In 13:4-19 Job accused his friends of being false. He called them plasterers of lies and physicians of no value and urged them to be silent (vv. 4-5).
In 13:3, 20—14:22 we have Job's arguments with God. In 13:3 he declared, "I would speak to the Almighty,/And I desire to argue with God."
In 13:20-28 Job contended with God for his case. In verse 28, referring to himself, Job said, "Such a one is like some rotten thing that wastes away,/Like a garment eaten by moths." On the one hand, Job recognized that he was something rotten, something that would waste away. On the other hand, Job continued to feel that he was not wrong in anything. Realizing that God had marked his paths and had set limits for him (v. 27), Job wanted God to explain the situation to him. As we have pointed out, Job did not know God's purpose concerning him, although he believed that there was a purpose hidden in God's heart.
The Bible, which consists of sixty-six books, begins with God and His creation in Genesis and consummates with the New Jerusalem in Revelation. Between these two ends of the Bible, there are history, teachings, prophecies, and types. But if we understand the Bible only according to these things, we still do not know the Bible. We need to see the eternal economy of God, which is God's eternal intention with His heart's desire to dispense Himself in His Divine Trinity as the Father in the Son by the Spirit into His chosen people to be their life and nature that they may be the same as He is for His fullness, His expression.
The word economy is an anglicized form of the Greek word oikonomia, which means "house law, household management, or administration," and derivatively, "administrative dispensation (arrangement), plan, economy." This Greek word implies the notion of dispensing. A dispensing is different from a dispensation. The word dispensing denotes an imparting of something, whereas the word dispensation, as it is commonly used by Christians, refers to the way God deals with people during a particular age. Today many talk about God's dispensations without seeing the crucial matter of God's dispensing.
An economy is an arrangement to carry out a plan for dispensing. God's economy is God's plan, God's arrangement, for God to dispense Himself in His element, life, nature, and attributes, and all that He has achieved and attained into His chosen people that they may be rebuilt by being constituted with the divine essence in the divine element of the divine source to be something divine. Before receiving God's dispensing, we were merely human. After God's rebuilding with the divine constitution we, like the Lord Jesus, become divinely human and humanly divine. Before incarnation Christ was only divine, but after His incarnation He became a God-man, a man with the divine nature. Now He is divinely human, and He is also humanly divine. Having been regenerated by Christ, we have become a part of Him, and now we are the same as He is—divinely human and humanly divine.