Commentary - Job 13:20-28

Bird's-eye view

In this portion of Job’s speech, we find him turning from his miserable comforters to address God directly. Having silenced his friends, at least for a moment, he now lays out the terms of his desired audience with the Almighty. This is not the groveling of a man who has simply been crushed, but the raw, honest, and desperate plea of a man who still believes there is a Judge to whom he can appeal. He is in agony, but he has not abandoned the field. He wants a fair trial. He wants to know the charges. He wants to understand why the God he has faithfully served now treats him as an enemy. This is a man wrestling with God, and in this, he is a forerunner of all saints who must do the same. The passage is a powerful exhibition of what it means to complain to God, which is a universe away from complaining about God.

Job sets two conditions for this divine encounter: that God would withdraw His heavy hand and not terrify him with His majesty. Under these conditions, he is ready for a legal showdown. He is willing to be the defendant if God will be the prosecutor, or to take up the prosecutor’s role himself. The core of his demand is for clarity. "How many are my iniquities and sins?" He is not claiming sinless perfection, but he is utterly bewildered by the extremity of his suffering. It seems disproportionate to any sin he is aware of. He feels hunted by God, like a driven leaf or dry chaff, and this sense of being unjustly pursued by an omnipotent foe is the source of his deepest torment. He concludes by describing his own decay, a man wasting away under a divine sentence for sins he cannot identify, including the forgotten sins of his youth.

Outline

Commentary

v. 20 “Only two things do not do to me, Then I will not hide from Your face:

Job begins his direct address to God by setting preconditions. This is audacious, but it is the audacity of faith, not of unbelief. A man who truly believed God was an arbitrary tyrant would not bother making appeals. He would curse God and die. But Job, in the blackest night of his soul, still believes in a God of covenant and order. He wants to come into God’s presence, but he knows that as a finite and frail creature, he cannot survive an encounter with raw, unveiled divine majesty and power. He is not trying to hide from God in a rebellious sense; he is saying that if God does not temper His approach, Job will be constitutionally incapable of not hiding. He wants a real conversation, not to be obliterated.

v. 21 Move Your hand far from me, And let not the dread of You terrify me.

Here are his two conditions. First, the hand of God, which he feels pressing down on him, causing his physical suffering, must be lifted. He needs a reprieve from the pain in order to make his case. Second, the overwhelming terror of God’s presence, the dread that made Isaiah cry, “Woe is me!”, must be restrained. Job understands the sinner's problem. How can a man be just before God? How can dust and ashes stand before the consuming fire? Job is asking for a mediated encounter. He is asking for a kind of gospel before the gospel. He knows he cannot stand before unmitigated holiness and power, and so he asks for grace. He needs the terror to be removed so that he can speak freely, and not out of sheer fright.

v. 22 Then call, and I will answer; Or let me speak, then respond to me.

Once the conditions are met, Job is ready for the trial to begin. He is flexible on the legal procedure. God can take the role of prosecutor, laying out the charges, and Job will be the defendant. Or, Job is willing to present his own case first, to be the plaintiff, and have God respond. The point is that he wants a dialogue. He wants a real back-and-forth. This is the cry of a man who believes in a rational, speaking God. He is rejecting the pagan notion of a silent, inscrutable deity who strikes from the shadows for no reason. Job’s faith, battered as it is, still clings to the conviction that God is a God who speaks and who can be spoken to.

v. 23 How many are my iniquities and sins? Make known to me my transgression and my sin.

Here is the heart of his demand. He wants the charges read. His friends have been operating on the tidy assumption that great suffering must mean great sin. Job, while not claiming to be sinless, is utterly baffled. He cannot connect his current state with any specific, heinous transgression. So he asks God to show him the ledger. "Tell me what I have done." This is a profoundly dangerous prayer for any sinner to pray, unless he is praying it in Christ. But Job prays it out of a desperate need for his world to make sense again. If he is being punished, he wants to know the crime. He is asking for the very thing the law does: it gives the knowledge of sin.

v. 24 Why do You hide Your face And think of me as Your enemy?

