Job 7-9 - One Mediator between God and Men

Job Continues: My Life Has No Hope

Job 7:17 LSB - [17] "What is man that You magnify him, And that You set Your heart on him,

Psa 8:4 LSB - [4] What is man that You remember him, And the son of man that You care for him?

Job 7:20 LSB - [20] "Have I sinned? What have I done to You, O watcher of men? Why have You set me as Your target, So that I am a burden to myself?

iii. Once more, we benefit from knowing the story-behind-the-story, which Job and his friends do not know at this point in the narrative. Job believed that God was against him and was punishing him, but it wasn’t true. “Job was not being punished; he was being honored. God was giving to him a name like that of the great ones of the earth. The Lord was lifting him up, promoting him, putting him into the front rank, making a great saint of him, causing him to become one of the fathers and patterns in the ancient Church of God. He was really doing for Job such extraordinarily good things that you or I, in looking back upon his whole history, might well say, ‘I would be quite content to take Job’s afflictions if I might also have Job’s grace, and Job’s place in the Church of God.’” (Spurgeon)

 

Bildad Claims God Rewards the Good

Job 8:7 LSB - [7] "Though your beginning was insignificant, Yet your end will increase greatly.

i. He was wrong in that he assumed that because Job was not currently in prosperity and abundance, it proved that Job had not made supplication and was not pure and upright. “He wished to prove that Job could not possibly be an upright man, for if he were so, he here affirms that his prosperity would increase continually.” (Spurgeon)

ii. He was right in that Job, in the end of it, did increase abundantly. “It is true, as indeed the facts of the book of Job prove: for Job did greatly increase in his latter end. His beginning was small: he was brought down to poverty! To the potsherd and to the dunghill he had many graves, but no children; he had had many losses, he had now nothing left to lose; and yet God did awake for him; his righteousness came out from the darkness which had eclipsed it; he shone in sevenfold prosperity so that the words of Bildad were prophetic, though he knew it not; God put into his mouth language which did come true, after all.”

 

Job Replies There Is No Adjudicator

Job 9:2 LSB - [2] "In truth I know that this is so; But how can a man be in the right before God?

Job 9:14-15 LSB - [14] "How then can I answer Him, [And] choose my words before Him? [15] "For though I were right, I could not answer; I would have to plead for the grace of my judge.

Job 9:20 LSB - [20] "Though I am righteous, my mouth will condemn me; Though I am blameless, He will declare me perverse.

i. “Years ago, there was, an old man, in Wiltshire, who according to his own statement, was a hundred and three years of age, he had never neglected his parish church, he had brought up eleven children, and had no help from the parish, and he expected that, by-and-by, he should go home to God, for ‘he had never done anything wrong in his life that he knowed about.’ ‘But,’ said someone to him, ‘you are a sinner, you know.’ ‘I know I ain’t,’ he said. ‘Well, but God says that you are.’ And what, think you, did that old man reply? He said, ‘God may say what he likes, but I know I ain’t.’ So, you see, he even contradicted God himself, and is not that a great sin for anybody to commit?” (Spurgeon)

Rom 8:33-34 LSB - [33] Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies; [34] who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who also intercedes for us.

Job 9:31 LSB - [31] Yet You would plunge me into the pit, And my own clothes would abhor me.

ii. “When the Lord, the Holy Spirit, convinces a man of sin, the words of Job are none too strong: ‘Mine own clothes shall abhor me.’ You may sometimes have abhorred your clothes because they were so dirty that you were ashamed to be seen in them: but, you must be dirty indeed when your very clothes seem ashamed to hang upon you. This is what the convinced sinner feels — that he is so foul that his very clothes seem to be ashamed of him, as if they would rather have been on anybody else’s back than on the back of such a filthy sinner as he is.” (Spurgeon)

Job 9:33 LSB - [33] "There is no adjudicator between us, Who may lay his hand upon us both.

1Ti 2:5 LSB - [5] For there is one God, [and] one mediator also between God and men, [the] man Christ Jesus, 

iv. Job began this chapter with the language of the law-court (If one wished to contend with Him, Job 9:3), and here he ends with the picture of a mediator to end a dispute. The end of Job’s dispute will not come until later, but the end of our dispute with God is available now in Jesus Christ. “But, what is more and more wonderful still, both parties have gained in the suit. Did you ever hear of such a law-suit as this before? No, never in the courts of man.” (Spurgeon)