Job 24:1

The first verse of Job 24 puts forward a question whose exact force is not easy to make out. But it does appear that in the rest of the chapter Job is listing the evils that were filling the earth in his day. Those evils went on unjudged until the grave closed the history of the wicked. This gives point and force to the question he asked. If so, the second half of verse 1 means, "Why do the God-fearing not see days of judgment falling from God on the heads of the godless?" That question is close to the one raised in Psalm 73.

The opening of Job 24 has given room for no small debate, many modern scholars preferring to understand and divide it like this: Why are times not reserved by the Almighty, and do His friends (literally, His knowers) not see His days? The times are judicial terms when He dispenses justice. The days are an even more common expression for the same intervention... It is the puzzle of the psalms and the prophets, and must remain so until Christ solves it.

"Why are bounds not reserved by the Almighty, and they who honour Him do not see His days?" ... Job is about to dwell on God's apparent failure to judge the wicked. He begins by asking why God does not allow His saints to see a righteous judgment carried out on them. Why does He not set a limit to their godlessness and cruel oppression?

Job wonders why God, who is Almighty, does not take account of all that happens in time. He wonders why those who know Him do not see Him deal seriously with gross evil when it is right in front of them... These were evils publicly known to take place. Job's friends had no such clear charge to lay against him; they only imagined he must have done wrong. But here were cases of obvious wickedness, and God had not dealt with them as He was dealing with Job.

Zophar kept up this claim: there is a righteous God above, and there are unrighteous, wicked people below, and God always deals with these wicked people now. That was not true. God has always allowed a large part of the world to prosper, to all appearances, in their evil. The reason is that the time of judgment has not yet come.

This was what Job found so hard to understand — how those who did evil prospered, while the righteous were persecuted. It is simply because the time of judgment has not come; the time of mercy is going on now, and we cannot have mercy and judgment at once. So everything is a riddle now.

There are these times of evil. God is a moral governor, and He takes notice of all evil — even of people's words, since words reveal the secrets of the heart. So how is it that He lets evil pass as He does, with no day of repayment now? Well, we can answer that perfectly. It is all reserved for Christ. The Father will not judge anyone... All judgment is committed to the Son, because He is the Son of man, and as Son of man He has been hated.

Asaph discovered that God intends to settle His accounts with the ungodly in His own time and His own way. He has unlimited time at His disposal in which to do it. He is in no hurry, and He will do it at the hour that is most inconvenient of all for them.