Job 16:22

One translation of the opening words of verse 21 is, "Oh that there were arbitration for a man with God!" So his mind went back to his desire for the "Daysman," recorded at the end of Job 9. A man might plead for his neighbour or friend. But Job felt there was no one to step in between God and himself. He could only expect a short time before his end. His breath was foul and the grave was ready for him, as he says in the first verse of Job 17. We probably have little idea of the extreme, drawn-out bodily decay and misery he had been enduring.

Poor Job fails to see God in His unchanging love through all these sufferings... And yet, not altogether, for there is real faith in his heart... He knows, not fully, for he has not yet seen, that there is One who pleads for him before God. What he longs for, we know that we have — One who pleads for us with God as a man pleads for his neighbour. We know a High Priest who is touched with the feeling of our weaknesses, who "always lives to make intercession for us."

In a state of despondency he says, "For when a few years are finished I shall go the way of no return" (v.22). He therefore expected to live a few years more. But he thought of those years only as continuing his present misery. He says nothing of the bright prospect of eternity — eternal glory and eternal blessing with Christ — which at least today should be deeply precious to a believing heart. How marvellous is the advantage the children of God have today over those of Old Testament days!

If we take it otherwise, then when he says that in dying he "goes where he shall not return," he denies all resurrection. But he is thinking of a return to the scene in front of him. This is not an abstract statement. He means the scene of mixed joy and sorrow he was living in at the time. And Scripture often speaks this way. "Enoch was not." Is that extinction? No, "he was taken up so that he should not see death." To the world "he was not." To God he was, for "God took him." The same is true of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who really died. To men they died; to God they lived: "Now He is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to Him" (Luke 20:38).

Suppose the suspicion of his friends — one might call it the charge — had been true. Then one thing above all others would have been terrible to him. Need I say it would be death? So far from this, there was nothing Job wanted so much as death... if he could only die, if he could only come near enough to God to plead before Him, even now he did not doubt what he would find there.

And from that home no traveller returns. Once a traveller crosses that frontier there is no way back. He must face whatever lies in that land: let it be darkness or light, let it be sorrow or joy, let it be good or ill. Once the step is taken, return is for ever out of the question.