But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold.
Job spends much of this chapter searching, almost frantically, for God — forward, backward, left, right, and coming up empty every time. That's worth sitting with before jumping to the hopeful line at the end. This isn't someone who feels close to God and is simply describing a nice metaphor about growth. This is someone who can't find God at all, and yet still says: he knows the way that I take.
That's the real claim here, and it's a strange one. Even in the absence of any felt presence, Job insists on a kind of confidence that isn't based on feeling — that whatever he's going through has a direction to it, a purpose being worked out, even if it currently feels like being tested past what seems fair. Gold doesn't become gold without intense heat. He's not pretending the heat doesn't hurt.
If you've ever searched for some sense of God's presence and come up with silence, this verse doesn't tell you that's fine, actually, or that you should feel better about it. It just holds open the possibility that being unable to feel a way forward isn't the same as there being no way forward at all.
If you've searched for God and found only silence, is it possible the absence of feeling isn't the same as the absence of a path?
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.