Job 27:10 Will he delight himself in the Almighty? Will he always call upon God
In most every circumstance of life, people respond in one of two ways. Now, that is an oversimplified way of looking at things, but I think in the main it is the truth. People can come to poverty or prosperity and either thank God and pray for what they need or become arrogant and think they don’t need God. Likewise, someone can come to calamity and either curse God or ask God for what he needs.
All of us may be familiar with the angry atheist. Is every atheist angry? I don’t know that every atheist is, but there do seem to be lot of scornful atheists. They seem to be angry at a God they deny even exists. I think many times people are angry at this God they say does not exist and they deny He exists because they are angry at Him. They want to get back at Him in some way.
When Job came to his turmoil in life, his friends claimed he was a hypocrite. The word hypocrite here does not mean two-faced; it just means a wicked man. Job claimed that he was a man of integrity. Again, here it does not mean so much that he is consistent as that he is innocent. In Job 27, Job continues what he was saying, “My lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit.” In verse 5 he says, “God forbid that I should justify you [his friends]: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.” Job claimed to be innocent. None of us are innocent in the absolute sense, but Job was correct inasmuch as he was not being punished for any specific sin in his life. This was something that went way back to a scene that Job, his friends, or his wife never could have even guessed at, that the devil came to God and said, “Does Job not fear God for a reason? You have been good to Job.”
What you find here is Job’s response to his turmoil. He essentially holds to his integrity and says, “My lips shall not speak wickedness.” Then he says he is a man who still calls upon God, but as for the wicked he says, “For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained, when God taketh away his soul? Will God hear his cry when trouble cometh upon him? Will he delight himself in the Almighty? Will he always call upon God?” That is really the question. Will we always call upon God? “So long as I live,” Job says, “I will hold to my integrity.” “And so long as I live,” Job implies, “I will be calling upon God.” That is integrity versus hypocrisy. Someone has called this mutual alienation, that is to say, what God hears and what we pray. He says, “My lips will not speak wickedness, and will God hear the prayer of the wicked man?” That is the question, my lips and God’s ears.
The Bible tells us in Romans it is the goodness of God that brings us to repentance, yet for the wicked person, whether thy rage or laugh, have good times or bad, they end up not coming to God. If a person has a reverence for God, that will be drawn out in prayer whether things are good or bad. The ups and downs in Job’s life and his confusion between what he knew of God and what he could actually see of God are examples of that fact. Earlier in Job 26:14 Job said, “Lo, these are parts of his [God’s] ways: but how little a portion is heard of him? but the thunder of his power who can understand?” He is saying, “I don’t always understand, nor can I always reconcile what I know of God to what I see of Him.”
The bottom line is that prayer is the righteous person’s response to things he cannot control. Now we can argue that we don’t control anything and God does. Again, there is the reminder that there is sovereignty and agency, that God is sovereign, yet He gives us agency and choice. One choice is how we respond to life. Sometimes things go great, not because we control them, but just because they are going well. Sometimes things go poorly, not because we are doing evil, but just because they are not going well. So, a righteous person’s prayer is his response to things he does not control.
This is true when things are good. In Job 21:13-15 Job says that the evil “spend their days in wealth…Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways. What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? and what profit should we have, if we pray unto him?” He was saying, “It is the very prosperity of the wicked that turns them from God.” Here was Job, not in prosperity but in evil times, and he turned to God. In Job 22, Job’s friends seem to imply that if you just turn to God, then you will be rich, and “then shalt thou have delight in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God.” Job wasn’t waiting for prosperity to turn up his face toward God. Job was turning his face toward God in the times of deepest despair. So, the righteous responds in prayer when things are good.
The righteous responds in prayer when things are bad. Verse 8 says “For what is the hope of the hypocrite.” Job says there is no hope. Psalm 66:18 says, “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” Then the psalmist goes on to say, “But verily God hath heard me.” In other words, sin can cut us off from the holy God, but it does not have to be that way. I can have my prayers heard. Again, in Job 1 it was the devil’s assumption that if God just let the devil have his way to make Job’s life miserable, Job would curse God. The devil thought Job only loved God because God was good to him, but prayer is the righteous person’s response to things he does not control. This is true always, when times are good or bad.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, “Prayer is always the tell-tale of spiritual life. No right prayer, then is there no grace within.” Later he says, “Prayer is as good a test of spiritual life and health as the pulse is of the condition of the human frame. Hence I say the hypocrite imitates the action of prayer while he does not really possess the spirit of prayer.” Prayer is the indication of spiritual health; prosperity or dark times are not. Prayer always is because prayer is the righteous person’s response to things that he does not control.