But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him shall mourn.
"Flesh" and "soul" describe the whole man. Scripture rests the hope of a future life, not on the inherent immortality of the soul, but on the restoration of the body with the soul. In the unseen world, Job, in a gloomy frame, anticipates man shall be limited to the thought of his own misery. Pain is, by personification, from our feelings while alive, attributed to the flesh and soul as if the man could feel in his body when dead. It is the dead in general, not the wicked, who are meant here.
Remarks:
(1) Three features of man's frail state here are brought forward-his birth of woman, implying at once his infirmity (1) Three features of man's frail state here are brought forward-his birth of woman, implying at once his infirmity and his proneness to sin; next, his fewness of days; lastly, his few days being full of trouble (Job 14:1). These considerations should abase our pride, moderate our earthly hopes, and lead us to seek our portion in the blessed world where frailty corruption, sorrow and death have no place.
(2) How vain it is for man, so constituted by his fallen nature, to dream of justification in his own righteousness, if God should enter into judgment with him! (Job 14:3.) Man, coming out of the unclean, can never be clean in himself (Job 14:4). But man can be faultlessly clean by being washed in "the fountain opened for uncleanness" (Zechariah 13:1; Hebrews 9:14).
(3) The number of each man's days and months is accurately defined with God (Job 14:5). We know not whether the days left to us be many or few. Our prayer, therefore, ought to be, not as Job's, Turn from us, that we may rest (Job 14:6); but, Turn to us, and "Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned" (Lamentations 5:21); so "shall we find rest for our souls" (Jeremiah 6:16); and, also, "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom" (Psalms 90:12).
(4) The book of nature teaches, in type, the doctrine of the resurrection. The tree that seemed dead in winter, after having been cut down to the stump, sends out fresh shoots in spring. Job in his gloomier seasons lost sight of the hope which revelation and nature both teach. But even then he was not without earnest desires that God would keep him in the grave, as in a secret chamber, against the time when God's wrath shall have been past, and a brighter, better order of things shall supersede the present troublous state. Blessed be God, we Christians can give an answer of joyful assurance to the question, "I a man die, shall he live again?" (Job 14:14.) "We know, if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Therefore "we are confident and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:1; 2 Corinthians 5:8).