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Intro and Review
We are in the third chapter of Job this morning. Last week we were introduced to the story of Job. The first two chapters set the foundation of the dilemma addressed through the rest of the book, which is mainly about how God governs the world.
Job is a wisdom book and is meant to help shape how we think about God. By the end of our four month journey through Job, my hope is that we will have a better understanding of, and trust in, the wisdom of God.
This will help us when we face trials and suffering in our lives, but also to keep a healthy perspective in times of prosperity.
Job starts out with great prosperity. He is described as the greatest man in the region. He is also a righteous man and devoted to God.
The set up of the story is that Job’s wealth and success is because of his devotion to God. So, the challenger, Satan, wants God to test whether Job will still be devoted to God even after losing all that God has blessed him with.
So, God takes it all away, with Satan as his agent. Job loses everything. He doesn’t know why. As the readers of the story we have the benefit of knowing what’s going on the behind the scenes, but Job doesn’t have that information.
His entire world has been taken away from him. Even his health. His wife urged him to abandon his faith in God. And now he is utterly alone, sitting among the ashes.
In his grief, he continues trusting in God even though he doesn’t have the answer to why these things are happening.
We will see moving forward that Job struggles with his suffering not because he thinks God has no right to take away what he has blessed him with, but because he believes in the principle of Divine Retribution.
He and his friends believe God is perfectly just and the way that God executes his justice is by giving people what they deserve. If you do good, you get good in return. If you do evil, you get evil in return.
Job is experiencing the worst kind of suffering, yet he has done nothing to deserve it. This causes a crisis for Job and his friends. For the next 30 chapters, we will see this crisis unfold.
One more introductory note about how best to interpret this section of Job. Almost all of it is poetry and is neither descriptive or prescriptive. Descriptive texts describe what is happening. Most of the history and narrative sections of the Bible are descriptive.
Prescriptive means to give instruction about what to do or believe. In the midst of some of the historical books there are sections of prescriptive texts. The Pentateuch contains quite a lot of it, most notably the Ten Commandments, which teach us how to live as people made in the image of God.
Much of the New Testament is prescriptive, with some descriptive texts in the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation. Just as is the case with knowing the genre of a book, it is also important to know the nature of the texts.
There is one more type of text, which is emotive. An emotive text is an expression of how people are feeling in response to the situation. Emotive language often takes the form of poetry.
We can read it in the Psalms where the writers want their enemies destroyed. Or in Ecclesiastes, where the writer says everything is meaningless.
Emotive texts give voice to a variety of emotions, such as grief, confusion, anger, despair, longing, but also hope, joy, and celebration.
Emotive poetry, songs, and images are a great gift because they give language and expression to what many of us feel but have a hard time expressing.
And while the friends think they are speaking wisdom to Job, we find out later that they were not correct in what they said. So, we have to be careful as we go through Job to not draw conclusions on what we believe about God from small portions of the text.
Just as is the case with all of Scripture, everything in Job is true, but it is important to understand how that truth operates and interacts with us, and how to apply that truth to our lives.
It is particularly important in Job not to draw quick conclusions about how it applies to your life but to first allow it to get into you.
We need to take the whole of the book into view. This is why I urged everyone to read or listen through the entire book in one sitting. If you haven’t done that yet, I encourage you to do it this week.
With that said, let’s look at the first emotive statement, which is Job wishing that he was never born. As we read Job 3:1-10, remember that Job has now been sitting with his friends in silence in the ashes for seven days.
1. Job Cursed the Day of His Birth
This emotive language expresses Job’s extreme despair. The key word or idea in this section is curse. And, unfortunately, English is limited here because there are quite a few different Hebrew words translated as the English word curse.
This is something I have never spent a great deal of time studying, and as I have discovered, there is a lot of different kinds of cursing in the Bible!
In verse 1, the idea behind the word is to make light of or to belittle the day of his birth. It is the same word as is used in Leviticus 20:9 “Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.”
In verse 8, it is a much stronger idea of cursing, meaning to put an enchantment on the day of his birth. It is the same idea as in the story of Balak and Balaam in Numbers 22. Balak, who was the king of Moab, was afraid of the Israelites who were making their way to Canaan to occupy that land as God promised they would.
Balak hires Balaam, who is a professional seer or diviner, to curse the Israelites so that they would not be able to overcome Balak. But, Balaam is interrupted by God and is told not to curse Israel but to bless them.
In Job 3:8, Job is calling upon someone like Balaam to undo the day of his birth in the same way Balak hires Balaam to curse the Israelites and change God’s plans for them.
Job’s language is highly emotive and should be understood not as something he actually was going to do or that anyone ever should do, but as an expression of how he was feeling.
The two important things to understand about this section of chapter 3 is that Job refuses to curse God and that no matter how extreme Job’s language and emotions, God’s purposes cannot be undone.
Job’s lament is emotionally raw and deeply personal. He is confronting his suffering by asking, “Wouldn’t it have been better never to exist than to endure this?”
Yet, even in this, Job doesn’t accuse God of wrongdoing. He doesn’t curse or deny God. His faith is steadfast even though his language is dark and troubling.
And in both Job and Balaam’s stories, humans seek to control or reverse God’s plans through cursing. But in both cases, those curses are ultimately powerless against the divine order.
Job wants the day of his birth undone—a poetic attempt to curse backward what has already happened. Balak wants to curse forward—to shape the future through incantation. In both cases, God’s will prevails. God’s purposes cannot be undone or prevented.
