Weep with Those Who Weep: Job: The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 3]

Pretty much the rest of the book of Job is poetry till you get to the end. Chapter three is a poem of immense power and poignancy. We left off last week in silence…now it is Job who breaks the silence.

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Job 3]

Job’s inner anguish has been building up within him, and he cannot hold it in any longer. And out it pours in the darkest chapter in the entire book of Job. Yet this outpouring of grief is not yet the beginning of a conversation.

We have watched the loneliness of Job. Now we listen to his loneliness. Chapter 3 is a soliloquy [se-lil-e-kwe]. Job is not speaking here to anybody. He is not speaking to his friends; the cycles of speeches begin with Eliphaz in chapter 4. He is not speaking to God. He is just speaking with himself. And although no doubt the friends are within earshot, and surely God is listening, this soliloquy deepens the solitariness of Job. Although his friends hear his words, it will become apparent that they have not really heard his heart. And although God has undoubtedly listened with a Father’s heart of love, Job has absolutely no awareness of that patient listening ear at this stage of the tragedy.

A true Christian believer may be taken by God through times of deep and dark despair. This may happen to a man or woman who is affirmed by God as a believer before the darkness, who remains a believer in the darkness, and who will finally be vindicated by God as a believer after the darkness. He or she may be taken through this darkness even though he or she has not fallen into sin or backslidden from faith in Jesus Christ. This is a very important truth.

In Job 3 we must “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).

One of the great Christian poets and hymn writers, William Cowper, who wrote “There is a fountain” [filled with blood drawn from immanuel’s veins; and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.] His life was one filled with tragedy and despair. His mother died when he was six years old. After that his father sent him off to a boarding school where he was cruelly bullied. Later in life, after a two year engagement, his fiancee’s father forbade the marriage.

Before his conversion he suffered repeated episodes of deep depressive illness. “I was struck,” he wrote, “with such a dejection of spirits, as none but they who have felt the same, can have the least conception of. Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horror, and rising up in despair.”

At the age of thirty-one, Cowper suffered a catastrophic psychotic breakdown, tried three times to take his own life, and was committed to an asylum (today it would be called a psychiatric hospital). This asylum was run by an evangelical Christian, and it was there, six months later, that Cowper met the Lord Jesus Christ and became a Christian. Describing his conversion he wrote, “Unless the Almighty arm had been under me, I think I should have died with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and my voice choked with transport; I could only look up to heaven in silent fear, overwhelmed with wonder and love.”

It was a wonderful change and a real conversion. And yet on four more occasions in his life he suffered deep depressive illness. And shortly before he died of dropsy in 1800 one of the last things he said was, “I feel unutterable despair.”

Now this was a Christian, a real Christian who gave to the church some of its deepest hymns. In one of his hymns, “O for a closer walk with God” Cowper laments the loss of the blessedness he had first known when he met the Lord Jesus and how his diagnosis for his despair is that there must be an idol in his life. While Cowper’s hymn suggest there must be some secret sin in his life causing this despair…the book of Job confirms for us it may not have had anything to do with backsliding or turning away from the worship of the true God. As we shall see in this study, Job’s despair was not the result of backsliding or unforgiven sin. And this is important to understand.

Job 3 is a very important chapter for contemporary Christianity. There is a version of Christianity around that is shallow, trite, superficial, “happy clappy” (as some put it). It is a kind of Christianity that, as has been said, “would have had Jesus singing a chorus at the grave of Lazarus.” We have all met it—easy triumphalism. We sing of God in one song that “in his presence our problems disappear,” in another that “my love just keeps on growing.” Neither was true for Job in chapter 3, and yet he was a real and blameless believer.

Chris Williams wrote a book about Christians who suffer depression and anxiety; it is called “I’m Not Supposed to Feel Like This.” That is a provocative title. The authors state, “It is bad enough that I feel low or anxious. But on top of that I feel guilty: for I ought not to feel low, as a Christian. I feel that I ought to be able to cast my cares upon him, for he cares for me (1 Peter 5:7). And yet somehow I can’t.”

In the first two chapters of Job we watched this blameless believer suffer heartrending loss—his possessions ruined, his children killed, his health destroyed. And we listened—as Job could not listen—to the conversations in Heaven that lay behind his loss—between God and the Satan, the enemy, and how the Lord gives his terrible permissions to the Satan to torture Job. Job is not being punished for his sin. Exactly the reverse: Job suffers precisely because he is conspicuously godly. And he suffers deep deprivation—physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual loss. And yet he still shows faith.

Christian piety has wanted to major on Job’s faith. That’s not surprising, for Job’s faith is very wonderful. But the danger with focusing on the first two chapters of Job, is we make Job’s faith two-dimensional. He suffered; he trusted…and so should we…end of story.

