Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Scripture Readings
- Primary Reading: Job 7-9
Key Verse
Job 8:19 — “Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow.”
Devotional Thought
Job has lost his cattle, his servants, his ten children, and now sits scraping his sores with a potsherd while his wife urges him to curse God and die. In Job 7, he turns from the silence of his friends to speak directly to heaven, and what pours out is not polished piety but raw anguish. He compares his life to a hireling’s — a day laborer who longs only for the shadow of evening and the wages that will let him eat. His nights are “wearisome,” his flesh clothed with worms and dust, his days “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle.” He even cries out, “What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him?” — turning Psalm 8’s wonder on its head. Job is not pretending. He is not performing. He is a real man in real pain, and he pours it out before the real God.
Then Bildad the Shuhite speaks, and he is worse than silence. His theology is tidy: God does not pervert justice; your children must have sinned; if you were pure, God would awake for you and your latter end would greatly increase. Every sentence is technically true in the abstract, and every sentence is a knife. Bildad looks at a suffering man and sees a case to be solved. He quotes the wisdom of the fathers and calls Job’s honest grief “a strong wind.” He is not wicked; he is simply unwilling to sit in the ashes and say nothing.
Job’s answer in chapter 9 is one of the profoundest speeches in Scripture. He does not deny God’s greatness — he confesses it. God “removeth the mountains,” “shaketh the earth out of her place,” “maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades.” Job knows God is sovereign. His agony is precisely that he cannot get a hearing before this sovereign God: “Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.” He longs for a mediator, someone who could stand with one hand on the holy God and one hand on a broken man. Job does not know how his own story ends. He does not know that a daysman is coming — one who is both God and man, who will lay His hand on both.
We read this in late May, when the garden is green and the days are lengthening. Suffering does not wait for winter. It comes in the middle of ordinary seasons, to ordinary people, and it does not always have a tidy explanation. Job teaches us that we may speak honestly to God from the ash heap, that we may ask our questions, and that our friends’ neat formulas often wound more than they heal. He also teaches us to wait — because the God who shakes the earth is not offended by our tears, and He has, in Christ, given us the Daysman we could never find on our own.
Reflection
- When you have suffered, have you been more like Job — honest before God — or like Bildad, offering tidy answers to someone whose pain you could not explain? Which posture does your own soul most need today?
- Job longed for a “daysman” to stand between him and God. How does knowing that Jesus Christ is that mediator change the way you bring your complaints and questions to the throne of grace?
Prayer
Lord God, You who command the sun and seal up the stars, we come to You as Job came — not with tidy answers, but with honest hearts. You know the wearisome nights and the days that flee like a weaver’s shuttle. We thank You that You have not left us without a Daysman; Your Son, Jesus Christ, has laid His hand upon us both, and in Him we have access to Your throne. When our friends wound us with easy formulas, give us grace to forgive. When our own grief overwhelms us, give us grace to speak plainly to You, and to rest in the Mediator we could never have found for ourselves. Amen.