(REFLECTIONS ON Job 9:1-35; Job 10:1-22)

God is sovereign. This is something that comes up over and over again in Job’s responses. Job acknowledges that God does whatever He desires, He doesn’t have to explain Himself to us, in fact even if we see what He is doing we could never fully understand, make sense of, or know why He does a specific thing at a specific time.

But in that is the reason why there needs to be something or someone to connect God and His creation. We need to learn to trust our Creator. If not, then we will try to fill in the blanks with our own understanding, experience, tradition, logic, our own words and ways. We may also end up despising, rejecting, and being offended by God if we can’t build a relationship of trust with Him.

Trusting in God is not only about trusting Him to take care of us, but also trusting in His ways above our ways, His understanding above our understanding. But how do we trust Him, if we cannot know Him?

Job says,

33 “There is no umpire between us,
Who may lay his hand upon us both.
34 “Let Him remove His rod from me,
And let not dread of Him terrify me.
35 “Then I would speak and not fear Him;
But I am not like that in myself.

There is nothing between Job and God and that leads him to a great sense of despair. All he can do is wish for it all to end, the pain, the suffering, the unknowing. All he can do is plead with a God that he can’t see, touch, hear, or find.

Job pleads saying,

8 ‘Your hands fashioned and made me altogether,
And would You destroy me?
9 ‘Remember now, that You have made me as clay;
And would You turn me into dust again?

18 ‘Why the have You brought me out of the womb?
Would that I had died and no eye had seen me!
19 ‘I should have been as though I had not been,
Carried from womb to tomb.’

Who hears Job’s pleas? All there is, is Job’s words spoken out into open air. Where would his words land? Did he know? Yet, he is there suffering, without answers, and can only acknowledge the sovereignty of God. Job, in many ways, brings us into a place of complete darkness. It is place where we cannot see what God is doing, cannot understand His purposes, and cannot find the answers to our suffering.

However, for us there is a hope, and that is why no matter how dark our lives are, there is a light that can help us, and that light is Jesus Christ. In 1 John 2:1-2, we read,

1 My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; 2 and He Himself is the propitiation for our sins; and not for our only, but also for those of the whole world.

Jesus Christ stands in the gap, is our Advocate or Intercessor, and is the propitiation or the sacrifice for our sins, not only ours, but all the world that bows the knee and confesses Him as Lord.

But Jesus Christ is long gone from the world. What of us now that don’t have Jesus physically standing next to us? We are not alone. As Jesus said in John 14:16-18,

16 “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever;
17 that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.
18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
19 “After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also.
20 “In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you.

Through Jesus Christ, to the Father, by the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 2:18).

We may not understand God’s ways, and we may not receive the answers we seek. But through Jesus Christ, we have an Advocate before the Father, and through the Holy Spirit, we are not left as orphans. And that is what we should put our trust in.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen!

Pastor Michael Lu
Enduring Word Bible Commentary: Job 9
Enduring Word Bible Commentary: Job 10