Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 303 · October 30
By the Hearing
“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.”
Job asked God for a meeting, and he asked more than once. Most people remember the questions he shouted, but fewer notice what he kept asking for, which was a hearing: a chance to stand before God and be answered.
Early on he says, "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 speeches, with nothing left to say, he cries, "Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the Almighty would answer me." He wanted a room, a seat and a hearing, with God there to answer him.
The meeting was the one thing he was given, and today's verse is his report on it: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee." The first half sums up everything he had before. "The hearing of the ear" is what you have when somebody has described a thing to you. That covers his friends' careful teaching, and it covers his own arguments too, because both were built from the same secondhand material. The second half is new, because now he has met God for himself. Watch what he says in his answer. God had opened by asking, "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?" Job takes that question and turns it on himself: "Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge?" Nobody made him say that.
The end of the book has an even more surprising line: "the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends." These were the three men who had spent most of the book explaining his suffering to him, and God sent them to Job so that he would pray for them. So the first thing Job does after seeing God is to stand before Him on behalf of the people who had wounded him. Ask for what Job asked for. Ask to meet God, even if no explanation comes, because Job never got one either. And take heart from how his story ends: the God who met Job also restored him, and "the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 303 is An Immovable Kingdom (Hebrews 12:28).