Job 19:25-26
“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will take His stand on the earth. “Even after my skin is destroyed, yet from my flesh I shall see God; Whom I myself shall behold, and whom my eyes will see and not another. My heart faints within me!
When I was a child and I hadn’t started doing deep personal Bible studies, I always heralded Job as a man who despite the pain always found hope in God and never wavered when it came to that. However, I started reading Job, and boy did God give me a hard lesson about ‘not putting people onto pedestals’ they didn’t deserve and remember that only by His grace are we made into people worthy of His calling.
Reading the book of Job showed me that the man I held in high esteem and the man I was reading about were two completely different people. Some differences between these two men who somehow had the name Job included: my Job was always hopeful while the Biblical Job yearned for his death in every plea and complaint he made to God; my Job always stood by God while the Biblical Job questioned God’s justice and providence so much so that in Job 38, God chastises Him for questioning Him by asking “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding, Who set its measurements? Since you know. Or who stretched the line on it? “On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7). The differences between the two are many to list here so I will leave that for now. The point is this was a very flawed man, a man who as I have said wanted to die and questioned God to the nth degree.
How Job represents Us
The thing is Job literally represents us. When we are prone to pain all the nice things we say about God and His attributes all but vanish and we start questioning Him as to why He is allowing the afflictions we face to afflict us the way they do. The problem however just like Job is that we base the reasons for our afflictions on assumptions rather than praying to God or reading His Word to see why we face them as Paul did in 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 which says:
““Boasting is necessary, though it is not profitable; but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a man was caught up to the third heaven. And I know how such a man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak. On behalf of such a man I will boast; but on my own behalf I will not boast, except in regard to my weaknesses. For if I do wish to boast I will not be foolish, for I will be speaking the truth; but I refrain from this, so that no one will credit me with more than he sees in me or hears from me. Because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me—to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I implored the Lord three times that it might leave me. And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.” Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore, I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Long story short every pain, distress, affliction is meant to achieve a grander purpose that always leads to glorifying God and finding absolute joy in Him. However, as we see from Paul we can’t just know the ‘Why’ without God thus necessitating prayer and reading of His Word with the end goal being absolute dependence on Him.
Problem is just like Job that is never our end goal as before that our go-to unlike Paul is to always question His Wise and Sovereign Judgements thus forgetting as Isaiah 55:8-9 say: “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” This comes after verses 6 & 7 which basically tell us to seek and call unto Him and forsake our worldly ways and He will abundantly pardon. Also, Paul adds to this in Romans 11:33-36 where He reminds us that God’s judgments are unsearchable and His ways inscrutable and everything is to God’s glory alone. So, in short, the end goal is always to turn to God to know and understand His ways in our afflictions only He can reveal His purposes for us through His written word or through friends or elders all inspired by His Holy Spirit.
The Lightning in the Bottle
Now back to Job 19 and if you have read through the 18 chapters before this you will see an underlying issue and that is none of the ways that I listed that the Holy Spirit uses to reveal God’s purposes are present as His three friends: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are constantly chastising Him for reasons that weren’t applicable to Job despite being true and they were basing these reasons on, you guessed it, their assumptions. As for the elders, well; “Both the gray-haired and the aged are among us, older than your father.” (Job 15:10) Also, we have seen that Job wasn’t exactly praying for God to reveal this to Him which makes Job 19:25-26 rather startling as to how we even arrived there cause if you were to read the first 22 verses you would see Job literally questioning God’s attributes but all of a sudden he is hoping to see God and proclaiming that his Redeemer lives.
This is where we get our last option arises and that answer is that the Holy Spirit Himself revealed this living hope to Job millennia before Christ was even born as this verse literally alludes to Christ himself who as Hebrews 1:1-4 shows is and was the subject of the old testament men: “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much better than the angels, as He has inherited a more excellent name than they.”
As Romans 8:26-27 tells us: “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” Those two verses show us that the Spirit showed Job the living hope that was to be even in the midst of questioning God.
So What is the Hope in the Dark?
Of course, it stands to reason that the hope in the dark is actually Christ himself but the hope I am alluding to at the moment as Jesus points out in John 6:37-40 is that those who are granted to Him by the Father He certainly will not cast out and this is pointed out in the prologue to Job in chapters one and two and that is despite Satan being the one subjugating Job, he still was under God’s watchful eye and as we see here God’s watchful eye through the Holy Spirit reminds Job of the living hope that is to come and eternal joy that comes from seeing Him. Don’t take this to mean that as long as we are under Christ any questioning or infringement on God’s character aren’t subject to God’s discipline as Hebrews 12:1-7 and God’s chastisement of Job in Job 38 beg to differ but it means that God in His infinite love and mercy will always find a way to point us to the cross and to the joy that is to be beheld from the cross in spite of our concerns and sinful and nature cause as He says Himself those are called or drawn He certainly shall not cast out. So how do we find our hope in the dark? The answer; we can’t but as Job shows us in those two verses God reveals it to us through His Holy Spirit who points us to the cross. To finish I will use a portion of Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on Job 19:22-29 to summarize all I have said:
The Spirit of God, at this time, seems to have powerfully wrought on the mind of Job. Here he witnessed a good confession; declared the soundness of his faith, and the assurance of his hope. Here is much of Christ and heaven; and he that said such things are these, declared plainly that he sought the better country, that is, the heavenly. Job was taught of God to believe in a living Redeemer; to look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come; he comforted himself with the expectation of these. Job was assured, that this Redeemer of sinners from the yoke of Satan and the condemnation of sin, was his Redeemer, and expected salvation through him; and that he was a living Redeemer, though not yet come in the flesh; and that at the last day he would appear as the Judge of the world, to raise the dead, and complete the redemption of his people. With what pleasure holy Job enlarges upon this! May these faithful sayings be engraved by the Holy Spirit upon our hearts. We are all concerned to see that the root of the matter be in us. A living, quickening, commanding principle of grace in the heart, is the root of the matter; as necessary to our religion as the root of the tree, to which it owes both its fixedness and its fruitfulness. Job and his friends differed concerning the methods of Providence, but they agreed in the root of the matter, the belief of another world.
Be blessed.
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