Job 18

¹ Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said: ² “How long will you hunt for words? Consider, and then we will speak. ³ Why are we counted as cattle? Why are we stupid in your sight? ⁴ You who tear yourself in your anger, shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place? ⁵ “Indeed, the light of the wicked is put out, and the flame of his fire does not shine. ⁶ The light is dark in his tent, and his lamp above him is put out. ⁷ His strong steps are shortened, and his own schemes throw him down. ⁸ For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks on its mesh. ⁹ A trap seizes him by the heel; a snare lays hold of him. ¹⁰ A rope is hidden for him in the ground, a trap for him in the path. ¹¹ Terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels. ¹² His strength is famished, and calamity is ready for his stumbling. ¹³ It consumes the parts of his skin; the firstborn of death consumes his limbs. ¹⁴ He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the king of terrors. ¹⁵ In his tent dwells that which is none of his; sulfur is scattered over his habitation. ¹⁶ His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above. ¹⁷ His memory perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the street. ¹⁸ He is thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. ¹⁹ He has no posterity or progeny among his people, and no survivor where he used to live. ²⁰ They of the west are appalled at his day, and horror seizes them of the east. ²¹ Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous, such is the place of him who knows not God.”

Job 19

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words? ³ These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? ⁴ And even if it be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. ⁵ If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me, ⁶ know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me. ⁷ Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice. ⁸ He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. ⁹ He has stripped from me my glory and taken the crown from my head. ¹⁰ He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree. ¹¹ He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary. ¹² His troops come on together; they have cast up their siege ramp against me and encamp around my tent. ¹³ “He has put my brothers far from me, and those who knew me are wholly estranged from me. ¹⁴ My relatives have failed me, my close friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ The guests in my house and my maidservants count me as a stranger; I have become a foreigner in their eyes. ¹⁶ I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer; I must plead with him with my mouth for mercy. ¹⁷ My breath is strange to my wife, and I am a stench to the children of my own mother. ¹⁸ Even young children despise me; when I rise they talk against me. ¹⁹ All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. ²⁰ My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! ²² Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh? ²³ “Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! ²⁴ Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! ²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. ²⁶ And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, ²⁷ whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! ²⁸ If you say, ‘How we will pursue him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’ ²⁹ be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment.”

On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards stood before his congregation and preached on Deuteronomy 32:35, “Their foot shall slide in due time.” It is perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached on American soil. It is entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is a startling and jarring sermon and one that God used to spark a massive awakening in the land. It is also filled with terrifying imagery of the wrath of God. Consider the imagery of this particular section of the sermon.

The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose. It is true, that judgment against your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the mean time is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the waters are constantly rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, that holds the waters back, that are unwilling to be stopped, and press hard to go forward. If God should only withdraw his hand from the flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power; and if your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it.

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.[1]

One does not often hear such preaching today. This is probably not a good thing. To be sure, the sweetness of the gospel must never be eclipsed by the wrath of God, but the righteous wrath of God is indeed one of the things that makes the gospel so very sweet.

What Edwards was attempting to do, in part, was remind his congregation of the odiousness of sin, the righteousness of God’s wrath, the certainty of God’s coming judgment against wickedness, and, ultimately, the graciousness of God who alone keeps the full vent of His fury from falling upon us at this very moment. Edwards was therefore seeking to move his people to repentance by invoking the wrath of God against wickedness.

Old Testament scholar J. Gerald Janzen has argued that Bildad the Shuhite is doing in Job 18 what Jonathan Edwards did in his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Bildad was seeking, Janzen tells us, “to move the intransigent sinner to a more tenable place in the world and before God.”[2] That is no doubt true, but it must be said that the critical difference between Edwards’ approach and Bildad’s approach was that Edwards was correct in pointing to the sins of the people as the reason for God’s wrath whereas Bildad was incorrect in his assumption that the calamity that had befallen Job was the result of Job’s sin.

Nonetheless, Bildad appeals to the wrath of God against wickedness and Job responds with a plea for greater understanding from his misguided friends.

Bildad launches the ultimate ad hominem attack: “Job, you are wicked.”

An ad hominem is a logical fallacy in which, in the midst of an argument or debate, one person abandons the substance of the argument itself and launches an attack on the other person’s character. It is a fallacy because a person’s character does not render a person’s argument right or wrong. It may render a person a hypocrite, to be sure, but it is irrelevant to the argument itself.

While Bildad’s approach in Job 18 may not be a pure ad hominem due to the fact that what Bildad thinks of Job’s character is bound up with his central theory concerning Job’s tragedy, the invective he unleashes in this next speech feels like an assault.

