Readers often feel that Job's repentance was forced. God revealed Himself and His power, and in the face of such an unmistakable demonstration, Job supposedly had nowhere to turn. Yet this was clearly more than a display of power alone. God really did speak to Job in human terms, as Job had wanted. It is another matter that...
Readers often feel that Job's repentance was forced. God revealed Himself and His power, and in the face of such an unmistakable demonstration, Job supposedly had nowhere to turn. Yet this was clearly more than a display of power alone. God really did speak to Job in human terms, as Job had wanted. It is another matter that the conversation took a turn he had not expected. God did not try to dissuade Job of his righteousness or confront him with sins for which He might reproach him. Nor did He answer the question about the suffering of innocent people, of the righteous.
He simply appeared before Job. Using the animals He had created as examples, He showed him what power that disregards human beings is like. And He made Job understand that He is God, who knows what He is doing and who remembers human beings. Of course, God gives Job no details, much less any guarantees. Except for one: He remembers humankind and knows how to deal with the evil in which the world lies. And even if everything seems utterly dark and hopeless to someone living in this world, God has His own plan, which includes, among other things, freeing the world from evil.
Of course, had Job's friends said these words to him, he would not have believed them. After all, they had indeed been saying something similar.
But what mattered was precisely the encounter, the face-to-face meeting with God that Job had so longed for and awaited. Among other things, it opened up spiritual horizons for Job that he had neither known nor seen before. It turned out that his entire former life, even his righteousness, had been a merely human affair, never going beyond the bounds of the traditional religiosity of which Job himself was a thoroughly sincere and convinced representative.
God opened up a different prospect for Job and showed him another life—a life where there is no religion, but there is the living God, and where righteousness is not a meticulous, almost accountant-like tally of merits and sins, but the experience of encountering this living and utterly real God, and therefore of encountering a new and equally real life: the life of God's great world, which will one day unfold in all the fullness of God's Kingdom.
Job can now bear witness to this new reality revealed to him and communicate with God from within it and through it. That is why God entrusts him with prayer for his friends, who as yet know nothing, or almost nothing, of all this—and therefore do not speak or bear witness about God as truly as Job, who has become a living witness to the living God.
42 Job throughly humbles himself before God, Job 42:1-6.
God reproves his friends, for whom Job intercedes, and God accepts them, Job 42:7-9.
God blesses and restores Job to his prosperity, Job 42:10-15.
His age and death, Job 42:16-17.
42:5 Seeth thee - The knowledge which I had of thy nature, perfections and counsels, was hitherto grounded chiefly, upon the instructions of men; but now it is clear and certain, as being immediately inspired into my mind by this thy glorious apparition and revelation, and by the operation of thy holy spirit; which makes these things as evident to me, as if I saw them with my bodily eyes. When the mind is enlightened by the spirit of God, our knowledge of Divine things as far exceeds what we had before, as knowledge by ocular demonstration, exceeds, that by common fame.