Job 21:32

32 Yet shall he be brought [yabal] to the grave [qeber], and shall remain [shaqad] in the tomb [gadiysh]. KJV-Interlinear

32 'While he is carried to the grave, Men will keep watch over his tomb. NASB

Even though we read the Bible over and over and over again, and we might think that we know all there is to know about life, but a truly smart person, knows that without a daily Bible study, the risks of losing ground in the spiritual life are enormous.

If you think you know it all, and feel that you do not need a daily study, you have in effect bet all that you have, on your own form of wisdom. You will lose.

We are studying wicked people. A wicked person, in a nutshell, is anyone who lives their life, consistently out of fellowship, and that is their chosen and established pattern of life.

This certainly has applied to you at some point in your life. Perhaps even now.

But for those who pursue their spiritual lives, confess their sins regularly, study their Bibles, and are more or less advancing in their spiritual lives, the term wickedness does not apply. Even though you will have your out-of-fellowship moments, your regular pattern of living is really the key to the kind of life you have.

Now, wicked people, have their own bizarre ideas of life. They have rejected God, they have rejected the spiritual life as defined in the Bible, they have rejected truth and reality, and that overflows into their ideas in the afterlife.

When a person dies, his soul leaves the body. If you are a believer, then you have a soul and a human spirit, both of which leave the body. The body is discarded and placed in a grave or cremated.

The physical body is worthless, in effect.

But what do spiritually deficient people do with a worthless thing? They continue caring for it, just as they continued caring for their own worthless life (a non-spiritual life), while they were alive.

I heard on the news just a couple of days ago, of some extremely wealthy person who died, and had in their will, terms for building a million dollar burial complex. Now, that person is in the next life somewhere, but their body is rotting, as is the nature of decaying bodies, and enclosed in a mausoleum that is more expensive than the homes that nearly everyone on this planet live in. And what is this burial home housing? A decaying worthless pile of dust.

And so it has been throughout history. From the pyramids to the current thought of our day, people have dedicated enormous sums in funerals and cemeteries, and their care. You will even see memorials along a highway, little crosses where someone died in an accident, and someone else will keep up that memorial for years.

The word here for 'carried' is 'yabal,' which means to be carried or brought with pomp and ceremony. The ceremony includes all of the activities following ones death, including the memorial services, the burial site, the care and upkeep to follow and so forth. And in this, humanity has invented death ceremonies from the very simple to the very extravagant.

Then, keepers or caretakers are established to watch over these gravesites. But there is more than meets the eye here.

The word for 'watch' or 'remain' is 'shaqad' meaning to be alert, to be sleepless, to be on the lookout. And, this means both the living and the dead are performing this function.

The living diligently watch over their cemeteries and such. Even if it is just to hold services, mow the grass or change the flowers. The dead, keep watch from their positions in the next life, waiting for what is coming next in their existence.

Neither party has any control over what they are doing. The living cannot do anything for the dead. And the dead have no more control over their existence.

This also indicates Jobs knowledge of the afterlife, that it exists, and that there are consequences to be addressed in the next life.

And what is all of the pomp and attention directed toward? The tomb, 'gadiysh,' which means 'to heap up.'

The body is heaped up conceptually, onto a pile, or discarded as it were, into a refuse pile. It has no further value and is thrown out.

This paints a picture of the dead, waiting on the heap of the dead, worthless in death as they were in life, being watched over by living memorials celebrating and caring for something that is dead and worthless for no apparent reason other than the emotional attachment to tradition and habit.

And Job has painted a pretty accurate picture of the spiritually deficient persons existence. It is worthless, it is silly, it is irrational, it is ridiculous, it is absurd, it is detached from reality.

Now, if you look into the mirror of your life, is this what you see?

Now is the time to post a prayer.