Pray to Begin
Ask — that the Holy Spirit would let the resurrection of Jesus shine back across these ancient words, filling us with the hope Job longed for as we sit with his honest fear of death.
Give thanks — that we come holding the answer Job could not yet see, an empty tomb, to the oldest question of the human heart: if a man dies, will he live again?
Bring — our own honest fear of death into the light, asking God to meet us there as one who longs for the work of His hands.
Today’s Passage: Job 14
Chapter 14 closes the first cycle of speeches, and it is Job’s most sustained meditation on death. He surveys the brevity of human life — a flower that withers, a shadow that flees, days already numbered. He notes, almost enviously, that a cut-down tree can sprout again, but a dead man seems simply gone. And then, into that darkness, he asks the question the whole Bible exists to answer: “When a man dies, will he live again?” (14:14). For one luminous moment he glimpses a hope — that God will call and he will answer — before the gloom closes back in. (The text is quoted block by block in the commentary below.)
As you read, hold this: The question asked into the dark that the empty tomb would answer.
Context The world of Job 14
Man “born of woman” (14:1). The phrase is an ancient idiom for human frailty and mortality — to be “born of woman” is to be finite, fragile, short-lived (cf. 15:14; 25:4). Job universalizes his suffering here: he speaks not only of himself but of all humanity, “short of days and full of trouble.” The chapter is the most general of Job’s speeches, a meditation on the human condition itself.
The limits of revelation about the afterlife. Job lives long before the resurrection is clearly revealed. The Old Testament’s hope of life beyond death grows slowly — a seed in Job and the Psalms (16:10; 49:15; 73:24), budding in the prophets (Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2), and bursting into full flower only at the empty tomb. Job’s question in 14:14 is so poignant precisely because he asks it without the answer. He is feeling forward in the dark toward a hope that had not yet dawned.
The tree that sprouts again (14:7–9). Job draws on something every ancient farmer knew: many trees, cut to the stump, will regenerate — “at the scent of water it will bud.” It is an image of resilience and return. Job’s grief is that humanity seems to lack what the olive and the oak possess. The irony the Christian reader feels: the answer to Job’s longing would one day hang upon a tree, and rise.
Job 14:1–6 (BSB)
¹ “Man, who is born of woman, is short of days and full of trouble. ² Like a flower, he comes forth, then withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure. ³ Do You open Your eyes to one like this? Will You bring him into judgment before You? ⁴ Who can bring out clean from unclean? No one! ⁵ Since his days are determined and the number of his months is with You, and since You have set limits that he cannot exceed, ⁶ look away from him and let him rest, so he can enjoy his day as a hired hand.
Word study "Shadow" — tsel (Job 14:2)
Four words trace the chapter from frailty to its flicker of hope.
Hebrew: צֵל (tsel), pronounced TSAYL. Strong’s H6738.
“Like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure.” Tsel is a shadow — present one moment, gone the next as the sun shifts. It is one of the Bible’s recurring images for the brevity of life (Psalm 102:11; 144:4; 1 Chronicles 29:15). Job is not being morbid; he is being truthful. A human life, measured against eternity, is a shadow passing across the ground. The honest acknowledgment of that brevity is the soil in which real hope — not denial — can grow.
Job widens his lens from himself to all humanity: short-lived, trouble-filled, a withering flower, a passing shadow. Verse 4 voices a deep truth he cannot yet resolve — “Who can bring out clean from unclean? No one!” — the problem of human uncleanness that only the gospel answers. And verse 6 repeats his ache from 7:19: let me alone, let me rest. Job experiences God’s attention as pressure and longs for relief. He does not yet know that God’s attention is the very thing that will one day raise him.
Job 14:7–12 (BSB)
⁷ For there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its tender shoots will not fail. ⁸ If its roots grow old in the ground and its stump dies in the soil, ⁹ at the scent of water it will bud and put forth twigs like a sapling. ¹⁰ But a man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last, and where is he? ¹¹ As water disappears from the sea and a river becomes parched and dry, ¹² so a man lies down and does not rise. Until the heavens are no more, he will not be awakened or roused from sleep.
