Job 13:18

“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” is one of the best-loved sentences in the Bible, and Job speaks it while believing that God is the one afflicting him. The verb qâṭal means to kill or slay. It is a final word, and Job uses it knowing that the hand that is on him may end his life, as he has just said in the verse before. Even then he will trust.

The Hebrew behind “trust” is yâchal, which means to wait or to hope. Job is saying that if God kills him he will still wait for God and still hope in him. That hope rests on who God is. What God is doing to him is beyond Job’s understanding, yet he holds on to God himself, even at the edge of death.

The same faith is heard elsewhere in Scripture. Habakkuk looks at failed crops and empty stalls and says, “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17–18). David walks through the valley of the shadow of death and fears no evil, “for thou art with me” (Psalm 23:4). Paul is persuaded that neither death nor life nor anything else in all creation “shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).

Job’s friends came to comfort him, and they have spent their speeches insisting that God always punishes the wicked and blesses the righteous, so a man who suffers as Job does must have sinned. Earlier in this chapter Job calls them “forgers of lies” and “physicians of no value” (Job 13:4), and he cries, “O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom” (Job 13:5). He asks, “Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him?” (Job 13:7), warns them that God will surely reprove them (Job 13:10–11), and tells them, “Your remembrances are like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies of clay” (Job 13:12). Later he sums them up in five words: “miserable comforters are ye all” (Job 16:2).

So he tells them, “Hold your peace, let me alone.” The verb is chârash, to be silent or keep silent, and so to leave someone alone. The lexicons list this as a separate verb from the one spelled the same way that means to engrave or plough. Job wants their silence “that I may speak”, and the verb is dâbar, the everyday word for speaking or telling. What he has to say is his case, and from verse 20 he turns and speaks to God directly. He has already wished for a go-between, saying there is no “daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both” (Job 9:33).

“And let come on me what will” uses ʻâbar, to cross over or pass, so Job is saying, let whatever will pass over me. Further suffering, God’s judgment or death itself, he is ready for all of it if he can only be heard.

“He also shall be my salvation.” The God whom Job sees as the source of his pain is the God who will rescue him. The word yᵉshûwʻâh covers deliverance, help, welfare, victory and rescue. It can be used of rescue that comes through people, as when Israel says that Jonathan “hath wrought this great salvation in Israel”, but Scripture traces every rescue back to the LORD. Here Job means that God will deliver him and clear his name.

His reason follows: “for an hypocrite shall not come before him.” The word is chânêph, godless, impious or profane, a man whose heart is estranged from God and who has no fear of him. It describes the heart itself as well as any false show. Such a man keeps away from God’s presence and has no standing there. Job is about to come before God of his own will, and that boldness is his evidence, because only a man who fears God asks God for a hearing. There is an irony in it. His friends have been treating him as a godless man with sin to hide, and Job turns their own principle back on them.

Scripture says the same about who may stand before God. “Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart” (Psalm 24:3–4). “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). “The LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), and “the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish” (Psalm 1:6). Jesus pronounced his woes on the scribes and Pharisees for exactly this kind of hollow religion (Matthew 23). A clean heart is God’s gift, and David asks for it: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10).

“Hear diligently my speech” doubles the Hebrew verb shâmaʻ, to hear: shim’u shamoa, “hear, hearing”. Hebrew uses this form for emphasis, so the sense is “listen carefully”, and the verb itself often carries attention, understanding and obedience. “My speech” is millâh, a word or discourse, and “my declaration” is ʼachvâh, a declaration or utterance. The two lines say one thing twice, as Hebrew poetry does, and “with your ears” presses it home. Scripture often speaks of the ear when it means taking words to heart, as in “My son, hear the instruction of thy father” (Proverbs 1:8).

Job’s friends have talked at length and listened very little. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13), and James tells us to be “swift to hear, slow to speak” (James 1:19). Job asks his friends for the kind of hearing David asks of God: “Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my meditation” (Psalm 5:1–3).

“Behold now” calls for attention to what comes next. “I have ordered my cause” uses ʻârak, to set in a row, arrange or put in order, the verb used for drawing up an army in battle array and for setting out food on a table. “Cause” is mishpâṭ, judgment, justice, or a case at law. Job has laid out his case like a man ready for court, the same picture he uses when he longs to “order my cause before him” (Job 23:3–4).

“I know” is yâdaʻ, to know, properly to find out by seeing, and Job speaks with settled conviction. “Justified” is tsâdaq, to be right or just, and here it means that Job will be found in the right and cleared of the charge. David prays in the same spirit, “judge me, O LORD, according to my righteousness, and according to mine integrity that is in me” (Psalm 7:8), and he says to Saul, “The LORD therefore be judge, and judge between me and thee, and see, and plead my cause” (1 Samuel 24:15).

A few verses later Job calls on God directly: “Then call thou, and I will answer: or let me speak, and answer thou me” (Job 13:22). His confidence grows into the great words “I know that my redeemer liveth” (Job 19:25). The debate with his friends runs on through Job 4–27, and when God at last answers him out of the whirlwind (Job 38–41), Job meets God himself: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5). The book ends with Job restored (Job 42).

“Who is he that will plead with me?” uses rîyb, to quarrel, contend or accuse, and in another sense to plead someone’s cause. Job is asking who will bring a case against him. It is a challenge, and it reaches past his friends to God, with whom Job longs to have his case heard (Job 9:32–33, Job 23:3–7).

“For now, if I hold my tongue” brings back chârash, the same verb Job used in verse 13 when he told his friends to be silent. He wanted their silence, and his own would kill him. “Give up the ghost” is gâvaʻ, to breathe out or expire, which is to die. Whether we hear it as a strong figure of speech or as the plain feeling of a man worn close to death, Job means that keeping his case shut up inside him would be the end of him.

David knew how silence can waste a person: “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long” (Psalm 32:3). His was the silence of sin he had kept from God. Job’s would be the swallowing of a true case, but both men felt what unspoken anguish does to body and soul.

Job wanted someone to stand between him and God (Job 9:33), and he hoped in a redeemer who lives (Job 19:25). God has given that Mediator: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). “We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:1–2). He intercedes for us at God’s right hand (Romans 8:34), and the Spirit himself intercedes for us too (Romans 8:26). Paul answers Job’s courtroom fears with questions of his own: “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died” (Romans 8:33–34).

Job demanded to speak. Jesus, the one sufferer who was wholly innocent, kept silent before his accusers, as Isaiah foretold: “he was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). In Gethsemane he accepted all that was coming: “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Job’s “let come on me what will” was the cry of a man defending his own name, and Christ’s was perfect obedience to the Father for the sake of others. He was tempted in all points as we are, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). On the cross he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and he died trusting: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). In him, trust that holds even unto death is carried to its end. God raised him up, “because it was not possible that he should be holden of it” (Acts 2:24), and he was “justified in the Spirit” (1 Timothy 3:16).

Job hoped to be cleared on his own record. We are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). God commended his love toward us “in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8), and he has made us “accepted in the beloved” (Ephesians 1:6). Christ fulfilled all righteousness (Matthew 3:15) and laid bare the hypocrisy of the religious leaders (Matthew 23:1–36), and through him people who were godless by nature may come before God with confidence. Job feared that silence would be his death. Christ, “the faithful and true witness” (Revelation 3:14), is himself “our life” (Colossians 3:4).

Job begged his friends to listen. Jesus, the Word who was with God and was made flesh (John 1:1, John 1:14), was refused a fair hearing by many who had ears and heard not (Mark 8:18). He himself listened. He looked on the crowds and “was moved with compassion on them” (Matthew 9:36), and he says, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27).

Job shows that a believer may bring God an honest case, with all its pain and confusion, and still be trusting him. The word behind his trust, yâchal, is a waiting hope, and Scripture commends that waiting: “Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation” (Psalm 62:1), and “It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD” (Lamentations 3:26). We can speak to God as Job did, sure that he is just, and wait for him as Job did, sure that he will answer in his time.

Job’s friends also teach by their failure. They answered before they heard, and their certainty made them cruel. When someone near us is suffering, a quiet, patient presence and a listening ear honour God more than a ready explanation of why the trouble came. Scripture calls us to speak for those who have no voice: “Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction” (Proverbs 31:8–9). And above all, every one of us has a better hope than Job could see clearly, for our case rests with an Advocate who pleads for us and whose righteousness is our own.