Job 9:3 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

If he will contend— To contend is a judicial term, and signifies properly to wage law. To answer him one of a thousand, signifies to justify himself for one of the thousand crimes which shall be charged against him. Though the uncharitableness and reproaches of Job's friends transported him into some passionate and bold expressions of his own innocence and integrity, yet he no sooner perceived that they took advantage of those expressions to charge him with presumption, as if God had unjustly afflicted him, but he made haste to free himself from that imputation. How should a man be just with God? and he who is best prepared for an account with him, can pay him nothing but his own coin; and that, rather laid up in a napkin, than husbanded and employed as it ought to have been. If he could offer him a good thought, an honest purpose and intention, he had received them from him, and, it may be, wanted courage to improve and execute them; and so the world had no more fruit of them, than if his heart had been as wicked as his neighbour's. So that, when he has said the best he can for himself, there will be no abiding the judgment which must still be deprecated; mercy must be implored; no satisfaction or payment pretended; but an entire release and pardon begged and relied upon.