Job 9:23

Job’s friends were sure that suffering is always the direct result of sin. In Job 8 Bildad told Job that God’s justice makes the wicked perish and the righteous prosper, and behind his words lay the charge that Job must be hiding some sin. This way of thinking, often called retribution theology, treats righteousness and prosperity, and wickedness and suffering, as cause and effect. It was widely held in Job’s day, and Israel’s law does set out blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience (Deuteronomy 28). Job’s friends hardened that into a rule that every sufferer must be guilty, and Job’s own life breaks the rule.

The book opens by calling Job “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1). Earlier in this chapter he has confessed God’s wisdom and might over all creation: “He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened himself against him, and hath prospered?” (Job 9:4–10). He knows that any case he brought against such a God would fail, even if he were in the right: “If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me” (Job 9:20). So Job holds two things at once. God is all-powerful, and God’s power is falling on a blameless man. In verses 22 to 24 that tension breaks out into open complaint. Job lives in Uz, outside Israel, and what he says speaks to every people who have known disaster.

“This is one thing, therefore I said it” marks Job’s settled conclusion. Through all his suffering he has come to one stark observation, and it may sum up his whole argument against his friends. The word ʼechâd is the ordinary Hebrew numeral “one”, and it can also mean united or alike. That fits what Job says next, because his point is that the perfect and the wicked meet one and the same end.

The verb kâlâh, “destroyeth”, means to end, cease, be finished, perish or consume. Job has felt God’s hand bring his own life, health and goods to an end, and he says that God brings the wicked to the same end. “He” in this verse is God, and Job names him plainly as the one who acts.

The two kinds of people are described with plain moral words. The perfect, tâm, is an adjective meaning complete, perfect, plain or upright. It is the word used of Job in Job 1:1, and it describes a person of integrity who walks in God’s ways. It makes no claim to sinlessness. The wicked, râshâʻ, are the guilty and the ungodly, people who do wrong and set God’s law aside. Job is saying that the man of integrity and the man who despises God go down under the same blow.

Other Scripture says something close to this about life in this world. The Preacher writes, “All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked” (Ecclesiastes 9:2), and Jesus says that the Father “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). Job sees the harder side of the same truth, where calamity also falls on both.

Verse 23 pictures a disaster that sweeps through a whole people. The scourge, shôwṭ, is literally a whip or lash, and here it stands for a sudden, devastating calamity: plague, famine or invasion, the disasters that were common and terrible in Job’s day and were often put down to divine wrath. “Suddenly” means the blow comes without warning, with no time to prepare or escape. Job is speaking of a general catastrophe that takes many lives at once, the righteous along with the rest.

“He will laugh at the trial of the innocent” is the hardest line of the three verses. The verb lâʻag means to mock or scorn. The trial is the testing or severe affliction the innocent go through. The innocent, nâqîy, are those who are clean, guiltless or exempt from blame, people whose suffering is undeserved. Job pictures God watching them perish and laughing, as if their agony were a matter of indifference or even amusement to him.

In verse 24 Job widens his view from one disaster to the whole world. “The earth is given into the hand of the wicked.” To be in someone’s hand is to be under his control, so Job sees the wicked in charge of the world’s affairs. The verb nâthan, “given”, is the ordinary word for giving, used with very wide latitude for putting, setting, making and yielding. Job’s “given” can carry what God has ordained or what he has allowed, and either way it troubles Job, because the wicked hold power under the rule of a righteous and almighty God. The word for the wicked is the same râshâʻ as in verse 22, so the very people God should punish are the ones holding sway. This is the strong language of lament, an extreme statement of the injustice Job sees on every side.

“He covereth the faces of the judges thereof.” Judges were entrusted with upholding justice, settling disputes and keeping order, and they were often seen as God’s representatives on earth. Israel’s law demanded impartial judgment from them: “Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words of the righteous” (Deuteronomy 16:18–20). The verb kâçâh means to cover, as with clothing or for concealment, and also to overwhelm. Covering a judge’s face is a picture of justice perverted. The judges are blinded so that the truth is hidden from them, or shamed so that they hide, or overwhelmed by corruption so that fair judgment becomes impossible. The courts that should protect the innocent have failed them.

The Hebrew leaves open who “he” is. It may be the wicked man who has the earth in hand, it may be God, whom Job holds responsible for allowing or ordering such a world, or it may be an impersonal force. On any reading the result is a world where injustice goes unchecked and accountability is gone.

“If not, where, and who is he?” is Job’s challenge to anyone who would deny what he has said. If someone other than God stands behind this, who could that be, and where is he? The question holds fast to God’s rule over all things, and that is exactly what makes the injustice so hard for Job to bear.

Job is in good company. Asaph confesses, “For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked,” and goes on to describe their ease and pride (Psalm 73:3–12). Jeremiah asks, “Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?” (Jeremiah 12:1). The Preacher sees just men treated as the wicked deserve and wicked men treated as the righteous deserve (Ecclesiastes 8:14). Habakkuk cries out that “the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth,” very close to Job’s covered judges (Habakkuk 1:2–4). The psalmist’s “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) puts Job’s sense of abandonment into a single line.

These laments show that God’s people may bring their deepest questions, frustrations and even accusations to him, and that he can bear our anger and confusion. Scripture is full of such prayers. Job’s honest words, poured out before God, lead in the end to a deeper and more refined faith. Faith of this kind lives through doubt and struggle and keeps pursuing God in the middle of them.

Job was the perfect man of his generation, and he suffered without knowing why. His suffering points ahead to the suffering of the One who was truly perfect, Jesus, who was tempted as we are “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus was given into the hand of the wicked: “And when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to Pontius Pilate the governor” (Matthew 27:2). The judges of his day, from the Sanhedrin to Pilate, had their faces covered by fear, political convenience and spiritual blindness, and they condemned the innocent. Even so, Jesus told Pilate, “Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above” (John 19:10–11), and through that injustice, which God’s sovereign plan permitted, God did his greatest work of justice and redemption.

On the cross the perfect one died between two criminals, numbered with the wicked. The Lamb of God, “which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), bore God’s wrath against sin for our transgressions: “For he 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). Christ “suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). There the perfect and the wicked were brought together in one death, and the distinction between them was made clear forever, because God’s judgment fell on his Son so that the wicked who believe might be declared righteous. Paul says God did this “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:23–26).

On the cross Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and Job’s sense of abandonment is heard again on the lips of God’s Son. So the God whom Job pictured laughing at the trial of the innocent came himself, in Christ, into human suffering at its worst. The cross looked like the triumph of evil, and there Christ “spoiled principalities and powers” and “made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). Job asked, “Where, and who is he?” In Christ we meet the one who entered the full experience of suffering and injustice in order to conquer them. Through his resurrection he has begun a new creation, and he will return to bring “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:13). Then “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4), and he says, “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:5).

These three verses give us words for the darkest hours of faith. They show that God’s people may speak to him honestly when the world contradicts all they know of him, and that Scripture itself records such speech. They show that a man God counts perfect can suffer terribly, which frees us from reading guilt into every sorrow, our own or anyone else’s.

They also show who God is. He is near to the broken-hearted, his justice is sure even when its day has yet to come, and in Christ he entered the very injustice Job lamented in order to end it. Those who know him stand against the injustices Job mourned, and with Job they wait for the day when his righteous kingdom is fully revealed.