Word study "Hope" — tiqvah (Job 14:7)
Hebrew: תִּקְוָה (tiqvah), pronounced tik-VAH. Strong’s H8615.
“For there is hope (tiqvah) for a tree.” Tiqvah means “hope, expectation” — literally something like a “cord” stretched out toward the future. Job’s ache is the contrast: a tree has tiqvah (cut it down, and it sprouts at the scent of water), but does a man? The same word will later become a banner of Israel’s hope (Jeremiah 29:11, “a future and a hope”; it is even the title of Israel’s anthem, Hatikvah, “the hope”). Job feels the gap between the tree’s hope and his own — a gap the resurrection will close.
The aching contrast: a tree has tiqvah (tik-VAH) (v. 7) — cut it down, and it sprouts at the scent of water — but a man “dies and is laid low; he breathes his last, and where is he?” (v. 10). From Job’s vantage, death looks final: “a man lies down and does not rise” (v. 12). Yet listen to the crack of light even here: “Until the heavens are no more, he will not be awakened.” Job assumes that means never — but the New Testament will reveal that the heavens will be remade, and the dead in Christ will be raised. Job’s “until” is more hopeful than he knows.
Job 14:13–17 (BSB)
¹³ If only You would hide me in Sheol and conceal me until Your anger has passed! If only You would appoint a time for me and then remember me! ¹⁴ When a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait, until my renewal comes. ¹⁵ You will call, and I will answer; You will desire the work of Your hands. ¹⁶ For then You would count my steps, but would not keep track of my sin. ¹⁷ My transgression would be sealed in a bag, and You would cover over my iniquity.
Word study "Long for" — kasaph (Job 14:15)
Hebrew: כָּסַף (kasaph), pronounced kah-SAHF. Strong’s H3700.
“You will call, and I will answer; You will desire (kasaph) the work of Your hands.” Kasaph means “to long for, to yearn, to ache with desire.” It is a stunning thing for Job to say of God: that God would one day yearn for him, His own handiwork. In his deepest darkness Job imagines not a God eager to be rid of him but a God who longs for the creature He made — who will call him by name out of the grave. It is the gospel’s heartbeat, glimpsed for a moment through the gloom.
Word study "Renewal" — ḥalipah (Job 14:14)
Hebrew: חֲלִיפָה (ḥalipah), pronounced kha-lee-FAH. Strong’s H2487.
“All the days of my hard service I will wait, until my renewal (ḥalipah) comes.” Ḥalipah means “a change, a replacement, a relief” — from the root “to change, to renew, to pass on.” It is the word for a change of clothes (Genesis 45:22). Job dares to imagine that his present “hard service” might give way to a change — a renewal on the far side of waiting. He cannot define it, but he reaches for it: the hope that death might not be the last word but a changing of garments. The New Testament will call it being “clothed” with immortality (1 Corinthians 15:53).
This is the radiant center of the chapter. Job dares to imagine being hidden in the grave only temporarily — until God’s anger passes and God remembers him (v. 13). Then the great question: “When a man dies, will he live again?” (v. 14). And for a breathtaking moment, Job answers his own question with hope: “You will call, and I will answer; You will desire the work of Your hands” (v. 15). He pictures resurrection as a reunion — God calling, the creature answering, God longing for him. Verses 16–17 add the gospel shape: sin “sealed in a bag,” iniquity “covered over.” Job is reaching, in the dark, for exactly what the cross would secure: a God who covers sin and calls the dead to life.
Job 14:18–22 (BSB)
¹⁸ But as a mountain erodes and crumbles and a rock is dislodged from its place, ¹⁹ as water wears away the stones and torrents wash away the soil, so You destroy a man’s hope. ²⁰ You forever overpower him, and he passes on; You change his countenance and send him away. ²¹ If his sons receive honor, he does not know it; if they are brought low, he is unaware. ²² He feels only the pain of his own body and mourns only for himself.”
