JOB THE SINNER

“I have sinned, [but] what have I done to you,  O watcher of men?  Why have you made me your target?” (7:20)

Was Job a sinner? Do the righteous continue to sin? All such questions should be clearly resolved by this verse, in which Job frankly confesses, “I have sinned.” (The NIV translation reads “if I have sinned,” but the word “if” is not present in the original Hebrew.) What Job is saying, in effect, is this: “I know I am a sinner, Lord. But what sort of sin could possibly have turned a forgiving God so violently against me?” This sense carries over into the next verse as Job asks, “Why do you not pardon my offenses and forgive my sins?” He is not pretending to have committed no sins or offenses. But as a believer in a merciful God he is accustomed to having his sins forgiven, not held against him. He cannot understand why his God seems suddenly to have changed the rules and to be withholding forgiveness.

Job’s friends are anxious to persuade him not simply that he is sinful (that much is perfectly obvious), but rather that his present misfortune must be the result of willfully repressed or concealed sin. This charge Job vehemently denies. He does not need to be told to repent, for he is the sort of man in whom repentance is already a deeply ingrained habit of soul. Repentance is second nature to him; he knows he has kept strict accounts with God. In fact if it were possible for Job to find some grave, hidden, unconfessed sin in himself, this would no doubt come as a tremendous relief to him. It would shed light on his present suffering and give some meaning to it. As it is, he knows his conscience is clear, and paradoxically it is this very fact that troubles him, since it casts aspersions on the forgiving character of his God. In Job’s mind the issue has nothing to do with whether or not he has sinned, but everything to do with whether God will pardon. His turmoil is centered not upon his own failure, but upon the Lord’s apparent failure to forgive him. Writes Francis Andersen, “Job’s faith does not relieve his agony; it causes it.”

Has God ever promised people a surefire system that would keep us from sinning? No. His promise, rather, is that He will be with us in the midst of our inevitable failure, and we can trust Him to “redeem [our] life from the pit” (Ps. 103:4). The faithful, wrote John Murray, “are not perfect in holiness. But they have been translated from the realm of sin and death to that of righteousness and life. Sin is now their burden and plague. Why? Because it is not their realm, they are not at home with it. It is foreign country to them. They are in the world, but not of it.” This is the notion Job clings to throughout the book—not that he is sinless, but that he is righteous. He is bold to believe that by faith such a blameless status in the eyes of God must be possible and achievable for a sinner even in the midst of his sin, and that if it is not, then all religion is a tragic joke and life is totally without hope.

Job’s conviction is fundamentally Christian. Part and parcel of believing in Christ is believing in our own blamelessness before Him. How can we “gain access by faith into . . . grace” (Rom. 5:2) if we do not believe, first of all, that such grace is truly available, and secondly, that through simple faith in Jesus Christ it is ours? To believe this is to believe the gospel, to accept the good news. It can hardly be called good news if for some reason we think that we ourselves may be excluded from it. To believe we might be excluded is to believe bad news. To be afraid that Jesus does not or will not accept us, is actually to refuse to accept Him. For He Himself said, “Whoever comes to me I will never reject” (John 6:37). To trust God is to trust that He is good, and to trust that He is good is to trust that He is and always will be good to me, and cannot be otherwise.

This is the faith that saves. However, is such faith to be equated with what is popularly called “assurance of salvation”? No, it is not. Job has faith, but in his present circumstances he seems not to have assurance, and that is a topic for the next chapter.