The Righteousness That Rots: Job 29:18-20
Introduction: The Blueprint of a Blessed Life
The book of Job is a divine assault on all our tidy, manageable, and ultimately idolatrous systems of explaining God. We want a God who fits into our flow charts. We want a cosmic vending machine: insert righteousness, receive blessing. Insert sin, receive calamity. Job's friends were the high priests of this transactional religion, and their creed was simple: God is just, you are suffering, therefore you must have sinned. It is a clean, logical, damnable lie. It is woodenly right and spiritually dead wrong.
But we would be gravely mistaken to think that Job's friends were the only ones in the story who had a faulty blueprint. Before the whirlwind, before God showed up to dismantle his servant's arguments, Job himself was operating with a similar, though far more respectable, set of assumptions. In chapter 29, Job is not sinning in the same way his friends are. He is not accusing God falsely. Rather, he is looking back on his former glory, and in doing so, he reveals the foundation upon which he had built his house. And we see that this foundation, while appearing to be solid rock, had a fatal vein of sand running through it.
Job is describing the Deuteronomic principle in full flower. God promises in His law that obedience brings blessing in the land. Righteousness, wisdom, and integrity lead to flourishing, honor, and stability. And this is true. God is not mocked; a man reaps what he sows. The problem is not the principle itself, but rather our relationship to it. When does a godly confidence in God's covenant promises curdle into a self-referential confidence in our own performance? When does the blessing become the basis of our security, rather than the God who blesses? Job, in his lament, shows us his heart. He shows us the good life as he understood it, and in doing so, he reveals a theology that was about to be gloriously wrecked by the living God.
This passage is a perfect photograph of the righteous man's dream. It is a picture of stability, fruitfulness, and perpetual strength. But it is a picture taken from the wrong angle. It is a man describing the goodness of his own nest, forgetting that the only true security is found not in the nest, but in the shadow of the Almighty's wings.
The Text
Then I said, ‘I will breathe my last in my nest,
And I shall multiply my days as the sand.
My root is spread out to the waters,
And dew lies all night on my branch.
My glory is ever new with me,
And my bow is renewed in my hand.’
(Job 29:18-20 LSB)
The Security of the Nest (v. 18)
Job begins his reflection on his former confidence with a picture of domestic tranquility and permanence.
"Then I said, ‘I will breathe my last in my nest, And I shall multiply my days as the sand.’" (Job 29:18)
Notice the first three words: "Then I said." This is Job quoting himself. This is his inner monologue from the good old days. And what was he saying to himself? He was preaching a sermon of security to his own soul. "I will die in my nest." A nest is a place of safety, of home, of children, of established comfort. It is a good thing. God gives us nests. But Job's confidence was in the nest itself. He saw his prosperity, his family, his righteousness, and he concluded that this structure he had built was invincible. He believed he would die there, peacefully, after a long and predictable life.
This is the subtle pride of the righteous man. The ungodly man says, "My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth" (Deut. 8:17). The righteous man, operating under a faulty covenantalism, says, "My faithfulness and the integrity of my hand have secured me this blessing." The focus in both cases has shifted from the Giver to the gift, or worse, to the recipient of the gift. Job looked at his life, which was indeed a model of godliness, and he extrapolated a straight line into the future. "I shall multiply my days as the sand." He assumed that the past and present blessings were a guarantee of future blessings. He had mistaken the fruit of God's favor for the root of his security.
This is a profound temptation for all believers who take obedience seriously. We build our Christian homes, we catechize our children, we are faithful in our callings, and we see God's blessing. And right there, the tempter whispers, "You've done well. This is a strong nest. Nothing can touch you here." We begin to trust the patterns of blessing instead of the God of blessing. But God is a jealous God. He will not allow His gifts to become our idols, and He will gladly burn down our comfortable nests to save our souls. He will introduce chaos into our formulas to remind us that He is God and we are not.
The Source of Fruitfulness (v. 19)
Job continues with two powerful metaphors for vitality and sustenance, drawn from the world of agriculture.
"My root is spread out to the waters, And dew lies all night on my branch." (Job 29:19 LSB)
This is the language of Psalm 1. The blessed man is "like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither." Job saw himself as this tree. His roots, he says, were spread out to the waters. He was tapped into the source of life. His branch was refreshed nightly by the dew. He was consistently, constantly sustained. And he was not wrong about the facts. He was a fruitful and flourishing man because he was, in fact, rooted in the wisdom of God.
