Job 27:8

These verses open Job’s last and longest speech, which runs through Job 27–31. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar have said all they have to say. Over and over they have argued that a man suffers because he has sinned, and that Job’s losses and sores prove some hidden wickedness. That was the common belief among the men of the east, in the land of Uz where Job lived, a region outside Israel and likely in Edom or northern Arabia. Prosperity was taken as a sign of God’s favour and suffering as a sign of his displeasure. Just before our passage, Job swears by the living God, who has taken away his right and made his soul bitter, that as long as his breath is in him his lips will speak no falsehood and his tongue will utter no deceit (Job 27:1–4). Verse 5 carries that oath on.

“God forbid” renders a single Hebrew word, châlîylâh, which literally means a profaned thing and is used as a cry of “far be it!” Job recoils from the very thought. To justify, tsâdaq, is to be right or to declare right, in a moral or a legal sense. To justify his friends would be to declare their verdict correct, and so to confess a guilt that belongs to some other man. Job would sooner die.

“Till I die” uses gâvaʻ, a verb meaning to breathe out, to expire. Until his last breath Job vows to keep hold of what he has. The verb behind “remove”, çûwr, means to turn aside or put away, so Job pictures his integrity as something he could set down, and he refuses to set it down. Integrity, tummâh, means innocence or wholeness. It comes from a root meaning to be complete or blameless, and it describes a life that is sincere and all of one piece before God. It is the quality God himself praised at the start of the book, when he described Job as blameless and upright, a man who feared God and turned away from evil (Job 1:1, Job 1:8).

This oath prepares for the fuller oath of innocence in Job 31, where Job goes through one possible sin after another and clears himself of each. The end of the book shows that he was right to hold on, for God rebukes the friends (Job 42:7) and shows that Job’s integrity was real. Scripture speaks well of such a life. Proverbs says that the one who walks in integrity walks securely (Proverbs 10:9), David asks the LORD to judge him according to his righteousness and the integrity that is in him (Psalm 7:8), and Peter says that those who suffer for righteousness’ sake are blessed (1 Peter 3:14).

Verse 6 restates the oath as a firm grip. “My righteousness” is tsᵉdâqâh, rightness, which covers uprightness of life, justice and virtue. Here it means Job’s moral uprightness, the blameless conduct God had praised. “I hold fast” is châzaq, which means to seize, to be strong, to make firm. “Let it go” is râphâh, to slacken or loosen. Job has taken hold of his righteousness, and whatever the pain and the pressure, his grip stays firm. His words match his earlier cry, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15).

The second half of the verse gives the inward ground for the first. The heart, lêbâb, is the innermost part of a person, the seat of thought, will, feeling and conscience. To reproach, châraph, is to taunt, to say sharp things against someone. Job’s friends have said sharp things against him for chapter after chapter, and Job declares that his own heart has no such charge to bring. “So long as I live” is literally ‘from my days’, miyyamay, from yôwm, the word for a day or a span of time.

Scripture prizes such a conscience. Proverbs tells us, “Keep thy heart with all diligence” (Proverbs 4:23). Paul speaks of the conscience bearing witness within a person (Romans 2:15), and he says that the goal of his charge is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience (1 Timothy 1:5). Peter calls believers to keep a good conscience (1 Peter 3:16).

With verse 7 Job turns from himself to his accusers. The enemy, ʼôyêb, is the word for a foe, from a verb meaning to be hostile. “He that riseth up against me” uses qûwm, to rise, here of rising against someone as an adversary. Where a man’s honour and standing were bound up with his relationship to God and to his community, an accuser of this kind was an enemy, and Job’s friends have become exactly that. Job asks that his enemy be as the wicked, rāšāʿ (also written râshâʻ), the word for someone morally wrong, guilty and ungodly, condemned by God’s judgment. The unrighteous, ʻavvâl, is the unjust man, and the word is traced to a root meaning to twist or pervert. The second line says the first again in other words, as Hebrew poetry often does, and the repetition makes it stronger.

The wish is a solemn appeal to God’s justice. If Job is innocent, those who call him wicked have borne false witness, and Job asks that the judgment they pressed on him fall where it belongs. Behind it lies his confidence that God is just and will in the end tell the righteous from the wicked, a confidence he keeps even while he rejects the friends’ rigid account of how God’s justice works. The Psalms share it. David asks the righteous God, who tries the hearts, to end the wickedness of the wicked and establish the just (Psalm 7:9), and another psalm promises that in a little while the wicked shall be no more (Psalm 37:10). Scripture shows that final judgment before the great white throne (Revelation 20:11–15).

From verse 8 Job describes the man his friends have taken him for and asks what becomes of him. The word the KJV renders “hypocrite” is chânêph, which means soiled with sin, impious, godless. It describes a man whose life is defiled and estranged from God, whatever outward show of piety or success goes with it. Pretence is part of it, and godlessness lies at its root.

Hope, tiqvâh, literally means a cord, something a person is tied to, and figuratively expectancy. The godless man’s hope is the cord he has tied to his gains and his standing. “Though he hath gained” grants that such a man may prosper. The verb, bâtsaʻ, means to break off and usually to plunder, and it is used of covetous gain. Job admits what his friends’ theory left out, that the wicked can flourish for a while, and then he points to the moment when it all counts for nothing.

