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Introduction and Review
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It came not by accident, or out of a need that God had for companionship.
The world God made was good—full of beauty, joy, and harmony. And traces of that goodness are still with us. But so much has been marred: harmony twisted by hatred, joy overshadowed by pain, beauty touched by death. What went wrong?
To answer that, we need to ask what was originally “right.” And that depends on the kind of God we believe in.
Some imagine a solitary god who created mainly to rule and be served, or to have companionship, where “right” means nothing more than strict obedience. In that view, the problem in Genesis 3 is simple: Adam and Eve disobeyed. They did something to displease God.
But sin is not just about broken rules—it’s about broken relationship.
The God of the Bible is not a solitary being. He is triune—Father, Son, and Spirit—eternally existing in loving relationship. And we were made in that image. Which means we were created for love, for communion with God and with one another.
That’s what makes suffering, like Job’s, so wrenching. It isn’t just pain, it’s the loss of connection, of meaning, of the love we were made for.
In this message, we see Job expressing the pain related to his loss of connection with God. As he sees it, the punishment of losing everything God has blessed him with, feels like rejection because of his view of justice.
His view is that suffering means God is displeased with his behaviour. Job doesn’t believe he has done anything wrong, so is God just outright rejecting him?
This is the dilemma of Job. As we continue our journey through the story, we will discover that this book is really about knowing what sort of God we have and why the idea of a cause and effect justice system is insufficient for understanding how God governs creation.
So far, we have seen that Job is a righteous man who has suffered the loss of everything, including his kids and his livelihood.
We heard Job’s initial lament, how he wished he had never been born and questioned why God was keeping him alive in his suffering.
And last week, we looked at the first speech from Eliphaz, who is one of Job’s closest companions. Eliphaz attempted to comfort Job by urging him to examine himself to know what he did to upset God, to repent, and ask God to restore him.
Throughout the dialogues, we will see that Job never fails to address God, while the friends never address God.
When we turned to the speeches of the friends, they have some characteristics that are common in the church. They may have smart and important things to say on the problem, but what they say does not address the real problem.
The real truth can only be addressed when God and people are engaged in eye to eye and mouth to ear encounter. In other words Job’s friends sure do sound like they’re speaking rightly about God, but their posture is all wrong.
In his speech to Job, Eliphaz seemed to have all the answers. But the only answer Job has is that he is innocent. Job’s apparent ignorance about what’s really going on leads him to ask God himself for the truth, to face the one ultimately responsible for his misery.1
Today, in Job chapters 6-7, Job responds to Eliphaz by first vividly explaining the weight of his suffering, then lamenting the wound of his friends betrayal, and finally, describing the wilderness of despair.
Let’s begin by reading 6:1-7.
The Weight of Suffering
Job imagines a scale with his misery on one side and all the sand of the seas on the other. His misery would be heavier than the sand.
Remember, this is emotive language. He doesn’t literally believe this to be true, but this is an expression of how he feels.
The weight of the loss he has been suffering, together with the implications of unrighteousness that his loss carries, is heavier than the sand on every sea-shore.
Verses 4-7 are similar. Job feels like God has done his worst against him. These images of the scale, the arrows, the donkey, and tasteless food are Job’s way of saying that he is right to lament.
And he sees only one solution, that God would crush him and end his life. That his life could be taken while he is still righteous.
Job is like a prisoner under torture, who fears the moment when he will break; the possibility that he will “curse God and die” has become a vivid one for him.
His hope (Job 6:8–10) is that he may still remain loyal to God, who seems to have become his enemy, until the moment of his death.
No greater blessing could be granted a dying man, no greater comfort in the agony of death, than to know that he has not betrayed his God.
This reminds me of a moment from Shūsaku Endō’s novel Silence, where a Jesuit missionary in 17th-century Japan is forced to choose between apostasy in the form of stepping on an image of Christ, and watching innocent Japanese Christians continue to be tortured.
After years of silence from God, after prayers have gone unanswered, after all hope seems lost, he hears what he believes to be the voice of Christ, saying:
“Trample! Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
And later, Endō offers this piercing line: “For love, Christ would have apostatized. Even if it meant giving up everything he had.”
It’s a stunning reversal. In Job’s world, fidelity means holding on until the end, not breaking, not cursing. But in Silence, loyalty looks like breaking your own heart to spare the pain of others.
Both stories ask: What does it really mean to be faithful to God when God seems absent? When your choices seem to pit love against loyalty?
Job prays to die before he betrays God. The priest in Silence steps on the image of Christ so that others might live.
Both are in agony. Both long to remain faithful.
But maybe, the deeper mystery is that Christ himself steps into both stories—the faithful sufferer and the sacrificial redeemer—and meets us in that tension.
Job is left without hope and strength. He is helpless under the weight of his suffering. This is why he has a right to lament.
Part of his suffering is the betrayal of his friends. Let’s read 6:14-17.
The Wound of Betrayal
Job addresses his companions directly. He uses terms like friends and brothers, which speaks to the closeness of their relationship and implies that they should be more supportive.
