Job 24:1 - Meaning and Application

Job’s friends had been sure that wicked people would soon fall, even if they prospered for a time. Job says, “No, that is not so.” Even though times are not hidden from the Almighty, those who know him do not immediately see his day, Job 24:1. God sees every age and event. Past times are not hidden from his judgment (Ecclesiastes 3:15), present times are not hidden from his providence, his wise care over the world (Matthew 10:29), and future times are not hidden from his foreknowledge, his full knowledge ahead of time (Acts 15:18).

Because God rules the world, we can be sure he notices what happens in it. Bad times are not hidden from him, even when bad people say, “He has left the earth” (Psalm 94:6-7). Every person’s times are in his hand and under his eye, so he can make wicked people’s lives bitter in this world. He knows the exact time of each person’s death. So if wicked people die before they are punished fully, we cannot say they escaped by surprise. God saw it ahead of time, and more than that, he ordered it.

Before Job asks why wicked people prosper, he first declares God’s complete knowledge. In a similar way, another prophet first stresses God’s righteousness (Jeremiah 12:1), another his holiness (Habakkuk 1:13), and another his goodness to his own people (Psalm 73:1). We must hold to these general truths, even when we struggle to fit them with what we see in life.

Job also says that those who know God do not yet see “his day,” that is, the day when God acts for them or judges open sinners. That was Job’s own complaint in Job 23:8, when he could not see God appear to defend him. It is also the day spoken of in Psalm 37:13, when God judges the wicked. We believe that day will come, but we do not yet see it, because it lies ahead and its signs are hidden.

This part of Providence is a mystery, but there is a reason for it, and we will understand it later. Even the wisest people do not yet see why judgment is delayed. God uses the delay to test their faith and patience and to stir up their prayers for his kingdom to come. They are to cry to him day and night for that, Luke 18:7.

To prove that wicked people often prosper, Job points to two kinds of sinners that everyone can see thriving in evil. The first are tyrants, and all who do wrong while pretending to act with law and authority. It is a sad sight, often seen under the sun, when wickedness sits in the place of judgment (Ecclesiastes 3:16), when the oppressed weep and no one helps them while power is on the side of their oppressors (Ecclesiastes 4:1), and when justice is twisted violently (Ecclesiastes 5:8).

These people seize their neighbors’ land, even land passed down from their fathers. They move boundary stones, pretending they were wrongly placed, and so they steal what belongs to others, Job 24:2. Then they try to make the theft look lawful for their children. God had forbidden this in the law of Moses (Deuteronomy 19:14), and he placed a curse on it (Deuteronomy 27:17). In our day, forging or destroying property deeds is much the same thing.

They also strip people of their goods, while claiming to act fairly. They take away flocks as though they were lost or forfeited, and they feed on them like the rich man who took the poor man’s ewe lamb (2 Samuel 12:4). If a poor orphan has only one donkey, they find some excuse to take it. If a widow has only one ox to work her small plot of land, they may seize it as a pledge for a small debt or unpaid rent, even if it was all she had. God calls himself the Father of the fatherless and the judge of widows. So those who fail to protect and help them are not his friends, and those who oppress them will answer to him as enemies.

These tyrants also abuse people personally, Job 24:4. If they meet the poor on the road, they mislead them or drive them aside. The poor and needy have to hide from them, because that is the only way to stay safe. They enjoy making a mockery of people and deceiving them, especially poor people. They push them away from any chance of help, threaten to treat them as vagrants, force them to flee, and then laugh at their misery.

Some understand the cruel acts in Job 24:9-10 as the work of these same oppressors under the cover of law. They “pluck the fatherless from the breast,” meaning they make children fatherless and then motherless too. They kill the father, break the mother’s heart, and leave the children to starve and die. Pharaoh and Herod did this kind of thing when they killed children (Exodus 1:22; Matthew 2:16). Scripture also speaks of children being brought forth for slaughter (Hosea 9:13). Such people are truly inhuman when they can enjoy sucking innocent blood.

They also take pledges from the poor and so strip away what little the helpless have. Some read this as meaning they even take the poor themselves as pledges. That may be what is meant when they pluck the fatherless from the breast, making them slaves, as in Nehemiah 5:5. Cruelty to the poor is great wickedness and cries out for judgment. Those who show no mercy to people under their power will themselves receive judgment without mercy.

