Job 17:1 - 18:21 - When You Feel Ready to Give Up (Session 22)

In this verse-by-verse Bible study of Job 17–18, Reasoning Through the Bible explores one of the darkest moments in Job’s story. Job says his spirit is broken, the grave is ready for him, and he can no longer see beyond his pain. This session speaks directly to those who have reached a low point and need to be reminded that life still has purpose, even in deep suffering. 

This study explains why Job’s despair does not mean his life has lost meaning, why believers always retain purpose because they are made in the image of God, and why Christians should not wait until people are near death to repair relationships, show love, and be faithful friends. It also highlights the danger of a works-based, behavior-only view of God that leaves no room for grace or true relationship. 

The second half of the session turns to Bildad’s speech in Job 18, where he becomes openly insulting, hypocritical, and more committed to being right than to helping Job. This episode shows how harsh theology can become cruel theology, and why suffering people need wise, compassionate counsel that looks deeper than outward circumstances. 

Topics in this episode include:

•  Job 17 explained 
•  Job 18 explained 
•  when life feels ready to end 
•  purpose in suffering 
•  why believers always have purpose 
•  Bildad’s hypocrisy 
•  retribution theology and its errors 
•  why suffering is not always caused by sin 
•  how to care for suffering people 

Reasoning Through the Bible is a verse-by-verse Bible teaching ministry committed to careful exposition, biblical context, and faithful application.

Transcript

Welcome And Job’s Breaking Point

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Welcome to Reasoning Through the Bible. We have a ministry where we go verse by verse, chapter by chapter, through the Word of God. We've been working our way through the book of Job. And if you've been with us, you've learned that Job had some great tragedies happen to him at the beginning of the book because of what was going on in heaven. But Job has three friends, and they've not been very friendly. They've actually been blaming Job for his own suffering. And Job is getting increasingly down. As we'll see today, he is very depressed, and he is at the point where he is ready to give up on life. So we have listeners probably today, possibly some of you, have been in a really bad spot, and perhaps you're ready to give up on life. Well, today's lesson will tell us that there's a reason to live, there is a purpose in life, and that even in the midst of great tragedy, God is good, and he is the one we should look to. We'll see that today as we go through this. If you have your Bible, turn to the book of Job, chapter 17. We're going to read the first nine verses.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

My spirit is broken, my days are extinguished, the grave is ready for me. Mockers are certainly with me, and my eye gazes on their provocation. Make a pledge for me with yourself, and who is there that will be my guarantor? For you have kept their hearts away from understanding, therefore you will not exalt them. He who informs against friends for a share of the spoils, the eyes of his children also will perish. But he has made me a proverb among the people, and I am one at whom people spit. My eye has also become inexpressive because of grief, and all my body parts are like a shadow. The upright will be appalled at this, and the innocent will stir himself up against the godless. Nevertheless, the righteous will hold to his way, and the one who has clean hands will grow stronger and stronger.

When Being Right Turns Cruel

What God Actually Wants From Us

SPEAKER_00 2:21

In this section, Job again is as low as he can go. The first verse or two there, he says, My spirit is broken, and the grave is ready for me. He can't see past his problems and pain, and he is at the point where he is ready to die. Adding to his suffering are his friends that are blaming him for it. Not only is his physical and emotional situation really bad, people around him are saying, Job, it's really your fault that you're in this. And of course, they are incorrect. Verse two, he sees his friends as not only saying incorrect things, but mocking him. He says, They're my eye gazes on their provocation. The mockers are with me. They don't care for Job's feelings as much as they have come to the point where they're caring about being right in the theological discussion. They've gotten into this theological debate with Job, and they don't care about him and his feelings. That's where we should take a great lesson, which is there's a time to be right in a discussion, and there's a time to have feelings for our suffering humanity. In verse three, Job is saying to God, in effect, Lord, tell me what you want from me. Who's going to be my guarantor? Make a pledge for me. God, what do you want from me? Somebody has to come along and make life good for me. He's still feeling like God is demanding something from him. He is pleading with God, just tell me what it is. Job, I think here, Steve, is misunderstanding God. Job here thinks that God must want something from me that he's not getting, which is why all this suffering's happened. But I think that's a misunderstanding. From a big picture, Steve, what does God want from us as humans?

