An Advocate on High Text: Job 16:18-22
Introduction: The Courtroom of Suffering
The book of Job is not comfortable reading. It is not meant to be. It is a rugged, mountainous book, full of sharp peaks and dark valleys. It confronts us with the raw reality of righteous suffering, and it refuses to give us easy, sentimental answers. We live in a therapeutic age that wants God to be a celestial guidance counselor, someone who soothes our feelings and validates our experiences. But the God of Job is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, who speaks out of the whirlwind and does not submit His management of the cosmos for our peer review.
Job is a man stripped of everything but his own integrity, and even that is being called into question by his well-meaning, but utterly misguided, friends. They are operating on a very tidy, but ultimately false, theological system: that all suffering is the direct and immediate result of personal sin. They are theological mechanics, trying to fix Job by banging on his soul with the hammer of their syllogisms. But Job's situation is not that simple. He is caught in a cosmic drama he cannot see, a heavenly contest between God and the Accuser. And so, on his ash heap, surrounded by these miserable comforters, Job does what any man in his position would do. He cries out. He laments. He argues his case.
This passage before us is a profound turn in Job's lament. He has been addressing his so-called friends, calling them troublesome comforters. He has been describing how God has, from his perspective, torn him apart like an adversary. But here, in the depths of his agony, something remarkable happens. Despairing of any justice or understanding on earth, Job appeals to heaven. He looks past the earthly court, where his friends are the prosecutors and his circumstances are the evidence against him, and he appeals to a higher court. He knows, somehow, that he has a witness in heaven. This is a staggering confession of faith, a seed of the gospel planted in the fertile ground of immense suffering.
We must understand that Job's cry is not the whining of a man who has lost his faith. It is the wrestling of a man who refuses to let go of God, even when it feels like God has let go of him. He will not accept the neat and tidy lies of his friends, and he will not accept the apparent verdict of his circumstances. He insists on dealing with God directly. And in this raw, honest, and desperate appeal, we find a profound picture of what it means to have faith in the teeth of the storm, and a foreshadowing of the one true Advocate we have with the Father.
The Text
"O earth, do not cover my blood, And let there be no resting place for my cry. Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And my advocate is on high. My friends are my scoffers; My eye weeps to God. O that a man might argue with God As a man with his neighbor! For when a few years are past, I shall go the way of no return."
(Job 16:18-22 LSB)
An Uncovered Crime (v. 18)
Job begins with a desperate plea to the created order itself:
"O earth, do not cover my blood, And let there be no resting place for my cry." (Job 16:18)
This is the language of an innocent man who has been unjustly slain. He is invoking the principle we see in the story of Cain and Abel, where God says, "The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground" (Genesis 4:10). Blood shed unjustly cries out for vindication. Job sees himself as a murder victim. He feels that God has struck him down without cause, and his one fear is that the crime will be forgotten, that the evidence will be covered up. He wants his blood to remain exposed, a perpetual testimony to the injustice he has suffered. He wants his cry, his lament, to be a restless ghost, haunting the world until justice is done.
This is not a rejection of God's sovereignty. It is an appeal to God's justice against what Job perceives to be God's actions. He is, in a sense, appealing from God to God. He is saying, "Let the evidence of what has happened to me stand, so that the righteous Judge of all the earth will see it and act." He refuses to let his story be silenced or explained away by the tidy platitudes of his friends. He wants the raw, bloody facts to remain in the open. This is a man who believes in a final accounting. He is not a nihilist who thinks his suffering is meaningless. He believes it means something, and he cries out for that meaning to be brought into the light.
The Heavenly Witness (v. 19-20)
From his appeal to the earth, Job lifts his eyes higher. This is the pivot point of the whole passage.
"Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And my advocate is on high. My friends are my scoffers; My eye weeps to God." (Job 16:19-20 LSB)
This is an astonishing statement. On earth, Job has no one on his side. "My friends are my scoffers." The very men who should be his advocates have become his accusers. They mock his claims of integrity. They interpret his tears not as grief, but as evidence of guilt. So where can he turn? He turns upward. "Even now," in the midst of the pain, the confusion, and the false accusations, Job declares that he has a witness in the very place where God dwells. There is someone in heaven who knows the truth.
