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King James Version (en)

King James Version (en)

Job, Chapter 27, verses 8-10

⁸ The hypocrite is without hope

⁸For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained, when God taketh away his soul?

⁹Will God hear his cry when trouble cometh upon him?

¹⁰Will he delight himself in the Almighty? will he always call upon God?

Read more:Job, Chapter 27

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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.

27:8 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.

NOTES

Job does not want to lie. He will not bear false witness about himself, calling himself a sinner while being sure of his righteousness. He is more ready to admit...

Job does not want to lie. He will not bear false witness about himself, calling himself a sinner while being sure of his righteousness. He is more ready to admit that God, for now, is depriving him of His judgment. He does not reject God, does not reject His righteousness, and does not doubt that God's judgment will still put everything in its place. But right now that judgment is absent, and Job speaks directly about what he sees and how he sees it. He does not want to lie to himself and to others for "pious" reasons. More than that, he regards such a lie as a very serious sin. A sin of which, among others, he accuses his friends. And of course the point here is not the words they said. One cannot pick fault with their words; they are so correct and self-evident that, in essence, they need not have been said at all.

The issue is why and for what purpose all these correct general words are being spoken. That is where the lie begins. Insincerity, when words that are perfectly correct in themselves are spoken not in defense of what they say, but in defense of one's own, at the least ambiguous, position. And sometimes a plainly deceitful one: the longer the conversation continues, the more the situation begins to lean precisely in that direction.

When general correct words hide from those who say them both the person and the real situation in which that person has found himself, this is, at minimum, a serious spiritual mistake. But when those saying them begin to suspect what is going on and understand the true motives for their insistence on correct words, it is no longer a mistake but a more or less conscious lie. And if the liars do not want to admit their lie even to themselves, so much the worse for them: unwillingness to see one's lie does not make a conscious sin into a mistake.

And here a question arises: what is such a person to do on the day of God's judgment? Then one will have to meet God face to face. What then? Will God really forgive deceit and falsehood merely because they were covered with pious words? The questions asked required a direct and honest answer. And a no less honest look at themselves.

Continuing his speech, Job turns to the second theme beloved by his friends...

Continuing his speech, Job turns to the second theme beloved by his friends - the fate of the wicked (vv. 8-23). And again he gives the kind of speech his friends expect to hear from him. Any one of them could have supported such a speech, and so could any religious person in general. But in speaking about the fate awaiting the wicked, Job rather transparently hints at his friends (vv. 5-7). He declares that he is not going to lie in order to please his friends, who express generally accepted opinions, or anyone else who shares those opinions (vv. 2-4). Apparently, Job understands that righteousness is impossible if there is even a drop of insincerity in one's relationship with God. And in the speeches of Job's friends there was plenty of such insincerity. After all, in essence, they did not even try to understand Job truly, fearing that such understanding would blow up their inner world and destroy their well-ordered religious life.

It is no accident that, beginning his speech about the fate of the wicked, Job first mentions hypocrites (v. 8). Of course, the hypocrisy of Job's friends was a hypocrisy of a special kind. They were not practicing hypocrisy deliberately in search of personal gain. But in spiritual life there are no trifles and no middle ground. Relationships with God can be either completely sincere, excluding every kind of deceit, or nonexistent. One drop of insincerity here could spoil everything.

Of course, Job's friends may well not have known some of what Job had begun to suspect, and their failure to understand in this case may have been quite conscientious. But the unwillingness to understand itself could hardly be considered conscientious: the attempts to write everything off by saying that Job was not in his right mind, that he himself did not understand what he was saying. Here there was already spiritual cowardice and an unwillingness to part with a convenient and familiar religious worldview. But God does not need religion; He needs the human heart, which a person would give to Him freely. The danger of insincerity lies not only in the fact that it is, in essence, nothing other than an attempt to deceive God, but in the fact that it completely destroys all of a person's relationships with God. And then a person remains with his religion, but without the God who could save him.

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.

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