Calvary Baptist Church

Calvary Baptist Church, Grenada, MS, USA

Holding to the truths embraced by Baptist for centuries.

The Book of Job is probably the earliest written book of our Scriptures. If this is true, this is the first time we have any record that a person called God “Redeemer”. Over against the pain, suffering, disappointments, and sorrow of this life Job found meaning and purpose in living in this Redeemer.

Job saw three great needs of man which find their answers in Jesus Christ, which go to the core of life. In Job 9:2, Job asked the question, “But how should man be just before God?” Again in Job 14:4 he asks a similar question “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” Job wanted to know how can a sinful man (of which we are all sinners) find acceptance with a holy God? The answer to this question is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Romans 3:24-25 says “Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past through the forbearance of God”. This means Jesus Christ paid the penalty for our sins satisfying the demands of a holy God. On the basis of Christ’s substitutionary death, God declares the believing sinner justified, fully accepted and clothed in the righteousness of Christ.

The second need Job saw is found in Job 23:3. He states: “Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seat!” Job wants to come into the presence of the invisible God. Jesus answered this need when He told Phillip, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” If you want to know what God is like, then look at the Lord Jesus Christ. He has all attributes that God the Father has and He is the One who is the mediator between God and man. He is the Incarnate Word, Emmanuel, God with us. It is only through the Lord Jesus Christ that we come to know the Father. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes unto the Father but by me.”

The last great need that Job saw related to the death of man. “If a man die shall he live again?” (Job 14:14) Job answered in the affirmative. “All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come. Thou shall call and I will answer Thee” (Job 14b-15a). Job believed that there would be a resurrection day. This hope finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Again He says, “The hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice and shall come forth.”

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live”. This is the answer to physical death, the resurrecting power of Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “Because I live, you shall live also” (John 14:19). Earlier, Jesus had said, “The hour is coming in which all that are in the graves shall hear my voice and shall come forth”. Job also understood that this resurrection involved more than just physical resurrection. The Bible says, “Without holiness, no man shall see God”. He must have new life through faith in Christ, be clothed in Christ’s righteousness. By faith Job declares, “In my flesh I shall see God”. In John 5 Jesus says, “The dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live”. Jesus told Martha, “He that believeth in me shall never die”. He was talking about spiritual life, the eternal life which we receive when we are saved. In Christ both spiritual life and new physical life are joined. The Scriptures proclaim a day when “He shall change our vile body that we may be fashioned like His glorious body”. Job had this hope. He affirmed, “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand in the latter day upon the earth; and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold and not another though my heart be consumed within me” (Job 19:25-27).

Job understood the need of man to have right standing before God, to know God, and to have new spiritual life and new bodies. He looked forward to the coming of his Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ. We today have the same hope that Job did as we look back upon the completed work of Jesus Christ.