Pray to Begin
Ask — that the Holy Spirit would lift your eyes to the living Redeemer and give you Job’s certainty: that even when you are most alone, you may know what he knew — “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Give thanks — that these words, spoken from the very bottom by a man abandoned and wasting away, have carried the faith of the suffering for three thousand years.
Bring — your own places of loneliness and loss, and ask to hold there the hope that our Redeemer will stand at the last, and that in our flesh we will see God.
Today’s Passage: Job 19
Job 19 descends to the loneliest place in the book before rising to its highest peak. Job feels utterly forsaken: God has “wronged” him and besieged him (19:6–12); every human relationship has failed — brothers, kinsmen, friends, servants, even his wife and the little children of the street (19:13–19). He begs, “Have pity on me, my friends” (19:21). And then, from that pit of total abandonment, comes the most astonishing confession in the Old Testament: “I know that my Redeemer lives… and in my flesh I will see God” (19:25–26). Stripped of everything and everyone, Job lays hold of the one thing that cannot be taken — a living Redeemer. (The text is quoted block by block in the commentary below.)
As you read, hold this: From total abandonment to the brightest hope in the book.
Context The world of Job 19
Words “inscribed in a book… chiseled in stone forever” (19:23–24). Just before his great confession, Job wishes his words could be permanently recorded — cut with an iron stylus, filled with lead, engraved in rock. The irony is breathtaking: his wish was granted beyond imagining. The words he longed to preserve became Scripture, inscribed in the most enduring “book” in human history, read by billions. What Job hoped a chisel might save, the Holy Spirit preserved forever.
The kinsman-redeemer (goʾel) in Israel’s law. The goʾel (go-AYL) was a concrete legal institution. If an Israelite fell into debt and slavery or lost the family land, the nearest kinsman was obligated to step in and “redeem” — pay the price to restore freedom and inheritance (Leviticus 25:47–49; Ruth 4). For Job to call God his goʾel (go-AYL) is to claim God as his nearest of kin, bound by covenant love to rescue him. It is a stunning leap of faith from a man who feels God has become his enemy (19:11).
“In my flesh I will see God” and the dawn of resurrection. Old Testament hope of bodily resurrection is rare and seed-like (Job 19; Psalm 16:10; Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2), flowering fully only in Christ. Job 19:25–27 is one of the earliest and clearest of these seeds — a flash of resurrection light centuries before the empty tomb. That such hope rises here, from the most abandoned man in the book, is the point: it is in the deepest darkness that the brightest hope is born.
Job 19:1–12 (BSB)
¹ Then Job answered: ² “How long will you torment me and crush me with your words? ³ Ten times now you have reproached me; you shamelessly mistreat me. ⁴ Even if I have truly gone astray, my error concerns me alone. ⁵ If indeed you would exalt yourselves above me and use my disgrace against me, ⁶ then understand that it is God who has wronged me and drawn His net around me. ⁷ Though I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I get no response; though I call for help, there is no justice. ⁸ He has blocked my way so I cannot pass; He has veiled my paths with darkness. ⁹ He has stripped me of my honor and removed the crown from my head. ¹⁰ He tears me down on every side until I am gone; He uproots my hope like a tree. ¹¹ His anger burns against me, and He counts me among His enemies. ¹² His troops advance together; they construct a ramp against me and encamp around my tent.
Job’s pain has two sources, and he names both. First the friends: “How long will you torment me?” (v. 2) — their words are their own kind of violence. Then, more agonizing, God Himself: Job feels besieged, as if God has laid military siege to his life (vv. 8–12), stripped his honor, “uprooted my hope like a tree” (v. 10) — picking up the very image of the felled tree from 14:7, now applied to himself. This is the bleak foundation on which, astonishingly, the chapter’s hope will rise. Job’s confession in verse 25 is not the optimism of a man whose troubles are easing; it is faith from inside the siege.
Job 19:13–22 (BSB)
¹³ He has removed my brothers from me; my acquaintances have abandoned me. ¹⁴ My kinsmen have failed me, and my friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ My guests and maidservants count me as a stranger; I am a foreigner in their sight. ¹⁶ I call for my servant, but he does not answer, though I implore him with my own mouth. ¹⁷ My breath is repulsive to my wife, and I am loathsome to my own family. ¹⁸ Even little boys scorn me; when I appear, they deride me. ¹⁹ All my best friends despise me, and those I love have turned against me. ²⁰ My skin and flesh cling to my bones; I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ Have pity on me, my friends, have pity, for the hand of God has struck me. ²² Why do you persecute me as God does? Will you never get enough of my flesh?
