God forbid that I should justify you
Not but that he counted them righteous and good men God-ward; he
did not take upon him to judge their state, and to justify or
condemn them with respect to their everlasting condition; but he
could not justify them in their censures of him, and say they did
a right thing in charging him with wickedness and hypocrisy; nor
could he justify them in all their sentiments and doctrines which
they had delivered concerning the punishment of the wicked in
this life, and the happiness that attends all good men; and that
a man by his outward circumstances may be known to be either a
good man or a bad man; such things as these he could not say were
right; for so to do would be to call evil good, and good evil;
and therefore he expresses his utmost abhorrence and detestation
of showing his approbation of such conduct as theirs towards him,
and of such unbecoming sentiments of God, and of his dealings,
they had entertained; and to join in with which would be a
profanation and a pollution, as the word used by him signifies;
he could not do it without defiling his conscience, and profaning
truth:
until I die one will not remove my integrity from
me;
Job was an upright man both in heart and life, through the grace
of God bestowed on him; and he continued in his integrity,
notwithstanding the temptations of Satan, and his attacks upon
him, and the solicitations of his wife; and he determined through
the grace of God to persist therein to the end of his life;
though what he chiefly means here is, that he would not part with
his character as an upright man, which he had always had, and God
himself had bore testimony to; he would never give up this till
he gave up the ghost; he would never suffer his integrity to be
removed from him, nor remove it from himself by denying that it
belonged to him, which his friends bore hard upon him to do. So
Jarchi paraphrases it,
``I will not confess (or agree) to your saying, that I am not upright;''the phrase, "till I die", seems rather to belong to the first clause, though it is true of both, and may be repeated in this.