of others what they themselves fail to live up to. Even if they militate against lawlessness as theists, they too cannot hear what we need to hear of God to be freed from it. Although they may even search the Bible in their pursuit of everlasting true life, they do not know and love the One of whom the Bible testifies that He can give it (Jn 5:39-40). Such theism only further conceals the root problem instead of solving it.
** Even Job himself did not yet understand at this point what is the antidote offered in the gospel. Only by his own sufferings he became prepared to hear it. Only his own sufferings and the resulting questioning of his own beliefs led him to even ask the right question and to realize that the crux (literally) of true religion is how God can be both all-sovereign and perfect in justice. Justice in the sense that there is not even a shadow of darkness in Him (or else He would by definition cease to be God); and sovereign in the sense that He determines the course of everything and everyone. Although, to our own senses, that kind of ‘predestination’ and justice seem too incompatible to trust God that He can handle it (Ro 9:14b; 11:33-36).
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