Job 16:12 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Job 16:12

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Job was at ease before his troubles started and then he had no reason to doubt God’s favour towards him for all his circumstances were pleasant. All that has now changed and he finds it impossible to believe that God could still love him and allow so many hardships to oppress him. God has shattered him as one army shatters another with such force that nothing is left of the formation of the other. Their ranks are broken and split apart. God has also taken him by the neck as an animal would seize its prey and shake it until there was no life left in it. Job felt the life ebbing out of him and knew that he could not endure much more of this. He knew that God was vastly stronger than him, and that if he chose to destroy him there was little he could do about it. ‘And set me up for his mark…’ It seems to him that God has deliberately set out to harm him and cause him pain. He has had Job in his sights and he is aiming precisely at him. God also acts as a marksman against him or leader of a band of marksmen who set him up as their target and employs their skill to aim arrows into his most vulnerable parts. They attack him in a coordinated fashion, surrounding him so that there is no possibility of escape. He knew that he could not get out of the trap that he was in. The word ‘reins’ translates the Hebrew for kidneys, which may stand for the deep emotions within, or to the receipt of a fatal wound. He uses this image to speak of the battering he has received from the Lord, both physical and especially in his soul and spirit. Inside he is unable to find relief, because every hope to which he would turn has been blocked. Like vital inner organs, his hopes and inner refuges of faith have been pierced by the Lord, as he imagines, so that he can scarcely hold on to God at all, and the God he tries to hold onto has become, in his mind, a being whom he does not understand anymore, one who only causes terror. God pours out his gall, that is, his bile, the product of his gall bladder, on the ground. This means that God has penetrated his innermost organs and taken their contents and poured it out on the ground as if it was worthless. Trials certainly expose what is deep within us and so help us to know ourselves as we would not otherwise do. God comes at him time after time, giving him no opportunity to recover. He runs at him like a warrior determined to give no opportunity to regather strength, but through closely repeated attacks to break him down. This is the way that Job sees the continuous sufferings which he faces, in the form of sleepless nights filled with pain, grief through loss of his children, insecurity through loss of all his property, unremitting attacks on his faith designed to take away any comfort he might have from God, and the prospect of death as the only end to his sufferings. If, however, it had really been God’s intention to destroy Job it would not have cost him any prolonged effort; he could have been done in a moment. Job ought to have considered that, while his life was allowed to persist, there was still hope and still opportunity to humble himself before God. It is never too late to pray, never too late to ask God for mercy, for God can raise us up again when our circumstances seem so desperate that they are beyond all other help.

Application

‘God did not send him one kind of adversity alone, but as it were dug a pit down to hell to cast him deeper into it. He loaded Job with such a weight as no creature could bear, if he did not have greater strength than is in man. And truly, it was a marvel that he had such constancy, in spite of the infirmities that we see in him. For when God strengthens his own, it is not by making them utterly insensible, nor by taking their feebleness completely away, but it is necessary for them to acknowledge themselves to be frail creatures. And yet in the meantime God relives their infirmities and sets them up again when they are cast down’ (Calvin – English updated).

We too find ourselves trapped by our situation and it seems as if it is especially designed to make escape impossible. How the wicked ought to fear a God who can hedge them in in such a comprehensive way, so that every event only pins them down in the position in which he wishes to hold them! Their relative powerlessness ought to make them tremble at the thought of what he will do to them.

But Job, as the reader knows, was incorrect in all these gloomy considerations. It was Satan who had urged the Lord to treat his servant in this way; it had not been the Lord who initiated this. Satan’s intention was certainly to bring Job down and destroy his faith, and prove him a hypocrite in serving God. But here was a contest in play which was of the utmost importance, and Satan himself could not see the outcome, or the hidden purpose of God in allowing this. Little wonder then that Job did not understand what was happening. The end would become clear as the Lord’s purposes unfolded, and Job would learn that God’s love is unchanging and must not be measured by temporary circumstance, even when they are extreme. God bring good out of evil which we are incapable of imagining.

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Job 16:12 Commentary and Bible Study