Job 23:17

Because I was not cut off before the darkness, neither hath he covered the darkness from my face.

Because I was not taken away by death from the evil to come (literally, from before the face of the darkness, Isaiah 57:1). Alluding to the words of Eliphaz (Job 22:11, "darkness" - i:e., calamity. "Cut off;" rather, in the Arabic sense, brought to the land of silence х nitsmatiy (H6789)]: my sad complaint hushed in death (Umbreit). "Darkness," in the second clause, not the same Hebrew word as in the first, cloud, obscurity. Instead of 'covering the cloud (of evil) from my face,' He "covers" me with it (Job 22:11).

Remarks:

(1) How light are our trials, for the most part, as compared with those under which Job "groaned" (Job 23:1); and, on the other hand, how much fuller and clearer are our spiritual privileges and consolations than his! What he sighed for we possess-boldness of access to the throne of God (Job 23:3). Moreover, we have not to plead our own cause, as Job unwisely desired to be permitted to do. Our Advocate with the Father, our "great High Priest, that is, passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God" (Hebrews 4:14). undertakes our case, and pleads with all-prevailing efficacy for us, who believe and come unto the Father by Him.

(2) When our spirits fail while God contends with us, He graciously keeps us from sinking by putting His strength in us (Job 23:6). Our greatest wisdom in such cases is, like the wrestling patriarch Jacob, to hang with our whole weight on Him: so shall His strength be made perfect in our weakness. The best 'arguments' we can 'fill our mouth with' are God's promises in His Word (Job 23:4), which He delights to be "put in remembrance" of, as though He needed to be reminded of them (Isaiah 43:26).

(3) There are times in the experience of every believer when God seems to withdraw Himself, so that His child, as it were, gropes after Him in the dark, but is unable to attain to the sense of His comfortable presence. At such times the believer must wait in faith and patience, remembering that God "knows his way," and that when God has fully tried him, and removed the dross from him in the fiery ordeal of affliction, he shall "come forth as gold" (Job 23:10).

(4) God's words are the spiritual food of every true saint (Job 23:12). The disciple of Christ, like his Master, feels that "man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4). As God is a sovereign, who performs whatsoever He appoints, so that none can turn Him (Job 23:13), the believer refers all things to the good pleasure of His will, and waits in assured hope that God is faithful to his promises, and that, though "weeping may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning" (Psalms 30:5).