“Relying on God” wrote C.S. Lewis, is “to start all over every day, as if nothing has yet been done.”
Have you heard of an antimetabole? No, it’s not an ancient sea creature or a newly-discovered subatomic particle. It’s “a rhetorical technique of reversing word order in successive clauses.” Here’s a famous one. “It’s not the years in your life, but the life in your years, that counts.” It isn’t the natural length of a life but its spiritual strength that matters. The last words we read about Job link these dimensions. “After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children and grandchildren for four generations. So Job died, old and full of days” (Job 42:16-17). After this? Yes, after Job had humbled himself under the mighty hand of God, and He had exalted him in due time (see 1 Pet 5:6). After he could make confession, “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5). Imagine walking with the Lord for an additional 140 years! What sweet lessons he would learn along the way. Although the curtain is drawn across the rest of Job’s life, we can imagine the influence his story had in his day, correcting the wrong notions of a vengeful God, of His supposed injustices, or of His indifference to His children’s suffering. Job’s experience put the lie to all these, and now, four thousand years later, we still learn from the suffering of that solitary man. We also see here our responsibility to children’s children (see Deut 4:9), not to “spoil” them, but to enrich them in the ways of God. Concerning his daughters we read, “their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers” (Job 42:15). This was surprising in a day of patrilineal societies, but another evidence that grace received inspires grace given. Want to die “full of days” (v 17)? Then use those days to empty yourself out for the Lord.