Job wanted his story chiseled onto lead sheets or into stone. Posterity would be amazed to hear about it! The story is excruciatingly in its grief. It is also buoyant with hope and vindication. There is no book like it for wrestling with the questions of the sovereignty of God and human suffering.
I would love to interview Job to learn how he got his surge of prophetic hope. It is so polar to the rest of the story’s pain and loss!
“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth;
And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him with my own eyes–I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:25-27)
Job was caught into a realm of inspiration that is still pulsing for us today. To read this passage is to be eradiated with hope!
A living Redeemer! Who could that be?
Standing on the earth at the end of days!
God visible to the human eye!
Job confesses that even after all his skin is destroyed, that is in death – in spite of that, from the vantage place of his own flesh he would see God with his own eyes! Here we find the first picture of resurrection, perhaps 2000 years before Jesus’ advent! How powerful! After the flesh has all rotted in the grave, after death, Job would once again have flesh and see his redeemer with his very own eyes! A proxy was not going to see God for him. Job himself would see the redeemer with his own peepers – after resurrection!
Then comes the verse that generates spiritual goose bumps: “How my heart yearns within me!”
The man who had lost everything, that was just then suffering physical torment, is overcome with craving for the future – to drink in the face of his Redeemer, with his own eyes. How do you spell “ecstasy?”
“How my heart years within me!”
Steven C Johnson
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