Job 21
BSB
Job: God Will Punish the Wicked
1Then Job answered:
2“Listen carefully to my words;
let this be your consolation to me.
3Bear with me while I speak;
then, after I have spoken, you may go on mocking.
4Is my complaint against a man?
Then why should I not be impatient?
5Look at me and be appalled;
put your hand over your mouth.
6When I remember, terror takes hold,
and my body trembles in horror.
7Why do the wicked live on,
growing old and increasing in power?
8Their descendants are established around them,
and their offspring before their eyes.
9Their homes are safe from fear;
no rod of punishment from God is upon them.
10Their bulls breed without fail;
their cows bear calves and do not miscarry.
11They send forth their little ones like a flock;
their children skip about,
12singing to the tambourine and lyre
and making merry at the sound of the flute.
13They spend their days in prosperity
and go down to Sheol in peace.
14Yet they say to God: ‘Leave us alone!
For we have no desire to know Your ways.
15Who is the Almighty, that we should serve Him,
and what would we gain if we pray to Him?’
16Still, their prosperity is not in their own hands,
so I stay far from the counsel of the wicked.
17How often is the lamp of the wicked put out?
Does disaster come upon them?
Does God, in His anger, apportion destruction?
18Are they like straw before the wind,
like chaff swept away by a storm?
19It is said that God lays up one’s punishment for his children.
Let God repay the man himself, so he will know it.
20Let his eyes see his own destruction;
let him drink for himself the wrath of the Almighty.
21For what does he care about his household after him,
when the number of his months has run out?
22Can anyone teach knowledge to God,
since He judges those on high?
23One man dies full of vigor,
completely secure and at ease.
24His body is well nourished,
and his bones are rich with marrow.
25Yet another man dies in the bitterness of his soul,
having never tasted prosperity.
26But together they lie down in the dust,
and worms cover them both.
27Behold, I know your thoughts full well,
the schemes by which you would wrong me.
28For you say, ‘Where now is the nobleman’s house,
and where are the tents in which the wicked dwell?’
29Have you never asked those who travel the roads?
Do you not accept their reports?
30Indeed, the evil man is spared from the day of calamity,
delivered from the day of wrath.
31Who denounces his behavior to his face?
Who repays him for what he has done?
32He is carried to the grave,
and watch is kept over his tomb.
33The clods of the valley are sweet to him;
everyone follows behind him,
and those before him are without number.
34So how can you comfort me with empty words?
For your answers remain full of falsehood.”
Introduction
Job 21
This is Job's reply to Zophar's discourse, in which he complains less of his own miseries than he had done in his former discourses (finding that his friends were not moved by his complaints to pity him in the least), and comes closer to the general question that was in dispute between him and them, Whether outward prosperity, and the continuance of it, were a mark of the true church and the true members of it, so that the ruin of a man's prosperity is sufficient to prove him a hypocrite, though no other evidence appear against him: this they asserted, but Job denied. I. His preface here is designed for the moving of their affections, that he might gain their attention (Job 21:1-6). II. His discourse is designed for the convincing of their judgments and the rectifying of their mistakes. He owns that God does sometimes hang up a wicked man as it were in chains, in terrorem - as a terror to others, by some visible remarkable judgment in this life, but denies that he always does so; nay, he maintains that commonly he does otherwise, suffering even the worst of sinners to live all their days in prosperity and to go out of the world without any visible mark of his wrath upon them. 1. He describes the great prosperity of wicked people (Job 21:7-13). 2. He shows their great impiety, in which they are hardened by their prosperity (Job 21:14-16). 3. He foretels their ruin at length, but after a long reprieve (Job 21:17-21). 4. He observes a very great variety in the ways of God's providence towards men, even towards bad men (Job 21:22-26). 5. He overthrows the ground of their severe censures of him, by showing that the destruction of the wicked is reserved for the other world, and that they often escape to the last in this world (Job 21:27, to the end), and in this Job was clearly in the right.
Cross-references: Job 21:1 · Job 21:7 · Job 21:14 · Job 21:17 · Job 21:22 · Job 21:27