In My Flesh

Some words get carved because the one who says them is afraid they will be lost. Job, scraping his sores with a broken piece of pottery, wishes his could be cut somewhere permanent: “Oh that my words were written!… Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever!” (Job 19:23–24). He has buried his children, lost his health and his standing, and watched his friends turn slowly into prosecutors. He is arguing with God from an ash heap. And it is there, at the very bottom, that he says the thing he wants chiseled where no grief can wear it away.

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). The word behind Redeemer is go'el — the near kinsman whose task in Israel was to buy back what a family had lost, to pay a brother's debt, to stand up in court for the one who could not stand for himself. Job has no advocate left among men; his comforters have joined the other side. Yet he is certain of one who will rise and take the stand — and not as a distant idea, but “upon the earth,” on this same dust, where the trouble actually is.

Then he presses it further than most of us would dare from a sickbed. “And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another” (Job 19:26–27). His own eyes, at least, Job is sure of. His own flesh is harder to pin down — the Hebrew here is famously knotted, and some read Job saying he will see God “without” his flesh, stripped of it rather than restored in it. Either way, it is the very flesh now falling away from him that hangs in the balance. And the sentence breaks off almost in a gasp: “My heart faints within me!” The hope is nearly too large for the body holding it, however the flesh in it is finally read.

Job never gets a tidy answer to his suffering; when God finally speaks, he explains almost nothing. What Job is handed instead is a Redeemer, and from the ash heap he trusts him sight unseen. He cannot see his Redeemer, and still he will not loosen his grip on him. Job himself could not have seen how far that hope would reach, but read in light of the whole of Scripture, his words point past anything he could have pictured: the go'el he reached for came in the flesh, took our losses onto himself, and paid the debt no kinsman could; then he did the very thing Job staked his hope on — on the third morning he stood upon the earth again, walking out of his own grave. It is the same power that will one day call us out, as surely as the voice at the tomb once called a dead man into the light.

So Job's carved sentence turns out to be more than a brave man's wish; it is a promise with a date behind it. Later, out of the same darkness, he had asked where wisdom could be found and learned that it begins in the fear of the Lord. Here he holds something better still than an answer — a living Redeemer. Because that Redeemer lives, our own hope is not that we will be spared the ash heap, but that we will not be left on it. These eyes, and not another's, will behold him — in our flesh, because in his own flesh he first met our death and walked back out of it.