Biblical Characters: Of Jesus and Job

Christ’s cry from the olive press in Gethsemane has a strikingly similar resonance to Job’s anguished complaint from the ash heap of Uz. The resemblances have led some commentators to identify Job as a “type” of Christ, a biblical figure that formally anticipates the coming of our Savior. While other commentators have balked at claiming Job as a formal type of Christ, there is no denying the remarkable similarities between these two suffering servants of God.

As you search the Scriptures for reflections of Christ, you would do well to heed God’s question in Job 1:8, “have you considered My servant Job?” Consider the following four points of similarity, in turn.

In the first place, Job was a uniquely godly man. God testified of Job, “there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, fearing God and turning away from evil” (Job 1:8). Though dwelling outside the Promised Land and covenant community of Israel, Job nonetheless stood before God—and in His perfect estimation—as a righteous man.

Job was scrupulous in his religious observances (Job 1:5, 42:8-10). He lived with a conscious awareness of God’s friendship (Job 29:4), which men experience only by way of God’s gracious covenantal condescension (2 Chronicles 20:7; Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23). Job was no mere “Everyman,” but was a moral exemplar par excellence.

As exemplary as Job was, however, his righteousness was not perfect. His was a relative blamelessness. He was upright, but by his own admission he was not without sin, and he sought for God’s pardoning mercy (e.g., Job 7:20f). At most, Job’s righteousness can simply direct our attention to the only perfectly righteous man ever to have lived, Christ Jesus Himself.

In the second place—and to echo a phrase introduced above—Job was a suffering servant. In the narrative frame that bookends the tense dispute between Job and his friends, God refers to Job as “My servant” half a dozen times (Job 1:5, 2:3, 42:7, 42:8). As a servant of God, Job worshipped the Lord and interceded for the good of others (Job 1:5, 1:20, 42:8-10). What’s more, Job suffered grievously because of his exemplary service rendered to God (Job 1:8-19, 2:3-7).

By way of amplification, Jesus is the Suffering Servant whose self-sacrificing ministry was explicitly predicted by Isaiah (Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12). Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross was the supreme act of worship rendered to God, “for the joy set before Him” (Hebrews 12:2) of presenting His elect people to the Father. As our Great High Priest, Christ made perfect and final atonement for the sins of many (Hebrews 10:12), and He yet intercedes for us from His station in heaven (Romans 8:34). Whereas Job suffered great hardship for being righteous, Christ suffered greatly “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15).

In the third place, Job underwent his trial by the will of God who loved him and yet crushed him. When Satan challenged the sincerity of Job’s devotion and, by extension, the worthiness of God to be worshiped apart from any benefit He might bestow in exchange, it was God’s will to put Job to the test. And this choice servant of God “did not sin nor did he blame God” (Job 1:22).

The Lord contended against Satan by saying of Job after the first round of devastation, “he still holds fast his integrity, although you incited Me against him without cause” (Job 2:3). Even as his own flesh and bone—understood both literally and figuratively—railed against him in the second round of woe, “Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:10). Job could rightly exclaim against his three adversarial pseudo-comforters in Job 27:2-6,

As God lives, who has taken away my right,

And the Almighty, who has embittered my soul,

For as long as life in in me,

And the breath of God is in my nostrils,

My lips certainly will not speak unjustly,

Nor will my tongue mutter deceit.

Far be it from me that I should declare you right;

Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me.

I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go.

My heart does not reproach any of my days.

Even more profoundly, Jesus Christ underwent His trial by the will of God who loves Him and yet “was pleased to crush Him” (Isaiah 53:10). When Satan deceived Eve and ensnared our first parents in willful rebellion against their Maker, God willed to send His Son to crush the head of the serpent (Genesis 3:15; John 3:16). Jesus repeatedly foretold His betrayal, arrest, and death, and He perfectly submitted to the will of the Father by voluntarily laying down His life to reconcile the world to God (2 Corinthians 5:19). He uttered the fateful words from the depths of perfect and undefiled woe, “My Father, if this cannot pass away unless I drink it, Your will be done” (Matthew 26:42).

Finally, Job was a man of prayer. Unlike the other characters featured in the book of Job, our protagonist directly addressed God with his noble complaint and impassioned lament. Job bared his broken heart, confusion, and desire for restored relationship before God.

He not only spoke of his desire for his former condition “as in months gone by, as in the days when God watched over me; when His lamp shone over my head, and by His light I walked through darkness” (Job 29:2f), but he pleaded with God, stretching out his hands and crying out for help (Job 30:24). He argued with a holy God as would be expected from a righteous man in deep distress, “According to Your knowledge I am indeed not guilty, yet there is no deliverance from Your hand” (Job 10:7).

But no one was more a man of prayer than was Jesus in His earthly sojourn. Though possessing the fullness of deity and all the power therefrom, Jesus lived as a man in full dependence on God the Holy Spirit. This dependence upon the Spirit of God was expressed in Christ’s regular times of solitary prayer. He removed Himself from friends and followers, from devotees and disciples, in order to pray.

According to His human nature, Jesus Christ the Son communed with the Father by the Spirit who led Him, strengthened Him, and gave Him the words to speak, even in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Christ, humanity was perfected, nowhere more clearly than in the agonizing prayer on the night of His betrayal “into the hands of sinners” (Matthew 26:45).

Be it from the nondescript dust and ashes of Uz or the mysterious Garden of Gethsemane, the agonizing lament and submissive pleading of Christian prayer is properly devotional, an act of Christian worship. So too are the cries of all those who follow Christ in His suffering, enjoy righteousness before God on account of His atoning death on Calvary’s cross, and submit to the will of God in every circumstance.

Job the suffering servant of the Old Testament Writings not only anticipates, but also directs, our attention to the perfect Man and Mediator of the Covenant of Grace, our Lord Jesus Christ. Of Christ our Savior, we testify, “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

Zachary Groff (MDiv, Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary) is Pastor of Antioch Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Woodruff, SC, and he serves as Managing Editor of The Confessional Journal and as Editor-in-Chief of the Presbyterian Polity website.

Picture by Léon Bonnat - http://www.histoire-image.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2188483