Job 14

Job 14:1

14:1-6 Job continues to ask why God is so unrelenting with one who is so fleeting, frail, and faulty. Verse 1 is very widely quoted, perhaps because it seems to fit so many occasions: “Man who is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble.“Why not let him live out the rest of his short life with some measure of peace? 14:7-12 There is more hope for a tree that has been cut down than there is for him. There is a terrible finality about human death; a dead person is like a dried-up river. 14:13-17 Job wishes that God would hide him in the grave . . . until His anger subsides. Then if the Almighty calls him forth, he will vindicate himself. In the meantime, God takes note of his every sin. Job does four things in this section: (1) He asks for a revelation of what his sins are; (2) He describes the transitoriness of human life; (3) He despairs over the finality of death (longing for a mediator and grasping at the hope of life beyond); (4) He complains of his present plight. Verse 14a asks a most important question: If a man dies, shall he live again? Our Lord answers the question in Joh_11:25-26 : “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.” Harold St. John comments on verses 14 and 15: In 14:14, 15 light dawns on a silent sea, light breaks in, and in a passage of almost incredible daring, Job declares that man is more than matter, that though the heavens will pass and decay, the everlasting hills will crumble, he himself may lie in the grasp of the grave for millennia, yet a day must break when God will feel a hunger round His heart for His friend and will have a desire for the work of His hands. Then from the deeps of the underworld, Job will answer and, more abiding than the hills, more permanent than the heavens, he will be reunited with the God who had become homesick for His servant. 14:18-22 As inevitable as erosion in nature is man’s decay under trials. His body returns to dust and his soul goes to a place of sadness. This ends the first round of speeches. The logic of Job’s friends has been: God is righteous; He punishes the wicked; if Job is being punished it proves he is wicked. But Job has steadily maintained that he is not a wicked person at all.