The light closes back to gloom. Job cannot sustain the hope of verse 15; the weight of what he can see presses back in. Like water wearing away stone, death seems to erode every hope (v. 19). The chapter — and the first cycle of speeches — ends in the dark, with a man alone in his pain. This is honest. Faith does not always hold its highest moments; sometimes the glimpse of hope flickers and the gloom returns. But the glimpse was real, and the book is not over. The God who Job hoped would “remember” him does not forget the work of His hands.
Study notes Going deeper
The question, and its answer. Job 14:14 is one of the most important questions in the Old Testament, asked into a darkness that could not yet answer it:
The answer, when it came, was not a doctrine but a Person standing outside a tomb:
"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?'" John 11:25–26 (BSB)
Job asked, “will he live again?” Jesus answers, “I am the resurrection.” The hope Job could only reach for in the dark walked out of a grave and asked Martha — and asks us — “Do you believe this?”
Dead in Adam, alive in Christ. Job felt the universal verdict of death pressing on all humanity (“man born of woman… short of days”). Paul names the deeper diagnosis and the greater cure:
"For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." 1 Corinthians 15:22 (BSB)
The death Job laments runs back to Adam; the life he longed for runs forward from Christ, the second Adam. The tree’s tiqvah (tik-VAH) — cut down, yet sprouting again — becomes, in Christ, humanity’s hope: the One who was cut down and rose, the firstfruits of all who will.
God who longs for the work of His hands. The most beautiful line in the chapter is Job’s astonishing hope that God would kasaph (kah-SAHF) — yearn — for His creature (14:15). This is not wishful thinking; it is true. The God who formed Job in chapter 10 does long for him, and proved it by sending His Son to seek and save and raise the work of His hands. Job’s glimmer is the gospel: the grave is not where God forgets us but where He calls us by name.
Personal Application
1. Asking the real question. Job did not suppress the deepest question — will I live again? — to seem more faithful. He asked it honestly, into the dark. What ultimate question have you been avoiding? Bring it into the light. And then hear the answer Job could not yet hear: “I am the resurrection and the life.”
2. The God who longs for you. Job’s boldest hope was that God would yearn for the work of His hands (14:15). If you have pictured God as eager to be done with you, let this chapter correct it. The God of the gospel does not merely tolerate you; He longs for you — enough to seek you into the grave and call you out. Sit with that today.
3. When hope flickers. Job glimpsed hope in verse 15 and lost it again by verse 19. If your faith cannot hold its best moments — if hope flares and then fades — you are in good company. The reality of the resurrection does not depend on the steadiness of your grip on it. The tomb is empty whether or not you can feel it today.
Pray to Close
The central truth of Job 14: the oldest and deepest human question — if a man dies, will he live again? — was asked from the dark long before it was answered at the tomb; and the God who longs for the work of His hands has answered it forever in the risen Christ. Job reached for a hope he could not see. We hold the hope he longed for: Jesus, the resurrection and the life.
Bring — our frailty honestly, that we are born of woman, short of days and full of trouble, a flower that withers and a shadow that does not endure, and ask Job’s question as our own: when a man dies, will he live again?
Give thanks — that God has answered, that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, that as in Adam all die so in Christ all will be made alive, and that the grave is not where He loses us but where He calls us by name.
Ask — that when our hope flickers and the gloom returns He would hold us and remind us of the empty tomb, as we wait, all the days of our hard service, until our renewal comes — in the name of Jesus, our hope in life and death.
Worship for Today
Christ Our Hope in Life and Death · Keith & Kristyn Getty, Matt Papa, Matt Boswell, Jordan Kauflin
Job asked, “When a man dies, will he live again?” This modern hymn (2020) is built entirely around that question and its answer. Structured like a catechism, it asks “What is our hope in life and death?” and replies with the risen Christ — the very answer Job reached for in the dark.
“What is our hope in life and death? Christ alone, Christ alone. What is our only confidence? That our souls to Him belong. …O sing hallelujah! Our hope springs eternal; O sing hallelujah! Now and ever we confess Christ our hope in life and death.”
Job longed for a God who would “call, and I will answer.” This song is the church’s confident reply across the centuries: because Christ is risen, the call will come, and we will answer.
Listen: