I Know That My Redeemer Liveth

The line is sung at funerals and in oratorios and almost nobody reads the ten verses in front of it.

So read them, because Job 19:13-22 is the most complete description of being left that exists in Scripture, and the famous sentence comes directly out of it.

He goes through the list of people, one at a time. His brethren are far from him. His acquaintance are estranged. His kinsfolk have failed. His familiar friends have forgotten him. The people in his own house count him a stranger. He calls his servant and the servant does not answer. His breath is strange to his wife. Young children despise him and speak against him when he stands up. And then, in verse nineteen: All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me.

Then verse twenty one, which is the one I find hardest to read out loud.

Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me.Job 19:21, King James Version

He says it twice. A man who has argued with his friends for chapters stops arguing and just asks.

That is where the famous verse is standing. Not in a cathedral. There.

He wanted it carved because he expected to die unvindicated

Now read what comes immediately before the line, because this is the part that changes it.

Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever!Job 19:23-24, King James Version

He wants a record. Written, printed, and then, because writing can be lost, carved into rock with an iron tool and the letters filled with lead so weather cannot take them.

That is not the wish of a man expecting things to be resolved next month. That is a man arranging for the truth about himself to outlast him, because he does not think he is going to be alive when it is finally admitted.

And out of that, in the next breath, comes this.

For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earthJob 19:25, King James Version

I know. Not I hope. Not perhaps. From a man who has just asked to have his case carved in stone because he expects to be dead before it is heard.

You are not going to be represented, you are going to see. Job 19:27 says mine eyes shall behold, and not another, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that first person alive for somebody who has stopped expecting to be present for anything good.

That word redeemer is worth a moment, because it is a legal word before it is a religious one. In that world it named the nearest relative whose job it was to step in for you: to buy back land you had lost, to buy you out of slavery, to take up your case in the gate when you could not.

So Job is not reaching for an abstraction. He is saying: I have no family left, they are all in the list above, and there is still somebody whose job this is and He is alive.

You have a nearest relative who took the office when everybody in the list stepped back. Job 19:25 uses the family word deliberately, and the same Spirit who preserved that word is the reason it is not a poetic flourish for somebody whose own list is short.

Then verse twenty seven, which is the sentence that stops me every time.

Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.Job 19:27, King James Version

And not another.

He will not settle for a report. He is not asking to be told about it afterward. He wants his own eyes on it, and he says so twice in one line: for myself, and not another.

That is the appetite of a man who has stopped asking God for anything except one thing, and the one thing left is not relief. It is to be there.

You have a want left that nothing in your losses reached, and Job says it out loud in the middle of the worst chapter of his life. The written word says for myself and not another in the same verse, and it is His Spirit who keeps that want alive in somebody who thinks they have stopped wanting.

I want to be honest about where this leaves him, because the book does not tidy it.

Job says this in chapter nineteen. The book has forty two chapters. He is still on the ash heap for twenty more, still arguing, still not answered. This sentence does not end his suffering, resolve his case, or bring anybody back. It is said in the middle and the middle goes on.

You are allowed to say a settled thing in the middle of an unsettled life, and the man who wrote this line stayed exactly where he was afterward. Job 19 sits nowhere near the end of the book, and the same Spirit who left it in the middle is the reason nobody has to be finished to say it.