Job 23:17 Commentary and Bible Study

The verse is translated with various senses. Some understand Job to protest because he was spared long enough to live to see the troubles that he now saw – ‘because I was not annihilated, exterminated before the darkness’ – that is before in time. He was grieved because he was not cut off before these troubles came so heavily upon him. Others translate, ‘Yet I am not silenced because of the darkness’ and so have Job claim that he has coped even with this extremity. This translation is not in keeping with what Job has said just before, and the words quite legitimately support the former meaning.He regrets that he had lived long enough to see such troubles. It would have been easier for him, he believes, if he had been spared all this. Matthew Henry comments, ‘And yet, if, in the height of his prosperity, he had received a summons to the grave, he would have thought it hard.’ It is always easier to face trouble at some other time and not at the present time. He says that such an attitude may have helped Job face death whenever it came, but that when trouble comes it is folly to wish we had not lived to see it. If we are the children of God then all things work for our good, even great troubles such as Job faced. The word of God is wiser than all the wisdom of man and the word of God says that the believer is advantaged by all things, even those things that seem to work against him. The only consolation we have to give ourselves or anyone else is what comes from Scripture, and a man may dare apply its remedies even to a disease that he has not yet experienced himself.‘The devil uses two extremities with us. The first is our carelessness, so that if God does not draw us to him by some violent means, we fall asleep in our sins. If the devil can succeed in that way, he is well content. But if God awakens us out of our carelessness, then the devil attempts to drive us to despair’ (Calvin- in modern English).