But it’s far from the end of the story. as we read in this chapter Job curses the very day he was born. Then Job goes on lamenting and protesting chapter after chapter. We must not soften this or over look this. This is as real as it gets…a man of God…affirmed by God righteous and blameless, yet in despair and anguish. We need to remember that in our day of visual filters that always make us look good…here is a story of a believer in real pain.

Job’s dark lament can be broken up into three natural parts; a curse [v.3-10]; a lament [v.11-19]; and an agonized question [v. 20-26].

A Curse [Job 3:3-10]

Job’s outburst begins with a carefully crafted curse. Job “cursed the day of his birth” (v. 1). He does not curse God, as Satan has said he would (1:11; 2:5) and as his wife exhorts him to do (2:9). But he comes right to the brink of doing this. He curses (literally) “his day” (the ESV is probably right to translate this as “the day of his birth”).

In verses 3–10 he expands on this to give a comprehensive curse on his very existence. The day on which Job was born and the night nine months earlier in which he had been conceived together supply the two foundations of his existence as a human being, indeed as “a man.” The word usually indicates a grown male in his strength and dignity, as opposed to a child. This lament is not at the troubles that have come upon some insignificant creature, a weakling or a nobody; these disasters have come upon a man of distinction, greatness, and dignity. This is a comprehensive wish not only that he had not been born but that he had not even begun to exist as a fetus.

Verses 4, 5 expand on the day of his birth and then verses 6–10 on the night of his conception. Every moviemaker knows that darkness is associated with sadness, danger, and gloom. Often the sad parts of a movie are set on rainy days or with a blue filter to indicate nighttime! When time began, darkness was everywhere, and “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day …” (Genesis 1:2–5). Light is about God, goodness, creation, order, and life. For a day to become night is for a part of creation to be undone.

Job piles up words for darkness and pours them onto the day of his birth. “Let that day be darkness!” he says. Let it never have come into existence as a day. “May God above not seek it, nor light shine upon it” (v. 4). For God to “seek” or pay attention to something is for it to be a place or time where God is present in his life-giving power.

“Let gloom and deep darkness claim it” (v. 5). This is not the darkness of a naturally cloudy day, but the “deep darkness” that is the shadow of death itself. This word means a thick, deep darkness, like that found in a mineshaft (28:3) or in the regions of the dead; it is the place of the gates of death. When God brings salvation, he “turns deep darkness into the morning” (Amos 5:8). Job’s desire is that these death-powers of gloom and deep darkness would lay “claim” to Job’s birth day, (Job 3:5). The word “claim” (ga’al) is also used, positively, of the redemption accomplished by the kinsman-redeemer; here, in an ironic reversal, Job wishes that the powers of darkness would “redeem” his day from light into endless darkness.

Life is so painful that Job wishes the roots of his existence had been recaptured by death and darkness, that he had never existed in the presence of God. He wishes God would rewind the tape of creation and undo the part that led to his existence.

And then, to press this wish home to its most radical conclusion, he does the same for the night of his conception in verses 6–10: The night of Job’s conception would have been fill with life and joy, as any parent knows, but Job wishes darkness over that joyous time.

He wishes that someone somewhere had the power and authority to “curse the day”; he wishes for someone to “rouse up Leviathan” (v. 8). Leviathan, whom we shall meet again in Job 41, was the storybook sea monster of chaos, the great enemy of the Creator whose mission it was to undo the order and beauty God had made. Job pictures Leviathan as having keepers, professional curse-bringers, who can whistle for Leviathan and call him to come and destroy part of the created order.

He wants them to stir up from the depths this chaotic, evil, supernatural sea monster whose design is always to bring disorder in place of order, death in place of life, darkness swallowing life. It is rather like in The Lord of the Rings, when those making up the Fellowship of the Ring are passing through the mines of Moria [Khazad-dum], and one of the hobbits accidentally stirs up the monstrous Balrog [Baelrog], with terrible consequences. But Job wants this to be done deliberately. He wishes for a supernatural demonic intervention to have prevented his conception and birth. “I wish they would call him to curse the night of my conception, so that I might never have been born,” he says in essence.

Verse 10 is the climax of this curse scene… “hide trouble from my eyes.” Job concludes he would never have known the trouble, pain, and despair he now knows if he’d never been born. Job is restless, but he’s not given up yet.

Lament [Job 3:11-19]

And so Job’s pointless, ineffective curse merges into a desperate lament. This lament is carefully structured in two parts. Each part begins with the question “Why?” and ends with a description of the place of the dead (v. 11). Each of these parts helps us to understand the other.

