yet you will plunge me into a pit, and my own clothes will abhor me.
Job has been wrestling with one question: how can a man stand right before God? Here he tries a last route — scrubbing himself clean. He pictures God dropping him straight back into the filth. So the rest of the book has two questions to answer: where does the dirt really sit, and who can deal with it? (Older translations say "ditch" where the ESV says "pit.")
Self-improvement, tested and rejected
Job works through a series of answers and discards them one by one. This verse closes the fourth.
F. B. HoleThe fourth "If…" occurs in verse 30. Job has already thrown out three suggested answers to his question: defiance, self-justification, and careless forgetfulness. What about a course of self-improvement? Would that help solve the question? He only has to state it to reject it just as firmly.
Snow water — the best washing a man can find
The washing Job imagines is not careless. Melted snow was the cleanest water anyone knew, and that is the point.
W. T. P. WolstonSnow water is the very purest of all water, and what does snow water picture? Rites and ceremonies, and everything else that springs merely from man's flesh. People are trying all this, but it does not work; snow water does not cleanse from sin.
The dirt is in the man, not in his surroundings
If the purest water still ends in the pit, the problem was never the mud outside.
F. B. HoleGod would plunge him into a dirty ditch as the only fit place for him. And even then, he himself, under his clothes, would be dirtier than they were! The defilement was in himself and not in his surroundings. Nothing could be more decisive than his rejection of the idea that a man is justified by a process of self-improvement.
Effort does not solve this; it only exposes it.
J. N. DarbyI cannot make myself clean before God. Men pass through the world in an astonishing way. They think about their character, their conduct, and getting honour from one another. But what are they in God's sight? … The more a man works at being good, the more he finds he cannot change what he is. The evil is in his nature, and he cannot get rid of it.
Clothes that refuse to dress the flesh
The strangest phrase in the verse is the one about Job's clothes turning against him. One reading ties it to Job's good deeds — real things, worked in him by God, which he was now wearing as ornaments.
James BoydHe seeks to adorn himself with his good deeds. But God lets His light into his soul, and he adds, "Yet you will plunge me into a pit, and my own clothes will abhor me." What God's grace had worked in him refused, so to speak, to be decoration for the flesh. His clothes abhorred him. Later on he comes to the same mind as his clothes: he abhors himself.
Real knowledge, not yet full knowledge
Job says something true here — and he was the most upright man alive when he said it. But he had not yet reached the end of it. The last line quotes an older translation of Job 40:4.
The Bible TreasuryHow Satan must mock any man who tries to make himself clean and fit for the presence of God. The Lord said of Job that he had no equal on earth, and that he was perfect and upright. Yet even then Job knew enough of himself to say these words. He did not know how vile his nature was. A man learns that only in the presence of God, whose divine light lays the heart bare. When brought to that light, he says, "Behold, I am vile."
The cry it produces
A man who cannot clean himself, and cannot argue his case, needs someone to stand between.
Samuel RidoutJob hints that there is no use in his making any effort to clear himself… he may wash his hands in innocence, in snow water. Then this irresistible Power takes him and plunges him into the ditch! All efforts to alter the judgment are useless. And oh, where is there a daysman — a mediator who could enter into judgment, laying his hands on God and Job alike? … Thank God, we know, as Job later knew in part, that there is such a Daysman.
The cleansing that does work
What Job could not do for himself, God has done. One way of cleansing shuts every other door.
Edward DennettIt is the only means of cleansing from guilt. God appointed this way and God gave it. It therefore rules out every other method… Only the blood of Christ can make the sinner whiter than snow.
Summary
- Washing. Snow water is the purest wash a man can find — and it still ends in the pit.
- Pit. The filth was never outside him. Effort only proves the evil lies in his nature.
- Clothes. Even his good deeds refuse to serve as decoration, and he ends up agreeing with them: "I am vile."
- Daysman. With no way to clean himself and no way to argue, Job cries out for a mediator.
- Blood. The washing Job wanted is God's to give, and only the blood of Christ makes a sinner whiter than snow.