So where is the trouble? The trouble is in the possessive pronoun. "My root... my branch." In his recollection, the focus is on the state of his own soul, his own stability. He is describing his spiritual condition as though it were an inherent quality, a possession. He understood that he needed water and dew, but he had come to see his access to them as a settled fact, an achievement. His perspective was that of a man looking at his own spiritual portfolio and admiring its robust performance.
He saw the connection between righteousness and life, but he had begun to think of that connection as automatic, something he managed. "Because my root is so well-placed, my branch will always be green." It is a subtle shift from "God graciously waters me" to "I am a well-watered tree." The first is a statement of dependence. The second is a statement of status. God was about to show Job that He controls the water. He can divert the streams and withhold the dew. He does this not to punish righteousness, but to purify it, to strip it of its self-reliance and ground it entirely in His sovereign grace.
The Fountain of Glory (v. 20)
Finally, Job describes his sense of perpetual honor and strength.
"My glory is ever new with me, And my bow is renewed in my hand." (Job 29:20 LSB)
Here the trouble comes into sharp focus. "My glory is ever new with me." Whose glory? Job had been given great honor by God and men. He was a man of immense stature and respect. But glory belongs to God alone. When a man begins to speak of "my glory," even if that glory was a gift from God, he is on dangerous ground. The word "new" or "fresh" implies that his honor was not a fading thing; it was constantly replenished. He woke up each morning with a fresh batch of glory. But he saw it as being "with me," as though it were a companion or a possession.
And then, "my bow is renewed in my hand." The bow is an instrument of strength, of power, of dominion. A renewed bow is one that never loses its tension, its potency. Job is saying that his strength was inexhaustible. His ability to act, to defend, to provide, to rule, was always fresh. He was not describing a gift that he received daily from God's hand, but a quality that resided in his own hand. He had come to believe in his own perpetual motion machine of righteousness and strength.
This is the pinnacle of the righteous man's folly. It is the belief that our sanctification is a self-sustaining reaction. It is the delusion that our strength is our own. God had given Job glory. God had given Job strength. And Job, like all of us are prone to do, had begun to admire the gift and forget the Giver. He had started to think the bow was renewing itself. God, in His severe mercy, was about to snap that bow over His knee, to strip Job of all his glory, to prove to him and to us that there is only one whose glory is ever new, and only one whose strength is self-existent. God was teaching Job the Creator/creature distinction in the most painful and personal way imaginable.
The Gospel for the Self-Sufficient
So what is the answer to this subtle, respectable, and deadly self-reliance? If Job's righteousness was the very thing that contained the seed of his pride, what hope do we have? The hope is found by looking away from our nest, our root, and our bow, and looking to the one they were always meant to point to.
We too desire a secure nest, a place where we can die in peace. But the gospel tells us that our nest in this world must be destroyed. We must die, not in a comfortable bed surrounded by our earthly accomplishments, but we must die with Christ. We are crucified with Him. Our old man, with his resume of righteousness and his portfolio of spiritual successes, is nailed to the tree. Our only security is in being buried with Him, so that we might be raised to walk in newness of life. The only safe nest is to be hidden in the wounds of Christ.
We desire to be a fruitful tree, with roots deep in the water of life. Jesus Christ is that water. He is the true vine, and we are the branches. Our fruitfulness is not an inherent quality; it is the result of our abiding in Him. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. Our root is not "our root," it is Christ. The dew on our branch is not a sign of our spiritual health, but a sign of His daily, unmerited grace, the grace of His Spirit. Our life is not in ourselves, but "Christ lives in me."
And we desire glory and strength. Job said "my glory" and "my bow." But the Christian says, "Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord." All our glory is found in the face of Jesus Christ. It is a reflected glory, not our own. And our bow, our strength? It is not renewed in our hand; it is perfected in our weakness. The gospel call is a call to lay down our own strength, to admit that our bow is broken and useless, and to take up the cross. The power of God is demonstrated not in our perpetual renewal, but in the resurrection of the crucified one. Christ's strength is not a renewable resource we possess; it is a person we cling to.
Job thought his righteousness was the engine of his blessing. The gospel shows us that the righteousness of Christ is the entirety of our blessing. Job had to be stripped of everything so that he could learn to say, not "my glory," but "I know that my Redeemer lives." He had to lose his nest so he could find his Redeemer. God's purpose was not to punish Job's righteousness, but to replace it with a better one, a righteousness that comes from God by faith. And that is the same severe mercy He shows to us, whenever He lovingly disrupts our plans, scatters our security, and breaks our bow, so that we might find our all in Him.