Job 14:15

Thou shall call, and I will answer thee,.... Either at death, when the soul of than is required of him, and he is summoned out of time into eternity, and has sometimes previous notice of it; though

Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands. Namely, at the resurrection (John 5:28; Psalms 17:15). Have a desire to - literally, become pale with anxious desire.

I trust there is a time coming when thou wilt grant me the mercy which now thou deniest me, to wit, a favourable hearing, when thou wilt call to me to speak for myself, and I shall answer thee; which I know will be to thy satisfaction and my comfort. Compare this with , where the same words are used in this same sense. Or, Thou shalt call me out of the grave of my calamities, and I shall answer thee, and say, Here I am, raised out of the pit in which I was buried by thy powerful and gracious command. To the work of thine hands, i.e. to me, who am thy workmanship in divers respects, from whom thou now seemest to have an aversion and abhorrency; but I doubt not thou wilt have a desire, i.e. show thy affection or good will to me; or a desire to look upon me, and to deliver me. Nor is it strange that Job, who lately was upon the brink of despair, doth now breathe out words of hope; such ebbings and flowings being usual, both with Job elsewhere, as ,16, and with David frequently in the Psalms, and with others of God’ s people.

Job 14:15 Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.Ver. 15. Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee] At the resurrection of the just thou shalt call me out of the grave by thine all powerful voice, uttered by that archangel, with the trump of God, 1 Thessalonians 4:16 1 Corinthians 15:52 Psalms 50:3-4, and thou shalt not need to call twice; for as I shall not need then to fear (as the hypocrites will) to show my face, so I will readily answer, Here I am; yea (as that dying saint did so), I will say, I come, I come, I come. I will even leap out of the grave to obey thine orders; and I doubt not but, to draw me out of that dark prison, thou wilt lend me that hand of thine whereof I have the honour to be the workmanship. Thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands] I know that thou thyself (for the love thou bearest me, of thy goodness, who am thy creature, and on whom thou hast shown favour, and reprinted thine image) wilt long after the consummation of my happiness; for then I shall be like unto thee (more like than ever), for I shall see thee as thou art, and appear with thee in glory, Colossians 3:4, being next unto thee, Luke 22:30; yea, one with thee, John 17:21, and so above the most glorious angels, Hebrews 1:14. The King shall greatly desire my beauty, Psalms 45:11, and rejoice over me, as the bridegroom doth over his bride, Isaiah 62:5; Isaiah 10:3. The word here rendered thou wilt have a desire signifieth thou wilt desire as men do after silver. The Lord seemed to deal by Job as men do by dross, to put him away as wicked, Psalms 119:119; nevertheless, he believed that he would look upon him as silver: and although he now crushed him together, and brake him to pieces, as the silversmith doth an old piece of plate which he means to melt; yet that he would in the grave, as in a furnace, refine him, and at the resurrection bring him out of a new fashion. Lo, this is the right logic of faith, to make conclusions of life in death, and of light in darkness, to gather one contrary out of another.

Verse 15. Thou shalt call] Thou shalt say There shall be time no longer: Awake, ye dead! and come to judgment! And I will answer thee] My dissolved frame shall be united at thy call; and body and soul shall be rejoined. Thou wilt have a desire] תכסף tichsoph, "Thou wilt pant with desire;" or, "Thou wilt yearn over the work of thy hands." God has subjected the creature to vanity, in hope; having determined the resurrection. Man is one of the noblest works of God. He has exhibited him as a master-piece of his creative skill, power, and goodness. Nothing less than the strongest call upon justice could have induced him thus to destroy the work of his hands. No wonder that he has an earnest desire towards it; and that although man dies, and is as water spilt upon the ground that cannot be gathered up again; yet doth he devise means that his banished be not expelled from him. Even God is represented as earnestly longing for the ultimate reviviscence of the sleeping dust. He cannot, he will not, forget the work of his hands.

13–15. Having pursued the destiny of man through all its steps down to its lowest, its complete extinction in death, Job, with a revulsion created by the instinctive demands of the human spirit, rises to the thought that there might be another life after this one. This thought is expressed in the form of an impassioned desire. To understand these verses the Hebrew conception of death must be remembered. Death was not an end of personal existence: the dead person subsisted, he did not live. He descended into Sheol, the abode of deceased persons. His existence was a dreamy shadow of his past life. He had no communion with the living, whether men or God; comp. Job 3:12-19; Job 10:21-22, Job 14:20-22. This idea of death is not strictly the teaching of revelation, it is the popular idea from which revelation starts, and revelation on the question rather consists in exhibiting to us how the pious soul struggled with this popular conception and sought to overcome it, and how faith demanded and realized, as faith does, its demand, that the communion with God enjoyed in this life should not be interrupted in death. This was in short a demand and a faith that the state of Sheol should be overleaped, and that the believing soul should be “taken” by God in death to Himself, cf. Psalms 16:10; Psalms 49:15; Psalms 73:24. This was the solution that generally presented itself to the mind when death was contemplated. The present passage differs in two particulars. It does not exhibit such assured faith as these passages in the Psalms. The problem before the Psalmists was a much simpler one than that before Job. They were men who, when they wrote their words of faith, enjoyed God’s fellowship, and their faith protested against this fellowship being interrupted in death. But Job has lost the sense of God’s fellowship through his afflictions, which are to his mind proof of God’s estrangement from him, hence he has so to speak a double obstacle to overcome, where the Psalmists had only one, and this makes him do no more here than utter a prayer, while the Psalmists expressed a firm assurance. In the following chapters, especially ch. 19, Job also rises to assurance. In another particular this passage differs from these Psalms. It contemplates a different and much more complete solution of the problem. In both the hope of immortality has a purely religious foundation. It springs from the irrepressible longing for communion with God. The Psalmists, in the actual enjoyment of this communion, either protest against death absolutely (Psalms 16), and demand a continuance in life that this fellowship may continue—that is, they rise to the idea of true immortality; or, contemplating death as a fact, they protest against the popular conception of it, and demand that the deceased person shall not sink into Sheol, but pass across its gulf to God. Job’s conception is different from either of these, because his circumstances are different.

Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee - This is language taken from courts of justice. It refers, probably, not to a future time, but to the present.

15. Have a desire — Pine or yearn for; primarily, become pale, (like silver,) as when, under strong emotion, the blood withdraws from the face.