Job 9:2

The question here is, how a soul can stand before God. Where is righteousness to be found? ... He was convinced that God hates evil and loves holiness. His friends looked at Job's condition and said he must be a hypocrite. He must have done something very bad, they argued, for God was against him, and prosperity is the mark of God's favour. But Job insisted that this is no adequate test.

In moral terms, this is the vital question of human life on earth since the fall. The peace of the human heart depends on the answer. Here lies the mystery of a conscience brought to rest. Believers in Old Testament times, from Adam onwards, tried to solve this problem. Both before and after the flood, before and after the Law, every sincere soul puzzled over this question.

There is more emphasis than we are often aware of in this chapter. "How should a man be just with God?" More emphasis on "with God." A man may be just in a certain sense. He may not fail in any way that troubles his conscience in his dealings with other people. But to be just with God is another thing.

A person who lives for a good reputation with people never has a conscience before God. Anyone who thinks that way about his own character is always wrong. He is only acting to please himself and the world, and not God.

Job has thrown out three suggested answers to his question: defiance, self-justification, and careless forgetting. What about a course of self-improvement? ... He knew that melted snow gives the purest kind of distilled water. It has the greatest power to absorb and remove dirt... If he achieved something like this in his own character and life, what then? Why, God would plunge him in a dirty ditch as the only fit place for him. And even then, he himself, beneath his clothes, would be dirtier than they! The dirt was in him, not in his surroundings.

Self-justification is a very attractive idea, yet Job stated it only to reject it as unworkable. He knew he had only to open his mouth to condemn himself. And anyone who would justify himself under God's searching eye must be able to prove his own perfection. Nothing short of that would satisfy.

Job did not know what was in his heart till he was put to the test... Job had a kind character, high position, great wealth and many possessions. People thought well of him, and he ended up thinking well of himself. God must break all this down. Trials come, and then self breaks out, because it was inside.

Read Job 9 and you can see Job's tries at answering this question. He throws them out one by one as worthless. He ends with a cry for a "daysman," or mediator — a cry that would not be answered for perhaps two thousand years.

Christ lays His hand upon the sinner, having been made sin for him. How could a man as he is be made righteous? Impossible; but Christ could be made sin with God for man... Now we find in the gospel, not the righteousness of man with God, but God's righteousness for man.