Another sign of their cruelty is that they take away even food and clothing. Their extortion squeezes people so hard that they go naked, Job 24:10, and may die from exposure. If a hungry poor family has gathered a sheaf of grain to make a small cake so they can eat and die, even that is taken from them. These oppressors seem pleased to watch people perish from hunger while they themselves eat their fill.

Job also says they are harsh to the laborers they hire. They not only fail to pay wages, though “the laborer deserves his wages,” a very serious sin (James 5:4), but they do not even give them food and drink. Some read Job 24:10 this way, “Those who carry sheaves are hungry.” This fits with Job 24:11, where those who make oil within their walls and work hard at the winepresses still suffer thirst. That is worse than muzzling the ox that treads the grain. Such masters forget that they have a Master in heaven, who will not approve of withholding life’s needed support from servants and laborers.

It is not only among poor country people, but in the cities too, that we see the tears of the oppressed (Job 24:12). People groan from the city, where rich merchants and traders are often as cruel to poor debtors as landlords in the country are to poor tenants. In cities, such cruel acts are more easily noticed than in hidden places in the countryside, and the wronged have a better chance to seek justice. Even so, oppressors there fear neither the limits of the law nor the honest blame of their neighbors. The oppressed groan and cry out like wounded men, but they cannot help themselves, because the oppressors are harsh and deaf to their cries.

He also speaks of robbers, those who do wrong by open force, like the bands of the Sabeans and Chaldeans, who had recently plundered him. He does not name them directly, so he will not seem partial to his own case or judge people, as we often do, by how they treat us. Among the Arabians, the children of the east, the people of Job’s own region, there were those who lived by theft and plunder, raiding their neighbors and robbing travelers. Their character, their trade, and the harm they do are described here (Job 24:5-8).

Their character is like wild donkeys in the desert, untamed, hard to control, and unreasonable, like Ishmael’s character (Gen 16:12), fierce and wild, with no real restraint from law or government (Jer 2:23, Jer 2:24). They choose the desert for their home so they can live without rules and away from other people, and so they can do more harm. The desert is indeed a fitting place for such wild people (Job 39:6). But no desert can put people out of God’s sight or beyond his power.

Their trade is stealing, and they make a living by taking what belongs to others. They have chosen it as their work because it brings in more and comes easier than honest labor. They pursue it carefully and closely, going out to it as a worker goes out to his job (Psa 104:23). They are diligent at it, rising early for prey. If a traveler starts out early, they are out just as early to rob him. They live by it as a man lives by his trade. The wilderness, meaning the roads through it, provides food for them and their children. They support themselves and their families by highway robbery, and they bless themselves in it without shame, pity, or conscience, acting as if it were honest gain, like Ephraim (Hos 12:7, Hos 12:8).

Their work brings great harm to the country. They do not only rob travelers, but they also raid their neighbors and reap grain from the field (Job 24:6). That is, they enter other people’s land, cut their grain, and carry it off as if it were their own. Even the wicked gather in the vintage, and that is their wickedness. Or, as it can be read, they gather the vintage of the wicked, so one wicked person becomes a punishment to another. What the wicked got by extortion, which is their own kind of stealing, these robbers take from them by stealing in their own way. In this way, the plunderers are often plundered themselves (Isa 33:1).

The misery of those who fall into their hands is terrible (Job 24:7, Job 24:8). They make the naked, whom they have stripped and left without clothes, lie down on cold nights without covering. The poor are soaked by the rain from the mountains, and, with no shelter, they cling to the rock and are glad to find a cave or hollow in it to protect them from the weather. Eliphaz had accused Job of this kind of cruelty, assuming that God would not have stripped him unless he had first stripped the naked of their clothing (Job 22:6). Job is saying that there really were people guilty of these very crimes, people he was being wrongly accused of. Yet they prospered and succeeded in their wrongdoing, and the curse they brought on themselves worked unseen. Job thinks it is far more fair to reason as he does, from open and obvious wickedness to future punishment, than to reason as Eliphaz did, from present trouble to hidden past sin.

The fact that these oppressors and robbers go unpunished is summed up in one phrase, God does not immediately charge them with folly (Job 24:12). That means he does not at once bring judgment on them for their crimes or make them examples to all people, so their foolishness is made plain. A person who gets riches by wrong means will end as a fool (Jer 17:11). But while he prospers, he may pass for a wise man, until God says, "You fool, this night your soul will be required of you" (Luk 12:20).