Job 9:20 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

If I justify myself— If I call myself righteous, my mouth shall condemn me: if innocent, it shall prove me perverse; Job 9:21. Innocent, or being innocent, yet would I not make trial; nor would my soul be less weary of life. Houbigant and Schultens. The meaning of the 21st verse is sufficiently cleared by the 22nd. Though I were perfect, yet would I not know my soul, or life; i.e. "I would make no account of it,—I would despise it; (as it follows) for I should not think this perfection any security either for a long life or a prosperous; much less, were I never so perfect, should I flatter myself with the vain hope that you would instil into me, of being delivered from this deep distress wherein I am now plunged, and from which nothing but a miracle can restore me. For, one thing I have learned from experience, that God destroys the perfect as well as the wicked." And of this he gives a demonstration in the following verse: If the scourge slay suddenly, &c. i.e. "In times of common calamity, the righteous and the wicked perish for the most part indiscriminately." This is apparently the general course of Providence; and if any exceptions be made, they are rare and extraordinary, by the special appointment and direction of the great Lord and ruler of the world, for extraordinary reasons of which he alone is judge. But no wise man would ever build any great hopes upon these extraordinary and excepted cases; at least, they can never be a just ground for confidence and assurance. This seems plainly to be the sense of Job in this matter; for, it is very observable, that he builds his arguments on the general course of Providence; the others argue chiefly from the extraordinary exceptions to it. They had seen a good man now and then remarkably delivered; they had seen many a wicked man remarkably punished. These remarkable things, as they are the most sensible demonstrations of a present Providence, led Job's friends, whose thoughts were full of them, to push the matter of an exactly remunerating Providence in this life too far; so as scarcely to allow a good man to be finally unhappy in the present world, or a wicked man prosperous upon the whole. And I suppose their own prosperity, which they were but too fond, perhaps, of ascribing to the blessing of God upon their piety, (for, except their hard censures of Job, there is nothing but what shews them to have been good religious persons in the main,) might help to confirm them in this notion; for it is an old observation, that we borrow our very thoughts and reasonings sometimes from the state and temper that we are in. Job therefore, on the other hand, being in a state of the deepest distress, we need not wonder that his thoughts were black and cloudy; that, even with the consciousness of an upright heart and righteous life, he could neither enjoy himself by day with cheerful thoughts, nor prevent the dreadfullest dreams by night, especially considering the obscure dispensation under which he lived. See chap. Job 7:13-14. The same melancholic disposition it was, no doubt, which made him dwell upon the general course of Providence, without allowing for those extraordinary and excepted cases, wherein God, as it were, makes bare his arm, to deliver a good man from distress, and of which he himself was in the end a noble instance. Peters. And we must never forget, that Job lived under a dispensation far inferior to ours. Schultens renders the 23rd verse, If the scourge slay suddenly, it [the scourge] will laugh at the trial of the innocent. The figure is bold, but not too bold for the elevated poetry of this book.