“When God taketh away his soul” names that moment. God here is ʼĕlôwahh, the same word for God that comes back in verse 10, and “taketh away” is shâlâh. The soul, nephesh, is a breathing creature, life, the self, the whole person. When God takes the nephesh, life itself ends and the man stands before his Creator, and whatever he gained stays behind. God holds life and death in his hand. Jesus asks what good it is to gain the whole world and lose one’s soul (Matthew 16:26), his parable of the rich fool makes the same point (Luke 12:16–21), and Hebrews says that people die once and then face judgment (Hebrews 9:27). The rest of Job 27 goes on to describe the wicked man’s miserable end.

Verse 9 asks, “Will God hear his cry when trouble cometh upon him?” God here is ʼêl, a word that means God and also carries the sense of strength and might. Job is asking about God’s willingness, since his power to hear is beyond question. To hear, shâmaʻ, is to hear with attention, the kind of hearing that often leads to a response. The cry, tsaʻăqâh, is a shriek, the outcry of someone in distress. Trouble, tsârâh, is tightness, the narrow place of distress, adversity and affliction, and “cometh” is bôwʼ, to come or befall. The “him” is the hypocrite of verse 8, and the trouble that has come upon him is the outworking of his own wickedness and of God’s judgment.

The question expects a hard answer. A man who lived for himself and cries out only to escape what he has earned has nothing to claim from God. “The LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7), and he knows a cry of self-preservation from a heart that turns to him. Wisdom warns that those who scorn her will call and receive no answer (Proverbs 1:28). God tells Israel that when they spread out their hands in prayer he will hide his eyes from them (Isaiah 1:15), and a psalmist says that if he had cherished iniquity in his heart the Lord would have refused to hear him (Psalm 66:18). The LORD hears the righteous when they cry (Psalm 34:17).

Verse 10 asks two more questions about the godless man. “Will he delight himself in the Almighty?” The verb ʻânag means to be soft or pliable, and from that to take delight or pleasure. To delight in the Almighty is to find pleasure and satisfaction in God himself, in who he is and in his presence. The Almighty is Shadday, the title “Almighty”, which may mean the All-Sufficient One, though its exact meaning is uncertain. It is one of the most frequent names for God in Job, used 31 times in the book.

“Will he always call upon God?” To call, qârâʼ, is to call out to someone, and here to cry out to God and invoke him. “Always” is ʻêth, the word for time, so the question is whether he will call on God at every time. God here is ʼĕlôwahh again. The godless man may cry out once in a crisis, as verse 9 pictures, and his prayer lasts only as long as the trouble lasts. Both questions expect the same answer, and together they name the marks of the godless: his heart takes no pleasure in God, and his prayers come and go with his needs.

The psalmist calls us to delight ourselves in the LORD (Psalm 37:4), and God invites us to call upon him in the day of trouble (Psalm 50:15). The righteous call on him in trouble and keep calling when it has passed. Jesus warns against prayer made for show (Matthew 6:5), and James says that some ask and receive nothing because they ask with wrong motives (James 4:3).

Here Job draws the contrast with himself. Through all his suffering, wrestling and lament he has kept on calling on God. His friends say he is wicked, yet the very thing the wicked man will never do is what Job has gone on doing from the ash heap.

Job’s oath points beyond itself to Jesus Christ. Christ alone is perfectly blameless: he did no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth (1 Peter 2:22). He was falsely accused and reviled and suffered unjustly, and he held to his mission in obedience to the Father, even to death on a cross (Philippians 2:8). God vindicated him by raising him from the dead, declaring him to be the Son of God with power (Romans 1:4).

Christ suffered for our sins and bore our punishment (Isaiah 53:5). He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), and God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). He fulfilled all righteousness (Matthew 3:15), and his blood purges our conscience from dead works (Hebrews 9:14). So the clear conscience Job held to is given to us in Christ. We are found in him with a righteousness that comes through faith (Philippians 3:9), justified and at peace with God (Romans 5:1). God justifies his people and Christ intercedes for them, so the accuser has no case against them (Romans 8:33–34).

In the hour of his own trouble Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). That trouble came upon him for our sin, and the Father answered his righteous Son by raising him and vindicating him. Because of him our cries are heard, on the ground of his righteousness, for he ever lives to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25).

Jesus also exposed the hypocrisy of verse 8. He warned against religious acts done to be seen by others (Matthew 6:1–6) and told us to lay up treasure in heaven, where moth and rust cannot destroy (Matthew 6:19–21). He is our hope (1 Timothy 1:1), and “hope maketh not ashamed” (Romans 5:5). It is an anchor for the soul (Hebrews 6:19), and it outlasts death itself.

The questions of verse 10 have their answer in him too. Jesus delighted in his Father perfectly. His food was to do the will of the one who sent him (John 4:34), and he often withdrew to pray (Luke 5:16). Through him we receive the Spirit of adoption (Romans 8:15), by whom we cry, “Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6), and we may come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). In Christ his people delight in the Almighty and call on God at all times.

These verses give us a man who held on to God and to a clear conscience when everything around him said he had lost both. His friends’ account of suffering was too small, and his oath shows that a believer can suffer greatly and still be upright before God. The rest of the book shows that God saw it and vindicated him.

They also show us who God is. He is the living God by whom Job swore, the Almighty who sees the heart, who hears those who truly seek him, and who will one day separate the righteous from the wicked. The godless man’s hope is tied to what he has gained, and it breaks when God takes his life. The hope of God’s people is tied to God himself, and in Christ it holds. Job’s questions in verse 10 describe a true believer, one who delights in the Almighty and calls on him in every season, in trouble and out of it.