Commentary - Job 17:6-9

Bird's-eye view

In this section of Job’s lament, we find him pressed down to the very dust of public opinion and physical frailty. Having been battered by the theological certainties of his friends, Job now describes the result of their counsel and God’s apparent abandonment. He has become a public spectacle, a cautionary tale, a man whose name is synonymous with disaster. His suffering is not private; it has made him a proverb, a byword, and an object of contempt. This public shame is matched by his internal and physical decay, his eyes dim with grief and his body wasted to a mere shadow. Yet, in the midst of this utter dereliction, a remarkable pivot occurs. Job, speaking with a prophetic voice he may not fully understand, declares that the reaction to his plight will divide his audience. The upright will be appalled, yes, but more than that, the innocent will be roused to action against the godless. And the climax of this section is one of the great Old Testament declarations of the doctrine of perseverance. Despite every appearance to the contrary, despite the mountain of circumstantial evidence that says "curse God and die," Job affirms that the righteous man will cling to his path, and the one with clean hands will not just endure, but will actually grow stronger through the trial. This is the logic of the gospel hammered out on the anvil of excruciating pain.

This passage is a microcosm of the book's central conflict. It pits the tidy, mechanical theology of the counselors against the messy, agonizing, yet ultimately persevering faith of a true saint. Job is a type of Christ, who was also made a byword of the people and one at whom men spit. And just as with Christ, the suffering of the righteous one becomes the very means by which God's purposes are advanced and His people are strengthened. The affliction is not meaningless; it is a crucible, and what comes out of it is not ash, but refined and stronger faith.

Outline

Context In Job

This passage comes in the middle of Job's third reply to Eliphaz, which is part of the second cycle of speeches. By this point, the lines are clearly drawn. Job's friends are fully committed to their central thesis: great suffering must be the result of great sin. They are woodenly correct about the general principle that God is not mocked and a man reaps what he sows, but they are disastrously wrong in their application of it to Job. They are trying to fit the wild and sovereign work of God into their neat little systematic theology boxes. Job, for his part, is not sinless in his response. He is full of complaint and confusion, and he sometimes veers close to accusing God of injustice. However, underneath his agony, his faith, though battered, remains fixed on God. He knows he is not guilty of the kind of wickedness his friends are accusing him of. This passage is a moment of profound insight, where Job, despite his personal misery, sees the larger spiritual reality at play. His suffering is a test case, a public trial, and the verdict will have implications for all the upright who witness it.

Key Issues

The Ash Heap as a Stage

We must not forget where Job is. He is on an ash heap, scraping his sores with a piece of pottery. His children are dead, his wealth is gone, and his body is a wreck. His wife has told him to give up, and his friends have become his prosecutors. In our therapeutic age, we would counsel him to look inward, to find his own strength, to practice mindfulness. But Job's suffering is not a private affair to be managed. It is a public, cosmic spectacle. God and Satan are watching from the heavenlies, and as this passage makes clear, men are watching on earth. Job understands that his life has become a piece of public theater. He has been made a byword, a proverb. When people want to give an example of a man utterly crushed by God, they will say, "May you not end up like Job." His personal catastrophe has become a public lesson, and the central question of the book is what, exactly, that lesson is. Is it the lesson his friends teach, that sin always brings this kind of ruin? Or is it something far deeper, something that can only be understood through the lens of a Redeemer?

Verse by Verse Commentary

6 “But He has made me a byword of the people, And I am one at whom men spit.

Job rightly attributes his condition to God's sovereign hand. "He has made me..." Job is not a victim of blind fate or bad luck. He knows God is behind this, which is both the source of his torment and the ground of his ultimate hope. And what has God made him? A byword. A proverb. His name is now shorthand for "disaster." He is the man everyone talks about, the story mothers tell their children to warn them. This is a profound humiliation. His reputation, which was once sterling, is now in the gutter. More than just gossip, he is an object of active contempt. Men spit at him, or perhaps more accurately, he is as one in whose face men spit. This is the ultimate sign of disgust and rejection. We cannot read this without seeing the shadow of another righteous sufferer, the Lord Jesus, whose enemies spit in His face during His trial. Job is walking a path that the Savior will one day walk in its fullness.

