Job’s interactions with his friends and before God have taken him a long way since the agonised darkness of chapter 3. In spite of his deep and drawn out suffering, he has remained steadfast in his resolve, and even displayed moments of profound hope (as we saw in Job 19:25-27). There is much more ground yet to be travelled, but chapters 27-31 mark a turn in the road. We will look at chapter 28 when we gather on Sunday, but the surrounding chapters bring together the thoughts and imagery of the book so far and point us toward the next stage of the journey.

As we saw earlier in the week, Job 26 raises the wonders and mysteries of creation and God’s sovereign purposes. When we read chapter 27, we find Job addressing his friends as a group (“you” is in the plural in 27:11-12) as he moves from God’s power to consider God’s justice. Leaving aside Job 28 for now, chapters 29-31 are a final summation of Job’s claim to innocence- again, not in an absolute sense, but in that he has a clear conscience before God:

“If I have walked in falsehood or my foot has hurried after deceit—
let God weigh me in honest scales and he will know that I am blameless" Job 31:5–6.

But how can Job claim to be blameless without opening himself to the accusation of hypocrisy? Christopher Ash comments:

Essentially this question is the same, doctrinally, as the puzzle of how the adulterer and murderer King David can so often claim innocence in the Psalms. Psalm 17 is a paramount example, where David claims not just innocence in one particular matter but a deep and wide innocence: “You have tried my heart, you have visited me by night, you have tested me, and you will find nothing” (Psalm 17:3). For David the answer is given explicitly in Romans 4. David has appropriated “the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works” (Romans 4:6). A righteousness from God is reckoned to him, so that when his steps are “counted” they are counted righteous. David in his faith foreshadows all who are righteous by faith in Christ today. And so does Job.

Job is not being arrogant in clinging to this boast. He is not glad about what he is in himself, but he is deeply joyful about what God has made him. In the midst of the most terrible grief and suffering he clings to this. Did not the Lord Jesus in his suffering hold on by faith to the fact that he was the beloved Son of God in whom his Father was well pleased? And have not countless believers since, when they have nothing in this world to hold on to, held tightly to the only thing the world cannot take from them, their righteousness in Christ?