The Ache for Yesterday's God Text: Job 29:1-6
Introduction: The Treachery of Memory
We live in an age that has a profoundly diseased relationship with the past. On the one hand, we have the sentimentalists, who treat yesterday like a warm, fuzzy blanket. They long for the "good old days," which, conveniently, have had all their sharp and painful edges sanded down by the passage of time. This kind of nostalgia is a form of idolatry, a refusal to live faithfully in the present God has given you. On the other hand, we have the revolutionaries, who treat the past as a crime scene from which we must escape. For them, all history is a story of oppression, and their mission is to tear down every monument and memory.
Both are wrong, and both are forms of unbelief. The Bible gives us a third way. The Bible commands us to remember. We are to remember the deeds of the Lord, remember His covenant, remember His past deliverances. But this remembrance is not for the sake of escaping the present; it is for the sake of arming us for the present. A godly memory is a full quiver.
This brings us to Job. In this chapter, Job is not simply being nostalgic. He is not whining for his lost comforts. He is doing something far more profound. He is taking up a formal, legal lament. He is recounting the goodness of God in his past, not to escape his present misery, but to sharpen the point of it. He is asking, in essence, "If God was so good to me then, what in the world is happening now?" His memory of God's past faithfulness is the foundation of his present complaint. He is not mourning the loss of his stuff; he is mourning the loss of the felt presence and friendship of the God who gave him the stuff. This is the ache for yesterday's God, and it is a lament that every serious saint will understand.
The Text
And Job continued to lift up his discourse and said,
"Oh that I were as in months gone by, As in the days when God kept me,
When His lamp shone over my head, And by His light I walked through darkness,
As I was in the prime of my days, When the intimate counsel with God was over my tent,
When the Almighty was yet with me, And my children were around me,
When my steps were bathed in butter, And the rock poured out for me streams of oil!"
(Job 29:1-6 LSB)
The Guarded Life (v. 1-2)
We begin with Job continuing his formal discourse.
"And Job continued to lift up his discourse and said, 'Oh that I were as in months gone by, As in the days when God kept me,'" (Job 29:1-2)
Notice the formality. "Job continued to lift up his discourse." This is not a casual sigh. This is a structured, weighty argument. He is making his case before the court of heaven. And his opening appeal is a deep, guttural groan for the past. But what exactly does he miss? He defines it immediately: "the days when God kept me."
The verb here for "kept" is the Hebrew word shamar. It means to guard, to watch over, to protect, to preserve. Job is remembering a time when he lived with a tangible sense of divine protection. He felt secure, not because his walls were high or his servants were many, but because God Himself was his sentinel. This is the foundation of true biblical peace. It is not the absence of threats, but the presence of a guardian who is greater than all threats. Job had this. He lived inside the fortress of God's favor, and he knew it. Now, sitting on an ash heap, scraped raw and abandoned, the memory of that divine protection is an agony.
The Guided Life (v. 3)
From protection, Job moves to guidance. The guard kept enemies out, but the lamp showed him the way forward.
"When His lamp shone over my head, And by His light I walked through darkness," (Job 29:3 LSB)
This is a beautiful and potent image. In the ancient world, darkness was a palpable danger. To have a lamp was to have clarity, safety, and the ability to move forward. Job says God's lamp was not just at his feet, as the Psalmist says, but it "shone over my head." It was a floodlight. It was an encompassing, brilliant clarity. This speaks of wisdom, of knowing the right way to go in business, in family, in civic duties. God's favor gave him supernatural insight.
And notice the result: "by His light I walked through darkness." He does not say that he avoided darkness. A blessed life is not a life free from dark places. A blessed life is a life in which you can walk through the dark places because you have a light that the darkness cannot overcome. Job is remembering a time when problems, challenges, and uncertainties were not terrifying, because God's wisdom made the path plain. Now, the lamp is out. He is in the dark, and he cannot see the path. This is the misery of a man who was used to divine guidance and now finds only divine silence.
The Intimate Life (v. 4-5)
Here, in verses 4 and 5, we come to the absolute heart of Job's loss. It is not the cattle, not the camels, not even the children, as precious as they were. It is this:
"As I was in the prime of my days, When the intimate counsel with God was over my tent, When the Almighty was yet with me, And my children were around me," (Job 29:4-5 LSB)
The "prime of my days" is a rich phrase, suggesting the fruitful season of autumn harvest. This was his peak. And what characterized that peak? "The intimate counsel with God was over my tent." The key word here is "intimate counsel," the Hebrew sod. This word means a secret, a council, a close friendship. It's used for the inner circle of a king. Job is saying that he felt like he was in God's inner circle. He had a friendship with the Almighty. God shared His secrets with him. This is the pinnacle of human existence, to be a friend of God, as Abraham was.
This is what the health-and-wealth charlatans get so disastrously backward. They think the goal is the stuff. They think God's friendship is a means to get the car and the cash. Job teaches us the opposite. The stuff was merely the pleasant shadow cast by the glorious reality, which was the friendship of God. The real treasure was the sod, the intimate counsel.
And this friendship was with "the Almighty," Shaddai, the all-sufficient, all-powerful God. His presence was the center. And from that center, all other blessings flowed, chief among them, "my children were around me." The covenantal blessing of a full table and a full house was the tangible fruit of his intangible friendship with God.
The Overflowing Life (v. 6)
Having established the source of his blessing, the friendship of God, Job now describes the sheer, ludicrous super-abundance of its effects.
"When my steps were bathed in butter, And the rock poured out for me streams of oil!" (Job 29:6 LSB)
This is magnificent oriental hyperbole. He is not giving a literal inventory. He is painting a picture of a world where the categories of nature were seemingly rearranged for his benefit. He had so much milk that he could wash his feet in its richest product, butter. He had so many olives that even the rocks, the most barren and unlikely of places, seemed to gush oil for him. This is a picture of Edenic, creational goodness. It's a picture of a world working the way it was designed to work under the benevolent rule of a righteous man who walked in friendship with God.
This is what God's blessing looks like. It is not stingy. It is not minimalist. Our God is a God of glorious excess. He doesn't just provide; He lavishes. He doesn't just give a cup of water; He makes rocks pour out streams of oil. Job knew this lavishness. And the memory of it makes his present desolation all the more bitter.
Conclusion: The Man of Sorrows
Job's lament is raw, and it is righteous. He is not sinning by remembering the goodness of God. But his story is incomplete, and his questions hang in the air. Where do we find the answer to Job's ache?
We find it in another man, a greater Job, who also lost everything. We find it in Jesus Christ. Jesus lived in perfect, unbroken sod with His Father. He was the beloved Son, in whom the Father was well pleased. He was the lamp of the world. He was guarded by legions of angels.
And yet, for our sakes, He willingly gave it all up. On the cross, the lamp went out. He was plunged into an outer darkness that makes Job's trial look like a flickering candle. On the cross, the Father did not "keep" Him; He forsook Him. On the cross, the intimate counsel was broken by the shriek of dereliction: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The rock did not pour out oil for Him; it stood silent as He died of thirst.
Christ endured the ultimate loss of God's felt presence so that we, who deserve only His wrath, could be brought into the sod of God forever. He became a man of sorrows so that we could inherit an everlasting joy. Job's longing for yesterday is answered by Christ's promise of tomorrow.
Therefore, when we feel the ache of loss, when the lamp seems dim and God seems distant, we do not look back to our own small "good old days." We look back to the cross, where our salvation was secured. And we look forward to the resurrection, where our hope is guaranteed. Because of Christ, our best days are never in the past. They are always, eternally, yet to come, in that place where the friendship of God will be our tent, and the glory of God will be our light forever.