Arraigned Before the Almighty
Introduction: When Piety Is Not Enough
We come now to the heart of Job’s lament. His friends, those miserable comforters, have been operating on a very tidy, very neat, and very false theological system. Theirs is a theology of the spreadsheet. If you do good, God puts a check in the "blessing" column. If you do bad, He puts a check in the "cursing" column. And since Job is currently sitting in a world of hurt, covered in boils and grief, the conclusion for them is simple arithmetic. Job, you must have sinned. Confess, and God will reverse the formula.
But Job, and the narrator of the book, and God Himself, all know this is false. Job is a righteous man. This is the premise of the entire book. So Job is caught in an impossible bind. He knows he is innocent of the charges his friends are leveling, but he also knows that he is in the hands of an omnipotent God whose ways are far beyond his comprehension. The text before us is not the defiant cry of a rebel. It is the agonized cry of a righteous man who finds that his righteousness is utterly insufficient when he is brought into the courtroom of the Almighty.
This passage is a stark and terrifying look at the human condition before the unmediated holiness and power of God. Job is wrestling with the absolute sovereignty of God, and he is doing so without the full light of the gospel that we now possess. He is feeling his way in a very dark room, bumping into very hard furniture. And what he discovers is the terrifying reality that no man, on his own terms, can stand before God. He discovers the absolute necessity of a mediator, a need that will become explicit later in this chapter. This passage plows the hard ground of our self-sufficiency to prepare it for the seed of the gospel. It shows us the problem to which Christ is the only answer.
The Text
How then can I answer Him, And choose my words before Him? For though I were right, I could not answer; I would have to plead for the grace of my judge. If I called and He answered me, I could not believe that He was giving ear to my voice. For He bruises me with a tempest And multiplies my wounds without cause. He will not allow me to get my breath, But saturates me with bitterness. If it is a matter of power, behold, He is the mighty one! And if it is a matter of justice, who can make Him testify? Though I am righteous, my mouth will condemn me; Though I am blameless, He will declare me perverse. I am blameless; I do not know my soul; I reject my life. It is all one; therefore I say, ‘He consumes the blameless and the wicked.’ If the scourge puts to death suddenly, He mocks the despair of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not He, then who is it?
(Job 9:14-24 LSB)
The Futility of Self-Justification (vv. 14-16)
Job begins by recognizing the absolute mismatch between himself and God. This is not a negotiation between two parties of comparable stature.
"How then can I answer Him, And choose my words before Him? For though I were right, I could not answer; I would have to plead for the grace of my judge. If I called and He answered me, I could not believe that He was giving ear to my voice." (Job 9:14-16)
Job understands that this is not a court of his peers. How can a finite creature possibly formulate an argument that would hold up before the infinite Creator? It is like a gnat trying to debate a hurricane. The very categories are incommensurate. What words could he possibly choose? Any word he speaks is a word God created.
But notice the profound insight in verse 15. "For though I were right, I could not answer." Job is not confessing to some secret sin. He maintains his integrity. He believes his case is righteous. But he knows that his righteousness provides him no standing. He cannot demand justice; he can only plead for mercy. He recognizes that even if he is in the right, his only recourse is to "plead for the grace of my judge." This is a staggering, pre-Christian apprehension of the doctrine of grace. Job knows that his relationship with God cannot be conducted on the basis of merit, not even his own genuine righteousness. It must be a relationship of grace, of unmerited favor from the judge.
The gulf is so immense that even if God were to answer him, he says he could not believe it. The sheer condescension would be too much to process. This is the cry of a man who feels his own creaturely smallness in the face of the transcendent majesty of God.
The Crushing Force of Sovereignty (vv. 17-19)
Job then moves from the legal impossibility to the experiential reality of his suffering. He describes the overwhelming and seemingly arbitrary power of God.
"For He bruises me with a tempest And multiplies my wounds without cause. He will not allow me to get my breath, But saturates me with bitterness. If it is a matter of power, behold, He is the mighty one! And if it is a matter of justice, who can make Him testify?" (Job 9:17-19)
Job is being brutally honest. From his vantage point, this suffering is "without cause." It is a tempest, a relentless barrage. God will not even let him catch his breath. This is not the complaint of a man who has a low pain threshold. This is the testimony of a man being systematically dismantled by affliction.
