Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again?
Job 10:9 belongs to the colloquies in Job 3-31 between Job and his three friends on the cause and object of human suffering. It voices the perplexity of a man who knows his own integrity yet cannot understand God's dealings with him, without charging God foolishly. God saw the end from the beginning and was working through the affliction what would glorify Himself forever after, bring comfort and hope to thousands of suffering ones, and prove a blessing to Job himself. It appears in Job's answer to Bildad and belongs to the section showing that afflictions are no proof of sin. It is part of the portrayal of suffering and God's overruling providence in which Job is being disciplined through affliction, while his friends wrongly insist that his suffering proves he has sinned.
The verse means that God made the whole person as clay and will bring that same person back to dust. The person brought back to dust is the one God formed, not merely a bodily house separate from an immortal soul. God is said to have formed man from the clay of the earth, and man returns to dust. The surrounding passage uses the image of God shaping a person from clay like the making of pottery and pouring him out like milk to describe human formation, and asks whether God will return the formed person to dust.
This language about God fashioning and shaping the human body does not prove that each soul is created immediately and separately by God, and it is compatible with natural causes contributing to the propagation of the body. The making and fashioning language for the body as clay in Job 10:8-11 is the same kind of made-by-God language used about souls, yet the body so described is produced by the natural process of generation through parents multiplying themselves. Therefore such language does not prove immediate divine creation of the soul apart from the body, but shows that soul and body together are transmitted with the body in reproduction, so that the begotten child possesses all the characteristics and natures of the parents.
Job 10:9 belongs to the colloquies in Job 3-31 between Job and his three friends on the cause and object of human suffering. It voices the perplexity of a man who knows his own integrity yet cannot understand God's dealings with him, without charging God foolishly. God saw the end from the beginning and was working through the affliction what would glorify Himself forever after, bring comfort and hope to thousands of suffering ones, and prove a blessing to Job himself. It appears in Job's answer to Bildad and belongs to the section showing that afflictions are no proof of sin. It is part of the portrayal of suffering and God's overruling providence in which Job is being disciplined through affliction, while his friends wrongly insist that his suffering proves he has sinned.
The verse means that God made the whole person as clay and will bring that same person back to dust. The person brought back to dust is the one God formed, not merely a bodily house separate from an immortal soul. God is said to have formed man from the clay of the earth, and man returns to dust. The surrounding passage uses the image of God shaping a person from clay like the making of pottery and pouring him out like milk to describe human formation, and asks whether God will return the formed person to dust.
This language about God fashioning and shaping the human body does not prove that each soul is created immediately and separately by God, and it is compatible with natural causes contributing to the propagation of the body. The making and fashioning language for the body as clay in Job 10:8-11 is the same kind of made-by-God language used about souls, yet the body so described is produced by the natural process of generation through parents multiplying themselves. Therefore such language does not prove immediate divine creation of the soul apart from the body, but shows that soul and body together are transmitted with the body in reproduction, so that the begotten child possesses all the characteristics and natures of the parents.