SPEAKER_01 4:12

He wants us to be faithful to him. He wants us to have a relationship with him. What is it that started this? Is that he offered Job up as an example to Satan of one who worshiped him and was fearful of him, meaning in a respectful way, that sacrifice to him. So Job is an actual example that God uses for Satan. So it's a picture of the type of relationship that God wants and desires to have with people and for them to worship him and for them to be faithful to him. You know, at the end of chapter 16, Job says, For when a few years past, I shall go the way of no return. And then starts out here in chapter 17, My spirit is broken, my days are extinguished, the grave is ready for me. Between these two verses, we see Job makes a statement that in a few years I'm going to pass on to a place of no return. I'm going to die. And then 17 opens up with, My days are extinguished, I'm ready to go. The grave is here. And what we see here is that Job is at the depths of his anguish. And sometimes we see that when people are at these types of depths, that death can seem like a relief rather than something to be feared. And I think that's where we are with Job. He's ready for death to come to take this pain and suffering away from him.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

The situation, as we've seen, as we've gone through the book, is not Job's fault. There was a scene in heaven at the beginning of the book between God and Satan, and that is the cause. Satan attacking him. God had a purpose for that. But Job doesn't see that. All he sees is the pain and the suffering, and he's blaming God for it. And his friends are saying, Job, it's it's your fault. The friends have a very behavior-based view of God. If you obey God, then you'll get blessings. If you disobey God, you'll get painful things and cursings. Therefore, if you're suffering, it must be because you disobeyed. And if someone is healthy and wealthy, then it must be because he obeyed God. That is a skewed view of God. It's a wrong view of God. God really wants a love relationship. It's a true relationship. God wants us to be faithful to him. He wants us to love him. He doesn't love us because of what we do. That's the main message that's in several places in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul in the book of Galatians gets quite incensed when the Judaizers came in and said, well, in order to please God, we have to do these things. And still today we have churches that hold our relationship with God to be because of our behavior, what our works are. And if we're doing works and obeying, then God's pleased with us. And if we're disobeying, then God will cast us away. And nothing could be further from the truth. Christianity is a love relationship. That's what the New Testament draws home to us. God wants us to be faithful. If we humble ourselves and love him, then he will exalt us, it tells us in the New Testament. All God wants is for us to be faithful to him and love him. It is a love relationship, not something we earn favors from God. In verse 4, Job is speaking to God about his friends, and he tells the Lord that he must have kept their friends from understanding what was going on. Job thinks that since his friends are so unwise, God must have a hand in keeping them in the dark. Verse 5, the friends are so cruel to Job that Job thinks they must be profiting from denouncing him in public. They must be having some sort of benefit from being so cruel to me. Job has a very skewed view. In fact, so do the three friends. Then in this section, starting in verse 6, Job again lays his problems at the feet of God. Job thinks God has made him to be ridiculed in the eyes of the public. It says, people that walk by will just spit on me as they go by. Job feels like he's at the wrong end of an ultimate insult. Steve, what do you see in this passage? I see just a very discouraged man in Job at this point. And his discouragement is biasing his viewpoint of God and the world.

Job 17:10-16 And Lost Hope

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Well, I think we're seeing here that he sees himself as an object of mockery and that his dignity has been stripped away before the people that are observing him from the village and the city that's there. Suffering often brings not only the physical pain, but also relational rupture and loss of social standing. Sometimes when people are going through this type of suffering, then they're looked upon as someone to not be dealt with, stay away from, don't go visit them, don't go look at them because there's something wrong, because they have done something wrong. They're not in a right standing with God. Therefore, we don't want to have anything to do with them. That's a little bit, I think, of what Job is talking about here. He's being despised by the community because of his suffering. And I think that we should take caution in that. That once again, the ideas that his friends have that God punishes the wicked, Job is being punished. Therefore, he has done something wicked against God is a wrong premise on their part. Job is innocent. There's nothing that he has done that has caused this infliction to be on him. It's being inflicted by Satan. So we just should take a cautionary tale from all of this, is that we also on the outside who are not suffering should not necessarily look at situations of other people and what they're in and come to a conclusion because it might not be the right conclusion. And we ourselves might have a skewed view of God and what is happening, and we should be cautious about that. We should be cautious of coming to conclusions lest they be the wrong conclusion.

Purpose Even When Death Feels Near

SPEAKER_00 10:39

In this next section, we're going to see Job continuing his response to his friend. And in this section, Job is getting very direct, telling his friends some very plain, direct things that they're being very unwise. I'm starting reading in Job 17, 10, but come again, all of you now, for I do not find a wise man among you. My days are past, my plans are torn apart, the wishes of my heart. They make night into day, saying, The light is near in the presence of darkness. If I hope for Sheol as my home, I make my bed in the darkness. If I call to the grave, you are my father, to the maggot, my mother and my sister, where then is my hope? And who looks at my hope? Will it go down with me to Sheol? Shall we together go down into the dust? In this section, he's speaking as if he's ready to die. He says, My days are past. He speaks of Sheol. Sheol is the grave. He says, the Sheol was my father and my mother. He speaks of going to the pit, to the worms, to the dust. In verses 15 and 16, that last part we just read, he has no hope in thinking that he's ready to die. All of us have a time that we're going to face death, and Job is convinced it's now. Job thinks he's going to die and that he has no purpose in life. Steve, one thing that's sure for all of us is that we will die on earth, assuming that the Lord doesn't come back first. So we face death. All of us that came before us have faced death. Can a Christian truly say, if we were at this point in Job's life, I'm looking death in the eye and I have no purpose in life? Can a Christian truly say I have no purpose in life?

SPEAKER_01 12:26

No, I don't think they can say that because we're made in God's image. We are imagers of God. We've been made with a purpose. Once we realize that the purpose is to worship God and to have a relationship with Him, then we have the right perspective of God is in control of our lives and that we should do whatever God wants us to do. Job here in verse 11, he says, My days are past, my plans are torn apart, the wishes of my heart. He's basically saying, all the plans that I had, the dreams that I had, they're all gone. They're not going to happen. Well, maybe we should take something from that, in that our lives are ones that are in God's hands, they're in God's control. We need to be aware that the plans that we make might not necessarily come to fruition. We need to understand that we should be in agreement with what God has planned for our lives and not necessarily all the plans and dreams that we have. Now we're going to see at the end of the story that God restores everything to Job. He is once again blessed. But again, Job is at the depths of his despair. He's ready to die. So this all skews his outlook on life.

Repair Relationships Before It’s Late

Job 18 Begins Bildad Attacks

SPEAKER_00 13:41

His outlook is rather skewed. He thinks he's going to die. He's facing death, and he thinks he has no purpose. My Christian friend, I submit that because we are made in the image of God, we always have a purpose. Even if we know our days on earth are short, we still have a purpose. God has put us here for a reason. We are to stay faithful until we go see Him. Even when we can do nothing else, as long as we're conscious, we can praise God and pray. We can be a faithful witness unto the end to those around us. We always have a purpose in life. All of us are going to die here again unless the Lord comes back. All of us are going to face death. We all die of our last disease. A Christian should be never to the point where they say, I have no purpose in life. I've seen people get to the end of their life thinking they have no purpose, and their whole demeanor changes, as opposed to the Christians that realize there's been a purpose in life and that we still have a purpose even in our last days. Even when we can do nothing else, we are still made in the image of God and we have a purpose. He has put us here for a reason. Job here thinks he is about to die. Many times I've seen Steve, people go to funerals, tell themselves, you know, I wish I would have gone to see this person sooner while they were still alive. I was just too busy. They make a commitment, well, I'll do better. And then after the funeral, they go back to the regularness of life. They go back to the same busy work and they don't spend the time with people around them while they're still alive. My friends, these three friends should have gone to see Job while he was not suffering, while he was still in good health. Don't wait until it's too late to try to make those amends and go see the people around you. Christians should not let petty squabbles in life get in the way of being friends with people. Jesus told us to settle differences quickly with people, not hold on grudges. If we have differences to drop what we're doing and make friends immediately. Of all people, Christians should not only get rid of our grudges and not carry those to our graves, but Paul said in 1 Corinthians 6 7 that we should allow ourselves to be cheated and accept wrong rather than take other Christians to court. So we should not wait until our friends are on their deathbed to go to them and say, I should have spent more time with my family, or I wish I would have made friends with them before they died. We should do those things now. We should settle those accounts now. We should not wait until we're facing death in the eye. Now, moving on to chapter 18, we see Job's old friend Bildad, Bildad the Shoehite. And Steve, he's still a shoehite, which means he's still really short. He's not more than a shoe high. He hasn't grown any since then. And we see not only that, but his ideas haven't grown any. They're still very small, very false ideas. So Steve, can you read the first four verses of Job chapter 18?

