A Word in Season: The Weaver's Shuttle (Job 7:6)

This is certainly not the best environment for some complete treatment of the Book of Job with its delicate interplay between divine purpose and human experience with Job and his three friends in this ongoing conversation about what is taking place in the life of Job.

What I want to say simply is that Job's three friends and Job himself in this book make the mistake of recognising true facts but drawing false conclusions. So Job knows that he is, in his life, a righteous man.

He fears the Lord and walks before him in a way that pleases him. He thinks, why then am I unfairly undergoing this suffering? Job's three friends, on the other hand, when they start speaking, their assertion is that if Job is suffering in this way, then whatever he protests otherwise, he must have done something sinful and therefore God is punishing him, and it's only when the younger man speaks at the end and then God himself makes himself known from the whirlwind that real truth begins to come to light, both in its principle and in its application.

Job’s Complaint: Days Swifter Than a Weaver’s Shuttle

The point that I want to make then is simply this, that Job and his friends in this letter often say true things even if we wouldn't follow them to their false conclusions. And so, for example, in a chapter like Job 7, you have the man of God saying my days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and are spent without hope.

He's really in a point of despair at this part of the letter. He feels the purposelessness, the emptiness, the vanity of the life that he's leading. He's in unutterable pains in his flesh. He's not sleeping and his life feels like a passing breath.

And he uses this telling phrase, my days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle and are spent without hope. Now that may not mean a great deal to you unless you know what a weaver's shuttle is. If you see a weaver at work with an old-fashioned loom, it's a frame that opens and shuts.

And in that frame are what are called the warp threads of a piece of cloth extended at tension across the frame. And as the frame opens and closes, a weaver would throw a hard, smooth piece of wood with the weft, talk about the warp and the woof in the cloth, but the thread that runs across going back and forth in order that the loom will create a piece of cloth.

And if you've ever seen a skilled weaver doing this, this weaver's shuttle with the thread attached to it is whipping back and forth through the loom as it rises and falls, as it opens and shuts. That's what Job has in mind, that this rapid, repeated, passing away of time, days moving swifter than a weaver's shuttle.

The Swift Passing of Life in a World of Suffering

It's a telling illustration of the speed at which life passes, and it may be that you feel it particularly if you're still going through some of the privations that are associated with the pandemic that has swept largely across the world.

Your days passing swifter than a weaver's shuttle. Now whatever conclusions you draw from that, the image itself is a true and a telling one. Our lives are passing at a stunning pace. Days follow days follow days.

Before we know it, weeks and then months and then years have passed by. Now we might not say that we're spending them without hope, but it is bringing to a fast close this brief life that we have upon earth.

Hope in the Lord Jesus Christ and the Life to Come

There is hope now for those who trust in a Redeemer. There is a prospect of days that never end, an everlasting hope that lies before those who are trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ. In this world, time passes so swiftly, our days swifter than a weaver's shuttle, our years pass so rapidly.

We are like the flower of the field, like the grass that withers and perishes. But if we're trusting in the Lord Christ, however swiftly this world may pass by, we know that there is an everlasting hope which is to come.

There is hope for those who are trusting in him, however quickly this life will go.