Job's words about the Creator's greatness and incomprehensibility at the end of chapter 26 bring his actual conversation with his three friends to a close...
Job's words about the Creator's greatness and incomprehensibility at the end of chapter 26 bring his actual conversation with his three friends to a close. We now read Job's concluding speech, in which he sums up the discussion before new characters appear.
Job insists that he is in the right, maintaining that he has always kept wrongdoing away from himself. ‘My heart will not reproach me all my days,’ says Job; whoever opposes me is the one who does wrong. Is Job right, can his friends accept this argument, and what is really at issue? Job's friends, and indeed most biblical texts, speak of God's truth, which a person is called to uphold. This truth of God finds concrete expression in the commandments, in the Lord's law. The Torah's words ‘love God and your neighbour,’ and the prophet Micah's call to act justly, love deeds of mercy and walk humbly before the Lord our God, reflect this truth. Yet at the end of the preceding chapter Job said that a person is unable to comprehend God, and therefore nothing accessible to human understanding can contain the whole truth about him.
When the prophets speak of knowing God, they mean knowing God himself: if one may put it this way, a personal acquaintance with the mystery of the Almighty. This knowledge of God, without which there is no life for a person, quenches the thirst for eternity mentioned by Ecclesiastes and nourishes the human heart. The truth about God and knowing God are closely related but not identical. Job longs to meet God himself, who is for him Judge, Accuser and Advocate alike. His friends understand Job's claim to be in the right as though he knew the whole truth about God and claimed to observe it all. That is why they insist so persistently that no living person can attain perfection. ‘There is no one who lives and does not sin,’ echoes the whole spiritual experience of humanity.
‘My heart will not reproach me’: these words of Job mean that he is speaking of something else. He is righteous in his actions insofar as he is able to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil. Job speaks of the voice of conscience, which God has placed in the human heart and which can convict him of sin. He does not claim to know the whole truth about God or to comprehend the full greatness of his ways. But in what is known to him, Job is in the right, and it is on this basis that he wants his case to be heard. Here it matters to the book's author that he chooses as his protagonist not an Israelite, a child of revelation called to be the Lord's witness, but a God-fearing person as such, outside a particular religious and historical context.
It also matters that the legal principle ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ is foreign to the author and his protagonist, whereas Job's friends seem to apply this principle to the human relationship with God. Within the Bible as a whole, perhaps only the apostle Paul's words in his Letter to the Romans can be compared with this position of Job: ‘Do you have faith? Keep it to yourself before God. Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself in what he chooses... whatever is not from faith is sin’ (Rom. 14:22–23). Like the apostle Paul, the author of Job considers it important for a person's heart to be directed towards goodness and the fulfilment of God's will, according to the measure of their faith and of what has been revealed to them. The rest may perhaps be atoned for by the Saviour's prayer: ‘...forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’ (Luke 23:34).
Thus everything Job goes on to say about the destruction of the wicked refers, unlike his friends' words, to conscious opposition to God's will and to human conscience.
27 Job protests his integrity, Job 27:1-6.
And his dread of hypocrisy, Job 27:7-10.
Shews the miserable end of the wicked, notwithstanding their long prosperity, Job 27:11-23.
27:1 Parable - His grave and weighty discourse.
27:2 Who - Though he knows my integrity, yet doth not plead my cause against my friends.
27:6 Reproach - With betraying my own cause and innocency.
27:7 Let - I am so far from practicing wickedness, that I abhor the thoughts of it, and if I would wish to be revenged of my enemy, I could wish him no greater mischief than to be a wicked man.
27:8 Though - Though they prosper in the world. God, as the judge takes it away, to be tried, and determined to its everlasting state.And what will his hope be then? It will be vanity and a lie; it will stand him in no stead.
27:10 Delight - When he has nothing else to delight in? No: his delight is in the things of the world, which now sink under him.And those who do not delight in God, will not always, will not long, call upon him.
27:12 Have seen - I speak what is confirmed by your own, as well as others experiences. Vain - To condemn me for a wicked man, because I am afflicted.
27:15 Remain - Who survive that sword and famine. Widows - For they had many wives. Weep - Because they also, as well as other persons, groaned under their tyranny, and rejoice in their deliverance from it.
27:16 As clay - In great abundance.
27:18 A moth - Which settleth itself in a garment, but is quickly and unexpectedly dispossessed of its dwelling, and crushed to death.A booth - Which the keeper of a garden or vineyard suddenly rears up in fruit - time, and as quickly pulls down again.
27:19 Lie down - In death. Not gathered - Instead of that honourable interment with his fathers, his carcase shall lie like dung upon the earth.One openeth his eyes - That is, while a man can open his eyes, in the twinkling of an eye. He is as if he had never been, dead and gone, and his family and name extinct with him.
27:20 Terrors - From the sense of approaching death or judgment.Waters - As violently and irresistibly, as a river breaking its banks, or deluge of waters bears down all before it. A tempest - God's wrath cometh upon him like a tempest, and withal unexpectedly like a thief in the night.
27:21 East - wind - Some terrible judgment, fitly compared to the east - wind, which in those parts was most vehement, and pernicious.Carrieth him - Out of his palace wherein he expected to dwell forever; whence he shall be carried either by an enemy, or by death.
27:22 Cast - His darts or plagues one after another. Would flee - He earnestly desires to escape the judgments of God, but in vain. Those that will not be persuaded to fly to the arms of Divine grace, which are now stretched out to receive them, will not be able to flee from the arms of Divine wrath, which will shortly be stretched out to destroy them.
27:23 Clap - In token of their joy at the removal of such a publick pest, by way of astonishment: and in contempt and scorn, all which this gesture signifies in scripture use. His - In token of detestation and derision.