Job 9
The Book of Job helps to answer this question of human suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people?
But there is another real theme in the book of Job, too: How can good things happen to bad people—how can sinners be forgiven?
God of Justice
Human Nature
What is man, that he could be pure? And he who is born of a woman, that he could be righteous? (Job 15:14).
Man is a sinner by birth, by nature, by choice, and by practice. We are all sinners. Behavioral psychologists try to explain away sin—“Man is ill, not evil.” But the Bible says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
God’s Nature
What word best epitomizes God’s nature? Contrary to popular opinion, it is not love. God is holy.
Man cannot lift himself to God, because he is sinful. God will not lower Himself to Man, because He is holy. This is God’s justice. “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness” (Habakkuk 1:13a).
False Hope for the Human Condition
Job had three friends try to answer his question, “How can man be right with God?” They give three, wrong, satanically inspired answers. The devil is the master liar—and every good lie has some truth in it.
One Mediator Between God and Man
Then Job answered and said: “Truly I know it is so, but how can a man be righteous before God? If one wished to contend with Him, he could not answer Him one time out of a thousand…. For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him, and that we should go to court together. Nor is there any mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both (Job 9:1-3,32-33).
Job is saying, “Oh God, you are holy, and I am sinful. I cannot argue with You. I need a middleman. I need a mediator.”
For whom was Job crying and longing?
For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus… (1 Timothy 2:5).
Not just any mediator would do. Jesus Christ is qualified because He is both God and Man.
The Go-Between Must Be Fully Man
Jesus became as much a man as any mother’s child. He wept, slept, hungered, and hurt. Why? Because our dominion was legally lost by a man, and it had to be legally regained by a man. “For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23a). No spirit can die. Christ became a man that He might die upon that cross.
But He had to be a sinless man. He could not have been a son of Adam, because in Adam all die. “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).
The Go-Between Must Be Fully God
Our mediator had to be the Son of God; therefore He had to be born of a virgin. Jesus is the Son of God, not of Adam.
Everything that God has, says, and does, Jesus has, says, and does. Yet, everything that Job felt, Jesus felt. He was the one “who may lay his hand on us both.” (See Job 9:33.)
Between God and Man there is a chasm, eroded by sin. Jesus bridges that chasm with His humanity on one side, and His divine nature on the other. There is one God, and one mediator between God and Man: Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all.To read more on this topic, click here.
