Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 131 · May 11
No Daysman
“Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.”
If you had to stand and answer for your whole life, who could go in with you? You would need someone with standing on both sides of the room, someone who could put one hand on your shoulder and the other on God's.
Job has just agreed with his friends' whole case about God's power: "I know it is so of a truth." Then he draws a conclusion they did not expect: "If I speak of strength, lo, he is strong: and if of judgment, who shall set me a time to plead?" In other words, he cannot even get a court date. He also knows what would happen if he did argue: "If I justify myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me." The case is impossible, and the reason he gives has nothing to do with his own guilt: "For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment."
Then comes the verse: "Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both." Daysman is an old English word for someone who settles a dispute, the man who set a day for the hearing and listened to both sides. To be honest, the Hebrew can be read as a flat no or as a wish: if only there were someone to stand between us. That changes the tone, but it leaves Job in the same place. Whether he denies it or longs for it, he does not have one, and the whole chapter runs on that absence.
He keeps coming back to it. Seven chapters later he says, "Also now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my record is on high." Two verses after that, he cries, "O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbour!" The book never names anyone who could stand between them. When God finally answers out of the whirlwind, He speaks to Job directly, with nobody in between.
That brings us back to the hand on both shoulders. Paul, writing to Timothy, says what Job longed to hear: "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus." Jesus is God, and He became a man, so He can lay His hand on both. Job never heard that sentence, but you have it in front of you. The One Job asked for has come, and when you stand before God, you will not stand alone.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 131 is He Goes Before (Deuteronomy 31:8).