Job Finally Speaks

“After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.  And Job spake and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.  Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it.”  Job 3:1-4

It had been a week since Job’s visitors had come to be with him in his time of extreme sorrow and misery, and all four of them had been sitting in silence.  But then the silence was broken when Job spoke only to curse his day.  What happened to the godly man who had been so conscientious in his worship and honor of God?  How about the man who said, “…the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away”?  Job had several days to sit and ponder his painful situation.  Things were different now.  After Satan’s first attack upon Job’s children and his possessions, Job was extremely sorrowful and appeared to be resigned to his loss, but now that his body had been touched by Satan, he abandoned his efforts to maintain a calm and accepting attitude and was a man filled with self-pity so much so that he wished that he had never been born.

Have you, perhaps as a child, ever became upset over something, and said that you wished that you had never been born?  You didn’t really mean it, but Job did mean it.  He even went as far as to wish that the day that he had been born had been wiped from the calendar as if it never existed.  He wished that the night that he was conceived by his parents had never existed.  He desired that the day in which he was born to be one of terror with a black cloud to cover it, and the same for the night.  Obliterate it from the month of the year in which it occurred.  He wanted other people to curse that day as well.

Job began to indirectly blame his own mother for bringing him into the world.  Why couldn’t she just have been barren, a curse to the women of that day.  This is the same Job who had once been the “go to” guy for seeking wisdom.  He is now saying things that a wise person would not say.  One can’t really believe that a day that has already occurred could be as if it never occurred.  No one has invented a time machine that can take folks into the past or into the future, a popular theme in science fiction.  To curse something that has already come and gone is vain.  He then went from wishing that he had never been born to wishing that he had died in childbirth.

Understanding that it was no use to wish that he had never been conceived, been born, nor died at birth, Job began to complain that he had been allowed to live up to this time of affliction and pain.  He had become a miserable and bitter man who dreaded each day that he was alive to suffer.  His days and nights were equally bad.  Anyone who experiences excruciating pain, deep depression, or severe loneliness comes to the point that nothing in this world matters.  Job considered those who died leaving behind a life of pain and torture as those who would rejoice once they closed their eyes in death.  He was apparently not thinking about the afterlife for all those who left their pain behind in death.  We know that Job was a worshiper of God, but there were many idolaters of his day who would find that death would not end their suffering.  But Job wasn’t really thinking about others and their standing before a righteous and holy God.  His affliction wore on him so heavily that all he could focus on was his own pain.  The only way out, he believed, was death.  I don’t think anyone other than Jesus Christ suffered like Job suffered.

Job then asked the question that many have also asked or at least wondered about:  why does God allow a person to be born if his or her life is going to be filled with pain, sorrow, disappointment, and troubles of all kinds?  Job felt that God had built a hedge around him to keep him in misery.  His pain kept him from remembering the hedge of prosperity and blessings that God had built around him in days past.  Satan had charged Job with only serving God because of this protecting hedge that God had put around Job (1:10).  At this point, Satan may have thought that he would win this round because Job had gone from a man consumed with honoring God, even sacrificing animals for the benefit of his own children, to a man filled with bitterness, complaints, and self-pity.  Matthew Henry pointed out that Job’s attitude was a display of ungratefulness to the Giver of life.  He wrote, “Grace teaches us, in the midst of life’s greatest comforts, to be willing to die, and in the midst of its greatest crosses, to be willing to live”.

Job said that the thing that he had feared had finally come upon him.  What was it that he feared?  He didn’t trust in his wealth, but that didn’t stop him from worrying about losing it.  I am reminded of those who have everything going their way but can’t enjoy it for worrying about something bad that might happen.  Job and his peers all had the same belief, which was that if a man lived righteously, then God would bless him, but if he was evil, then God would punish him.  They were very adamant about that belief.  Thus, we can see Job’s dilemma.  Job knew that it was the LORD who had prospered him and didn’t take that for granted as if he was entitled to his possessions, but even after all of his labor in building a life to honor the LORD and living as righteously as he knew how, trouble came anyway.

Next week: Eliphaz Speaks