Job 19

Job opens with exhaustion: How long will ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? The men before him came as comforters; they have become a second affliction, and the verb Job reaches for is violent - they are breaking him in pieces. Words can do that. A man already crushed by loss can be crushed again by the speeches of those who were supposed to sit with him, and Job names the wound plainly: these ten times have ye reproached me. “Ten times” is the language of a man who has lost count - again and again and again.

And the cruelest detail is that ye are not ashamed. They feel no embarrassment at making themselves strangers to him, at turning their faces into the faces of accusers. Job is asking the question every battered sufferer eventually asks of the people meant to help: how long? When does the hammering stop?

Then Job makes a remarkable concession, and it exposes the friends' whole method: And be it indeed that I have erred, mine error remaineth with myself. Grant it, he says - suppose I have gone wrong somewhere. Even so, the error is mine, lodged with me, my own affair to answer for before God. It is not a public charge for them to magnify, not a thing they are entitled to seize and parade. There is a quiet dignity in the line.

He is refusing to let his friends turn the bare possibility of a fault into a verdict. If indeed ye will magnify yourselves against me, and plead against me my reproach - if they insist on making themselves large at his expense, using his disgrace as the evidence in their case - then they should know what he knows: that the true author of his ruin is God, whose hand has fallen on him for reasons no one in the room understands.

Now the lament lifts its eyes from the friends to heaven, and the language turns terrible: Know now that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me with his net. Job feels himself not merely afflicted but actively brought down - overthrown, as a city is overthrown, as a wrestler throws his opponent flat. And then the net: he is caught, encircled, hunted like an animal driven into a snare. This is the heart of Job's anguish in the chapter, and it must be heard for what it is.

He believes the hand against him is God's own hand. He does not curse God for it; he does not turn away. But neither will he pretend the blows are gentle or that their source is anywhere but the throne. I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard, he says - he protests his innocence into a silence that gives back no answer, no judgment, no relief. The honest lament of Scripture does not hide the felt severity of God's dealings behind careful language.

It names the net as a net, and keeps speaking to the One who, Job believes, set it.

The image of the walled road runs straight into a deeper grief: He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my head. Job had standing once - honor, respect, the bearing of a man others rose to greet. All of it has been pulled off him like a robe, the crown lifted from his brow, until nothing of his former dignity remains. He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone. And then a line of quiet devastation: mine hope hath he removed like a tree. A tree does not lose hope the way a man loses a mood; a tree is uprooted, torn out by the roots so that it cannot grow again.

That is what Job feels has happened to his hope - pulled up entire, the whole living thing wrenched out of the ground. It is worth marking how far down the chapter has come before its great turn. Job is a man whose hope has been uprooted like a felled tree, who can see no way forward and no glory left. The confession that is coming will rise from the stump.

Job names the thing that has wounded him most of all: He hath also kindled his wrath against me, and he counteth me unto him as one of his enemies. This is the bitterest clause in the section. It is one thing to suffer; it is another to feel that the God you have served counts you among His enemies - that you have been moved, in His ledger, from the column of the beloved to the column of the foe.

His troops come together, and raise up their way against me, and encamp round about my tabernacle. The picture is of a besieging army throwing up its siege-ramp against a single tent - the whole might of heaven, as Job feels it, marshaled against one frail man's dwelling. We should not soften this into something more comfortable than Job meant. He genuinely feels treated as an enemy by the One he loves. And yet - this is the wonder we are being prepared for - the very man who feels counted among God's enemies is about to confess that he has a Redeemer in God who will stand for him at the last.

The siege and the confession are spoken by the same mouth. Job holds the agony and the hope together, and refuses to let go of either.

If the first movement was the siege of heaven, this one is the silence of earth - and in some ways it cuts deeper. Job begins to count the relationships, one by one, like a man walking through an emptied house calling names and getting no reply. He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are verily estranged from me. His brothers, his kin by blood, have been set at a distance; the people who merely knew him have made themselves strangers.

