Context No. 344 of 4322 · Job

Job 14:17-22: in context

17My disobedience is sealed up in a bag. You fasten up my iniquity. 18“But the mountain falling comes to nothing. The rock is removed out of its place. 19The waters wear the stones. The torrents of it wash away the dust of the earth. So you destroy the hope of man. 20You forever prevail against him, and he departs. You change his face, and send him away. 21His sons come to honor, and he doesn’t know it. They are brought low, but he doesn’t perceive it of them. 22But his flesh on him has pain, and his soul within him mourns.”

This is Job at the very bottom, and it is one of the bleakest passages in the Bible. There is no resurrection hope in it, no silver lining, just a faithful man giving voice to despair as honestly as anyone ever has. And the striking thing is that Scripture lets him say it, and does not rush in to correct him or make him mouth something more pious.

His central image is erosion. Look at how the world wears down, Job says: mountains crumble and fall, rocks are pried out of their places, water wears away the stones, torrents wash the soil off the land. And then the line the whole picture was building toward: so you destroy the hope of man. Hope, to Job right now, does not die in a single blow. It is ground down slowly, relentlessly, the way water grinds down rock, until it is simply gone. He goes on, even more desolate: a man dies and is sent away, and does not even know it if his children later rise to honor or fall into disgrace; all he feels is the pain of his own body and the mourning of his own soul. It is despair with no exit, and it is in the Bible, spoken by the man God will later call the one who spoke rightly of him.

There is a strange permission in that. Faith does not require me to hide the erosion, to pretend my hope is intact when it is being worn away stone by stone. Scripture records a faithful person at the absolute bottom, telling God it feels like being ground down by water, and it does not scold him for it. When my own hope is eroding slowly and I can feel it going, do I believe I have to cover that over to stay faithful, when even Job was allowed to say it out loud to God?

Sources

Job 14:18-19: mountains crumbling and water wearing away stone, so God wears down human hope
Job 14:20-22: the dead departing, not knowing their children's fortunes, feeling only their own pain
Job 42:7: God's later verdict that Job, even in his despair, had spoken rightly of him