Context No. 3451 of 4322 · Job

Job 9:17-35: in context

17For he breaks me with a storm, and multiplies my wounds without cause. 18He will not allow me to catch my breath, but fills me with bitterness. 19If it is a matter of strength, behold, he is mighty! If of justice, ‘Who,’ says he, ‘will summon me?’ 20Though I am righteous, my own mouth will condemn me. Though I am blameless, it will prove me perverse. 21I am blameless. I don’t respect myself. I despise my life. 22“It is all the same. Therefore I say he destroys the blameless and the wicked. 23If the scourge kills suddenly, he will mock at the trial of the innocent. 24The earth is given into the hand of the wicked. He covers the faces of its judges. If not he, then who is it? 25“Now my days are swifter than a runner. They flee away. They see no good. 26They have passed away as the swift ships, as the eagle that swoops on the prey. 27If I say, ‘I will forget my complaint, I will put off my sad face, and cheer up,’ 28I am afraid of all my sorrows. I know that you will not hold me innocent. 29I will be condemned. Why then do I labor in vain? 30If I wash myself with snow, and cleanse my hands with lye, 31yet you will plunge me in the ditch. My own clothes will abhor me. 32For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment. 33There is no umpire between us, that might lay his hand on us both. 34Let him take his rod away from me. Let his terror not make me afraid; 35then I would speak, and not fear him, for I am not so in myself.

Job voices a deep anguish and, buried within it, a deep longing. He feels God has overwhelmed him, and despairs of ever pleading his case: how can a mere man answer God, who is not a man like me that we could go to court together? The distance between them feels unbridgeable.

And then comes a cry that pierces to the heart of the whole Bible's hope: there is no umpire between us, who might lay his hand on us both. Job aches for a mediator, someone who could stand between the infinite God and frail man, bridging the gap, laying one hand on each. He does not yet know it, but he is longing for exactly what God would one day provide in Christ, the one mediator between God and men, who is himself both God and man, able to lay his hand on both. In our own sense of the vast distance between ourselves and God, Job's cry becomes ours, and the answer to it is Jesus.

In my sense of the distance between myself and God, do I turn to Christ, the mediator Job longed for, who alone can lay his hand on both God and me?

Sources

Job 9:33: "There is no umpire between us, that might lay his hand on us both."
Job 9:32: "For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment."
1 Timothy 2:5: "There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."