God could keep the enemy always at bay if He chose to, but He didn’t with His Son, nor does He with us.
We now come to the crux of the matter as far as Job is concerned. Why do these ne’er-do-wells feel free to terrorize him? He puts his finger on the day God allowed a break in the divine hedge around him. All his trouble can be traced to that. “Because He has loosed my bowstring and afflicted me, they have cast off restraint before me” (Job 30:11). A loosened bowstring leaves an archer defenseless, the divine affliction leaves Job distracted, and “the rabble” crowd (v 12) has taken advantage of his vulnerabilities. This is up close and personal. “They push away my feet, and they raise against me their ways of destruction. They break up my path, they promote my calamity; they have no helper. They come as broad breakers; under the ruinous storm they roll along” (vv 12-14). If they’re close enough to spit in his face (v 10), they certainly can jostle him, like an old person being accosted on a city street, harassed, man-handled, and abused. Job is unguarded by heaven, he feels. So although “they have no helper,” the ruffians don’t need any. “Broad breakers”? This describes removing a large section of a rampart in order to easily breach the defenses. Job feels just as exposed and imperiled. The “ruinous storm” is a strange one because “they pursue my honor as the wind, and my prosperity has passed like a cloud” (v 15). Angry, hot blasts of their violent behavior tear at him and humiliate him, but the sky is cloudless, and no raindrops of blessing fall. What do we make of all this? The Lord allows the ungodly to harass and persecute His people, but they will be judged for it, and somehow He tempers their treatment of His saints because, says He, “I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.” —“K”