The Divine Surety and the Blinded Heart Text: Job 17:3-5
Introduction: A Courtroom in the Dust
We come now to the heart of Job's anguish, which is not primarily his physical suffering, but his legal standing before God. The book of Job is many things, a profound meditation on suffering, a declaration of God's inscrutable sovereignty, but at its center, it is a covenant lawsuit. Job is on the ash heap, covered in boils, scraping himself with a shard of pottery, but his mind is in a courtroom. He is surrounded by accusers, his so-called friends, who are functioning as a prosecution team with a very simple, and very wrong, theory of the case. Their argument is a rigid, wooden application of covenant theology: God blesses the righteous and curses the wicked; you are cursed, therefore you are wicked. Confess, and all this will go away.
This is the essence of what we might call prosperity theology, and it is as cruel as it is simple-minded. It takes a general truth, that obedience brings blessing, and turns it into an ironclad mathematical formula that leaves no room for the mysterious purposes of a sovereign God. God Himself will later say to Eliphaz, "My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (Job 42:7). Job, in the midst of his confusion and lament, gets God right in a way his friends, with all their tidy theological boxes, get Him profoundly wrong.
Job knows he is not the secret sinner they accuse him of being. He knows their premise is flawed. And so, he appeals his case. But to whom can he appeal? The judge, God, is the very one who has brought this calamity upon him. His friends, who should be his advocates, have turned on him. He is utterly alone, and so he cries out for a legal representative, a surety, a guarantor who can stand between him and the Almighty. In these verses, we see Job, in the depths of his despair, reaching forward through the centuries and grasping for the ankles of Christ. He doesn't know His name, but he knows what he needs. He needs a mediator.
The Text
"Establish, now, a pledge for me with Yourself; Who is there that will clap my hand in pledge? For You have hidden their heart from insight, Therefore You will not exalt them. He who informs against friends for a share of the spoil, The eyes of his children also will come to an end."
(Job 17:3-5 LSB)
The Cry for a Mediator (v. 3)
We begin with Job's desperate legal plea directly to God.
"Establish, now, a pledge for me with Yourself; Who is there that will clap my hand in pledge?" (Job 17:3)
Job is using the language of legal surety. A pledge, or a security deposit, was required in a legal dispute. To "clap my hand in pledge" was the ancient equivalent of co-signing a loan or posting bail. It was an act of a third party guaranteeing the obligation of another. Job looks around and sees no one. His wife told him to curse God and die. His friends are piling on condemnation. He is bankrupt, bereaved, and broken. Who on earth could possibly stand for him?
And so, in a breathtaking paradox, he appeals to God against God. "Establish, now, a pledge for me with Yourself." He is saying, in effect, "O God, the Judge, only You can provide the advocate I need to stand before You. You must provide my defense. You must be my surety." This is a staggering statement of faith, buried in a mountain of grief. Job understands the Creator/creature distinction so profoundly that he knows no mere man can bridge this gap. No angel, no friend, no one but God Himself can satisfy the demands of God.
This is a gospel cry from the Old Testament. Job is longing for an incarnation. He is asking for a divine Mediator who can lay His hand upon them both, as he says earlier (Job 9:33). He is asking for the God-man. The New Testament gives us the resounding answer to Job's question. Who is there to clap my hand in pledge? "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). Jesus is the one who stands as our surety, our guarantor. He is the pledge from God to us, and for us to God. The Father is the judge, but the Son is the advocate who steps into the dock and takes the sentence upon Himself. Job did not have the name, but he had the need, and his faith, even in its raw and wounded form, reached out for the only possible solution: God must save, for no one else can.
Sovereign Blinding (v. 4)
Next, Job explains why he cannot find any help from his human counselors. It is not simply because they are cruel, but because God has sovereignly ordained their foolishness.
