Job 26:5 Commentary and Bible Study

Job now begins a sublime discourse in which he considers the majesty of God. The dead are the most remote and inaccessible members of the human race as far as the living are concerned. It is proverbial among men that the dead do not live again, and with the exception of those few whom God has raised from the dead as recorded in Scripture, no one has returned from that realm to give a report to the living. And yet hell is an open book to the Lord. The Hebrew is, ‘The Rephaim tremble ...’, Rephaim being the Hebrew name for the those who inhabit Sheol, meaning the ghosts or the shades; they are the departed spirits of men and women. The word tremble means to whirl, dance or to writhe in pain. It is associated with childbirth. The spirits of the dead are described as writhing because they sense the scrutiny of God even in this terrible place and they know that he is angry with them. It is the lost who are described here. They have never gone out of God’s view even though they are banished from heaven, indeed it is his holy eye upon them that makes their situation so terrible. They are pictured as being under the waters, figuratively a remote place where the living cannot come. Sheol, the place of the dead, is naked before God so that he sees every twist and turn which their thoughts make. Guilt is not removed from the lost and remorse consumes them and the agony of knowing what they are and the sins that they can never be separated from. Destruction, Abaddon, has no covering to him who sees everywhere. The awareness that God knows them and that they can never evade his eye and the reminder of his holy standards and his faithful warnings which they ignored all their days is a torment to them. These are disembodied souls for the resurrection has not taken place but they are described as naked because they experience the true nakedness, the inability to hide from God’s eye. How valuable was that covering which God provided for Adam and Eve which was a token of the covering of Christ’s blood which hides our sins even from his sight. If the lost souls in hell could hide their sins from God’s sight, they would, but they are must endure the burning rays of his gaze for all eternity.