By the Hearing

Job asked for a meeting, and he asked for it more than once. Everybody remembers the questions he shouted. Fewer people notice that the thing he requested, over and over, was an audience.

Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God. Ten chapters later he is more specific and more desperate: Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat! I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. And at the end of his own speeches, with nothing left to say: Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the Almighty would answer me. He wanted the room, the seat, a hearing, and somebody at the other end of it.

That is the one thing he got, and this verse is his report on it. The first half is a verdict on everything he had before. The hearing of the ear is what a person has when a thing has been described to him, and it covers his friends' careful doctrine and it covers his own arguments too, since both were built out of the same material. Then watch how he opens his answer. He takes the question God had opened with and turns it on himself: Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Nobody made him say that.

The epilogue has a stranger sentence still. The LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: the same three men who had spent thirty chapters explaining his suffering to him. Praying for them is the first thing he does with a face he has now seen. So ask for what Job asked for. Ask for the meeting; the explanation was never on the table for him either. And be ready for what a man who got one wanted to do first, which was to stand in for the people who had wounded him.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 303 is An Immovable Kingdom (Hebrews 12:28).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two