Who is this witness? Who is this advocate on high? Job does not know his name. He has no developed Christology. And yet, by faith, he is grasping for the Son. This is a profound, Spirit-inspired intuition of the gospel. Job understands that his case is not hopeless because there is someone in the heavenly court who will testify on his behalf. This advocate is not a neutral observer; He is on Job's side. While his earthly friends scoff, his heavenly friend knows his heart.
This is precisely the role that the New Testament assigns to Jesus Christ. "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). And again, "My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 2:1). Job, in the depths of his Old Testament darkness, saw a glimmer of the light that we now see in full. He knew he needed a mediator, an advocate, someone who stood in heaven and could plead his case. His tears are not just tears of sorrow; they are a prayer, an appeal directed to God, banking on the hope that his Advocate is listening.
A Neighborly Argument (v. 21)
Job's desire for an advocate leads to his ultimate desire: direct, honest engagement with God.
"O that a man might argue with God As a man with his neighbor!" (Job 16:21 LSB)
This sounds audacious, even blasphemous, to our modern, pious ears. But we must understand what Job is asking for. He is not seeking to stand over God in judgment. He is longing for the kind of relationship where he can plead his case honestly and openly, face to face. The word "neighbor" here is key. A neighbor is an equal, a peer. Job is not claiming to be God's equal in power or glory. He is longing for a legal standing, for the right to be heard, for the kind of relationship that is not characterized by sheer terror and overwhelming power, but by a covenantal bond that allows for real dialogue.
He wants to hash it out. He wants to lay his case out on the table and have God lay His case out, as one man does with another. This is a cry for relational intimacy, not a cry of rebellion. Job wants to be treated like a covenant partner, not a bug to be squashed. He is essentially saying, "If only there were someone, a go-between, who could make this possible!"
And again, this is exactly what the incarnation accomplishes. In Jesus Christ, God becomes a man. He becomes our neighbor. He walks with us, talks with us, and in Him, we are given the right to approach the throne of grace with confidence (Hebrews 4:16). God condescended to become our neighbor so that we might have this very argument, this very dialogue, and have it resolved once and for all at the cross. Job longed for an arbitrator, a "daysman" as he calls it earlier, who could lay his hand on them both. That daysman is Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, our true neighbor.
The Final Journey (v. 22)
The passage concludes with a note of finality and urgency.
"For when a few years are past, I shall go the way of no return." (Job 16:22 LSB)
Job is acutely aware of his own mortality. He knows he does not have forever to get this sorted out. He is on a path that leads to Sheol, the grave, the land of no return. This is not the confident hope of resurrection we see later in chapter 19, but rather the grim reality of his current situation. His life is draining away. This adds urgency to his cry. He needs vindication now. He needs his advocate now. He needs this neighborly conversation with God before it is too late.
This sense of mortality is what drives us to Christ. We too are on a way of no return. We have but a few years, and then we will stand before the Judge. Without an advocate, our case is hopeless. Our blood, shed not unjustly but justly for our own sins, cries out against us. Our friends, our good works, our religious efforts, all become scoffers in the courtroom of God, unable to speak a word in our defense. Our only hope is the one Job longed for: the Witness in heaven, the Advocate on high.
Conclusion: The Verdict is In
Job's cry from the ash heap is ultimately answered, not in the whirlwind, but on the cross. The justice Job demanded was meted out, but not on him. It was poured out on his heavenly Advocate.
The earth did not cover the blood of Christ. His blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel, crying not for vengeance, but for mercy and pardon. His cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" was not left without a resting place. It was heard, and it was answered three days later in an empty tomb.
Because of Jesus, we have what Job could only long for. We have a Witness in heaven who testifies to our righteousness, a righteousness not our own, but His. We have an Advocate on high who pleads our case, presenting His own perfect life and substitutionary death as the grounds for our acquittal. And we have a God who has become our neighbor. Through Christ, we can come to God not as cowering slaves, but as beloved sons, able to argue, to plead, to weep, and to know that we are heard.
Job's friends thought the verdict on Job was obvious; just look at his suffering. The world does the same to the church today. They see our struggles, our hardships, our afflictions, and they scoff. They conclude that God must be against us. But we know better. We know that even now, our Witness is in heaven. Our Advocate is on high. And because He stands for us, we can endure the scoffers. We can weep to God in our pain, knowing that our case has already been heard, and the verdict is in. In Christ, we are declared righteous. And that is a verdict that no amount of earthly suffering can ever overturn.