Shall He Live Again

Where in your Bible does a question stand for centuries with nobody answering it?

Job asks his in a chapter that has already ruled it out. He starts with a tree: For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again. Then the comparison collapses. But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? Two verses later the door shuts: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

So when he asks, If a man die, shall he live again? the answer his own chapter has built is no. He waits anyway. All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. He waits for a thing he has just said does not happen, then says something odd and hopeful straight to God: Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee.

The question travels. Psalm 88 asks it from the same floor: Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? Nothing comes back there either, and that psalm ends in the dark.

Isaiah, generations later, says a thing the older books do not. Thy dead men shall live. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust. Daniel adds the part that unsettles everyone: many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

Then it is answered to a face. Martha at a graveside has the doctrine correct and is not helped by it: I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. He answers with himself. I am the resurrection, and the life. Then he turns the question on her: Believest thou this?

Job did not have that sentence. He had a question, a wait with no end date, and the nerve to say it to God. Nothing in the book treats the asking as unbelief, and God ends up defending the man who asked it.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 184 is Gracious and Compassionate (Psalm 145:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two