Job 17:13

Finally, Job tells them to come on again, though he is sure they have no spiritual understanding at all. He had made up his mind for death, and for the total collapse of every plan he had cherished. His friends might hold out fresh and bright expectations if he repented, putting night for day and light close at hand out of sheer darkness. But if he was to hope at all, the grave was his house. His bed was spread in darkness, with corruption and the worm his nearest relatives.

The closing words of this speech of Job are a very sad complaint about how hopeless his outlook was. As for his poor body, only corruption and the worm lay ahead of him, while his soul would be in the unseen world. The word translated "grave" in verse 13, and the word translated "pit" in verse 16, is the Hebrew sheol, the equivalent of the Greek hades used in the New Testament.

And what is his hope now? How dark and evil his thoughts are! The grave is to be his house, the darkness his bed. Corruption is his father, the worm his mother and his sister. He and his hope will go down to the bars of the pit and rest together in the dust. But we shall soon hear a different confession from his lips.

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. Certainly nothing could test a man more thoroughly than that. A bad conscience would have shrunk back from death, since death strips away every disguise and means ruin for the soul. Job, on the contrary, proved not only that he was genuine but what state his conscience was in, by his earnest desire to depart and be with God. We see his confidence in God even while he spreads out his sorrows, with nothing but death in view.

His future looked bleak and hopeless to him. How wrong he was! God had designed greater blessing for him in the future than he had ever known before. And eternity holds greater blessing still, beyond measure. But meanwhile Job's feelings were those of defeat and misery... He did want to die. So why did he think so hopelessly about what death would bring? But our feelings often make us inconsistent. Of course, at that time he could not know how fully the death of Christ answers the many distressing questions that death raises.

How wonderfully different from such gloomy words of a saint is the strong encouragement we have! We have fled for refuge to take hold of the hope set before us. That hope is an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast. It reaches into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has entered for us as forerunner, made a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.