YES

“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.” (13:15)

With these words, God has just won His wager with Satan. On earth Job and his friends will continue to slug it out for a while longer. But in Heaven everything is now settled, and it is settled on the basis of Job’s clear and stunning declaration, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.”

Remember the Devil’s initial taunt, “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:9). Without at all realizing what he is doing, Job now delivers a direct answer to that taunt, and his answer is a resounding yes! YES!—Job’s trust in God is unconditional. YES!—this man is not just out for himself. YES!—there is such a thing as faith that carries absolutely no ulterior motive—in other words, there is such a thing as love! And YES!—Job possesses this entirely disinterested faith and love towards God. Even if God Himself should strike him dead, Job declares, he will not cease to trust Him.

Did we catch the weird but unmistakable implication in these words? It is that even a dead person can exercise faith in God. If this were not the case, then why did Christ descend into Hell in order to “preach even to those who are now dead” (1 Peter 4:6)? Or how could dead Lazarus have heard the voice of Christ and come out of his tomb, except by faith? Indeed, is it not true that every one of us was stone-cold dead in our sins at the time when we first heard the gospel, and believed, and so were saved?

But note that Job does not say merely, “Even if I die, yet will I hope in him.” No, the thought is infinitely stronger than that. For even if this same God of love in whom he trusts should Himself be the agent who hounds and harries and hates him into the grave— even then, Job testifies, he will continue to cry out to this God in the faith that He must and will hear him, and must finally reverse His judgment and vindicate him. Here is a kind of faith against which the Devil has nothing to say. Here is the faith of a man upon whom neither death nor Hell has any hold. Perhaps there are only two other places in the Bible in which such faith is so purely and intensely expressed: in the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, and ultimately in the willing death of the Son of God on a cross.

What is the secret of such faith? Perhaps the secret lies in the second part of Job’s statement: “I will surely defend my ways to his face.” It is the first half of the verse that is the famous part, but the second half is, on reflection, equally arresting. In fact the second half is almost a commentary on the first, for it tells me that the way to hope in God is to accept unwaveringly His gift of personal righteousness, even (and especially) when the reality of that righteousness seems most in question, even when all earthly appearances suggest that God Himself is against me and is bent on blotting me out. The time when I feel most overwhelmed and defeated by the onslaughts of the Devil, by the pressures of the world, by the weight of my own sin, and by the threat of death itself—this is the very time when I am to cling most vigorously to the promised and inalienable truth of my righteousness, which is the hope of the gospel. This is the time when I shall not fail to defend my way to God’s face. For what is my way? My way is Jesus Christ.

Job’s testimony is all the more remarkable for having come long before the historical advent of Christ, at a time when death held not the slightest promise of spiritual enlightenment for the orthodox believer. We today find this state of affairs almost impossible to grasp, but the fact is that in the Old Testament the place of the dead, Sheol, was the realm not of eternal life but of eternal murk and shadow, featuring at best cessation from worldly striving. The Old Testament contains hardly a hint that those who died would end up any closer to God than those who remained alive; on the contrary, the clear implication was that at death one lost touch with some vital dimension of real existence. Not only the physical but the spiritual pilgrimage came to an abrupt and inelegant end. How could it be otherwise, at a time before Jesus Christ had arrived in person to burst the gates of Sheol and free the dead along with the living? The fact that Job had a faith which he assumed would be operative even in Sheol stands as powerful evidence that he was fundamentally a believer in the gospel of Christ. Like Paul he as much as said, “I am convinced that neither death nor life . . . nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).


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