And here he states the core of his dilemma. If this is a contest of strength, there is no contest. "Behold, He is the mighty one!" God is omnipotent, and Job is dust. But if it is a matter of justice, what can he do? "Who can make Him testify?" You cannot subpoena God. There is no higher court. He is the ultimate reality, the final authority. You cannot put God in the witness box and cross-examine Him. This is the terrifying side of absolute sovereignty when viewed from the ash heap. If the sovereign one is afflicting you, there is no one and nowhere to appeal.
The Righteous Man Condemned (vv. 20-21)
This leads Job to a startling paradox. Even his own righteousness becomes a trap in God's courtroom.
"Though I am righteous, my mouth will condemn me; Though I am blameless, He will declare me perverse. I am blameless; I do not know my soul; I reject my life." (Job 9:20-21)
This is a profound piece of theology hammered out on the anvil of suffering. Job knows he is righteous in the horizontal sense; he has not committed the sins his friends accuse him of. But he intuits that in the vertical presence of absolute holiness, any claim to righteousness is itself an act of pride that God could rightly condemn. The very act of saying "I am blameless" before the throne of God is an act that proves you are not. Before a holy God, our best righteousness is a tainted thing. Isaiah would later say that all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment (Is. 64:6). Job is discovering this truth in the crucible.
The result is an existential crisis. He holds to his integrity, "I am blameless," but this experience has so undone him that he feels alienated from his own self, "I do not know my soul," and has been driven to despair, "I reject my life." When your theological framework cannot account for your experience of reality, the whole structure begins to collapse.
The Scandal of Providence (vv. 22-24)
Having exhausted every other avenue, Job makes a raw, sweeping, and scandalous pronouncement about the nature of God's rule in the world.
"It is all one; therefore I say, ‘He consumes the blameless and the wicked.’ If the scourge puts to death suddenly, He mocks the despair of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not He, then who is it?" (Job 9:22-24)
This is Job's desperate attempt to make sense of his reality. He looks at his own situation, and he looks at the world, and he concludes that the tidy retribution theology of his friends is a lie. From the ground, it appears that God is indiscriminate. He consumes both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster strikes, it seems that God "mocks the despair of the innocent." This is a shocking thing to say, and we must understand it as the cry of a man at the absolute end of his rope.
He takes the doctrine of sovereignty to its hard and logical conclusion. "The earth is given into the hand of the wicked." Who gives it to them? The one who is in charge. "He covers the faces of its judges," meaning justice is blinded. Who does this? Job's final, haunting question drives the point home: "If it is not He, then who is it?"
Job refuses the easy out of dualism, as though God is in a cosmic arm-wrestle with some rival power. He refuses to believe in a weak or limited God. No, God is sovereign. And if God is sovereign, then He is sovereign over all of it, including the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the righteous. Job is staring into the abyss of what theologians call the problem of evil, and he does not blink. He affirms God's total control, even if he cannot reconcile it with God's justice from his place in the dust.
The Mediator We Were Made For
Job's entire speech is a cry of desperation. He is a righteous man, but his righteousness cannot save him. He is a wise man, but his words fail him. He is a creature, and he is being crushed by his Creator. His problem is the human problem in its most distilled form. How can a sinful, finite man stand before a holy, infinite God?
Job has diagnosed the disease with terrifying accuracy. But he cannot yet see the cure. Later in this chapter, he will cry out, "For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him... Nor is there any mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both" (Job 9:32-33). This is the cry of the entire Old Testament. It is a cry for an umpire, an arbiter, a go-between.
It is a cry for Jesus Christ.
Every dead end Job encounters is a signpost pointing to the gospel. Job says, "though I were right, I could not answer." But we have an answer, for Christ is our Advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1). Job says he must "plead for the grace of my judge." But we have not just pleaded for grace, we have received it in abundance through the one who is full of grace and truth (John 1:14, 16).
Job says God "multiplies my wounds without cause." But on the cross, the Father multiplied the wounds of His only Son, the only one who truly suffered "without cause," so that our justly deserved wounds might be healed (Isaiah 53:5). Job asks, "who can make Him testify?" God made Himself testify, when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Job says, "my mouth will condemn me." But Christ stood silent before his accusers, so that our mouths, which would condemn us, might be opened to sing His praises.
Job’s scandalous conclusion that God "consumes the blameless and the wicked" finds its ultimate, horrific, and glorious fulfillment at Calvary. There, God did consume the only truly Blameless One in the place of the wicked. The ultimate scourge fell upon the ultimate innocent, and God did not mock His despair, but forsook Him for our sake. Job was right. If it is not God, then who is it? It was God, at the cross, reconciling the world to Himself. Job saw the problem. Jesus is the answer.