Job 35:14 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Job 35:14

Comments

The thought is that Job must exercise faith in a situation in which he can sense nothing. Don’t give up – God knows how he will bless you already. Elihu is here encouraging Job even though he is in darkness spiritually. Job must not think that, because he cannot see God, the Lord has forgotten to be himself, that he has abandoned justice, and that it somehow requires Job’s scrutiny to keep the Lord from abandoning his attributes. God has been his glorious self from all eternity without any monitor to remind him of his duty. Judgment is still before him and indeed he holds it before his own eyes as something which he can never abandon. As Matthew Henry paraphrases the verse, ‘God knows what he has to do, and will do all in infinite wisdom and justice; he has the entire plan and model of providence before him, and knows what he will do, which we do not, and therefore we understand not what he does.’ God has not lost his skill to unfold his plan. It is a plan which we could never unfold for not only do we lack the power, but we would lack the depth of wisdom to follow a course which seems, temporarily, to lead in the wrong direction. It takes God’s greater wisdom to persist along a track which his far sightedness sees will achieve a higher goal than any we could imagine. Job’s right response is to stop complaining and to know himself to be loved by God and to wait patiently for the chastisement to do its work and for deliverance to come from the Lord when he is ready.

Application

But how beautiful a thing is justice and how wonderful that God is so committed to it. Justice will find a way through the most complex of cases and allocate to each one what is right, perfectly vindicating the judge and honouring the law by which he proceeds. But in the case of God’s children there is something even more wonderful than justice for grace is mixed with it, and we receive much more good from the Lord than plain justice would dispense.

Questions

An alternative translation (RSV, NIV, ESV) treats the verse as an argument from the lesser to the greater: if God does not hear a vain petition (verse 13), how much less will he hear you ‘when you say you do not see him, that the case is before him, and that you are waiting for him’; that is, how much less does he regard your cry when by your own admission you say that you do not detect his presence. This thought is alien to the Bible which exhorts faith even when we see nothing and certainly does not make God’s answer to our prayer conditional on our perceiving him.

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Job 35:14 Commentary and Bible Study