Part I begins with the question, if I had to be conceived and born, why did I have to be born and stay alive? Why could I not have died at or immediately after birth? There is a movement in verses 11, 12 from womb to knees to breasts. This is a movement toward sustainable life on earth.

The knees may be the knees of Job’s father or of his mother. For a father to take a baby on his knees seems to have indicated acceptance of paternity and responsibility for the child’s support and future. More naturally here, however, it would seem to refer to a mother taking a baby on her knees prior to putting the baby to her breast for nursing. This would seem to be the picture here. Job had traveled from his mother’s womb to being on his mother’s knees and then lovingly put to his mother’s breast. It is a beautiful picture of a young life loved and nurtured. But for Job it was a disaster. All it did was to launch him into a life that would end with unbearable misery.

Job longs for the place of the dead. Verse 13 piles up four consecutive images of rest. First, “I would have lain down.” That is, “I am tired; I want to lie down.” Then he would have “been quiet,” away from the noise and tumult. Third, he would have enjoyed the peace of sleep. Lastly, he “would have been at rest.” This is normal human experience at night: we lie down, we are quiet, we sleep, we find rest. It is rest for which Job most deeply longs.

Verse 14-15 he refers to kings, counselors, and princes. However we understand the detail of verses 14, 15, the main picture is clear: the place of the dead is where powerful people end up, no matter how rich and strong they were in this life. But why does Job specifically speak of his longing to be with these people? He is surely not expecting a privileged status in Sheol!

But in verses 17–19 we see a different portrait of his prospective Sheol companions. Instead of just kings, counselors, and princes, we now have two groups—on the one hand “the wicked” who cause turmoil and trouble, “the taskmaster,” “the great,” the “master” and on the other hand “the weary,” “the prisoners,” “the small,” and “the slave.” The kings, counselors, and princes are now seen as the oppressors. Here humanity is viewed through the lens of power and divided into the powerful and the powerless. Job clearly identifies himself with the latter group.

Job can find no rest on earth because he is now identified with the small, the weak, the downtrodden. He experiences with them the turmoil and restless misery of being oppressed by forces stronger than himself. The deep reason for Job’s unrest is that he cannot understand his sufferings. He cannot understand why a believer, a man of godliness and piety, suffers with such mind-numbing intensity. This inexplicable trouble shakes the foundations of his moral and ordered universe. It is for this reason he cannot and will not rest until he has found some resolution to this cosmic question.

At heart human rest is rooted in the rest of God when he looks on a completed and good creation (Genesis 2:1–3). Rest is predicated on cosmic order, a creation in which there are proper boundaries, in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished, in which there is justice and in which goodness triumphs. Job longs to share that rest with God. At the moment his experience is the polar opposite. So he ends his speech with a desperate question.

An Agonized Question [Job 3:20-26]

In verse 20 “him who is in misery” is singular; we think of Job. But “the bitter in soul” is plural. Job’s question does not relate to Job alone. Although God is not mentioned by name, the verb “given” implies that God has given it, as in 1:21 (“The LORD gave …”); it is from the Lord that we “receive” good things and bad things (2:10).

The expression “bitter in soul” speaks of a deep distress. The childless and desperate Hannah experiences this deep distress (1 Samuel 1:10). It is the bitter misery of the defeated and crushed. Hushai says to Absalom that David and his men are “enraged” (literally, “bitter of soul,” ESV footnote) after their expulsion from Jerusalem (2 Samuel 17:8). In Ezekiel’s lament for the trading city of Tyre, he speaks of the mariners weeping over her “in bitterness of soul” (Ezekiel 27:31). The expression is used of parents who have lost a child in 1 Samuel 30:6 and of the sick and despairing King Hezekiah in Isaiah 38:15. These are men and women who have lost all hope and who cannot see the point of continuing to live. Why does God give them life in the first place? asks Job.

Verses 21, 22 speak with biting irony. These miserable people, of whom Job is one, long for death with the passionate desire of the treasure hunter, rushing out to the wild west in the gold rush, dreaming of death as the gold-hunter dreams of the yellow stuff. And when they die, their exuberance can only be understood when you think of the treasure hunter striking a rich vein of gold. The Roman writer Ovid speaks of a terrible curse so that someone has a reason for dying but not the means. Job feels like a man on a life-support machine who longs for it to be switched off. Job is obsessed with death as the only way out of trouble because life is so futile.

In verse 23 he describes himself and others like him as walking on a way or path that is “hidden” from God’s blessing and grace, a God-forsaken walk, and a path that is “hedged in” by God. To be “hidden” suggests it has no purpose or meaning. To be “hedged in” is an ironic twist to what Satan had said. In 1:10 Satan said that Job’s happy prosperous life was hedged in by God’s gracious protection. Now he experiences a different kind of hedge, a hedge of razor wire, not to keep the marauder out, but to keep Job imprisoned in a miserable life he longs to leave but cannot, a life that is locked in to trouble, with the key thrown away. He speaks of it again in a later chapter: “[God] has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths” (19:8).

