Christ in Job

Christ Connection - Testing in the Wilderness

Job is tested in the place of blessing, in the midst of abundance, being asked to surrender it all. Christ is tested in a different way - in the wilderness, stripped of all comfort, asked to turn stones to bread (Matthew 4:1-4). But the principle is the same: the testing of faith not through easy circumstances, but through deprivation and hunger. Like Job, Christ refuses to use His power for self-preservation. Like Job, He submits to the Father’s will, saying not "my will"…

Job 2 sets before us a righteous man who suffers though he has done no wrong, and in that picture the New Testament will find a faint outline of One greater. The LORD Himself says Job suffers without cause (v. 3) - the affliction is not the wage of any sin of his - and Job, struck from the sole of his foot unto his crown (v. 7), sits in the ashes and yet will not curse God. The Scriptures speak of a truly innocent Sufferer in the same key: a man of sorrows, and acquainted…

Job 3 is the chapter where a faithful man, after seven days of silence in the ashes, finally opens his mouth - and what comes out is not praise but a lament so raw it curses the very day he was born. Let the day perish wherein I was born (v. 3); let darkness swallow it, he prays, let it be struck from the calendar of the year. He longs for the womb that might have been a grave, and for the still rest of the dead, where the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary b…

Job 4 is the first of the friends’ speeches, and it must be read with a warning the book itself supplies: at the end the LORD will say to Eliphaz, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath (Job 42:7). So the chapter is not the Bible’s teaching about suffering - it is the careful, courteous, and mistaken counsel of a man who thinks he understands a grief he has never felt. Eliphaz begins gently, even reluctantly, and reminds Job of his own min…

Job 5 is one of the hardest chapters in Scripture to read rightly, because so much of it is true - and all of it is aimed at the wrong man. Eliphaz finishes his speech with words that ring like the rest of the Bible. He declares that suffering is no accident - man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward - and he praises the God who doeth great things and unsearchable, who lifts the lowly and taketh the wise in their own craftiness (a line Paul will quote as Scriptur…

Job 6 is the reply of an honest sufferer, and it teaches us how grief is allowed to sound. Job does not answer Eliphaz’s logic; he sets his anguish on the scales and lets its weight speak: O that my grief were throughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea (vv. 2-3). He names the source without flinching - the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit (v. 4) - and c…

Job 7 is the prayer of a man at the end of his strength, and it shows us how lament is allowed to sound when it is spoken straight to God. Job frames human life as a conscript’s hard tour and a hired man’s long day: Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? are not his days also like the days of an hireling? (v. 1). His nights are wearisome, his flesh clothed with worms, his days swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and… spent without hope (vv. 3-6). He refuses…

Job 8 is the first speech of Bildad the Shuhite, and like the words of all three friends it must be read under the warning the book itself supplies: at the end the LORD says, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath (Job 42:7). So the chapter is not Scripture’s teaching on suffering - it is the blunt and mistaken counsel of a man certain he understands a grief he has never felt. Bildad begins by dismissing Job’s lament as a strong wind and t…

Job 9 holds one of the deepest cries in all the Old Testament, and it rises not from doubt of God but from too clear a sight of Him. Bildad has said God is just; Job agrees - I know it is so of a truth - and that is exactly his anguish: but how should man be just with God? (v. 2). God is so far above him that he could not answer Him one of a thousand (v. 3); He removeth the mountains, shaketh the earth out of her place, commandeth the sun, and it riseth not, alone spreadet…

Job 10 is the chapter where a suffering man, too weary to keep up appearances, takes his complaint straight to God - and the ground he stands on is not his innocence but his Maker. I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul (v. 1), he says, and his plea is plain: I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me (v. 2). Then the lament turns into an argument no one would dare make who did not believe God…