This is the relational agony behind the legal and physical torment. For a man who has walked with God, the hidden face of God is hell itself. God's favor is life, and His frown is death. Job experiences his suffering not just as pain, but as divine hostility. He feels that God is treating him, a faithful servant, as an enemy of the crown. This is the ultimate bewilderment. Why would a loving king turn on a loyal subject? The question echoes down to the cross, where the Son would cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Job is tasting the bitter cup of imputed guilt, feeling the wrath of God for reasons he cannot comprehend.

v. 25 Will You cause a driven leaf to tremble? Or will You pursue the dry chaff?

Job now argues from a sense of divine propriety. He appeals to God's greatness. Is it fitting for the Almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, to expend so much energy tormenting someone as insignificant and fragile as Job? He compares himself to a leaf, already torn from the tree and driven by the wind, and to dry chaff, weightless and worthless. "Is this a worthy contest for You, God?" he asks. There is a profound imbalance of power. It is like an elephant declaring war on an ant. This is not to deny God's right to do as He pleases, but it is an appeal to His character. A great and noble king does not display his strength by crushing the weak.

v. 26 For You write bitter things against me And make me to possess the iniquities of my youth.

Job feels that God has become a prosecuting attorney, writing up a formal, bitter indictment against him. And what are the charges? God is dredging up the sins of his past, the follies of his youth. This is a terrifying thought for any man. Who among us could stand if God were to bring back every foolish, sinful act of our younger years and hold them against us now? Job feels that God is not just punishing him for recent failures, but is reaching back into the archives and holding him accountable for a lifetime of sin. This is what it feels like to be under the law, where every sin is recorded and none are forgotten. This is the very condemnation from which Christ came to deliver us.

v. 27 You put my feet in the stocks And kept watch over all my paths; You set a limit for the soles of my feet,

The imagery here is of a prisoner under maximum security. His feet are locked in stocks, rendering him immobile. But it's worse than that. God is also a sentry, watching his every path, ensuring there is no escape. And He has drawn a line, a boundary, on the ground around his feet that he cannot cross. This is a picture of absolute constraint and meticulous, hostile scrutiny. Job is not just afflicted; he is imprisoned by his affliction. He can't move, he can't escape, and he is being watched constantly by his jailer. This is a powerful description of what it feels like to be trapped in inescapable suffering under the sovereign hand of God.

v. 28 While I am decaying like a rotten thing, Like a garment that is moth-eaten.

The verse numbering here is a bit tricky, as this verse logically connects to the beginning of chapter 14. But standing here, it serves as a summary of Job’s condition under this divine siege. He is simply falling apart. The "I" here refers to his physical body and his entire existence. He is like a piece of wood that is rotting from the inside out, or a fine garment that has been left in a dark closet for moths to devour. The process is slow, inexorable, and destructive. He is not being struck down by a single blow, but is being consumed, bit by bit. This is the end result of being pursued by a holy God when you are a sinful man without a mediator. It is a slow, agonizing decay into nothingness.

Application

Job’s raw and honest lament provides a template for the suffering saint. There is a vast difference between shaking your fist at God and clinging to His robes while you cry out to Him. Job does the latter. He argues, he questions, he demands, but he does it all within the framework of faith. He never leaves the courtroom. This teaches us that God is big enough to handle our questions, our pain, and our confusion. Pious-sounding platitudes are often a form of unbelief, a refusal to engage with the hard realities of a fallen world. True faith wrestles.

Second, Job’s longing for a fair hearing and a known list of charges is a longing for the gospel. He wants to know his sin so he can answer for it. What he doesn't know is that he cannot answer for it. His only hope, and ours, is to have someone else answer for him. Jesus Christ is the one who stood in the courtroom for us, who had the bitter things written against Him, who was made to possess the iniquities of our youth. He is the one who endured the hidden face of the Father so that God’s face might shine upon us.

Finally, Job’s sense of being hunted and imprisoned by God reminds us of our true condition outside of Christ. We are all like driven leaves, pursued by the just requirements of the law. We are all decaying like moth-eaten garments because of sin. The only escape is to flee to God for mercy, not from Him in terror. Job’s suffering forces him to the bedrock questions, and those questions only find their ultimate answer at the foot of the cross, where God’s justice and mercy meet, and where a man can finally stand before God without being terrified.