Withdraw your hand far from me: and let not your dread make me afraid.
All Commentaries on Job 13:21 Go To Job 13
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
What are we to understand here by the “face of God,” except his visitation? While God beholds, he also punishes our sins from which no just person is even hidden if the two things that he entreats are not removed. About this, Job adds, “Withdraw your hand far from me, and do not let dread of you terrify me.” Concerning the two, what else does Job ask for in a voice of prophecy, but the season of grace and redemption? For the law held the people abhorrent to the stroke of vengeance, that whoever committed sin under its yoke should be immediately punished with death. Nor did the Jewish people serve God from a principle of love but of fear. But righteousness can never be perfected by fear, seeing that according to the voice of John, “perfect love casts out fear.” And Paul comforts the children of adoption by saying, “For you have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” Therefore in the voice of humankind, longing for the hardness of the law’s stroke to pass away and eagerly desiring to advance from fear to love, Job names in prayer the “two things God should put far from him,” saying, “Withdraw your hand far from me, and do not let dread of you terrify me”; that is, remove from me the hardness of the stroke, take away the weight of dread, and while the grace of love illuminates me, pour upon me the spirit of assurance. If I am not removed far from the rod and from dread, I know that I shall not be withdrawn from the strictness of your searching since he cannot be justified before you, who serves you on a principle of love but of fear. Hence he seeks the very presence of his Creator, as if it were a familiar and bodily way, that he may thereby both hear what he is ignorant of and be heard in the things that he knows.
