Chapter 27

Job continues:

Job vows to continue in righteousness despite his suffering.  He refuses to compromise just because he is being punished anyway.  He won't say "I might as well drink all night, God is punishing me anyway". 

Last night, I was feeling very keyed up, bored, unable to settle on anything.  I decided on some "medicine" to calm my mind, though I had sworn off that medicine.  And...if I'd stopped with one, I might have been fine, and not feel guilty today.  But I didn't stop, I never stop once I start.  Unlike Job, I compromised my principles. (This was written in March 2019.  Things got worse before I finally changed my ways.  As I write this in March of 2020, I have been alcohol free more than 16 months.)

The point of the first 6 verses here are that Job still doggedly, stubbornly, and certainly maintains that he has done nothing to bring on this kind of rebuke from God, and says he will not under any circumstances let the apparent unfairness that now characterizes his life provoke him to rebel against God.  This is the attitude that ranks Job with Noah and Daniel.  Job does not react to God's will with rebellion, though all around him become his accusers.  Just like Noah when the whole world laughed at him, and like Daniel - a slave in a victorious nation of the worst sort of sinners.

Possible FB post, need a key verse from Job 27:1-6

In 13-23 Job describes how God operates.  He seems to be saying that it isn't always the evil person himself that God punishes, but his heritage - his offspring and descendants.  It is like the "patriarch" who decides to be an evil man and amass riches and gather to himself sort of "curses" his own house for generations yet to come.  This flies in the face of "the soul that sins, it shall die".  Unless we are to understand from this that God's ultimate justice is in the hereafter.  At that point the saved are always rich, and the unsaved will burn forever.  But on this earth, this corrupt and sinful earth laboring under the consequences of God's curse, it works a bit differently.  Physical consequences are not immediate but they are still certain, even on this physical ball of dirt created exclusively as an environment for physical man as opposed to the spiritual realm - the third heaven if you will, which was all that existed before creation.  In eternity - when all has been made perfect again - this underlying principle of good rewarded and evil punished will reign once again.