Zophar tells Job, “know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth” (Job 11:6) - applying true general doctrine cruelly to a specific innocent man God Himself has commended. At the cross, the equation runs the other way: God exacted of Christ more than the punishment of His Son was due, in order that He might require less of us (Isa 53:6; 2 Cor 5:21). Christ is also the answer to Zophar’s rhetorical question: Paul says of God’s ways, “O the dept…

Job, mocked by the friends who came to comfort him, declares: I am as one mocked of his neighbour, who calleth upon God, and he answereth him: the just and perfect man is laughed to scorn (Job 12:4). The line lands directly on the cross. “He was despised and rejected of men… we hid as it were our faces from him” (Isa 53:3). “They that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, and saying… he saved others; himself he cannot save” (Matt 27:39, 42). Job is the Old Testament’…

Job’s reply contains the verse the church has reached for in every later season of unjust suffering: though he slay me, yet will I trust in him (Job 13:15). Christ inhabits the verse at full pitch in Gethsemane and on the cross: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46) - trust held all the way through death. The chapter also calls the friends physicians of no value (13:4) and demands a hearing before God - the demand Christ answers as the One Mediator: “th…

Out of the deepest meditation on human mortality in the wisdom literature comes the question the Old Testament is reaching toward and Christ alone finally answers: if a man die, shall he live again? (Job 14:14). Jesus says it to Martha in seven words: I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live (John 11:25). Job’s “till my change come” (14:14) lands in Paul: we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of a…

Eliphaz returns with a harsher speech that uses a textbook portrait of the wicked man (Job 15:20-35) as a mirror Job is supposed to recognize himself in. The chapter’s deepest irony is that the only One who would ever fit Eliphaz’s portrait perfectly while being personally innocent was Christ at the cross - he was numbered with the transgressors (Isa 53:12) - taking on every external feature of the wicked so that the actually-wicked could go free (2 Cor 5:21). And Eliphaz’…

Against every visible evidence - friends who scorn him, a body torn, a God who feels like an enemy who has “set me up for his mark” (Job 16:12) - Job declares, my witness is in heaven, and my record is on high (16:19). The Hebrew stacks two words for witness in two different languages, doubling the testimony. The chapter then asks: O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour (16:21). The New Testament answers by name: we have an advocate…

Three remarkable Christ-seeds in one chapter. Job asks God to be his arav - surety - “be surety for me with thyself; for who is he that will strike hands with me?” (17:3) - answered by Heb 7:22: by so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament . Job names himself the mashal (byword, public object lesson) of the people (17:6) - answered by Luke 2:34, Christ as a sign which shall be spoken against . And Job makes his bed in the darkness and calls corruption his fathe…

Job 18 is the second speech of Bildad the Shuhite, and like every word of Job’s three friends it must be read under the warning the book itself supplies: at the end the LORD says, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath (Job 42:7). So the chapter is not Scripture’s teaching on why people suffer - it is the harsh poetry of a man so stung that he has stopped arguing and begun simply to threaten. Bildad paints, in line after vivid line, the do…

Job 19 begins in the dark and ends on a summit. Bildad has lashed him again, and Job answers out of fresh pain - how long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? (v. 2). He feels God Himself has turned on him: God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net (v. 6); He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass (v. 8), stripped me of my glory (v. 9). And then, worse than the affliction, comes the loneliness. Every human bond is severed: He hath put…

Job 20 is the second speech of Zophar the Naamathite, and like the words of all three friends it must be read under the warning the book itself supplies: at the end the LORD tells them, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath (Job 42:7). Stung by Job’s reproach, Zophar answers in haste with a vivid poem on the doom of the wicked, and he states his thesis as an ancient and self-evident law: the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy…

Job 21 is the chapter where a suffering man looks straight at the world and says the true thing his comforters could not bear to hear. They had built their whole counsel on a clean rule - the wicked are cut off quickly, suffering proves guilt, prosperity proves favor - and Job dismantles it with a single honest glance: Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? (v. 7). Their houses are safe from fear, their children dance, their herds breed without…