7 My eye has also grown dim because of grief, And all my members are as a shadow.

The public shame is mirrored by private, physical decay. The constant weeping and sorrow have taken their toll on his eyesight; his vision is literally blurred by grief. This is a common biblical image for overwhelming sorrow. His physical body has wasted away. "All my members are as a shadow." There is no substance left to him. He is a wraith, a ghost of his former self. This is not just poetic hyperbole; it is the description of a man whose life force is draining away under the immense pressure of his affliction. The grief is not just an emotion; it is a physical reality, consuming him from the inside out.

8 The upright will be appalled at this, And the innocent will stir up himself against the godless.

Here is the pivot. Job looks away from his own condition for a moment and considers the effect of his suffering on others. And he sees that it will cause a great sorting. The upright, the truly righteous, will look at his situation and be appalled. They will be astonished, horrified. Why? Because it will not compute with the simple, tidy theology of the wicked. They will see a righteous man suffering and it will shake them. But it will not shake their faith in God; it will shake their faith in the godless. The suffering of the innocent will stir up the righteous against the wicked. They will see Job's plight and realize that the world is not as simple as Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar make it out to be. They will be roused to a holy indignation. Job's suffering, therefore, is not a stumbling block for the true believer, but rather a catalyst. It forces them to a deeper, more robust understanding of God's ways and a firmer opposition to the ways of the wicked.

9 Nevertheless the righteous will hold to his way, And he who has clean hands will grow mightier and mightier.

This is the triumphant conclusion, a glorious non sequitur that flows not from Job's circumstances but from a deep well of faith. Nevertheless. In spite of all the evidence, in spite of the public shame, the physical decay, and the appalling nature of it all, here is the truth that stands firm. The righteous man will hold to his way. This is the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints in a nutshell. True, God-given righteousness is not a fair-weather faith. It is a rugged, tenacious reality that clings to its path even when that path leads through the valley of the shadow of death. And not only will he hold on, but he who has clean hands will grow mightier and mightier. The trial that was meant to destroy him becomes the very instrument of his strengthening. The phrase "clean hands" is key. Job is maintaining his integrity, not claiming sinless perfection, but testifying that he is not the wicked hypocrite his friends accuse him of being. And for such a man, the testing of his faith produces endurance. The spiritual muscle, when exercised under great resistance, does not tear but grows stronger. This is a profound statement of faith, a declaration that God's grace is not just sufficient to preserve, but powerful enough to strengthen His saints through the very fires that threaten to consume them.

Application

We live in a world that, like Job's friends, loves a tidy theology. We want formulas. We want to believe that if we do A, B, and C, then God is obligated to give us X, Y, and Z. This is the essence of the prosperity gospel, which is just the ancient error of Job's counselors dressed up in a cheap suit. The book of Job, and this passage in particular, blows that whole system up.

The lesson for us is threefold. First, we must be prepared for suffering that does not "make sense" from a human point of view. Sometimes the righteous are made a byword. Sometimes godly men and women lose everything. When this happens, we must not rush to judgment, either of them or of God. We must be the kind of "upright" who are appalled in a way that drives us to God, not to easy answers.

Second, we must see our own sufferings in light of the ultimate sufferer, Jesus Christ. He was made the ultimate byword of the people. They spat upon Him. His body was wasted. And His suffering was the most appalling injustice in the history of the world. Yet it was through that suffering that our salvation was accomplished. Because we are united to Him, our sufferings are never pointless. They are part of our sanctification, the means by which He is making us stronger.

Finally, we must grab hold of the glorious promise of verse nine. The righteous will hold to his way. Our perseverance does not depend on our own grit or willpower. It depends on the preserving grace of God, who works in us. The promise is that the one with clean hands, hands washed in the blood of the Lamb, will not just survive, but will grow mightier and mightier. The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until the full day. This is true even when, and especially when, the path leads through the darkest of nights.