When someone thinks of Job, the book of Job from the Old Testament of the Bible, maybe he doesn’t think of “justification.”  I’ve taught through the whole book twice, once fast and the second fairly slowly.  Recently I was reading through it the second time this year, moving through the Bible twice in this year, and the word, “justify,” stuck out this time to me.

When I taught slowly through Job, I taught the theme was the security of God.  God kept Job.  Job passed the test because of God.  I taught that Job was about God and what He did, not about the person, Job.  When we look at the names of the books of the Bible, we can think about the men of the Bible.  However, the whole Bible is about God.

The Hebrew word, tsadek, that is translated, “just” or the forms of it, “justify,” “justified,” etc. is found at least twenty-eight times in Job.  In this post or maybe a series of two of them, I want to look at all of those usages and how they fit into the book of Job.  The word refers to something that is according to a standard that is of the nature and the will of God, so it is just, right, or righteous.  It doesn’t fall short of the glory of God.  The word applies to God.  The standard for right or righteousness is God.  Whether someone is righteous or just compares to God, not a human standard.

A big part of Job is whether Job is right with God.  You could ask, Is he saved?  To be saved, you have to stand before God as righteous.  Apparently, Job was righteous, but not according to everyone.  How righteous did he need to be?  Whatever trials he went through, was it because he was not righteous or because he was?  These are important questions.  Everyone needs to think about them still.  Here’s a last one.  If God is the standard, His righteousness, how is Job or anyone else to be justified before God?  This brings in the doctrine of justification.  How is someone justified?  Churches and religions differ as to the answers to these questions, and there is only one right answer.

I’m going to assume that you know, that in the story of Job (chapters 1-2), he is put through one of the most difficult trials ever for any human being in all history, losing all his children, his wealth, and his health.  God allows Satan to put Job through this test to prove whether he’s really a righteous man.  Satan says, no.  God says, yes.  While going through these severe circumstances, certain so-called friends of Job give him speeches, also casting doubt on his righteousness.

In Job 4, one of the friends, Eliphaz, talks to Job and argues essentially that people go through things like Job out of judgment for their sin.  It had to be his sin.  As further evidence, Eliphaz recounts in verses 12-16 that a spirit had given him (we know none sent by God gave him the message) the following message (verse 17), which is also the first usage of tsadek in the book of Job:

Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?

It’s the word, “just.”  Through the use of these questions, the message to Job is that he shouldn’t be justifying himself before God.  Even though no angelic spirit communicated or even would communicate those questions to Eliphaz — you can’t be more just than God — it introduces the subject matter.

Job speaks in Job 6 and says in verse 29:

Return, I pray you, let it not be iniquity; yea, return again, my righteousness is in it.