Instead of standing by him in his suffering, they have betrayed him.
The image he describes in this section is the seasonal valley of Palestine, full to overflowing in the rainy season, and a dry ravine in the heat of summer. The valleys overflow when their water is not needed; when it is needed they have nothing to offer. So it is with Job’s friends and their loyalty.
When they came, perhaps he had hope of support and solidarity, that they would agree with his right to lament.
But, they have instead become a source of additional pain, an unhelpful barrier in Job’s search for justice. Instead of siding with him in the truth that he is innocent, they are challenging him along with Satan.
So, he invites his friends to examine his life and point out his wrongdoing. He is confident they will find nothing.
He is treating them like witnesses in his court case against God. And like any good lawyer, he asks the witnesses questions that he already knows the answer to.
There is no good reason for his suffering. The questions are rhetorical. He knows he has been wrongfully convicted.
This brings us to chapter 7, in which Job addresses God with some more rhetorical questions and statements about his present condition.
The Wilderness of Despair
Job 7:3 “so I have been allotted months of futility, and nights of misery have been assigned to me.”
Here we see that this suffering has been going on for months. The grief of losing everything has been with him the entire time, but even worse is the feeling of abandonment. He has no one on his side, no one to bear witness to his darkness.
Job 7:6 ““My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope.”
This statement uses an illustration of a weaver making a tapestry and the material has run out before the work is done.
The same metaphor occurs in Isa 38:12: “Like a weaver I have rolled up my life, and he has cut me off from the loom.”
Job 7:7 “Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath; my eyes will never see happiness again.”
Because he is hopeless that God will rescue him, the only thing left to do is cry out to him, even complain to him.
Yet, he does not sin in this honesty.
Remember, God is a God of relationship and love. Job looks God in the eye, so to speak, and expresses his lament to his face. His hope is still in God, and if God is not going to give an answer to his suffering, then, as it says in verse 16, life has no meaning.
Let’s look at Job 7:17–18, which contains familiar words found elsewhere in Scripture.
Here, the familiar words of Psalm 8:5–6, which is repeated in Hebrews 2:6-8, are shifted to portray’s God’s attention to humans as a negative experience. “You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet:”
Once again, we the readers have an advantage over Job because we know what has really been going on.
God is not the one who has been paying so much attention, examining the lives of humans looking to test their faith. It is the challenger, Satan, who has been doing this and reporting to God.
But, from Job’s perspective, it makes no difference who is doing the examining. Ultimately, God is responsible for his suffering. Job has become God’s target, and it feels like a personal attack.
Job’s appeal for deliverance from his distress is not by restoration to life, but for death as the only means of escape.
The burden of Job’s protest is this: “If I am as insignificant as I appear to be, why do you pay me so much hostile attention?”
So he says (v. 20), “If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of mankind?” “Sure, I sin. I am not perfect. But does my sin really justify this constant unrelenting ‘hostile attention’?”
Usually in the Bible God’s watchful eye is a source of hope for those who trust in him. For example, in Psalm 33:18, 19 the psalmist rejoices:
Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear him [as Job does], on those who hope in his steadfast love, that he may deliver their soul from death and keep them alive in famine.
But for Job, God’s “eye” is a terrible thing. “Why are you to me like Big Brother, picking on me, making me ‘your mark’ (v. 20)? I feel like God’s punching bag; it is as if he goes to the gym to practice hitting me.”
Or to put it another way, “I seem to be a terrible ‘burden’ (v. 20) to him, so that all God’s time is taken up with watching me, guarding me, finding fault with me, striking me.” It is all deeply sarcastic. “And anyway, why don’t you forgive me (v. 21a)?”
We must remember that Job understands sacrifice. He believes in a God who forgives those who repent and believe.
Job knows—and he is right—that he should not be punished for his sin since the sacrifices he has offered have atoned for his sin. Or so he had been led to believe.
Conclusion
Just as in chapter 3, Job’s final words in this speech are once again unresolved.
Job 7:20–21 “If I have sinned, what have I done to you, you who sees everything we do? Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you? Why do you not pardon my offenses and forgive my sins? For I will soon lie down in the dust; you will search for me, but I will be no more.””
In that wilderness of despair, we hear an echo of one who will come centuries later, one who also was abandoned and suffered unjustly.
Jesus, who was even more righteous than Job, also fell to the ground and cried out to God. “My soul is overwhelmed to the point of death… Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me.”
But it was not taken from him. He drank the full cup of the consequence of our sin.
Hebrews 2:17–18 says “[Jesus] had to be made like us, fully human in every way, so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of everyone. Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”
In Jesus, God does not just listen to the cry of the righteous sufferer, he becomes the one who suffers.
In this act, God entered the wilderness himself and drank the cup that Job could not. And his cup of suffering was not meaningless as was the case with Job. Instead, the suffering of Jesus transforms all suffering.
And now, we benefit from the obedience of Jesus, from his righteous life, and his triumph over death.
- Adapted from from Approaching Job by Andrew Zack Lewis (p. 107) ↩︎