Job 33:23

Job 33:15-22. He shows God using the plough — a dream, a striking providence, bodily pain or sickness — to break up such unploughed ground. And such is the work to this day. Job 33:23-24. The sower comes after the ploughman. The seed is the Gospel. God provides the ransom, and deliverance comes to the sinner.

The word for "messenger" is "angel," and this suggests a supernatural revealer of the mind of God. We find this often in the Old Testament, where the "angel" made known the will of God (see Judges 2:1; Judges 13:3). The "angel of Jehovah" is indeed His representative — so fully that Scripture calls Him Jehovah Himself ("The angel of His presence," Isaiah 63:9). Here we have a hint of the Mediator, and the next word makes it stronger: "an Interpreter," or "Mediator" (see Genesis 42:23; 2 Chronicles 32:21) — one whom God sends as an ambassador to make His mind known. An ordinary messenger will not do; it must be "one of a thousand."

Times of emergency are the opportunity for the one Elihu called a "messenger," an "interpreter." He can show what God has to say in these things. Such people are not common, as we know, but they are of great value, and Elihu called them "one among a thousand," which shows how rare they are. Many can pity the afflicted one, and sometimes condemn him, as Job's three friends did. To give the mind of God is another and a greater thing.

Yes, there is help, but only in God, who knows how to send a messenger at the right time, a messenger who is also a mediator, "one among a thousand" (v.23). Such an individual is typical of the Lord Jesus, the "one mediator between God and men" (1 Tim. 2:5).

He had asked for someone with feelings like his own, when he was crushed in spirit under the hand of God. He longed for a man who would step in between God and himself. And God now gives him what he wanted (not yet the man Christ Jesus), a man of God indeed, but with weaknesses like his own.

We fully grant that the Hebrew word can sometimes be translated "duty," but that hardly fits man's sinful state and condition before God. No doubt his state calls for self-judgment; but you could not press this on him as a duty... The sinner needs someone to show him what, for him, is uprightness: bowing before God, and owning his true state, holding nothing back and hiding nothing.

This interpreter is to show man his uprightness. But whose uprightness, or righteousness, does this mean?... Most commentators explain that the interpreter tells the sufferer how to do right before God, and critics even suggest changing the word "uprightness" to "fault." There is a deeper meaning here. The word "his" should carry a capital "H" — not man's righteousness, but God's.

The moment the conscience bows under the sin and confesses it, it comes into an upright position. Where evil has been, uprightness of soul shows itself in the awareness of that evil, and in the power to confess it... Get sin judged in the conscience, and then comes the revelation of the unfailing love of God to meet the need.