Daily Devotional • August 30
A Reading from Job 9:1-15, 32-35
1 Then Job answered:
2 “Indeed, I know that this is so,
but how can a mortal be just before God?
3 If one wished to contend with him,
one could not answer him once in a thousand.
4 He is wise in heart and mighty in strength;
who has resisted him and succeeded?
5 He removes mountains, and they do not know it
when he overturns them in his anger;
6 he shakes the earth out of its place,
and its pillars tremble;
7 he commands the sun, and it does not rise;
he seals up the stars;
8 he alone stretched out the heavens
and trampled the waves of the Sea;
9 he made the Bear and Orion,
the Pleiades and the chambers of the south;
10 he does great things beyond understanding
and marvelous things without number.
11 Look, he passes by me, and I do not see him;
he moves on, but I do not perceive him.
12 He snatches away; who can stop him?
Who will say to him, ‘What are you doing?’
13 “God will not turn back his anger;
the helpers of Rahab bowed beneath him.
14 How then can I answer him,
choosing my words with him?
15 Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him;
I must appeal to my accuser for my right.
Meditation
Would that there were an umpire between us… (Job 9:33)
Job’s deep in the ditch. It appears that all has been lost. Even his so-called friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Zophar the Naamathite, and Bildad the Shuhite have no comfort to offer the suffering Job. Instead they pile on: “If you are pure and upright, then God will rouse himself for you” and “Have the innocent ever so suffered?” and “Know this: God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.”
Job’s friends make sense of his suffering by way of understanding that he is getting what he deserves. Somewhere, in some moment, somehow, when Job wasn’t paying attention, or — worse — when he was paying attention and meant it as an affront to God, Job broke the law, broke the covenant, and for that he now pays the price.
In verse 33 of chapter 9, Job longs for a mediator, someone who might help him explain his position to God, someone who might stay the hand of God, if only for a moment. “Would that there were an umpire between us!” he exclaims. “I’ve got a case to plead here. Maybe there is yet some discretion that the judge could exercise.”
Job will get his comeuppance when the Almighty finally appears to speak to him from the whirlwind. Job’s friends misunderstood the cause of his suffering. Job underestimated his testing of God. But his longing for an umpire, his longing for a mediator, surely proved prophetic in the anticipation of the coming Messiah.
Lord Jesus Christ … we pray to set your passion, cross, and death between your judgment and our souls…
The Very Rev. Timothy Kimbrough is the director of the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies and the Jack and Barbara Bovender Professor of the Practice of Anglican Studies at Duke Divinity School. He was previously dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Nashville, Tennessee.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Ika – The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Durham, North Carolina