A Hand on Us Both

A daysman is an old word for an arbitrator — the person who steps between two parties at odds and holds them both to fair terms. It carries a small history of its own: to day a quarrel was to fix a day for the hearing, and the daysman was the man of that day, trusted to lay a hand on each side and bring them together. The word has nearly fallen out of English, and the King James Bible keeps it in a single place — here, in the mouth of a ruined man scraping his sores in the ashes.

Job is in the middle of a long argument. Two answers are on offer at the ash heap: Job is secretly guilty, or God is not just. His friends press the first. Job, who has lost nearly everything, wants to take the matter higher, to God himself. Then he sees the shape of the problem. God is not a man he can summon and cross-examine as an equal: "For he is not a man, as I am, that I might answer him, that we should come to trial together." Between an infinite God and a small, aching sufferer, no one stands in the gap. "There is no arbiter between us," Job says, "who might lay his hand on us both."

Give the complaint its full weight, because it is honest. The distance Job names is real, and he feels it as fear — God's "rod" over him, a dread so heavy he cannot speak his case. This is the oldest loneliness: to sense that the God we must answer to is beyond our reach, and that the reaching itself might undo us. What Job wants is a person to stand between — one who belongs to both sides at once, and is strong enough not to let go.

The daysman Job could not find, the New Testament names without hesitation: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Everything hangs on those last two words, the man. An arbiter has to belong to both parties, or he cannot lay a hand on both — and this one does. He reaches all the way to God, because he is God; he reaches all the way to us, because he became one of us.

And when the hand closed, it did not spare itself: the rod Job begged God to lift, the mediator took onto himself — "upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace" (Isaiah 53:5). The ash heap had two answers: the sufferer is guilty, or God is unjust. Here is a third — the innocent one counted guilty, standing between. He does not hold the two apart until tempers cool; he takes away what set them at odds, and hands us a standing we never earned. The reconciliation the whole story was straining toward is not a truce at a safe distance, but a peace paid for in his own flesh.

Job's hope in that dark chapter was small and exact: if the dread were gone, "then I would speak without fear of him." We may draw near "with confidence" to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16) and speak, at last, without fear. The hand Job could not find has already closed on us both, and it has not let go.