Job now pleads so humbly: ‘Hear me when I come.’ he is only daring to address the Lord because he has invited him.’ None of us has any right to stand before the holy God. How dare any of us stand before God, the pure and holy God? You are like a member of a rebel army; you have murdered the king’s people, and now you go to capital and say, ‘By the way, I want to be forgiven.’ We cannot just come on our own merits; we will not be received; we have forfeited any right to come. We need some ground on which to come. We need the righteousness of God. Whenever we come we remember Christ our Saviour. The mercy of God and work of Christ and his authority is the ground of our coming.
The NKJ treats the second half of the verse as the Lord’s words quoted back to him by Job. This is plausible even though other versions translate these as the words of Job, because the force expressed by the words would be inappropriate coming from Job given his new state of mind, because they are very close in Hebrew to words just spoken by the Lord in Job 38:3 and 40:7 and it would be s further instance (as in 42:3) of Job exposing the full extent of his guilt, and because in the next two verses, far from having further demands to make of God or questions to ask, he admits that following the Lord’s glorious appearance he has nothing to say, and confesses his ignorance and repents in shame.