Job 9:21

He began by admitting that God is right to discipline. But he raised the all-important question: how can a man be right with God? In our day the short sentence, "Get right with God," has been used to awaken interest in the gospel message. It might well provoke the reply, "Yes, but how is it to be achieved?" This is exactly the question Job asked in verse 2. The rest of the chapter shows how earnest and sincere he was in asking it, for he put forward and examined four possible answers.

Self-justification is a very attractive idea. Yet Job raised it only to dismiss it as impossible. He knew he had only to open his mouth to condemn himself. And anyone who would justify himself under the searching eye of God must prove his own perfection. He went on to say that even if he were perfect, God would judge and destroy him. Job only knew perfection as human standards measure it.

But with all this, Job had never sounded the depths of his own heart. He did not know himself. He had never really grasped the truth of his own utter ruin and total depravity. He had never learnt to say, "I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing." We must grasp this point, or we will not understand the book of Job. We will not see the purpose of the deep and painful trials Job had to pass through. First we must face a solemn fact: his conscience had never really been in God's presence, and he had never seen himself in the light.

Even if he knew himself innocent, he is completely lost and despairs of his life. God is a destroyer of guilty and innocent alike, and mocks when they perish. The earth is in the hands of the wicked — is it not so? Oh Job, for these words you will yet abhor yourself, and repent in dust and ashes.

"For He breaks me with a tempest" — and that was true — "and multiplies my wounds without cause." Ah, without cause; that is a little too much to say. He had His own wise cause; He had His own blessed end. He meant that Job should be a far happier man and brighter in his state than he had ever been before; and until Christ came it could only be by making him a bag of broken bones — to learn that all the goodness was in God and all the badness was in himself.

If only there were an effective go-between, how different it would be; but, says Job, "it is not so with me." Have we ever thanked God with enough warmth that it is so with us? The fact is that though he may not have known it, Job was longing for the coming of Christ. We can now rejoice in the "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2:5). By Him the ransom price was paid, so that it is possible for a man to be just with God.

In gaining this knowledge of God, Job gained a matching knowledge of himself by experience, for he added, "I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." So it always is. The more we know of God, the more, by contrast, we know ourselves. Self-knowledge of this sort is very painful but it is very healthy, for it leads to salvation from self, which is a deliverance of the first order.