Scripture Daily

Context No. 4234 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 9:1-16: in context

1Then Job answered, 2“Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God? 3If he is pleased to contend with him, he can’t answer him one time in a thousand. 4God is wise in heart, and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against him and prospered? 5He removes the mountains, and they don’t know it, when he overturns them in his anger. 6He shakes the earth out of its place. Its pillars tremble. 7He commands the sun and it doesn’t rise, and seals up the stars. 8He alone stretches out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea. 9He makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the rooms of the south. 10He does great things past finding out; yes, marvelous things without number. 11Behold, he goes by me, and I don’t see him. He passes on also, but I don’t perceive him. 12Behold, he snatches away. Who can hinder him? Who will ask him, ‘What are you doing?’ 13“God will not withdraw his anger. The helpers of Rahab stoop under him. 14How much less will I answer him, and choose my words to argue with him? 15Though I were righteous, yet I wouldn’t answer him. I would make supplication to my judge. 16If I had called, and he had answered me, yet I wouldn’t believe that he listened to my voice.

In his suffering, Job wrestles with a question that reaches to the heart of the human condition: how can a man be righteous before God? He is overwhelmed by God's greatness and his own smallness; he feels he could not answer God once in a thousand times, could not stand before him or argue his case. Before the God who moves mountains and stretches out the heavens, Job feels the impossibility of a mere mortal being justified.

What stands out is the depth and honesty of Job's question. It is not a shallow worry but a recognition of the vast gulf between sinful, finite man and the holy, infinite God. How can such a creature be right before such a God? Job feels the weight of it and finds no answer within himself; he cannot argue his way to acceptance before God.

Job's question is one of the deepest in Scripture, and it finds its answer only in the gospel. How can a man be righteous before God? Not by arguing his case, not by his own goodness, which cannot stand the scrutiny, but by the righteousness God himself provides. What Job longed for and could not attain, a way to be right before God, has come in Christ, in whom sinners are justified freely by grace. The question that crushed Job is answered at the cross.

Do I feel, like Job, the impossibility of standing righteous before God by my own goodness, and have I found the answer his question could not reach, the righteousness God provides in Christ, by which sinners are justified freely through faith?

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