Job 16:7 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Job 16:7

Comments

Job turns now to God, but it is less a prayer and more a complaint; he is complaining in the presence of God. God has exhausted him and exterminated his family. The gloomiest of thoughts fill his mind. God, he complains, has worn him out through relentless suffering, which did not give him a moment’s ease in soul or body. Continual suffering is exhausting and Job suffered in every part of his being. He was not able to interpret this as anything other than hostility on God’s part towards him, for he could see no possible kindly purpose in any of it. He was exhausted with trying to understand it, and yet he could not give up trying. At this level at least, faith was still at work and was not utterly extinguished.Switching to the second person, he protests that God has destroyed his company, that is, his family and that circle of friends that had previously surrounded and respected him. His condition was so terrible that all were bound to think him under judgement. His wife had turned against him, his children had been killed, his friends regarded him as a hypocrite, and his servants refused to answer him. All these might normally have been a source of consolation to a man who was suffering such things.Job sees in his condition as a sign that God is preparing to removing him from the earth. He is against him and intends to destroy him. The fact that his life is yet spared does not bring any encouragement, for he is simply taking his time to remove Job at the moment that he chooses. The same is true of his leanness. His friends and family see it as a sign that God is in the process of taking his life and as a prelude to death, and it hard for Job to resist the same conclusion. Satan had heaped up circumstances in Job’s life which left him no visible grounds for hope. His only source of consolation now was the promise of God to his soul, the God who cannot lie or change his mind. He must remember the Lord’s work in his heart and the better days and now he must walk by faith.

Application

‘We must note that God intends to give us mirrors through those who have excellent virtues, so that in them we may learn that, just as he distributes the gifts of his Holy Spirit, so also he sends them great afflictions, trying and chastising them to the uttermost to bring forth more fruit. So for example, consider Abraham, who was ruled by God’s Spirit, not as any common person, but as an angel, and was as full of excellence and perfection as could be. And yet, for all that, see how God dealt with him. If we were to endure the tenth part of the conflicts that Abraham sustained and overcame, what a thing it would be! We would quale. But God spares us because he has not given us as excellent gifts as he gave him … God means to set these lively pictures before us so that we know that when God gives great virtues to men he also exercises them so that those virtues should not be idle but should be known in due time … The greatest temptations that the faithful endured were these spiritual battles as we call them: that is, that God summoned them in their consciences so as to feel his wrath by siting them so that they knew not how their case stood … so that Isaiah said, “as a lion, so will he break all my bones: from day even to night wilt thou make an end of me” (Isaiah 38:13) … Let us note that when a poor creature doubts what state he is in with God, and cannot perceive that God will make him feel his goodness, he will be in such distress and fear that it was as if he was between the wolf’s paws’ (Calvin – English updated).

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Job 16:7 Commentary and Bible Study