In verses 24–26 there is a great emphasis on what “comes” upon Job. His sighing “comes” to him (v. 24a); his groanings “are poured out” over him like water (v. 24b); what he fears “comes” upon him, and what he dreads “befalls” him (v. 25). He has no rest, but trouble “comes” (v. 26). He is the target. Things happen to him. What is “given” by God “comes” to Job. These things are the reality of his experience. But he does not, and cannot, know why. This is the source of his deep unease. He knows that God is the author, and he knows that these things have come to him. But why?

Verse 25 speaks of the things Job had most dreaded, which are now coming upon him. Right at the start, in 1:4, 5, we see Job anxious about possible troubles. But whatever troubles he may have dreaded in his worst nightmares are now fulfilled.

Verse 26 is the climax of the speech, with its four images of rest/unrest. Job is “not at ease,” he has no “quiet,” he has “no rest,” but instead just “trouble.” Three negatives (no “ease,” no “quiet,” “no rest”) and one terrible positive (“trouble”). This is torment not just of body, terrible though that is, but of the soul. The word “trouble” is the keynote and the closing word of the speech. What a contrast to the idyllic picture of 1:1–3, a portrayal of a restful prosperity untroubled by pain, a reassuring regularity unbroken by disorder.

The question “Why?” will echo throughout the book (v. 20). We are drawn by the tragedy of Job into bigger and more alarming questions than the individual tragedy of Job himself. Job wants not only to undo his own life but to question the creation of the world. Genesis 1 moves from darkness to light, from night to day, from inanimacy to life. Job wants to put it all into reverse.

Where is the Gospel in Job 3?

We know if we are Christians that for every believer the best is yet to be. Always there are better things ahead; always there is hope, because the future is God’s future, and our destiny is glory. But we need to recognize that there may be times in the life of a believer when that future appears utterly blank and all we can do is look back with regret, consumed with “if only.” That is where Job is in Job 3. It is a bleak time.

So where is the gospel in Job 3? It is not very obvious, but it is there in three ways.

1: Even in the Darkness Job Cannot Avoid God

It seems unlikely that Job is conscious of the presence of God. Perhaps he would have echoed the words of C. S. Lewis in his moving personal reflection after the death of his wife (A Grief Observed). Lewis asks the question, in bereavement, “Where is God?” and he answers:

“This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him … if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.

But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.”

And yet Job knows that he cannot turn away from that door. Right here in the depth of his misery he knows he has to deal with God. We shall see as the book unfolds that this is a great theme in his journey. Even in God’s felt absence he is somehow there. We see this in the word “given” in verse 20. Light and life have been given, given by God, and therefore it is with God we must deal. Even in his absence God is present as the focus of Job’s loss.

There is a glimmer of hope here. But it will take some time for that glimmer to become a ray.

2: Job’s Restlessness Is a Paradoxical Sign of Hope

We have seen that the dominant tone of chapter 3 is restlessness. Job cannot rest with things as they are. And therefore he will not rest. In his weakness, misery, and distress there is yet an energy within Job that surges and drives him to discover the God who has treated him like this. Although he says he has no hope, his restlessness betrays him. A restless man is not a defeated man; a troubled man is not a hopeless man resigned to his fate. If there really is no hope, there is no point asking “Why?” (v. 20). And yet Job does ask “Why?” and he asks it repeatedly and energetically. He says he wants to die, but his restless words betray him, for they point to life and resurrection.

3: Job’s Darkness Anticipates a Deeper Darkness

At the end of Job 3 we leave Job terribly alone, sitting with friends who want to comfort him but have nothing to say. We leave him able only to look back with bitter regrets that he ever lived, mired in deep darkness. Is there anything that can be said to him?

I believe there is; even at this stage there is something to be said, beyond the silence of bankruptcy, beyond even the silence of sympathy. We saw when considering 2:11–13 that Job’s loneliness foreshadowed a greater loneliness. His darkness likewise anticipates a deeper darkness. Two thousand years ago another blameless man, the God man, was in deep darkness, hanging on a cross at midday. Deeper than the darkness of night. Deeper even than Job’s darkness. And from his lips came the cry of abandonment, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33, 34). In some strange way, because Job’s darkness of soul foreshadows the deeper darkness of the cross there is within it hope of rescue from despair because Christ conquered the darkness!

Perhaps you have experienced that kind of darkness and despair

Perhaps you are experiencing a dark night even now…

Friends cling to this gospel truth...there’s hope in the cross of Christ!