One other quick observation from this section is the concepts of darkness and chaos. He speaks in the language of un-creation—undoing light and order.
His despair has led him to express a desire for not only the day of his birth but also the cosmic order to be undone, for God to reverse creation. He is putting to words what he has experienced by losing everything.
In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis reflects on his own anguish after losing his wife to cancer: “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God is really like.”
Job doesn’t lose faith, but his faith is in tension with his pain. He understandably finds it difficult to reconcile his experience with what he believes to be true.
The temptation is not to deny God, but to believe that God isn’t good. That he is distant and cruel.
But the book of Job invites us to wait, to keep being present with Job as he continues to lament his suffering.
This first section of his lament ends with exhaustion and transitions now into a longing for rest as he questions the meaning of his life.
2. Job Questions the Meaning of His Life
Job asks: if it was all going to end in ashes, why let it begin? Why let the full days of my life run its course?
He sees no legacy, no relief, no rest—except in death. In Sheol, the grave, there is equality: the great and the small lie still. Kings and slaves lie side-by-side, equal in the fate of all humankind.
This section shows how different Job’s view is of the afterlife compared to the Christian view.
When Job uses language such as lying down in peace, or hidden away in the ground, he has something different in mind than what we usually think about related to life after death.
Our understanding of the afterlife is based on the promises of God fulfilled in Jesus. We have hope of resurrection through the resurrection of Christ, of eternal communion with God, and death being defeated.
For people in Job’s time, the afterlife was not understood as heaven or hell in the way we tend to think about it, but simply the grave. They viewed it as a place of stillness and unawareness, a kind of non-life—the opposite of the complexity of the living world.
For Job, this would be better than his current experience because it would be an end to his suffering. In death, he would finally be relieved.
Yet, Job doesn’t die. He keeps waking up, day after day, to more suffering. Grieving the loss of his family and his livelihood. Constant pain due to sores all over his body.
In the midst of his suffering, he asks a question so familiar to many of us.
“Why does God give life to those who long for death?”
3. Job Questions why Life Continues for the Suffering
In these verses, we see Job questioning why, if death brings peace, must the hurting continue to live? If God sees our pain, why doesn’t he intervene?
If God is just, why prolong the agony? Why take everything away yet spare his life? Why has everyone else been taken and he is left alone to suffer?
I have heard this question especially from the aging. Why am I still here and others pass on? In my observation, one of the most difficult things a person can experience is to move on after losing a child.
In these verses, Job gives voice not only to this kind of sorrow, but also to confusion. It makes no sense. This shouldn’t be how life operates. A parent should die before their children.
And yet, this too is an act of faith. He is not abandoning his trust in God. He is asking, wrestling, expressing. He doesn’t deny or abandon God. He approaches him.
Job gives us permission to ask these questions of God. This isn’t doubt or rebellion, but honesty. These are questions worth asking.
My mentor, Alec Hill, wrote a book called Living in Bonus Time, which is a reflection on his cancer journey. The cancer he had was extremely rare and difficult to treat. The best treatment was a bone marrow transplant. The chance of survival was really low.
At the time he was president of InterVarsity in the US. He resigned and went through the extremely difficult process of the transplant, thanks to the selflessness of his own brother, Grant. The transplant ended up saving Alec, but it had a negative effect on Grant, who was an incredibly healthy athlete at the time.
In his book, Alec reflects, “When agony flooded my soul, I nearly lost my faith. For the only time in my life, I had suicidal thoughts… the dark night is a particularly ominous spectre for cancer patients. Walking into the hellhole of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, we crave light, not darkness. We covet hope, not despair. The last thing we need is to sense God’s absence. Having cancer is bad enough; feeling spiritually abandoned would only multiply our suffering.”
Alec and I meet over a video call once per month. I consider myself so very fortunate to have him as my mentor, not just because of all the great things he has accomplished and the wisdom he offers me as a leader, but because he has faced the dark night of the soul head on.
His posture is literally hunched over due to the effects of the bone marrow transplant. He walks with a limp. Yet, he considers himself blessed by God, living in bonus time. This perspective of gratitude took time, though. It wasn’t instant. Just as is the case with Job.
Conclusion
This poem of lament offers no resolution. It is the lament of someone who has suffered the loss of everything and wondering why God keeps him alive or why he was even born only to lose everything.
In our own suffering and difficulties, great or small, God allows lament. You don’t need to sanitize your sorrow in order to approach God. In the midst of suffering, we will not always think logically. We need permission to express our emotions.
But, what you believe about God will shape how you suffer. If God is simply a transaction machine—rewarding good and punishing evil—you’ll find yourself in unresolvable despair when life breaks that formula.
This is where Job is at the moment. He believes God rewards the good and punishes the evil. The journey we are on with Job is a journey of discovering the depths of God’s goodness and wisdom.
If God is trustworthy because of his infinite goodness and wisdom, we can keep trusting him no matter how good or bad life becomes. You can cry out to him, even complain to him, in the dark night of your soul.
You might weep, you might rage, but stay in conversation with God. Call out to God alongside the great poetry of the Psalms and Job and Lamentations.
Although we end this message and chapter 3 in despair, the biblical narrative does not end in despair. While we may experience times of darkness and pain, the promise of Jesus is that we will be brought to fullness of life upon his return.
While we wait, let us put our trust in the God who hears us.
Benediction
May the God of Job be near you, may the Holy Spirit increase your trust in God, and may he strengthen your hope. Go now in the peace and grace of our great God, who was and is and will always be. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.