This is one of the most complete portraits of loneliness in Scripture. Job lists every circle of human relationship — brothers, acquaintances, kinsmen, close friends, guests, servants, his wife, even the street children — and every one has failed him. Verse 20 gives us the famous phrase “the skin of my teeth”: he has barely escaped with his life. Then the heartbreaking plea: “Have pity on me, my friends, have pity” (v. 21). Stripped of everyone, Job asks only for compassion — and even that the friends withhold. It is precisely here, with every human comfort gone, that Job is driven to find his comfort in God alone.
Job 19:23–29 (BSB)
²³ I wish that my words were recorded and inscribed in a book, ²⁴ by an iron stylus on lead, or chiseled in stone forever. ²⁵ But I know that my Redeemer lives, and in the end He will stand upon the earth. ²⁶ Even after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. ²⁷ I will see Him for myself; my eyes will behold Him, and not as a stranger. How my heart yearns within me! ²⁸ If you say, ‘Let us persecute him, since the root of the matter lies with him,’ ²⁹ then you should fear the sword yourselves, because wrath brings punishment by the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.
Word study "See" — raʾah (Job 19:27)
Hebrew: רָאָה (raʾah), pronounced rah-AH. Strong’s H7200.
“I will see (raʾah) Him for myself; my eyes will behold Him, and not as a stranger.” Job repeats the verb for emphasis — I will see, my eyes will behold. The longing is intensely personal: not to hear about God secondhand, but to see Him face to face. “How my heart yearns within me!” (literally, “my kidneys are consumed within me” — his innermost being aches for it). This is the hope of the beatific vision — “we will see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2) — the deepest desire of the human heart, planted even in Job’s darkest hour.
Word study "Flesh" — basar (Job 19:26)
Hebrew: בָּשָׂר (basar), pronounced bah-SAHR. Strong’s H1320.
“Even after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh (basar) I will see God.” Basar is the physical body, flesh-and-blood humanity. This is the verse where bodily resurrection breaks into the Old Testament dawn: Job dares to hope that after his skin is gone, he will in his own body see God. It is not a hope of escaping the body but of a redeemed body — the very hope the gospel secures when “this perishable body must be clothed with the imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:53). The God Job will see is the God who took on basar Himself in Christ.
Word study "Lives" — ḥay (Job 19:25)
Hebrew: חַי (ḥay), pronounced KHAI. Strong’s H2416.
“I know that my Redeemer lives (ḥay).” Surrounded by death — the firstborn of death Bildad just described, his own body wasting — Job stakes everything on a Redeemer who is alive. The contrast is total: everything around Job is dying, but his goʾel lives, and a living Redeemer can act. The Christian reads this with a thrill Job could not feel: our Redeemer not only lives but conquered death itself — “I am the Living One. I was dead, and behold, I am alive forever and ever” (Revelation 1:18).
Word study "Redeemer" — goʾel (Job 19:25)
Four words carry Job from abandonment to assurance.
Hebrew: גֹּאֵל (goʾel), pronounced go-AYL. Strong’s H1350.
“I know that my Redeemer (goʾel) lives.” The goʾel is the kinsman-redeemer — the near relative responsible to rescue a family member in trouble: to buy back lost property or freedom (Leviticus 25:25), to avenge wrong, to vindicate the helpless, to carry on the family name (the role Boaz plays for Ruth). Job, abandoned by every actual kinsman (19:13–14), declares that he has a goʾel in heaven who will take up his case and set it right. It is the same longing as the “mediator” (9:33) and “advocate” (16:19), now in its richest form — a family redeemer who is bound to rescue. The New Testament names him: Jesus, our kinsman-Redeemer, who took on our flesh to buy us back.
