The Impatience of the Afflicted
Introduction: The Ancient Prosperity Gospel
We live in an age that loves simple formulas for success, and this is especially true in the church. We have our modern hucksters who promise health and wealth if you just have enough faith, which usually means if you just send them enough money. They preach a tidy universe where God is a cosmic vending machine: insert faith, receive blessing. If you are not blessed, if you are sick or poor or suffering, then the problem is a lack of faith. The problem is you.
This is not a new heresy. It is a very old one. In fact, it is the very heresy that Job's three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, had perfected. Their argument was simple, clean, and devastatingly wrong. It was this: God is just. Therefore, the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Job, you are suffering intensely. Therefore, you must be hiding some monumental wickedness. Confess it, and God will restore you.
It sounds pious. It sounds logical. But it is a cruel and satanic logic when applied as a rigid, universal formula to the lives of God's saints. The entire book of Job is a divine refutation of this tidy lie. And in our text today, Job, in his agony, does not attack God's justice. Rather, he attacks his friends' cartoonish, oversimplified version of it. He does what any honest man must do. He looks at the world as it actually is, not as his friends' neat little syllogism says it should be, and he points out the glaring inconsistencies. He is not abandoning faith; he is abandoning a false and brittle framework that cannot account for reality.
Job's complaint is a hard one, but it is an honest one. And God would much rather have His children wrestle with Him honestly in the dark than mouth empty platitudes in a false light. Job is about to take a hammer to the stained glass theology of his friends.
The Text
"How often is the lamp of the wicked put out, Or does their disaster fall on them? Does God apportion destruction in His anger? Are they as straw before the wind, And like chaff which the storm steals away? You say, 'God stores away a man's wickedness for his sons.' Let God repay him so that he may know it. Let his own eyes see his decay, And let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty. For what desire does he have for his household after him, When the number of his months is cut off? Can anyone teach God knowledge, In that He judges those on high?"
(Job 21:17-22 LSB)
An Inconvenient Observation (vv. 17-18)
Job begins with a series of rhetorical questions that are meant to poke holes in the central thesis of his friends.
"How often is the lamp of the wicked put out, Or does their disaster fall on them? Does God apportion destruction in His anger? Are they as straw before the wind, And like chaff which the storm steals away?" (Job 21:17-18)
Job is essentially saying, "Look around you. Open your eyes." His friends have been arguing from abstract principle. Job argues from observable fact. The "lamp of the wicked" is a common biblical metaphor for a person's life, prosperity, and ongoing legacy. The friends' position is that this lamp is snuffed out quickly and reliably. Job's question, "How often?", implies the answer: "Not nearly as often as you claim."
He continues the assault. Are the wicked truly like straw in the wind? Are they like weightless chaff that the storm whisks away? This is what the Psalmist says will be their ultimate end (Psalm 1:4), and Job does not dispute their final destiny. What he disputes is the timing. He is looking at the here and now, and he sees wicked men who are not like chaff, but are like deeply rooted oak trees. He sees them living in solid stone houses, not being blown about by every wind of adversity. He is pointing out that, from our vantage point on the ground, divine justice often appears to be on a significant delay.
This is a profound pastoral point. We must not build our theology on a denial of reality. When we offer suffering saints a flimsy blanket of platitudes that their own experience tells them is false, we are not comforting them. We are lying to them, and we are misrepresenting God. Job insists on a faith that is robust enough to handle the messiness of the real world, where godless men often die old, rich, and in their beds.
A Demand for Personal Justice (vv. 19-21)
Job then anticipates his friends' fallback argument. This is the argument that if a man gets away with his sin, justice will catch up with his children.
"You say, 'God stores away a man's wickedness for his sons.' Let God repay him so that he may know it. Let his own eyes see his decay, And let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty. For what desire does he have for his household after him, When the number of his months is cut off?" (Job 21:19-21)
Job will have none of this. He rejects this concept of deferred, second-hand justice as a moral cop-out. While it is true that sin has generational consequences, the Bible is also clear that "the son shall not bear the guilt of the father" (Ezekiel 18:20). Job's cry here is for true, personal, individual accountability. He says if a man is wicked, let that man pay the price. "Let God repay him so that he may know it."
Justice, to be justice, must be seen and felt by the perpetrator. The punishment must connect with the crime in the mind of the criminal. Job wants the wicked man's own eyes to see his ruin. He wants him to be the one who drinks the cup of God's wrath. This is not simple vindictiveness. It is a profound and holy desire to see God's justice vindicated in a way that is meaningful and undeniable.
His reasoning in verse 21 is sharp and practical. Why would it be a just punishment for a wicked man if his family suffers after he is dead and gone? "What desire does he have for his household after him?" A selfish, godless man who has lived his entire life for his own pleasure is not going to be tormented in the grave by the thought of his great-grandchildren's troubles. The punishment does not land. It is, in effect, a miscarriage of justice. Job demands that God's justice be direct, personal, and keenly felt by the guilty party.
The Sovereignty Check (v. 22)
After this raw, passionate, and entirely logical complaint, Job's argument takes a sudden and crucial turn. He has pushed his case to the absolute limit of human reason, and he finds himself standing at the edge of a cliff, looking into the infinite wisdom of God.
"Can anyone teach God knowledge, In that He judges those on high?" (Job 21:22)
This is the pivot. After demanding that God's justice make sense according to his human standards, Job acknowledges the utter folly of such a demand. Who is he, a man of dust, to instruct the Almighty on the proper administration of cosmic justice? "Can anyone teach God knowledge?" The question answers itself. It is a profound admission of creaturely limitation.
The second clause is staggering. God "judges those on high." This refers to celestial beings, angels, the powers and principalities in the heavenly places. God's portfolio of justice includes realms and beings that we can scarcely imagine. His wisdom operates on a plane so far above ours that for us to critique His methods is like a child with crayons trying to correct the work of a master architect.
This is not Job giving up his case. It is him placing his case, with all its confusing and painful details, into the hands of a Judge whose wisdom is absolute, even when His ways are inscrutable. Job does not get his answers, but he is beginning to get a right perspective on the One he is questioning. He is learning that the problem is not with the Judge's character, but with his own limited line of sight.
The Cross and the Final Judgment
So where does this leave us? Job's questions are not fully answered within the book of Job. They are answered at Calvary and at the final judgment. Job's friends were wrong because they thought all suffering was punitive. The cross shows us the most righteous man in history enduring the greatest suffering in history, and it was not for His own sin, but for ours.
Job's demand for personal justice is also answered. His cry, "Let God repay him so that he may know it," is the very heart of hell. The unrepentant wicked will indeed drink of the wrath of the Almighty, and they will know it, personally and eternally. God's patience in this life is not a sign of His indifference. It is a space He grants for repentance. But the day of reckoning is coming. The books will be balanced. Every injustice that Job saw and that we see will be dealt with perfectly by the only perfect Judge.
And what of Job's cry in verse 19, that God stores up a man's wickedness? In a glorious and terrifying way, God did just that. He took all the wickedness of His people, from all of history, and He stored it up and laid it, not on their sons, but on His only Son. Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath that we deserved, so that we could be offered the cup of His fellowship.
In the end, we are left in the same place as Job. We see rampant injustice. We see the wicked prosper. And we are tempted to think that God is asleep at the wheel. But we must do what Job did. We must state our case honestly before God, and then we must confess that we cannot teach God knowledge. We trust His character when we cannot trace His hand. We look to the cross as the ultimate proof that He is just and the justifier of those who have faith, and we wait with patience for the final day when He will make all things right.