Job 14:17

These verses come near the end of Job’s long speech in chapters 12 to 14, where he answers his friends. They held that suffering always follows sin, so Job’s calamities had to come from some hidden wickedness. Job steadily maintains his integrity. He has already poured out his grief in Job 3, pleaded for relief in Job 7, and complained that God deals with him as an adversary in Job 9 and Job 10.

Job 14 is his lament over the brevity of life. Its opening verses (Job 14:1–12) say that man is born to trouble, flourishes like a flower and is soon cut down. Job asks God to turn away from him so that he can rest a little before his end (Job 14:6). Then he sets man beside a tree. A tree that is cut down can sprout again from its stump when water reaches its roots (Job 14:7–9), but a man dies, gives up the ghost, and is gone (Job 14:10–12). Out of that low point Job turns to God with the plea of verse 13.

Job’s first wish is to be hidden in the grave. The word is shᵉʼôwl, Sheol, the world of the dead, pictured as a place beneath the earth, which the KJV renders “grave”, “hell” or “pit”. In Job’s day it was spoken of as the place where all the dead go, a silent and shadowy realm from which return was generally thought impossible. Job asks God to hide him there and keep him secret, as a shelter from his suffering until God’s anger has run its course.

The word for wrath, ʼaph, properly means the nose or nostril, and from the hard breathing of a person in passion it came to mean anger. Job takes his suffering as the anger of God against him, even while he insists he is innocent, and he believes that anger will one day pass.

Then comes the most remarkable part of the verse: “that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me!” Job asks God to fix a time for his recall from the grave. The verb zâkar means to remember, and in another form to mention or bring to remembrance. When Job asks God to remember him, he is asking God to act for him at that set time, to bring him back, vindicate him and restore him. So a prayer that began as a wish for death ends as a hope of life beyond it, resting on God’s rule over every time and season.

Job’s question follows straight on from the tree. The verb for die, mûwth, is the ordinary word for dying, and here it is the plain end of earthly life. The verb for live, châyâh, means to live, and in its causative form to revive. The Hebrew form here, yichyeh, simply asks “shall he live?” The KJV prints “again” in italics because the translators supplied it for sense. The bare question asks whether a man who has died will live at all, so it takes in any life beyond death as well as a return to this one.

After verses 10 to 12 the expected answer is that a man does not come back to life on earth as a tree does. Yet Job asks the question because he longs for another answer, and the rest of the verse leans toward hope: “all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.” The words “appointed time” translate tsâbâʼ, the word for an army or host, for war, and for service, and Job speaks of his days as a term of service that God has set. He will wait, yâchal, a verb that means both to wait and to hope. The length of his life and its end are in God’s hands. The psalmist asks the LORD to make him know his end and the measure of his days (Psalm 39:4), and Moses numbers our years at threescore and ten (Psalm 90:10). Hebrews says that it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this the judgment (Hebrews 9:27).

Verse 15 is the high point of Job’s hope. In his suffering God has been silent, yet Job pictures a day when God takes the lead and calls him, and Job answers. Calling and answering is the speech of a living bond between God and his worshipper, and here it reaches past the grave Job has just described.

Job gives the reason: “thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.” The verb kâçaph properly means to grow pale, and by implication to pine or long for something, so Job is saying that God will long for him. The word for work, maʻăseh, means a deed, a work, a product or workmanship, and yâd, hand, often stands for power and for something done by a person’s own agency. “The work of thine hands” speaks of God as the maker and owner of man, who formed him with care in his own image (Genesis 1:26–27). The psalmist praises God for forming him in his mother’s womb, and says that he is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:13–16). Job’s hope rests on who God is as Creator. What God has made with his own hands he will want back, even from the grave.

That hope runs through the rest of Scripture. The psalmist trusts that God will not leave his soul in the grave and will show him the path of life (Psalm 16:10–11). Through Hosea, God promises to ransom his people from the power of the grave and to be death’s plague (Hosea 13:14). Paul is persuaded that neither death nor life can separate us from the love of God in Christ (Romans 8:38–39), and he looks to the day when death is swallowed up in victory and the grave loses its sting (1 Corinthians 15:54–55). The worth of a human being comes from being God’s own workmanship, and that does not end when health, usefulness or life itself are gone.

In verse 16 the mood turns back to pain. “For now thou numberest my steps.” The verb çâphar means to count or number. Job feels that God is counting every step he takes, as one keeps a tally for a reckoning. “Dost thou not watch over my sin?” uses shâmar, to guard, keep, preserve or watch. Job is saying that God is keeping his sin, holding on to it as evidence against him. He has asked God to look away so that he could rest (Job 14:6), and now he feels the opposite, watched without relief. He maintains his integrity against his friends’ charges of great sin, yet he knows he is a sinful man, and he fears that God is keeping even his smallest faults.

Verse 17 sharpens the picture: “My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up mine iniquity.” The word for transgression, peshaʻ, means rebellion, an act by which someone defies an authority, and by extension the guilt of it. “Sealed up” is châtham, to close up or seal, and “bag” is tsᵉrôwr, a bundle, parcel or small bag, often used to carry money or valuables. Important documents and valuables were commonly bundled and sealed with a signet to guarantee them, prevent tampering and keep them for later use, including in court. “Sewest up” is ṭâphal, to stick on as a patch, and the same verb can mean to impute falsely. “Iniquity,” ʻâvôn, means perversity, fault or sin, and it often carries the guilt and the punishment that sin brings. Together the two lines picture God as a clerk who gathers every one of Job’s offences, binds them up, seals them and keeps them for the day of judgment.

Each part of these verses finds its answer in Jesus. Job asked to be hidden in the grave for a set time until God’s wrath was past. Jesus, the sinless Son of God, lay in the grave for the time he had foretold, three days and three nights, as the sign of Jonah (Matthew 12:40). He went into death bearing the wrath of God against the sin of others, so that we are saved from wrath through him (Romans 5:9). God remembered him and raised him up, because it was not possible that death should hold him (Acts 2:24). He is the firstfruits of them that slept (1 Corinthians 15:20), and his rising is the pledge that all who are his will be raised at God’s appointed time. Job asked, “If a man die, shall he live again?”, and Jesus says, “I am the resurrection, and the life” (John 11:25).

Job was sure God would long for the work of his hands. In Christ, God came into the very work of his hands, for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Job said, “Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee”, and Jesus says that his sheep hear his voice, and he gives them eternal life, and they shall never perish (John 10:27–28).

Job feared that God was sealing up his sins in a bag. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), the mediator Job longed for. God 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). His blood cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7), and the handwriting that was against us has been blotted out and nailed to his cross (Colossians 2:14). God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8), and there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). At the end, God will wipe away all tears, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow (Revelation 21:4).

These verses give us a man who brings his whole heart to God, his longing for death, his fear of God’s anger and his dread of a sealed record of sin, and who speaks all of it to God himself. God kept these words in Scripture, and so we know that honest lament belongs in prayer.

They also show who God is, even through Job’s tears. He rules the grave and sets its times. He remembers. He calls, and his people answer. He longs for the work of his hands. What Job glimpsed from far off, we see in the risen Christ, and Job’s resolve to wait for his change is the patience of every believer who waits for the resurrection with the same God holding the appointed time.