Job 14:22

He closes his answer (Job 14) with wider reflections on man's miserable lot in this world. Man is frail and faulty by nature, with no hope of revival in this life. A tree is different: cut it down ever so low, and it may still sprout again. But man cannot, until the heavens are no more: then he too will wake from sleep. Again Job prays that God would hide him in the grave till his change or renewal comes. Then God will call, and he will answer. Meanwhile he sees no ground of hope. Even the strongest things fall to ruin. Man passes away so completely that he knows nothing of his sons, whether they come to honour or sink low.

Of course, Job's sons had all been killed before this. But he treats the situation as a general truth: man can find no pleasure in his family, and no more in himself. Rather, his flesh will be in pain and his soul will mourn (v.22). How painful and dismal is the picture he portrays!

Now, in these examples, the soul is distinguished from both body and flesh. It longs, it grieves, it hates, it loves. It is indeed a living thing, as Gen. 1:30 declares.

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 does not doubt at bottom God's yearning after the work of His hands. Man is surely to live again; spirit, and soul, and body, he will be renewed. But the contrast he believes in throws him back on his own trials, which he cannot explain. A fresh flood of feeling takes him over as he dwells on the ruin of man under the eye and hand of God. Man is ruined so completely that, whether his son comes to honour or to nothing, the father is none the wiser. The only thing he knows is his own pain, outside and inside.

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 and visibly in this present world — man does not... Job was right, only he did not see beyond, nor here know Him who is the resurrection and the life.

He speaks of "man" for this world, and nothing can really be conceived more exact. It was not the time or place to introduce the special blessedness of the first resurrection, which we shall find has its echo elsewhere in this book.

...we cannot take all that Job says in the vexation of his spirit as revelations, any more than all his friends say, who did not speak rightly of God as he did. They all utter many acknowledged truths which no Christian doubts, and the writer of the book was inspired to give them.