Job 42:1

We have now the second and closing answer of Job to Jehovah. The three friends have not a word to say. They are as silent before His solemn intervention and appeal as they were when the sufferer silenced them, and when they could not speak with Elihu. Here is the moral solution of the book. It comes before the formal sentence on the great controversy in verses 7 and 8, and before the open mark of divine blessing that follows in verses 10-17.

This portion forms the connecting link between the present part and the last main division of the book. As showing the effect upon Job of Jehovah's words, it belongs to the fourth division; as introductory to the conclusion of the whole book it belongs to the brief fifth division.

Again Job responds to the piercing, humbling words of Jehovah. Again he repeats his confession in a complete way. He acknowledges that God is all-powerful. Nothing can block His purposes, and those purposes display His power, wisdom and goodness as fully as His works do. There is a complete surrender and reversal of all that he had previously said against God.

The friends are silent; Job does not believe in his heart only but makes confession with his mouth. He murmurs no more. He resents no more. He questions no more. He openly owns, as something realised in his soul, that Jehovah is able for all things, and that no purpose is withheld from Him… Not a word now about his friends, or about their lack of understanding, honesty and love, however true that was. He judges himself before God. He takes the words God had applied to him — the withering proof of his presumption — and makes them the lowly words of a man who felt his need of learning from God.

"I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear" — Job had been correctly instructed in a general way, but he had only learned about God. "But now my eye sees you." He had been brought face to face with God — not with his eyes, though the awful glory was in the sky — but he had a perception of God in his soul, through his enlightened reason and chiefly through conscience. God had drawn near, personally near. Job was conscious of the indescribable holiness, as well as the power, that belong to Him. Previously he had been in the presence of man, and could more than hold his own with the best of them. In God's presence no creature can boast, and Job was at last in that glorious, holy Presence.

Here, then, was the turning point. Job now calls all his earlier statements about God and His ways "words without knowledge." What a confession! What a moment in a man's history, when he discovers that he has been all wrong! What a thorough breakdown! What profound humiliation!… To get right thoughts about God is to begin to get right about everything. If I am wrong about God, I am wrong about myself, wrong about my fellow men, wrong about everything.

God blessed Job abundantly, turning his captivity and giving him twice as much as he had before. He did this when Job had prayed for his friends — and not until then… Yet God held that tide of blessing back until Job was deeply changed in spirit and character. Job, therefore, was not a loser but a gainer by God's dealings, even in material things.