Commentary on the Book of Job part twenty six

                                     Job 16:1-22

In Job 16:1-10, Job complained that his comforters had failed to comfort him. Job complained that their words had made his suffering worse. Job rebuked them by telling them that if they were in his place, he would do his best to try to truly comfort them and ease their grief. That which Job spoke in verses 7-10 reminds one of the old adage, "With friends like these, a man would not need any enemies." Job suspected that his friends actually secretly hated him because they were envious of his fellowship with God in which God comforted and strengthened him.

In Job 16:11-16, Job complained to God that He had allowed everything that Job loved to be taken from him. God had allowed Job's children to be taken, had allowed his wife to turn against him, had taken his health, and had even allowed his ungodly friends to mock him. By his use of the phrase "shadow of death," Job realized that he had been reduced to a state of absolute nothingness except for his good life which barely rose above the darkness of death like a shadow on his eyelids. The Bible (KJB) often uses the phrase "shadow of death" and the word "darkness" to symbolize a place of total evil and emptiness called Death in Revelation 20:13. The Bible clearly denotes three different places of the dead called the Sea, Death, and Hell in Revelation 20:13. All forms of sin and evil have secretly emerged into God's creations from this abyss, this place of chaos and absolute nothingness called "the deep" in Luke 8:31, "the bottomless pit" in Revelation 20:3, the "prison" in Revelation 20:7, and Death in Revelation 6:8 and Revelation 20:13.

In John 3:17-21, Jesus referred to those who love truth as coming to the light, and those whom God condemns as being in evil darkness. In Revelation 9:1-3, God sent a fallen angel to open the bottomless pit to allow all the demonic beings there, like a cloud of locusts, to emerge to torment all men who have not been sealed in their foreheads by God for their protection. God will have a good reason for doing this. God will desire to gather all the forces of evil to the Battle of Armageddon so that He can destroy most of them at one time. Revelation 19:17-21; Ezekiel 39:2. In Genesis 1:3-5, God created the light but not the darkness. God created the light to overcome the darkness. John 1:5. The light symbolizes goodness and righteousness. The darkness symbolizes the evil abyss, the place of absolute nothingness, the place of demonic beings who possess negative consciousness. God possesses infinite knowledge of all that is good and creative and righteous. God created humans to possess only positive consciousness. God raises the idea of nothing to a level of positive consciousness slightly above absolute nothingness as a useful idea in His creations of good systems. God knew nothing about absolute nothingness until it suddenly emerged into Lucifer as recorded in Ezekiel 28:15. Not even God knows how evil emerged from the bottomless pit to infect His creations because God only knows positive consciousness. II Thessalonians 2:7. The forces of evil have some secret way of getting into God's creations.