GOD IS MY WITNESS

“Only grant me these two things, O God, and then I will not hide from you:Withdraw your hand far from me, and stop frightening me with your terrors.” (13:20-21)

These two prayer requests of Job’s happen to be the very conditions that God in fact grants to human beings through the grace of the gospel—the gospel that Job already believes in his heart, even though it has not yet been revealed to the world. For by faith in Jesus Christ believers are, first of all, “saved from God’s wrath” (Rom. 5:9), and secondly we are “enabled to serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days” (Luke 1:74-75).

As we saw in the last chapter, Job understands that spiritual truth is like legal truth. In both areas a case may appear hopelessly complicated on the surface, and yet underneath the confusion there is always a hard kernel of truth. Either the defendant is guilty as charged or he is not; either the sinner is saved or he is not. This present life may be clouded with gray, but the job of the legal system, whether temporal or spiritual, is to make everything black and white, bringing all the facts out into the open to weigh them and pass judgment. While human law accomplishes this goal imperfectly, God’s law will in the end accomplish it perfectly. In either case, however, the process of making things clear takes time—often a very long time—and in the interim objective reality is obscured by subjective illusion. The solid legal truth that remains all along at the heart of the issue is temporarily overshadowed by an apparent, circumstantial “truth” that is really a pack of lies. This happens in human law, and it happens also in regard to God’s law. Just as outlaws of society can get off scot-free, so blatant offenders against God can go on living as though they are innocent, when the fact is that they are guilty as sin. By the same token, righteous believers who have been acquitted of their sins can, through the unrelenting pressures of the world and the flesh and the Devil, turn around and live their daily lives just as though they are still under condemnation.

This is the very corner that Job’s friends are trying to back him into, but he will have none of it. For Job knows in his heart that his God is a God of love and forgiveness. He seems intuitively to understand the message of 1 John 4:10: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Job is well aware that he himself does not love God as he should; but he also knows that his love for God is not the basis of his faith. The basis, rather, is God’s love for him. Therefore the fact that at present he is not feeling a peaceful, joyful trust and love towards his God is not what is uppermost in his mind. What is uppermost is the fact that God loves him, with a love that is rooted in objective, judicial reality, and that something must have gone terribly wrong for all the tangible evidences of that love to have been torn away from him. In beseeching God to bring his case to court, Job is not being unduly demanding; he is simply seeking his legal rights from a just God. While law and gospel may sometimes appear to be at odds, in reality they are in perfect harmony, so that the person who trusts in God’s love trusts also in His justice, and vice versa.

The Apostle Paul, at times when his probity was in question, went so far as to say, “I call God as my witness” (2 Cor. 1:23). Job too is so bold as to believe that God Himself will ultimately testify on his behalf. As preposterous as this may sound, surely it is the very essence of the gospel. For our God is one who has sworn to take our part and to defend us eternally against all accusation, and to believe in Him is to take Him at His word and gratefully to accept His protection. It is on this very basis that we in turn become witnesses for Him, taking the stand to declare His faithfulness to a lost world. Such faith is not a religion but a relationship. In other words, it is not one-sided but two-sided, being comprised not merely of our faith in God but of His in us. It is our faith that behind all the fear and pain of life in a fallen world lies a loving and all-sufficient God, and it is God’s faith that behind our corrupt nature lies a being with a capacity for perfection and everlasting life.


Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.