Job 14:5 Commentary and Bible Study

So many things are out of man’s control, even things that are of the utmost importance to him. He cannot determine the length of his life; his days are in the Lord’s hands. God has appointed a day and an hour when each life must end, and there is nothing we can do to lengthen it. That does not mean that we should be careless about the means of preserving our lives – we are not fatalists. Job is not asking to know how long his life will be, but he wants God to take into account his frailty and not hurry him out of the world. He is ready to accept the fact that there are things that God has not and will not reveal to him. Each one of us should trust God to appoint our end, and concentrate on living for God today.But Job uses this true fact about his life as an argument for God showing him leniency. Look away from me, he says, for to have your eye upon me is more than I can bear. He now thinks as he would not have thought before; he regards the eye of God on him as a threat and a harbinger of more suffering. Let God look away and focus his attention elsewhere, then Job will be able to get to the end of his days as the hired worker that he is. His life cannot be compared to a man who works his own land, but rather to one who has been hired to work in another’s plot. He will be dismissed when the work season ends, for when his life is over he will find that he owns nothing and can keep nothing of this life to take with him into the next. All will return to God and life will have been only a temporary employment. He is allowing gloomy thoughts to overwhelm him and failing to fight against them. He is like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress when he was battling with Apollyon: ‘This sore combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was almost quite spent; for you must know, that Christian, by reason of his wounds, must needs grow weaker and weaker.’