Commentary on the Book of Job part forty

                                      Job 21:1-34

Can any goodness reside in evil itself? All evil can only be totally evil. Since sin attaches itself to the good image of God in every man, then some good can be manifested in sinful acts. For example, adultery is sinful, but a man may genuinely love his mistress. Sin results from a weakness in man caused by his free will, but evil results from an attitude of total rebellion against God. Sin soils and mars the good image of God in man, but evil seeks to annihilate that goodness entirely. God cannot lose anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14. For this reason, God will exert His almighty love and power to cleanse and save His image in all humans from their sins either by the blood and water from Jesus on the cross or by the use of His consuming fire which resulted from the fact that Jesus left all of the sins of mankind behind when He descended into Hell. Christ had to have accomplished this because He rose immaculate from the dead.

God cannot fail to answer the cry of His Son from the cross in Luke 23:34. God will answer Jesus' cry and save His image in all humans from the weakness of their sins, some by His grace and all others by His consuming fire. God always saves humans from their sins, but God will never save humans from their evil because it is allied with Satan in his desire to murder God. This total evil in humans, which is the same as spiritual death, God will separate from all humans still in their graves and cast it all into the lake of fire forever. Revelation 20:11-15. In the lake of fire, their "worms" will never die. Mark 9:43-49.

In Job 21:26-29, Job turned again to rebuke his false comforters. They had falsely reasoned that Job had to be wicked because of God's punishment of him. But Job informed them that they did not know much about wickedness, and they did not know what happened to the wicked.