"For You have hidden their heart from insight, Therefore You will not exalt them." (Job 17:4)
This is bedrock Reformed theology, straight from the ash heap. Job does not attribute his friends' lack of understanding to a mere intellectual failure on their part. He sees the hand of God in it. "You have hidden their heart from insight." God is the one who grants wisdom, and He is the one who withholds it. This is not comfortable doctrine for our egalitarian age, which wants to believe that every man is the master of his own spiritual perception. But Scripture is plain. God told Isaiah to go and make the heart of the people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes (Isaiah 6:10). Jesus told his disciples that to them it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom, but to others in parables, "that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand" (Luke 8:10).
God is not a passive observer in the spiritual blindness of men. He is an active agent. This is a judicial hardening. Job's friends came to him armed with their proverbs and their systematic theology, but because their hearts were not right, because they approached a suffering brother with accusation instead of mercy, God turned their wisdom into foolishness. He hid insight from them. They thought they were defending God's honor, but they were slandering His character, and God Himself blinded them to the fact.
And because of this, Job is confident of their ultimate end: "Therefore You will not exalt them." God resists the proud. These men, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, were the exalted intellectuals of their day. But because they used their knowledge as a club to beat a righteous man, God would ensure their arguments came to nothing. Their counsel would be shown to be folly, and they themselves would be humbled. This is a permanent principle. When men, particularly learned Christian men, use their theology to crush the afflicted instead of comforting them, God will hide their hearts from insight and ensure that their intellectual projects are not exalted.
The Covenantal Consequences of Betrayal (v. 5)
Job concludes this section with a proverbial statement about the far-reaching consequences of the kind of betrayal he is experiencing.
"He who informs against friends for a share of the spoil, The eyes of his children also will come to an end." (Job 17:5)
Job is accusing his friends of the basest kind of treachery. He sees them as opportunists, turning on a friend in his moment of weakness for some perceived gain. What is the "share of the spoil" they are after? It is the self-righteous satisfaction of being correct. It is the desire to win the theological argument and be seen as the ones who truly understand God's ways. They are sacrificing their friend on the altar of their own intellectual pride. They are informing against him in the heavenly court, hoping to get a share of the "spoil" of divine approval.
But this kind of sin, this covenantal betrayal, does not end with the sinner. Job invokes the principle of multi-generational consequences. "The eyes of his children also will come to an end." This is the language of the second commandment, where God visits the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him (Exodus 20:5). Actions have consequences that ripple through families and through history. A father who betrays his friends for personal gain is teaching his children that treachery is the way to get ahead. He is poisoning the well from which they will drink. The blindness he displays in his own life will be visited upon his children.
This is not some arbitrary punishment. It is the organic outworking of sin. A man whose heart is so dark that he would sell out his friends for a little theological street-cred has nothing of value to pass on to his sons. The light has gone out in his own soul, and so his lineage will be one of darkness. The spiritual insight he forfeited will be forfeited by his children as well. This is a solemn warning. How we treat our brothers, especially our brothers in affliction, is not a small matter. It is a covenantal act with consequences that will long outlive us.
Conclusion: Resting on the Pledge
In these three verses, Job gives us a complete theological framework for navigating suffering and conflict. First, when accused and abandoned, our only recourse is to the Divine Surety. We must appeal to God in Christ, our only pledge and mediator. We cannot stand on our own righteousness, and we cannot trust in human advocates. Our only hope is the advocate that God Himself provides, Jesus Christ the righteous.
Second, we must recognize the sovereignty of God over the hearts and minds of all men. When we are confronted with baffling foolishness and hard-heartedness from those who should know better, we must not despair. We must recognize that God is the one who opens eyes and the one who shuts them. Our job is not to force insight upon the blind, but to entrust the situation to the God who judges justly, confident that He will not exalt the proud.
Finally, we must take with utmost seriousness our covenantal obligations to one another. We are not to be friends of convenience. We are not to inform against our brothers for a share of the spoil, whether that spoil is money, reputation, or the satisfaction of being right. To do so is to invite covenantal curses upon our households. Rather, we are called to be like the ultimate Friend, our pledge, Jesus Christ, who did not condemn us in our weakness but stood in the gap for us, who did not accuse us but absorbed the accusation Himself. He is the one who clapped His hand in pledge for us, and because He did, we can face any accusation, any suffering, and any loss, secure in His finished work.