Job 1:9 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Job 1:9

Comments

‘Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side?’ Satan gives this cynical answer. The great battle between himself and the Lord is not being conducted fairly, he claims. God is giving himself an undue advantage. If the gloves come off and he is allowed to exert his full force, the outcome will be different. What is the point in God arguing that Job has real integrity if Satan is never allowed to test it as he knows he can?The devil is entirely self-interested, and he cannot believe that any other creature is any different. To believe that would be to admit inferiority in some way. He cannot bear to think that a puny creature like man has access to powers which are beyond his comprehension, the power to love which has its origin in God himself. Job only serves God because he gains from it: that is his twisted view. All devotion to God is a sham. Christians want to pretend they are worshipping God from genuine love for him, but they are deceiving themselves, unlike Satan who sees things more clearly. Job appears to fear God, but he is a phoney. The new nature of the Christian created at conversion is therefore something beyond Satan’s capacity to understand. He desperately wants all to be like himself. The trial of Job is going to be special case. His suffering will be extreme, and the Lord will allow in his case what he certainly does not allow in every believer’s experience. For this reason the book cannot be seen as a general treatment of the suffering of God’s people. Instead it shows us that in Job’s case, God allowed Satan to do his utmost, and still he could not defeat a true child of God.

Application

Since God’s honour is at stake we can be certain that God will give us sufficient grace for every trial. But didn’t Job fall? Wasn’t Satan proved right when Job started to complain against God? No, for this is the depth of the book in that we follow the heart of the only man who has ever gone through this experience, and we see his words and reactions from the heat of the battle. We learn the depths to which a believer may fall to, and yet he rises again and is restored by the Lord.

Satan’s view of Job is also the view of believers which is held by worldlings, as seen in the arguments of the three friends of Job. Like their father, they cannot believe there is good in another which they do not have; they cannot understand genuine love for God. The realisation that another person is genuinely loved by God, and they are rejected, awakens the murderous instincts of a Cain.

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Job 1:9 Commentary and Bible Study