Job 21:11-21

11 They send their little children out [to play] like a flock of lambs, and their children dance around.

12 They sing with the tambourine and lyre, and they are happy with the music of the flute.

13 They spend their days in happiness, and they go peacefully to the grave.

14 But they say to God, 'Leave us alone. We don't want to know your ways.

15 Who is the Almighty that we should serve him? What do we gain if we pray to him?'

16 Anyhow, isn't their happiness in their own power? (The plan of the wicked is foreign to my way of thinking.)

17 "How often is the lamp of the wicked snuffed out? How often does disaster happen to them? How often does an angry God give them pain?

18 How often are they like straw in the wind or like husks that the storm sweeps away?

19 "[You say,] 'God saves a person's punishment for his children.' God should pay back that person so that he would know that it is a punishment.

20 His eyes should see his own ruin. He should drink from the wrath of the Almighty.

21 How can he be interested in his family after he's gone, when the number of his months is cut short?

Job 21:11-21 Meaning and Commentary

INTRODUCTION TO JOB 21

This chapter contains Job's reply to Zophar's preceding discourse, in which, after a preface exciting attention to what he was about to say, Job 21:1-6; he describes by various instances the prosperity of wicked men, even of the most impious and atheistical, and which continues with them as long as they live, contrary to what Zophar had asserted in Job 20:5, Job 21:7-15; as for himself, he disapproved of such wicked men as much as any, and owns that destruction comes upon them sooner or later, and on their posterity also, Job 21:16-21; but as God is a God of knowledge, and needs no instruction from any, and is a sovereign Being, he deals with men in different ways; some die in great ease, and peace, and prosperity, and others in bitterness and distress, but both are alike brought to the dust, Job 21:22-26; and whereas he was aware of their censures of him, and their objections to what he had said, he allows that the wicked are reserved to the day of destruction, which is future, and in the mean while lie in the grave, where all must follow; yet they are not repaid or rewarded in this life, that remains to be done in another world, Job 21:27-33; and concludes, that their consolation with respect to him was vain, and falsehood was in their answers, Job 21:34.