5 Seeing his days are determined, The number of his months is with you, And you have appointed his bounds that he can't pass;
"Yahweh, show me my end, What is the measure of my days. Let me know how frail I am.
For what does he care for his house after him, When the number of his months is cut off?
Seventy weeks are decreed on your people and on your holy city, to finish disobedience, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy.
"To the angel of the assembly in Philadelphia write: "He who is holy, he who is true, he who has the key of David, he who opens and no one can shut, and who shuts and no one opens, says these things:
Inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once, and after this, judgment,
"But God said to him, 'You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared--whose will they be?'
The king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvelous things against the God of gods; and he shall prosper until the indignation be accomplished; for that which is determined shall be done.
"Isn't a man forced to labor on earth? Aren't his days like the days of a hired hand?
All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing; and he does according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand, or tell him, What do you?
You hide your face: they are troubled; You take away their breath: they die, and return to the dust.
But he stands alone, and who can oppose him? What his soul desires, even that he does. For he performs that which is appointed for me. Many such things are with him.
If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my warfare would I wait, Until my release should come.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Job 14
Commentary on Job 14 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 14
Job had turned from speaking to his friends, finding it to no purpose to reason with them, and here he goes on to speak to God and himself. He had reminded his friends of their frailty and mortality (ch. 13:12); here he reminds himself of his own, and pleads it with God for some mitigation of his miseries. We have here an account,
This chapter is proper for funeral solemnities; and serious meditations on it will help us both to get good by the death of others and to get ready for our own.
Job 14:1-6
We are here led to think,
Job 14:7-15
We have seen what Job has to say concerning life; let us now see what he has to say concerning death, which his thoughts were very much conversant with, now that he was sick and sore. It is not unseasonable, when we are in health, to think of dying; but it is an inexcusable incogitancy if, when we are already taken into the custody of death's messengers, we look upon it as a thing at a distance. Job had already shown that death will come, and that its hour is already fixed. Now here he shows,
Job 14:16-22
Job here returns to his complaints; and, though he is not without hope of future bliss, he finds it very hard to get over his present grievances.