Job 22 is the third and final speech of Eliphaz the Temanite, and it must be read under the warning the book itself supplies: at the end the LORD says, ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath (Job 42:7). In his first speech Eliphaz only inferred Job’s guilt from his suffering; here, with Job still refusing to break, he stops inferring and starts inventing. Is not thy wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite? (v. 5) - and then a list…

Job 23 sets two things that rarely sit together in the same breath: the ache of a God who cannot be found, and a faith that the fire is a refining. Job longs for a hearing - Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat! (v. 3) - certain that if he could only reach God he could order his cause and be heard, for there the righteous might dispute with him (v. 7). But the door will not open in any direction: Behold, I go forward, but he is not ther…

Job opens the chapter with the question every later martyr would ask: Why, seeing times are not hidden from the Almighty, do they that know him not see his days? (Job 24:1). The catalog of injustices (vv. 2-17) makes the question concrete. The cry of v. 12 - Men groan from out of the city… yet God layeth not folly to them - is the same cry Revelation 6:10 records the souls under the altar making: “how long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood?”…

Bildad’s third and final speech is the shortest in the book - six verses - and after it the friends fall silent for good. He exalts the dominion and fear of God, he maketh peace in his high places (v. 2), and then, almost in passing, he asks the question the whole of Scripture is reaching toward and only the gospel finally answers: How then can man be justified with God? or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? (v. 4). The verb is tsadaq - to be declared righteous -…

After the friends’ collapse, Job demonstrates that he knows God’s cosmic majesty far better than they do. He names God hanging the earth upon nothing (Job 26:7), binding up the waters in His clouds (v. 8), and His hand forming the crooked serpent (v. 13) - the same serpent Genesis 3:15 promised the seed of the woman would crush. Paul names the One doing all of it: by him were all things created… and by him all things consist (Col 1:16-17). And Job’s closing line - how litt…

Job takes the most famous oath of integrity in the Old Testament: till I die I will not remove mine integrity ( tumati ) from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go (Job 27:5-6). The Hebrew tom is the exact word God Himself used of Job in the prologue (Job 1:1, 8; 2:3). The chapter is Job refusing to surrender what God had already said about him. Christ inhabits the verse at full pitch: He did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth (1 Pet 2:22), hel…

The chapter is the Old Testament’s most explicit poem on the inaccessibility of wisdom to human effort and its sole location in God. Verses 1-11 celebrate human mining; vv. 12-22 ask but where shall wisdom be found? ; vv. 23-28 answer that God alone knows the way, and that the fear of the LORD, that is wisdom (Job 28:28). Paul names what the chapter is pointing toward: Christ Himself is the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24), and in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and know…

Job 29 is a sustained act of memory - the great sufferer recalling the days when the candle of God shined upon my head (Job 29:3). What he grieves first is not lost wealth but lost nearness: when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle... when the Almighty was yet with me (vv. 4-5). Then he remembers the honor that was grounded in mercy - he was eyes to the blind, and feet... to the lame, a father to the poor (vv. 15-16), one that comforteth the mourners (v. 25). The work…

Job 30 is the photographic negative of the chapter before it. Every honor Job remembered in chapter 29 is turned inside out: the man the whole city rose for has become the song and byword of the lowest outcasts (vv. 1, 9), who spare not to spit in my face (v. 10); the comforter of mourners now goes mourning without the sun (v. 28); the harp that played at his feasts is turned to mourning (v. 31). And in the center of it he prays the prayer that gives the book its rawest li…

Job 31 is the last word of a genuinely upright man - a sweeping oath of innocence in which Job, one sin at a time, calls down a curse on himself if he has done the thing he names. Read forward, the list is the shape of a righteous life, and what is most striking is where it begins: not with the outward act but with the inward root. I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid? (v. 1). Job binds even his gaze by covenant, reaching after a purity tha…

Job 32 introduces Elihu, the young man who has waited at the edge of the debate and now breaks in, his wrath... kindled four times over (vv. 2-5) - at Job for justifying himself rather than God, and at the friends for condemning Job without ever answering him. His central claim is one the whole Bible will echo: wisdom is not the automatic reward of age. Great men are not always wise (v. 9), for there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them under…