My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. The word familiar is tender - these were the intimates, the ones who knew his table and his habits - and they have simply forgotten him, as though the suffering man were not worth remembering. Notice that Job lays even this at God's door: he hath put my brethren far from me. The estrangement is not only the cruelty of others; it is, to Job, part of the same overthrow, the loneliness folded into the affliction.

To lose health and wealth is bitter. To lose, on top of it, every face that once turned toward you in love - that is a different order of desolation.

The catalogue descends, rung by rung, into ever more intimate ground. They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a stranger: I am an alien in their sight. In his own household, under his own roof, Job is treated as a foreigner - an alien, someone with no belonging there. I called my servant, and he gave me no answer; I intreated him with my mouth. The master must now beg the servant, and still gets silence; the ordinary order of his life has collapsed so completely that he pleads where he once commanded, and is ignored.

Then the most painful line of all: My breath is strange to my wife, though I intreated for the children's sake of mine own body. His very breath has become repellent to the one person who should be closest - the disease has made him loathsome even to his wife, so that the marriage bond, the last warm thing, recoils from him. And he has begged her, he says, for the sake of the children they share.

There is almost nothing left to lose after this. The man who began the chapter besieged by God ends this descent abandoned by the wife of his own body, a stranger in his own house, repellent to his own flesh and blood.

Job sums up his bodily ruin in a phrase that has outlived its own language: My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth. He is wasted to the point that the skin clings directly to the bone, the flesh gone from between them - the picture of a man reduced almost to a skeleton by his disease. And then the famous, almost untranslatable idiom: escaped with the skin of my teeth. Teeth have no skin; that is the bleak wit of it.

Job has escaped with nothing - the barest, most imaginary margin, a hair's breadth, the thinnest possible sliver of survival. He is alive, but only just, and only barely. The phrase has entered every tongue because it names a universal experience: the narrow, undeserved, almost accidental survival of a person who by every measure should have been lost. Job is hanging on by the skin of his teeth - and it is from that thread-thin hold on life, with the body all but gone and every relationship severed, that he is about to say the strongest thing said in the entire book.

And so the whole descent gathers into a single, doubled cry: Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me. He says it twice - have pity upon me, have pity upon me - the repetition of a man with no argument left, only a plea. He has stopped trying to win the debate. He is simply asking, of the very people who have become his accusers, for the one thing they have withheld: pity.

And the reason he gives is the truest thing in the chapter: for the hand of God hath touched me. He is stricken - can they not see it? - and a stricken man is owed pity. Then the heartbreaking question: Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my flesh? Is it not enough that God's hand has wasted his flesh - must they pile on too, hunting him as if they were heaven's own deputies?

There is a profound and gentle truth buried in his cry: the afflicted are owed compassion simply because they are afflicted. Job is asking to be pitied. And the failure of his friends is precisely that they could not give the cheapest and most necessary gift of all.

Before the confession comes the longing to make it permanent. Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! Job, who feels his life slipping away by the skin of his teeth, wants his testimony to outlast him. He reaches for the most enduring medium the ancient world knew: not ink on a perishable scroll but letters cut into rock with an iron tool, the grooves filled with lead to make them stand out and endure the weathering of ages. The deepest words of his life are about to be spoken, and he wants them carved into stone for ever, so that when he is dust some future reader will find them and know what he held to at the end.

There is a kind of faith hidden in the very wish. A man who believed his words were worthless, or that no vindication would ever come, would not labor to make them permanent. Job wants the record to stand because, somewhere beneath the ruin, he believes the record matters - that the truth he is about to confess will one day be read and known to have been true. And in a way he could not have imagined, the wish was granted: the words were written, and printed in a book, and have been read in every generation since.

And now the summit. For I know that my redeemer liveth. Mark first the word know. Job says I know - the most certain word a man can use - and he says it from the place of least evidence, with his body wasting and every friend turned away and God seeming to count him an enemy. Job can see nothing that would warrant it; this is the knowledge of faith, the strange and stubborn certainty that lays hold of what the eyes cannot find.