The summit. Job wishes his words could be carved in stone forever (vv. 23–24) — and then speaks the words that were: “I know that my Redeemer lives.” Notice the certainty: not “I hope,” but “I know.” He affirms three things against all the evidence: his Redeemer lives (when all around is death); his Redeemer will stand upon the earth at the last (a final, public vindication); and he himself, in his own flesh, will see God (resurrection). From the man who felt God had become his enemy (v. 11) comes the confession that God is his kinsman-Redeemer who will vindicate him face to face. This is faith at its most defiant and most beautiful — and it is, dimly but truly, faith in the risen Christ. Job did not know the Redeemer’s name. We do. And He lives.
Study notes Going deeper
The living Redeemer Job confessed. Job 19:25 is the mountaintop of the book:
The New Testament fills in the price the goʾel (go-AYL) paid:
"For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or spot." 1 Peter 1:18–19 (BSB)
A kinsman-redeemer paid a price to buy his family back. Job’s Redeemer paid the highest price of all — not silver or gold, but His own blood. The goʾel (go-AYL) Job trusted from the ash heap stepped into our flesh and bought us back at the cost of His life. He lives because He first died for us.
“In my flesh I will see God.” Job’s hope of seeing God in a resurrected body is exactly the promise the gospel secures:
"Beloved, we are now children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when Christ appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is." 1 John 3:2 (BSB)
Job said, “my eyes will behold Him, and not as a stranger.” John says, “we will see Him as He is.” The yearning that consumed Job’s heart will be satisfied — not as a disembodied ghost but as a redeemed child, with our own eyes, beholding the Redeemer who bought us. The deepest ache of Job 19 is a promise with a guaranteed fulfillment.
Hope born in the dark. It is no accident that the book’s brightest confession comes from its darkest chapter. Job has just catalogued total abandonment — God, family, friends, servants, even his wife. With nothing and no one left, he discovers the one thing that was never going to fail: a living Redeemer. Sometimes it is only when everything else has been stripped away that we finally see what cannot be taken.
Personal Application
1. Knowing what cannot be taken. Job lost everything and everyone, and in that emptiness laid hold of the one thing that could not be stripped away: a living Redeemer. What are you holding onto that can be taken? And do you know — not just hope, but know — the One who cannot? In your darkest hour, this is the ground that holds: my Redeemer lives.
2. Hope for the body, not just the soul. Job’s hope was not to escape his body but to see God in his flesh. The Christian hope is bodily resurrection — these very selves, redeemed and remade. Whatever is failing in your body today, hold the promise: you will see Him with your own eyes, and not as a stranger.
3. The ache that is a promise. Job said, “how my heart yearns within me!” That yearning to see God is not a cruelty; it is a promise planted in you, guaranteed to be satisfied. When you feel the ache for something this world cannot give, do not numb it. Let it point you to the day you will see Him as He is.
Pray to Close
The central truth of Job 19: from the pit of total abandonment, faith lays hold of the one thing that cannot be taken — a living Redeemer who will stand at the last and whom we will see, in our own flesh, with our own eyes. Job confessed it in the dark, not knowing the Redeemer’s name. We confess it in the light of the empty tomb: our Redeemer lives.
Ask — that when everything is stripped away — when relationships fail, when our bodies waste, when even God seems to have become our enemy — we would be taught to say what Job said: “I know that my Redeemer lives.”
Give thanks — for Jesus, our kinsman-Redeemer, who took on our flesh and bought us back not with silver or gold but with His own precious blood; who lives, who will stand upon the earth at the last, and in whom we will see God with our own eyes, and not as a stranger.
Yield — the yearning God has planted in us, asking Him to satisfy it, and to hold us until that day in the certainty Job had in the dark.
Worship for Today
I Know That My Redeemer Lives · Samuel Medley (hymn, 1775)
There is no more fitting song for this chapter: Samuel Medley built this hymn directly on Job 19:25, turning Job’s defiant confession into a cascade of resurrection joy. Each line begins with the same anchor — He lives — the very word Job clung to in the dark.
“I know that my Redeemer lives; What comfort this sweet sentence gives! He lives, He lives, who once was dead; He lives, my ever-living Head.
He lives to bless me with His love, He lives to plead for me above, He lives my hungry soul to feed, He lives to help in time of need.”
Job said it from the ash heap before the resurrection; Medley sings it on the far side of the empty tomb. The Redeemer Job knew lived is the Christ we know rose — He lives, He lives.
Listen: