Theme: The Redeemer’s Appearing in the Flesh
In this week’s lessons, we look at the amazing trust that Job had in his coming Redeemer.
Scripture: Job 19:25-27
So far this week we have only said that Job believed in God, personally to be sure. He did not have a remote, abstract, unconcerned deity to worship, like so many do. He believed in a living, powerful, compassionate and vindicating God. But so did many of the Old Testament figures. By definition, any truly godly person believes in a personal, powerful, living and vindicating God.
What is really remarkable is what appears next, the second line of Job’s confession: “and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.” This is nothing less than faith in the coming incarnation of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. True, Job may have been thinking of the day of judgment and thus of what we would today call Christ’s second coming. But that is largely incidental. What is truly remarkable is that he expected an appearance of his Redeemer in the flesh.
Where did he ever get that idea? It must have come by revelation, of course, but not necessarily in any new or special way to Job. In essence this was the revelation given to Adam and Eve back in the Garden of Eden, when they had sinned and God promised a Redeemer in the context of his judgment upon Satan.
“And I will put enmitybetween you and the woman,and between your offspring and hers;he will crush your head,and you will strike his heel” (Gen. 3:15).
This was the first announcement of the gospel, which is why Bible students call it the protoevangelium. It is what Adam and Eve believed, and it is why they were saved. They were saved as we are, not by any works that they had done or might have done but by believing what God had to say about the Redeemer who was to come. They looked forward. We look back. This faith must have been passed on through their godly line to such patriarchs as Seth, Enoch, Methuselah and Noah, and to such later believers as Abraham and others.
In Job, we learn that this early, almost prehistoric faith had spread beyond even the immediate family of Abraham to a godly eastern cattle breeder and that he no less than the others was looking forward to Jesus who should come. Isn’t that remarkable? And important?
It is important because it says in clear terms that in all the long history of the human race there has never been any other way of salvation than by the work of Jesus, who crushed Satan by his death, though it was by his death, he being thus “stricken” in the process. Paul affirmed this for his young co-worker Timothy when he wrote, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men—the testimony given in its proper time” (1 Tim. 2:5).
Study Questions:
How do we know that Job expected to see his redeemer in the flesh?
Where did Job’s faith come from?
How was Job looking forward to Christ?
Prayer: Give praise to God that he has indeed sent his Son to be your only Redeemer and Mediator, the one who was stricken for your sins so that you can be forgiven.
