Job 16:1

JOB’S FOURTH REPLY. Chaps. 16, 17.

1. Job answered and said He replies to their heartless speeches, that there is a vast difference between the condition of a sufferer and that of his upbraiders. Their windy words have left his grief unassuaged. The conflict rages sore around him. His friends are not his sole antagonists: his startled soul sees on all sides a glaring throng of fiendish foes, into whose power God has cast him headlong. In every form of assault known to warfare the Divine Being has attacked him, until, (so he imagines,) crushed and wounded, he lies weltering in his own blood. The darkest hour, however, is one of hope. The blood of the innocent has power with God. Job’s faith, like that of Abel, is glorified in the juncture of extreme distress. It rises to the certainty that the God who is in the heights sees and feels his woes, and, conscious of this divine sympathy, he ventures to supplicate God himself, to plead with God in his behalf (ch. 17). With the grave beneath his feet, he prays for a mediator. He makes the amazing appeal to God to be his sponsor or bondsman with God. He has faith to believe that his sufferings shall not injure the cause of virtue. “A bitter feeling at the behaviour of his friends extends itself like a red thread throughout the entire discourse.” Hitzig. See Job 16:10; Job 16:20; Job 17:2; Job 17:4; Job 17:10; Job 17:12.