Job 9 · Clearspring

Job: How Can I Contend with God?

¹Then Job answered,+ ²“Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God?+ ³If he is pleased to contend with him, he can’t answer him one time in a thousand.+ ⁴God who is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who has hardened himself against him, and prospered?+ ⁵He removes the mountains, and they don’t know it, when he overturns them in his anger.+ ⁶He shakes the earth out of its place. Its pillars tremble.+ ⁷He commands the sun, and it doesn’t rise, and seals up the stars.+ ⁸He alone stretches out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea.+ ⁹He makes the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the rooms of the south.+ ¹⁰He does great things past finding out; yes, marvelous things without number.+ ¹¹Behold, he goes by me, and I don’t see him. He passes on also, but I don’t perceive him.+ ¹²Behold, he snatches away. Who can hinder him? Who will ask him, ‘What are you doing?’+ ¹³“God will not withdraw his anger. The helpers of Rahab stoop under him.+ ¹⁴How much less shall I answer him, And choose my words to argue with him?+ ¹⁵Though I were righteous, yet I wouldn’t answer him. I would make supplication to my judge.+ ¹⁶If I had called, and he had answered me, yet I wouldn’t believe that he listened to my voice.+ ¹⁷For he breaks me with a storm, and multiplies my wounds without cause.+ ¹⁸He will not allow me to catch my breath, but fills me with bitterness.+ ¹⁹If it is a matter of strength, behold, he is mighty! If of justice, ‘Who,’ says he, ‘will summon me?’+ ²⁰Though I am righteous, my own mouth shall condemn me. Though I am blameless, it shall prove me perverse.+ ²¹I am blameless. I don’t respect myself. I despise my life.+ ²²“It is all the same. Therefore I say he destroys the blameless and the wicked.+ ²³If the scourge kills suddenly, he will mock at the trial of the innocent.+ ²⁴The earth is given into the hand of the wicked. He covers the faces of its judges. If not he, then who is it?+ ²⁵“Now my days are swifter than a runner. They flee away, they see no good.+ ²⁶They have passed away as the swift ships, as the eagle that swoops on the prey.+ ²⁷If I say, ‘I will forget my complaint, I will put off my sad face, and cheer up;’+ ²⁸I am afraid of all my sorrows, I know that you will not hold me innocent.+ ²⁹I shall be condemned. Why then do I labor in vain?+ ³⁰If I wash myself with snow, and cleanse my hands with lye,+ ³¹yet you will plunge me in the ditch. My own clothes shall abhor me.+ ³²For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment.+ ³³There is no umpire between us, that might lay his hand on us both.+ ³⁴Let him take his rod away from me. Let his terror not make me afraid;+ ³⁵then I would speak, and not fear him, for I am not so in myself.

Job: How Can I Contend with God?

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