And what he knows is this: that he has a redeemer - a kinsman who will buy him back - and that this Redeemer liveth. The contrast with everything around him is total. Job's own life is nearly spent; his Redeemer lives. Job's friends have all turned; his Redeemer stands. In a chapter where every living thing has failed him, Job confesses One who is alive and will not fail. This is the answer the whole descent was driving toward.

Forsaken by all the living, Job lays hold of the Living One.

And that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. The Redeemer Job knows is not only living but coming - He shall stand, and He shall stand upon the earth, and He shall do it at the latter day, the last day, the appointed end. The verb stand carries the weight of a courtroom and a victory at once: to stand is to take one's place as the one who will plead and prevail, the advocate who rises last when every other voice has fallen silent.

Job does not expect his vindication in this life. He has stopped looking for relief from his friends or rescue from his disease. His hope has leapt clean over the grave to a day still to come, when his Redeemer will stand upon the very earth and set right what no one set right while Job lived. There is something staggering in the reach of this. A man with no future left in this world stakes everything on a future beyond it - on a Redeemer who will stand at the last and have the final word over death and accusation alike.

The hope does not depend on Job's circumstances improving. It depends on his Redeemer arriving.

Then Job says the thing that has astonished readers for three thousand years. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. He looks his own death full in the face. He does not pretend the worms will not come; he grants it - this body will be destroyed, the flesh will rot in the ground. And then, against that very certainty, he sets a greater one: yet in my flesh shall I see God. In his flesh - in a body - he will see God.

After the destruction, a seeing. After the grave, a beholding. And he presses it almost beyond bearing: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. It will be Job's own eyes that see, Job himself and no substitute, no stand-in - not another. The personal certainty is overwhelming. Though my reins be consumed within me - though everything inside him is wasting now - he will yet, in his own restored flesh, with his own eyes, behold God.

This is the bodily hope at its purest: that the destruction of the body is not the end of the person, and that the same flesh which the worms claim will yet stand and see God face to face.

Linger on those two words - not another. They are the seal Job sets on the whole confession, and they answer, by anticipation, the loneliness of everything that came before. Job has spent this chapter watching others turn away: another face, another back, another door closing. Brethren far off, friends estranged, a wife recoiling, children mocking - everywhere another and another and never the one he longed for. But in the seeing that is coming, there will be no substitution and no estrangement.

I shall see for myself - not through a representative, not by report, not with someone else standing in his place. Mine eyes shall behold, and not another. The man who was made a stranger in his own house will not be a stranger in that day; the man whose every intimate turned away will, with his own eyes, behold God directly. There is a deep healing folded into the phrase. All the alienation of the chapter - every relationship that failed, every face that became another - is answered by a seeing in which Job is fully himself and fully present, beholding the One who never turned away.

The Redeemer who lives will be seen by the very eyes that wept, and by no other.

After the summit, Job turns one last time to his friends - and the warmth of the confession gives way to a sober warning. But ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the matter is found in me? The friends have hunted for the “root” of Job's trouble in some hidden sin; Job tells them the real matter lies elsewhere, and that their persecution of him will not go unnoticed. Be ye afraid of the sword: for wrath bringeth the punishments of the sword, that ye may know there is a judgment. It is a hard word, but a just one.

The same God whose existence and justice the friends have invoked to condemn Job is a God before whom they too must stand. There is a judgment - and the man who confesses a Redeemer who will stand at the latter day knows it better than they do. The friends have wielded the certainty of judgment as a weapon against the sufferer; Job reminds them that judgment cuts both ways, and that to accuse the innocent and withhold pity from the afflicted is itself a thing that will be weighed.

The chapter that rose to the confession of a living Redeemer ends with the reminder that the Redeemer's coming is also a reckoning - good news for the wronged, and a summons to the careless to fear.