¹ Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said: ² “How long will you hunt for words? Consider, and then we will speak. ³ Why are we counted as cattle? Why are we stupid in your sight? ⁴ You who tear yourself in your anger, shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place? ⁵ “Indeed, the light of the wicked is put out, and the flame of his fire does not shine. ⁶ The light is dark in his tent, and his lamp above him is put out. ⁷ His strong steps are shortened, and his own schemes throw him down. ⁸ For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks on its mesh. ⁹ A trap seizes him by the heel; a snare lays hold of him. ¹⁰ A rope is hidden for him in the ground, a trap for him in the path. ¹¹ Terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels. ¹² His strength is famished, and calamity is ready for his stumbling. ¹³ It consumes the parts of his skin; the firstborn of death consumes his limbs. ¹⁴ He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the king of terrors. ¹⁵ In his tent dwells that which is none of his; sulfur is scattered over his habitation. ¹⁶ His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above. ¹⁷ His memory perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the street. ¹⁸ He is thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. ¹⁹ He has no posterity or progeny among his people, and no survivor where he used to live. ²⁰ They of the west are appalled at his day, and horror seizes them of the east. ²¹ Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous, such is the place of him who knows not God.”

Simply put, Bildad tells Job that he is wicked and deserves what he is getting. The imagery is Edwardsesque in its descriptive force and emotional intensity. Job, being a wicked man (in Bildad’s mind), is like an extinguished fire, a tripped up schemer, a man caught in a net, a man haunted and running fro terrors, a weak man, a man eaten alive by calamity, a man thrown before the terror of terrors, a tree that is dead above ground and below, a man whose name is blotted from the books of the living, a man whom nobody will remember, a man with no children or heirs, and a man of whom people are afraid.

This ad hominem is essentially a doubling-down on Bildad’s part. It is as if he has stuck his fingers in his ears so as not to hear Job’s protest and then started screaming, “You are evil! You are evil!”

I once did marriage counseling with a young couple who were having a very difficult time communicating. Conflict resolution was a real weakness to say the least. The wife recounted to me that on one occasion they were in the car having a disagreement when all of a sudden her husband began to shout over here, “GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN! GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN!” Not surprisingly, such is not conducive to a healthy relationship.

This is, in essence, what Bildad is doing in Job 18. He is, as it were, increasing the volume and intensity of what he has been saying all along, wrong that it was. He is saying that the matter is simple and settled:

• The wicked suffer.
• Job is wicked.
• Therefore Job suffers.

It is hard to reason with a man who has determined not to listen.

Job responds by pleading with his friends to understand that God is ultimately responsible for his calamity.

Perhaps realizing that the intensity of the exchange he is having with his friends has reached an impasse, and perhaps realizing that his arguments heretofore are not being seriously considered by his friends, Job takes a bit of a different approach in Job 19. He asks his friends to show him understanding and mercy since, after all, it is God who has struck him and who can stop God from doing what he wants.

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words? ³ These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? ⁴ And even if it be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. ⁵ If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me, ⁶ know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me. ⁷ Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice. ⁸ He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. ⁹ He has stripped from me my glory and taken the crown from my head. ¹⁰ He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree. ¹¹ He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary. ¹² His troops come on together; they have cast up their siege ramp against me and encamp around my tent. ¹³ “He has put my brothers far from me, and those who knew me are wholly estranged from me. ¹⁴ My relatives have failed me, my close friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ The guests in my house and my maidservants count me as a stranger; I have become a foreigner in their eyes. ¹⁶ I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer; I must plead with him with my mouth for mercy. ¹⁷ My breath is strange to my wife, and I am a stench to the children of my own mother. ¹⁸ Even young children despise me; when I rise they talk against me. ¹⁹ All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. ²⁰ My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! ²² Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?

Job’s speech somewhat matches Bildad’s in terms of its impressive marshaling of the imagery of ruin.   In Job’s speech, however, the imagery is not of a wicked man getting what he deserves, but rather of a man who has simply been assaulted by God for some unknown reason. One might risk oversimplification by suggesting that Job’s friends are screaming, “It is Job’s fault!” whereas Job is screaming, “It is God’s fault!”

Job recognizes that he is not a perfect man and not beyond error, but he still maintains his innocence and argues that the reason for his calamity is found in God’s secret, interior will and not in Job’s wickedness. In so ruthlessly pursing him, Job says, his friends have become vicious towards him in the same way that God has: “Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?” (v.22)

Job argues that God has laid him low. In Job’s mind, God has walled him in, cast him in darkness, stripped him of glory, broken him, robbed him of hope, attacked him with all of His armies, deprived him of family and friends, made him an exile and outsider in his own home, ruined his marriage, made him monstrous to young children, destroyed his friendships, and wrecked his health. In light of God’s attack, Job wonders, might his friends extend to him a bit of understanding and compassion?