Into the middle of Job’s agony Elihu drops the book’s brightest word of hope: there is a way out, through a mediator. He describes a messenger... an interpreter, one among a thousand (v. 23) who stands between the dying man and God and says the decisive word - Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom (v. 24) - and at once the sufferer is restored, his flesh fresher than a child’s, his face lifted to God with joy (vv. 25-26). Elihu can only point at thi…

Job 34 is the second speech of Elihu, the young man who broke in after Job’s three friends had run out of words - and it must be read with care, because it is neither the error of the friends nor the answer of the book. Elihu summons the wise as a jury and mounts a great defense of God’s justice, and much of what he says is simply, gloriously true. Far be it from God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity (v. 10). Yea, surely G…

Elihu’s coldest argument hides a warm thread. He insists that God is too high to be enriched by our goodness or wounded by our sin - if thou be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine hand? (v. 7) - a God who, as Paul would later preach, is not worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing (Acts 17:25). And yet that same self-sufficient God giveth songs in the night (v. 10) to those who seek Him as their Maker, and tells the man who cann…

Elihu’s final speech reaches for something true and nearly touches it. He sees that affliction can be God’s way of opening the ear - that suffering is not always punishment but sometimes instruction (vv. 8-10, 15) - and he ends gazing up at a God who is great, and we know him not (v. 26), whose voice is gathering in the rising storm (vv. 29-33). But Elihu bends every insight back into a verdict against Job: obey and prosper, refuse and perish by the sword (vv. 11-12). The…

Elihu finishes with a storm breaking over his head, and he hears the thunder not as weather but as speech - the noise of his voice, and the sound that goeth out of his mouth (v. 2), the God who thundereth marvellously and does great things... which we cannot comprehend (v. 5). He watches that voice command the snow, the rain, and the frost, steering every cloud round about by his counsels for correction, or for his land, or for mercy (vv. 12-13) - one storm, many purposes,…

For thirty-seven chapters men have spoken about God; in Job 38 God at last speaks for Himself, and He does it out of the whirlwind. The wonder of His answer is what it withholds: no explanation of Job’s suffering, no mention of the unseen wager, no “why.” God answers a question with questions, and the questions are a tour of creation that leaves Job small and steadied at once. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? (v. 4) - Job was not there; the world w…

The answer from the whirlwind keeps unfolding, and in Job 39 it becomes a parade of wild creatures - the goats of the rock that bring forth where no shepherd watches (v. 1), the wild ass sent out free (v. 5), the wild ox whose strength no farmer can harness (vv. 9-12), the foolish ostrich (vv. 13-18), the war-horse who saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha (v. 25), the hawk and the eagle who soar and see afar off (vv. 26-30). Not one of them is fed, governed, or understood by J…

Job 40 turns on a single gesture. After the first half of God’s answer, Job does what his friends never could - he stops: Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth (v. 4). It is not a guilty man crushed but a small man humbled, and the book guards the difference, for God will say Job spoke the thing that is right while the friends did not (42:7). Then God presses the question that exposes the whole problem of running a moral universe:…

Job 41 is the climax of the whirlwind, a whole chapter spent on Leviathan - the great untameable creature of the sea - and the point is never the monster but the Maker of the monster. No man can hook him, leash him, bargain with him, or play with him as with a bird (vv. 1-5); the thing that terrifies the strongest is simply God’s handiwork. The pivot comes in v. 10: None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me? - and in v. 11, whatsoever is…

Job 42 is the book’s last word, and it turns not on an answer but on a sight: I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee (v. 5). Job withdraws the lawsuit he had pressed for forty chapters - I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes (v. 6) - not as a guilty man unmasked but as a creature who has at last met his Maker and has nothing left to argue. Then God does the unexpected twice over: He declares that Job, who questioned and wept and…