For anyone still reading (OK, both of you), I am still plowing through the Old Testament in chronological order.  Granted, it’s not the pace I had originally hoped, but I’m still dedicated.

Earlier this week, I came across what I think is the best passage in Job.  It’s Job 19:23-27, and I like how the New American Standard Bible puts it best:

²³“Oh that my words were written!
Oh that they were inscribed in a book!
²⁴“That with an iron stylus and lead
They were engraved in the rock forever!

Job understands that what he’s about to say is important, and so he wishes that it would be recorded.  The methods he described here were not cheap at the time, so that gives weight to the next two verses.

²⁵“As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,
And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.
²⁶“Even after my skin is destroyed,
Yet from my flesh I shall see God;
²⁷Whom I myself shall behold,
And whom my eyes will see and not another.
My heart faints within me!

Here we get the first peek of life outside the bookends.  And really, only someone who has known brokenness, either in their own life or by giving themselves over to the brokenness of others, can appreciate this passage.

Up to this point, Job has been having an argument with his friends.  Contrary to what I had always pictured, this was a very heated argument.  I had always pictured four ancient guys, one of them with a really bad skin condition, sitting around giving soliloquies, like a Shakespearean play.  This time through Job, with the help of people much smarter than me, I can see it more clearly: it’s an argument among friends about the nature of the universe, and how Job must have brought this upon himself.  Job’s friends are stressing that they know how the world works: you do bad things, bad things happen to you.  And the vast majority of humanity would agree with that sentiment.  It just seems proper.  In English, we call it “poetic justice”.  Job clearly has had bad things happen to him, all in a fairly short span of time.  It seemed to everyone that someone, somewhere, had something in for him.  In order to justify that belief, Job’s “friends” accuse him of some awful things later in chapter 22.

Job angrily maintains his innocence.  Since we have the privilege of seeing the whole script with the writer/director’s notes in Chapters 1 & 2, we know that Job is right.  God knows that Job is right.  And, yet, there had to be nagging doubts in Job’s mind.  The idea of poetic justice is ingrained because it happens so often.  Yet, in verses 25-26, Job recognizes that he can’t save himself in this situation, that he needs another.  Not only someone to save him from the current, temporal issues, but someone to save him from the sin/sacrifice cycle described in chapter 1.  Job doesn’t say how this will happen, because he doesn’t know.

In verse 25, he declares that the person who is able and willing to redeem exists.  (When we hit the book of Ruth, we’ll discuss the concept of a kinsman redeemer in more detail.  for now, think “defender”, or “the one who will make everything right”).  Not only does He exist, but He is alive.  Job is certain who will do the saving, and that perosn is God.  Job calling the Lord his redeemer implies an existing relationship, a kind of fellowship that (I’m guessing) would have been pretty unheard of at that time.  It foreshadows the relationship God desired with Israel, as well as the relationship we enjoy with God now.

Job takes it a step further, and declares that, even after his body has turned to dust, yet he will see God with his own eyes.  Given what we know of God from the rest of scripture, this is an incredibly bold statement.  At the same time, other passages of scripture confirm that it will be true, for Job as well as for us.  This same promise was fulfilled for Simeon in Luke 2:30, in the form of Jesus’ first incarnation.  In one sense, this passage could be a prophecy about His first coming.  At the same time, these words also Jesus’ second appearance, vividly described in Zechariah 14:

³Then the LORD will go forth and fight against those nations, as when He fights on a day of battle.

⁴In that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south.

⁵You will flee by the valley of My mountains…Then the LORD, my God, will come, and all the holy ones with Him

Wow.  Now that’s an entrance.

By the way: If you have given your life to Christ, then “all the holy ones” means you.

My question at this point is, how did Job know this?  Remember, this was before Moses, and before God made His covenant with Abraham.  Was it a personal revelation to Job?  Was it part of an oral tradition?  It doesn’t necessarily matter.  Job’s statement shows that as long as humanity has lived on the Earth, the dream has existed that God would return to live with us.  Until then, we live in a world filled with injustice and unfairness.  That’s what I’ve come to call “Life Between the Bookends”.  It’s a phrase to express the knowledge that, while we can’t know the rest of the story, we can be certain about how the story ends.