Job’s theology is worthy of consideration. It must be said that in terms of ultimate causes he is correct. He is correct that behind everything there is God. But, again, let us remember that Job has not read the first chapters of the book of Job! He does not know that Satan presented himself to God, that God agreed to allow Satan to strike Job, that God forbade Satan to kill Job, and that God loved and had not forsaken Job. In other words, Job’s theology had room only for simple, direct causes and not for divine allowance. But divine allowance changes everything.

Is God not ultimately the cause behind all causes? In a sense. But the presence of divine allowance is critically important here. It means that God Himself does not actively, directly, and simply cause Job’s calamity or ours. It means He allows it. Could God have chosen not to allow it? Of course. But sometimes He does allow it. This is the great question of the book: why does God allow bad things to happen to His people?

Job is therefore partially right, but he is also partially wrong. Is the hand of God involved in this? Yes, but not in the simple way he imagines, not, that is, in any way that makes God the active cause of the evil that has befallen him.

Yet Job still holds out a lingering hope.

What happens next is surprising to say the least. In the midst of Job’s diatribe against what he sees as the harming hand of God, he breaks into something like praise. What is more, he exhibits something that sounds like hope!

²³ “Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! ²⁴ Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! ²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. ²⁶ And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, ²⁷ whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! ²⁸ If you say, ‘How we will pursue him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’ ²⁹ be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment.”

Unbelievable! In the midst of his disappointment, pain, dismay, fear, dread, anger, anxiety, and loss of hope, Job pronounces his certain belief in a coming Redeemer, a Redeemer who is God. He proclaims that he will see God.

Steven Chase has made an interesting observation about Job’s statement in verse 25, “yet in my flesh I shall see God.”

The phrase umibbe-sari is more properly rendered, literally, as “from or out of my flesh” or even “without my flesh.” Whatever the phrase means, it does not mean “in.” Dhorme thinks it means “behind my skin…as behind a curtain,” and the curtain may be death. Once again the question of immortality and the afterlife is raised, but once again it is ambiguous: for instance, the skin may need to be peeled off before Job sees God (i.e., in death); or it may mean a robust and renewed vision “from out of my flesh” in this life.[3]

However he means it, Job means that he will one day stand before God. Significantly, he says that this God will be a saving, redeeming God to him.

What are we to make of this? We have seen glimpses of this before, this unexpected, out of place, spontaneous, surprising doxology in the midst of prolonged complaint.

We are reminded again of Piper’s beautiful line from his Job poem, “I cling with feeble fingers to the ledge of thy great grace.” It would appear that this is what is happening. Just when we think that Job has slipped into an incurable despair and lust for death, he springs up with an undeniable and unvanquished note of hope, anticipation, and even joy!

Such is the power of hope within the hearts of the people of God. In our darkest moments, our moments of spiritual abandonment and loss, our deepest agonies of mind, body, and soul, there is something within the hearts of God’s people that refuses to let go in any ultimate and final sense. There is a hope that cannot be vanquished, a flame that cannot be extinguished, a small, almost imperceptible, sometimes barely there kernel of faith that refuses to go away.

“For truly, I say to you,” says Jesus in Matthew 17:20, “if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Mustard seed faith: small, simple, almost imperceptible…but there. Mustard seed faith is not impressive faith as humans reckon it. It is contemptible in human reckoning. But not so in God’s. God can work with the small faith of His beleaguered people. He does not despise it. We do, but we are fools. The reality is that many people often find their faith to be the size of a mustard seed. Job did. Perhaps you do. And, like a small thing that refuses to die, there are times when it has to fight its way to the surface, peeking its head up above the soil of our own dismay and complaints. But there it is, surprising even us, growing up out of the soil, still there, still present, not vanquished. And that means that our small faith, like Job’s small faith, is actually quite a very big thing indeed! For our mustard seed faith clings to the great and eternal King of heaven and earth who is ever and always in the business of taking the small offerings of His children and extending them outwards and onwards into amazing and beautiful displays of His great grace.

Job grieved and roiled and writhed in his pain. He complained and condemned and rebuked and rebuffed. But here, at the end of Job 19, we see something else: Job still believed. With feeble fingers, perhaps, but, then, feeble fingers are all that we ever bring to God. Even so, the grasp of God is strong and does not let go.

Job barely held on to God…but God never let go of Job.

“I know that my Redeemer lives!”

And there it is! Mustard seed faith! Faith struggling to see and understand! Faith barely peeking up above the topsoil! But faith nonetheless.

Do not let go. Do not quit. Do not walk away. Your Redeemer lives!

 

[1] https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=544

[2] J. Gerald Janzen, Job. Interpretation. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1985), p.130.

[3] Steven Chase, Job. Belief. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), p.137-138.