ao:eng_webu
Job 17
1“My spirit is consumed. My days are extinct and the grave is ready for me.
2Surely there are mockers with me. My eye dwells on their provocation.
3“Now give a pledge. Be collateral for me with yourself. Who is there who will strike hands with me?
4For you have hidden their heart from understanding, therefore you will not exalt them.
5He who denounces his friends for plunder, even the eyes of his children will fail.
6“But he has made me a byword of the people. They spit in my face.
7My eye also is dim by reason of sorrow. All my members are as a shadow.
8Upright men will be astonished at this. The innocent will stir himself up against the godless.
9Yet the will hold to his way. He who has clean hands will grow stronger and stronger.
10But as for you all, come back. I will not find a wise man among you.
11My days are past. My plans are broken off, as are the thoughts of my heart.
12They change the night into day, saying ‘The light is near’ in the presence of darkness.
13If I look for Sheol as my house, if I have spread my couch in the darkness,
14if I have said to corruption, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worm, ‘My mother,’ and ‘My sister,’
15where then is my hope? As for my hope, who will see it?
16Shall it go down with me to the gates of Sheol, or descend together into the dust?”
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Read Job 17 three times
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Questions this passage answers
Why does God allow suffering?
Scripture never gives one tidy reason for all suffering. It says that pain entered a good world through sin, that God is neither its author nor its prisoner, that he uses it without approving of it, and that he entered it himself in Christ rather than explaining it from a distance. The Bible answers the question with a person before it answers it with an argument.
Why does God seem silent?
God's apparent silence is felt by some of the most faithful people in Scripture, not only by the weak in faith. David, Job and Habakkuk all cried out into what felt like empty air. Scripture never rebukes them for asking. It records their words as prayer, answers them in its own time, and teaches that God's silence is never his absence.