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Then Bildad the Shoehite responded, How long will you hunt for words? Show understanding, and then we can talk. Why are we regarded as animals as stupid in your eyes? You who tear yourself in your anger, should the earth be abandoned for your sake or the rock moved from its place?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Bildad here says Job is hunting around for words, but he's not saying anything understandable. Bildad insults Job. He's getting more and more blunt, more and more insulting, more and more really just wrong in how he's speaking to Job, insulting, saying that if Job says anything that shows intelligence, then he would respond. This is now an insulting debate. It's not a helping Job. He's using biting ridicule, a terrible thing to say to a man that is suffering, that has just lost his family. In verse 3, Bildad says Job is treating the friends as if they were animals. In reality, it was the friends who compared Job to a donkey back in chapter 11, verse 12. Bildad had referred to Job as not having any understanding. Here, he's even worse. His friends are being hypocritical. They were the ones that were calling Job like an animal, and now they're accusing Job of doing the same thing. They're very hypocritical. What does the New Testament tell us about being hypocritical?

SPEAKER_01 18:33

He called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs. He said on the outside, you put forth this appearance that you're very pious and that you are God-fearing and that you worship God, but on the inside, you're really corrupt and you have a black heart. That's probably a little bit harsher than what Jesus put it, but we had that contrast there. They were hypocritical in the way that they acted. Whenever we are to go to a brother, we are not to be judgmental from the standpoint of not judging ourselves first. We are not to go and be critical of the speck in their eye until we get the log out of our eye ourselves. The response that's going on here from his friends is not a pastoral response. It's one of insensitivity. They're offended and have hurt feelings, and striking back out to Job viciously, they continue to look at the situation as black and white, and they're not giving any type of leeway for the possibility of Job being innocent. They continue just to pound on him that he has done something wrong. They should actually look at that and step back. Why is Job responding back to us the way he is? Why is he calling us the things that he's calling us? Maybe it's because he's innocent. Maybe he's offended at the approach that we've been taking, but they don't take that. Bildad comes back and basically just insults him and says, you're wrong and you're wrong for pushing back on us whenever we're right, that you have done something wrong.

Retribution Theology Under The Microscope

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Hypocrisy is one of the major sins that's spelled out in the New Testament. The Gospels tell us that Jesus said to take the log out of our own eye before we try to take the speck out of the other person's eye. One of the major accusations that Jesus made against the Pharisees were that they were hypocritical in the way they administered the law. So here, Job's friends were being hypocritical. They were saying things against Job that they were themselves guilty of. We need to be very careful that we don't do the same type of thing. Now, in the next section, starting at 18.5, there's a very descriptive section. Bildad is going to describe the fate of a wicked person in very vivid detail. Now, this is, again, Bildad's rather false view of the wicked person. It's kind of a half-truth. But as before, he only considers that only wicked people are going to suffer. Bildad has a very mechanistic view of the world. Good deeds get rewarded and evil deeds get punished, and that's it. He thinks the world is a very predictable and based on our behavior. He leaves no room for God's grace or mercy. But again, this section is quite vivid in the way he describes his opinion of how the wicked person gets treated. I'm starting in 18.5. Indeed, the light of the wicked goes out, and the spark from his fire does not shine. The light in his tent is darkened and his lamp goes out above him. His vigorous stride is shortened, and his own plan brings him down. For he is thrown into the net by his own feet, and he steps on the webbing. A snare seizes him by the heel, and a trap. Trap snaps shut on him. A noose for him is hidden in the ground, and a trap for him on the pathway. All around, sudden terrors frighten him and harass him at every step. His strength is famished, and disaster is ready at his side. It devours parts of his skin. The firstborn of death devours his limbs. He is torn from the security of his tent, and they march him before the kings of terrors. Nothing of his dwells in his tent. Brimstone is scattered on his home. His roots are dried below, and his branch withers above. The memory of him perishes from the earth, and he has no name abroad. He is driven from light into darkness and chased from the inhabited world. He has no offspring or descendants among his people, nor any survivor where he resided. Those in the west are appalled at his fate, and those in the east are seized with horror. Certainly these are the dwellings of the wicked, and this is the place of him who does not know God. Now, this was very descriptive language, and it's a very colorful description of Bildad's opinion of a wicked person. So, Steve, some of those verses have Bildad's view of God working in the world. Is that accurate? Does God work like the way he described here? He described these traps. The wicked person just walks along and God's gonna trap him suddenly, and it's inevitable that he goes through all these things. Is that an accurate view of how God treats the wicked in our day?

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Just a few verses before Bildad goes into this diatrab of retribution theology. He says in verse two, show understanding and then we can talk. That goes to them coming back to Job after they've been very critical of him and telling them, you need to show understanding of our position and what we've been telling you. And then we can talk, we can have a conversation. And right after that, now he goes into this very vitriolic condemnation of Job and he misses the mark because Job's real trouble involves his relationship with God and his friends rather than the material circumstances. He focuses on the externals of what's happening to wicked people, looking at the outside. Bildod is not doing anything to look within Job and his heart to see what is the relationship that Job is having with God. Is it something that is there? He's just looking around at the external part of Job's suffering and then coming to this conclusion of how God reacts. He sets traps for people, he sets snares for them, for them to walk into. And when they walk into it, then he's going to entrap them. All of this idea that God is out to get people who sin against him. And Bildot is doing nothing at all to look at the relationship that Job actually has with God. He's only concerned with number one, his hurt feelings that started this chapter. And number two, that Job continues to be guilty. That's why he's being punished, and Job won't succumb to Bildod's theory that he's doing something wrong. Therefore, that's why he is suffering, is because he's being punished.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Well, that's exactly what he's saying. He has a very, again, behavior-based, mechanistic view of how God reacts to the world. And it's one of these things that it has an element of truth to it. I mean, it's generally true that wicked people are going to suffer, but it's not always true. God is indeed long-suffering, and he doesn't punish wicked people immediately. If we just look around, we see God allowing wicked people to do wicked things all the time, some of them being wicked for quite a long time now. Verse 11, it is generally not true that wicked person, it says, has quote, terrors frightened him on every side. I see wicked people don't seem to be very frightened of doing wicked things. And the next verse, verse 12, it says, His strength is famished. But we know that wicked people have enough strength to keep doing wicked things continually. Thank you very much. So Bildad is trying to paint this picture, a very simplistic picture of Job's condition that takes away both the sovereignty of God and the long-suffering of God, and add to that even the grace and mercy of God. God is indeed sovereign in that he can decide to make Job an example of somebody that's going to hold their faith in the midst of suffering if God wants to do that. And that's God's sovereign pleasure to do that. He can also be long-suffering and not punish a wicked person immediately, giving them time to repent. In the end, we can be assured that God will right every wrong and he will reward every faithful person. We're assured of that, but not in this life. It's not going to all be in this life. The second part of verse 21, Bildad concludes by saying that Job doesn't even know God. He says at the very end of this chapter, Bildad is not hesitating to be very blunt and very insulting with his language to Job. And Steve, this is just a very sad picture of how Bildad and the other two friends are treating this man Job. They've been sucked into what they're viewing as kind of a theological debate about this technical doctrinal point, and they're not being compassionate to Job and his feelings.

Next Time Job Answers Bildad

SPEAKER_01 27:50

Suffering believers need advisors who are going to understand the interior dimensions of their faith and not merely the external consequences. And that's exactly what Bildod is looking at. He's just looking at the external circumstances, not the internal.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

We'll see Job's response to Bildad next time as we continue to reason through the book of Job. Thank you so much for watching and listening.