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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Job 17:13
Comments
Job now asks a rhetorical question based on the only possibilities that appear to be open to him. He does so to emphasise the hopeless of his situation. The only refuge that stands before him is the grave itself. How can he find any rest or relief there? Job deeply longs for a place, a home, an eternal refuge for he speaks here of the afterlife. He is not thinking of the few years he has left on earth, but of where he will go when life is over. He feels that need which is common to all mortal human beings for security, for safety and consolation, but all that he can see coming is the grave. How can death be a home to him, or darkness be a bed for him to lie down on? Can a man rest in darkness when his being is designed by God to need light? These words are full of bleakness. Can anyone bring themselves to regard corruption as a father, one who will look after them, teach them, guide them, provide for them? Can a man look on the worm, which consumes the body and destroys even the fragile remains that are buried in the earth, as if it was a tender mother who succours and speaks words of comfort, or as a sister who has family love in her heart? These impossibilities only underline the awfulness of Job’s situation in his view, for he has lost sight again of the hope that momentarily passed before his eyes in 17:9. Though he saw that there is light for some, he was unable to take hold of that light for himself.
Application
‘We must take all the miseries of this present life, especially those that are in common to all God’s children, as an open declaration that God reserves much better things for us, and this must confirm us in the hope of the heavenly life as Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 1:3-7. For in rehearsing that they suffered many things, and had been vexed by the wicked, it is, he says, an evident token of God’s just judgment, for it is a reasonable thing and agreeable to his nature to give you relief when you have been oppressed, and therefore you need to assure yourselves that since you have not had your rest on earth, God prepares it for you in heaven’ (Calvin – English updated).
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