Job 24: Job Asks Why the Wicked Are Not Punished
“Why doesn’t the Almighty bring the wicked to judgment? Why must the godly wait for him in vain? Evil people steal land by moving the boundary markers. They steal livestock and put them in their own pastures. They take the orphan’s donkey and demand the widow’s ox as security for a loan. The poor are pushed off the path; the needy must hide together for safety.”
If you thought slum lords and loan sharks preying on the poor are a recent phenomenon, you’re quite wrong. When God was giving Moses the commandments for the Israelites, He kept emphasizing on His concern for orphans and widows. In that culture, women without men to protect them were vulnerable to all kinds of abuses, and orphans might be kidnapped and enslaved. Grasping rich men might even seize a widow’s ox or an orphan’s donkey as surety for a loan and never release them. If a rich man was traveling along a narrow path, the poor would have to get to the side and hope they wouldn’t fall and be injured. Poor people frequently found themselves huddling together for protection.
The Bible is full of assurances about God’s care for widows and orphans. Exodus 22:22 “You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.” Deuteronomy 10:18 “He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.” Psalm 146:9 “The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.”
“Like wild donkeys in the wilderness, the poor must spend all their time looking for food, searching even in the desert for food for their children. They harvest a field they do not own,
and they glean in the vineyards of the wicked. All night they lie naked in the cold, without clothing or covering. They are soaked by mountain showers, and they huddle against the rocks for want of a home.” Homelessness is also as old as humanity, particularly wicked humanity. Few things are worse than suffering from starvation and cold. Even though God has ordained that anyone taking a cloak as surety must return it at night to keep the debtor warm, wicked loan sharks don’t care. And these people do even worse things.
“The wicked snatch a widow’s child from her breast, taking the baby as security for a loan. The poor must go about naked, without any clothing. They harvest food for others while they themselves are starving. They press out olive oil without being allowed to taste it, and they tread in the winepress as they suffer from thirst. The groans of the dying rise from the city, and the wounded cry for help, yet God ignores their moaning.” Wait a minute, Job! God depends on people to do His perfect will. God is not ignoring the moaning of the poor; it’s callous self-absorbed individuals who refuse to recognize their plight. Ironically, those who most frequently blame God are generally the very ones who should be solving the problems about which they are complaining.
“Wicked people rebel against the light. They refuse to acknowledge its ways or stay in its paths. The murderer rises in the early dawn to kill the poor and needy; at night he is a thief. The adulterer waits for the twilight, saying, ‘No one will see me then.’ He hides his face so no one will know him. Thieves break into houses at night and sleep in the daytime. They are not acquainted with the light. The black night is their morning. They ally themselves with the terrors of the darkness.”
Wicked people have always embraced darkness. John 1:5 tells us, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.” John 3:19-21 “And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants.”
1 John 1:5-7 “This is the message we heard from Jesus and now declare to you: God is light, and there is no darkness in him at all. So we are lying if we say we have fellowship with God but go on living in spiritual darkness; we are not practicing the truth. But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.”
“But they disappear like foam down a river. Everything they own is cursed, and they are afraid to enter their own vineyards. The grave consumes sinners just as drought and heat consume snow. Their own mothers will forget them. Maggots will find them sweet to eat. No one will remember them. Wicked people are broken like a tree in the storm. They cheat the woman who has no son to help her. They refuse to help the needy widow.” Job trusts that God will eventually deal with the wicked, even those who cheat widows and refuse to help them.
“God, in his power, drags away the rich. They may rise high, but they have no assurance of life. They may be allowed to live in security, but God is always watching them. And though they are great now, in a moment they will be gone like all others, cut off like heads of grain.
Can anyone claim otherwise? Who can prove me wrong?” In earlier generations more familiar with Latin, this phrase was commonly quoted: “Sic transit gloria mundi,” or “So passes the glory of the world.” Worldly glory and power are fleeting. Many of the ancient kingdoms that surrounded Israel at one point were wiped out by other nations who also later fell apart. Two hundred years ago, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem describing a long-dead ruler.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Even though Job is frustrated, depressed, and discouraged, he still believes that God WILL deal with the wicked, although he wishes God would deal with them swiftly! But wickedness carries the seeds of its own reward with it, for the longer someone practices wickedness, the more they cut themselves off from God and everything belonging to Him-light, life, and love. May we choose to follow God, remembering that 1 John 1:8-9 tells us, “If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” We cannot clean up ourselves, but God can.
PRAYER: Father God, thank You for loving us and caring for us. Lord, help us to follow hard after You all the days of our lives and to allow You to cleanse us completely. In the mighty and precious Name of King Jesus. Amen.
Burunche's Blog 
Leave a comment