Commentary - Job 21:23-26

Bird's-eye view

In this pointed section of his discourse, Job lands a heavy blow against the tidy, predictable, and ultimately false theology of his friends. He presents two contrasting portraits: one man who dies fat and happy, full of vigor to his last breath, and another who dies in misery, never having tasted any of life's goodness. Job's devastating conclusion is that despite their polar opposite lives, their end is precisely the same. They lie down together in the dust, and the worms make a feast of them both. This is Job's raw, empirical observation from life "under the sun," and it serves as a frontal assault on the idea that you can neatly calculate God's favor or displeasure by looking at a man's earthly circumstances. Death, in its grim democracy, is the great leveler of all human fortunes.

This is not the complaint of an atheist, but rather the honest cry of a man of faith grappling with a world that does not operate according to a simple formula of blessing and cursing. Job is forcing his friends, and us, to confront the fact that God's providence is far more mysterious and complex than we would like. The ultimate end of the prosperous man and the bitter man is identical in the grave, which drives us to the necessary conclusion that the ultimate meaning of their lives cannot be found there, but must be found somewhere else entirely.

Outline

Context In Job

This passage comes in Job's third cycle of speeches, his reply to Zophar in chapter 21. By this point, the battle lines are clearly drawn. The friends, with increasing harshness, have insisted that suffering is the direct result of sin. Since Job is suffering spectacularly, he must be a spectacular sinner. Job, knowing his own integrity, has been forced to question their foundational premise. In this chapter, he moves from defending himself to launching a full-scale offensive against their worldview. He does this by pointing to the undeniable reality that the wicked often prosper. They live long lives, have strong families, and die peacefully (Job 21:7-13). Our text, verses 23-26, is the capstone of this particular argument. Job universalizes the point: it is not just that the wicked prosper, but that there appears to be no discernible pattern at all in how men die. A man can live well and die easy, or live hard and die bitter, but the grave receives them both without distinction. This observation demolishes the friends' system and forces the question of God's justice onto a much higher and more mysterious plane.

Key Issues

The Great Leveler

One of the central errors of Job's friends, and a perennial error in the church, is the attempt to domesticate God. They had Him figured out. They had a system, a theological spreadsheet, where they could plug in a man's circumstances and get a neat readout of his spiritual condition. Righteousness in, prosperity out. Sin in, suffering out. It was clean, predictable, and put them in the comfortable position of being able to judge others from a distance.

Job takes a sledgehammer to this entire apparatus. His argument in these verses is brutal in its simplicity. He is not arguing that God is unjust. He is arguing that God's justice is not on display in the simplistic way his friends imagine. He points to the two great mysteries that defy all our formulas: the mystery of providence in life, and the mystery of finality in death. Some men get a life of ease, others a life of bitterness. But the worms, Job observes, are no respecters of persons. The dust of the grave is the most democratic institution on earth. This observation is meant to silence the glib pronouncements of the comfortable. If we all end up in the same place, then perhaps we should be a bit more circumspect in judging how we all got there.

Verse by Verse Commentary

23 One dies in his full strength, Being wholly carefree and at ease;

Job begins with his first exhibit, a man who would be the envy of the world. He dies in his full strength. There is no long, lingering illness, no slow decay. He is robust and vital one day, and gone the next. The Hebrew speaks of dying "in the bone of his perfection," a picture of complete, untroubled integrity of body. He is not just physically healthy; his soul is at rest. He is "wholly carefree and at ease." He has no anxieties, no pressing worries. By all external measures, this is the man who has "made it." He is the poster child for the theology of Job's friends, the very picture of a man blessed by God.

24 His sides are filled out with fat, And the marrow of his bones is moist,

The description of this blessed man continues with earthy, visceral details. The older translations which speak of his pails being full of milk miss the point of the parallelism. The Hebrew word here likely refers to his flanks or entrails, which are "filled out with fat." This was a sign of extreme prosperity and health in the ancient world, not a cause for a new diet. His very bones are healthy, the marrow within them "moist." This is a man who is flourishing from the inside out. He is the picture of vitality. He lacks nothing. He dies at the very peak of his well-being, a life without a tragic third act.

25 But another dies with a bitter soul, Never even eats anything good.

Now comes the stark contrast, exhibit B. Here is a man whose entire existence has been the polar opposite of the first. He dies not in carefree ease, but with a bitter soul. His life has been a long series of disappointments, griefs, and hardships. The bitterness has seeped into his very being. While the first man feasted, this man "never even eats anything good." He has known nothing of the sweetness of life, only its sorrows. He has lived a life of want, of pain, of affliction. He dies as he lived, in misery.

26 Together they lie down in the dust, And worms cover them.

This is the punchline, and it lands with the force of a coffin lid slamming shut. Together. This is the key word. The man of ease and the man of bitterness, the fat man and the starving man, the carefree and the care-worn, all share the same bed. They lie down side-by-side in the dust. And what is their final blanket? The worms. The worms do not distinguish between the marrow-filled bones and the brittle ones. The dust does not care if the life it is reclaiming was happy or sad. This is the brute fact of existence in a fallen world. From the standpoint of the grave, all the vast differences in human experience are flattened into nothing. All the world's striving, all its joys and sorrows, are silenced and brought to the same ignominious end.

Application

Job's observation here is a necessary dose of realism for all Christians. We are constantly tempted to adopt the theology of the friends. We want to believe that if we just follow the right formula, our lives will be smooth, prosperous, and easy. We want a God who can be managed. But Job reminds us that this is not the world we live in. God's ways are not our ways. He is sovereign over the easy life and the bitter life, and He owes us no explanation for which lot He assigns.

The second application is that we must therefore refuse to judge a person's standing with God based on their outward circumstances. The man languishing in a hospital bed may be far dearer to God than the tycoon closing a deal on his yacht. The single mother struggling to make ends meet may be laying up far more treasure in heaven than the televangelist with a private jet. God's economy is not Wall Street's economy.

But the final and most important application is found in the gospel. Job's observation, if left here, leads only to the bleak despair of Ecclesiastes: all is vanity. If the dust is the end, then nothing matters. But we know the story does not end in the dust. There was one Man who lived a life of sorrow and was acquainted with grief, who died with what seemed to be a bitter soul, crying out that His God had forsaken Him. He lay down in the dust, and a stone was rolled over His tomb. But the worms did not cover Him. The dust could not hold Him. Jesus Christ broke the terrible logic of verse 26. Because He rose from the dust, He gives ultimate meaning to both the easy life and the bitter one. For the believer, prosperity is a tool for generosity and a reason for gratitude, not a sign of our righteousness. And for the believer, suffering is a tool for sanctification and a participation in Christ's afflictions, not a sign of God's displeasure. Because of the resurrection, we know that our final end is not to be covered by worms, but to be clothed in glory.