Our Umpire in Heaven

by Henry M. Morris, Ph.D.

"For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment. Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both." (Job 9:32-33)

Job, in his sufferings, was mystified by the complete silence of God, whom he had loved and tried to serve faithfully all his life. He longed somehow to be able to come before the great Judge to plead his case, but this was not possible, for God was not a man like himself. He did not even have a "daysman" to mediate between himself and God.

Oh, yes, he did! And so do we. A "daysman" is an arbitrator or umpire, or mediator (as this word is usually rendered in modern versions). But how could there be an umpire to mediate disputes between God and man, unless such an umpire could somehow be both God and man, able to "lay his hand upon us both"?

There is one perfect umpire, of course. "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time" (1 Timothy 2:5-6). The ransom He paid was His own blood, with which "he entered in once |for all| into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us" (Hebrews 9:12).

Thus the God/man Christ Jesus is perfectly able to bridge the chasm between God and man. Perhaps an even better connotation of "daysman" is that of "advocate." Now, when Satan, "the accuser of our brethren" (Revelation 12:10), accuses us of sin before God, as he did against Job, our great Intercessor defends us. "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous" (1 John 2:1), and "he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them" (Hebrews 7:25). HMM

This article was originally published November, 2011. "Our Umpire in Heaven", Institute for Creation Research, https://www.icr.org/article/6358/ (accessed December 22, 2024).