The great design of the book of Job, leaving out all detail and the undercurrents of the story, appears to be twofold: (1) to show that a good man, and because he is good, may yet receive at the hand of the God he loves and serves the severest discipline of pain and sorrow; (2) to illustrate that, however high the moral level of a man may be, he needs further sanctification, and specially that nothing avails before God, nothing has reached its necessary standard, without great humiliation and a very deep sense of sin.
I. There is no doubt that Job was a good man. He was a man of prayer. He had attained a spiritual knowledge far beyond his age, and he had many direct revelations from heaven. His want was a clearer insight into his own heart; juster views of the holiness of God; a truer estimate of sin, its nature and its vileness; a more personal conviction of the wickedness which, nothwithstanding all his virtues, still lived and reigned in him.
II. We see in the history of Job God's method by which He gives penitence to a good, but not yet humbled, man: the school of suffering, the greatnesses of His own majesty and power, the inworking of the convicting Spirit, revelations of Jesus, and the ministrations of His messenger.
III. Why is it needful for a good man to say, "I have sinned"? (1) Because it is true; (2) because it places him in a right relation to God; (3) because it puts Jesus in His proper place. The Cross is the centre of God's universe. Everything revolves around the Cross. Everything must minister to the Cross.
J. Vaughan, Sermons,7th series, p. 104.
References: Job 7:20. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 113; Expositor,3rd series, vol. iv., p. 284; Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Genesis to Proverbs,p. 121.Job 8:4. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iv., p. 129.