Job 14:20

Job sees only power on God's side, God prevailing against man without man having any chance of recovery: man passes on. God changes His countenance (from pleasant to depressing) and sends man away (v.20), left alone to wander in misery. Yet in reality God was dealing in pure love toward Job, not merely in power.

Again the darkness shuts down upon his soul, and Job describes man as a mountain once strong, but now fallen and worn away by the rushing waters. Death's shadow falls upon the face once bright and smiling, and we bury our dead out of our sight.

In Job 14, he clearly does not go beyond this present world of sight, and in the bitterness of his spirit has no sense of resurrection. The tree sprouts now, where we can see it, in this present world. Man does not, and in fact never will, unless by a miracle, as with Lazarus. Death has come fully upon him as an inhabitant of this world — a child of Adam. Such life he never recovers. Job was right, only he did not see beyond, nor here know Him who is the resurrection and the life.

Such is death for man; and being such, it is the wages of sin. Man in it, as the creature which God made for Adam's paradise, perishes forever — is set entirely aside. Nor do I forget resurrection when I say so. Resurrection does not restore him to this. Job's words are absolutely true here... God's grace may give him another and a better thing, but it does not reverse the first judgment.

Job then returns to his desire that God would hide him in the grave until His anger had turned away, set him a time, and then remember him. If a man dies, shall he live again? Job was the very reverse of a sceptic. He looks for his time of renewal or exchange, and deep down he does not doubt God's longing for the work of His hands. Man is surely to live again; in spirit, soul, and body, God will renew him. But the contrast he believes in throws him back on the trials he was going through, which he could not explain.

It is full of bitterness against man and God. Job is partly right in what he says of man. But he appears throughout as someone whose sufferings had absorbed him in selfishness. He sees no mercy in God, and so the only future he dwells on is escape from His presence. That is not even an Old Testament view of the future, but the one-sided view of a man sick with misery. We pity him, though, thank God, he no longer needs it, but we cannot endorse his unbelief. He too will before long tell a different story, and out of his sorrow will come the morning of joy.