The Lament: The Stripping of Dignity: Job: The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 30]

{Pray}

Something we don’t talk about much in church is the judgment of God. ONE OF THE MOST painful facets of the judgment of God is that it dehumanizes people. Men and women are created with infinite dignity and honor in the image and likeness of God. The judgment of God strips them of this dignity and reduces them to creatures with the status of beasts. It is this that Job laments at the head of the second part of his closing speech.

In chapter 29 he began with the supreme joy of fellowship with God (29:1–6) and went on to describe his consequent dignity (29:7–25). Here in chapter 30 he begins with the experience of indignity (30:1–15) before reflecting on the perceived hostility of God (30:16–31). The structure of chapter 30 therefore reflects and balances the structure of chapter 29. If chapter 29 described life under the smile of God, chapter 30 throbs with the drumbeat of the terrible wrath of God.

The tone of chapter 29 was yearning and longing, the experience described in chapter 30 is emphatically that of being trapped in the present torment. The words “But now …” or “And now …” appear, almost as a refrain, in verses 1, 9, and 16. “I long for the paradise of the past, but all I can experience is a hellish present.” The hope that comes from the memory of the past and hope for the future is removed and replaced by the prison of now. This is what it is to endure redemptive suffering.

We tend to want to look at Job as a handbook on suffering or a help in grief, but it’s so extreme it really doesn’t make sense for that. The extreme experience of Job only makes ultimate sense when it is understood as a foreshadowing of the redemptive suffering of Jesus Christ. Let us keep this in the forefront of our minds. So as we look at what Job went through it points forward to what Christ endured in His life and death.

There are basic two points in this chapter [refer bulletins]

Redemptive Suffering Turns God’s Good Order Upside Down (vv. 1–15)

Job begins with a description of mockery: “But now they laugh at me …” (v. 1). The word translated “laugh” here is the same as that translated “smiled” in 29:24. When Job “smiled” at his people, he expressed a pleasure that conveyed and promised blessing to them; but when these mockers “smile/laugh” at Job, they express a cruel pleasure enjoyed at his expense. He begins with a description of the mockers and continues with the nature and effects of their mockery.

A Portrait of the Mockers (vv. 1–8)

But now they laugh at me,

men who are younger than I,

whose fathers I would have disdained

to set with the dogs of my flock.

What could I gain from the strength of their hands,

men whose vigor is gone?

Through want and hard hunger

they gnaw the dry ground by night in waste and desolation;

they pick saltwort and the leaves of bushes,

and the roots of the broom tree for their food.

They are driven out from human company;

they shout after them as after a thief.

In the gullies of the torrents they must dwell,

in holes of the earth and of the rocks.

Among the bushes they bray;

under the nettles they huddle together.

A senseless, a nameless brood,

they have been whipped out of the land. (vv. 1–8)

The headline fact about the mockers is that they are “younger” than Job (v. 1b). There is a proper ordering in human society, in which wise elders ought to be respected by those younger than they are. In chapter 29 Job remembers how “the young men saw me and withdrew” in humble respect (29:8); here this order is turned upside down, and they mock Job mercilessly.

But so that we feel the full force of the disorder experienced by Job, he is not content just to describe them as “younger” than him. In verses 1b–8 he gives a vivid and chilling description of their family, their usefulness, their reputation, and their character.

First, in verse 1b Job describes their family: dogs—even useful sheepdogs (which is the meaning of “the dogs of my flock”)—were utterly despised creatures, “symbols of filth and baseness.” When Goliath accuses David of not treating him with respect, he says, “Am I a dog …?” Job would not have given the fathers of these men jobs on his estate, even as shepherds in charge of his sheepdogs. These men are junior to men who are more despised than shepherds. Such is their family.

Second, in verses 2–4 Job speaks of their usefulness, which is zero: these young men are unemployable. They have no “vigor” (v. 2) because they are undernourished, reduced to eating revolting salty vegetation and other wild stuff of a kind consumed only in dire extremity. They are reduced to being feral creatures picking out scraps on rubbish heaps. You would not want to give them even the most despised and servile job on your estate because they are utterly useless; they have no energy, no stamina, no concentration, no skills, and no sense. If you took them on your payroll, they would be on permanent sick leave.

But it is not only their uselessness that causes Job to despise them; it is also their reputation, described in verses 5–7. They are the kind of people you don’t want near your property or your family. When they come near, you shout at them to go away, as you do for disreputable and potentially dangerous people (v. 5). So they are reduced to living in terrible places, in ditches that suddenly flood and drown people when the rains come (v. 6a), in caves (v. 6b), in the wild (v. 7). Here are men excluded from civilized society.

But supremely the horror of this mockery is focused on the character of the mockers. They are a “senseless, a nameless brood” (v. 8a). This is critically important to understanding Job’s lament. Clines, a bible commentator, is very critical of Job and accuses him of mocking the weak; he finds Job’s description deeply distasteful and inconsistent with having a healthy social conscience. Job ought to take pity on these poor destitute men, not to look down on them, Clines says. Commenting on the words “what could I gain” in verse 2, Clines says Job speaks “like the coarsest of nineteenth-century mill owners, for whom people have no value apart from their productivity.”

But this is entirely to miss the point of the description, the key and climax of which is in verse 8. When Job describes them as “senseless” and “nameless” he makes it clear that he is not describing the virtuous poor; he paints a picture of men who are poor because they deserve to be poor (v. 2). The word “senseless” means they have the character of fools (literally, “sons of a base fool”), men whose problem is not intellectual limitation but moral wickedness.

The word “nameless” may just mean people who are not known, people who do not fill in a census form; but more likely it includes the idea that they have no “name” in the sense of no deserved reputation for worthiness. These are men who are destitute and unemployable not because they are victims of a cruel society but because they never worked at school, never took the opportunities offered them, never showed honesty or reliability because they are thieves and violent men, because they are foolish and wicked. That is why they are—or ought to be—at the bottom of the heap, excluded from any healthy society. And yet, surprise and shock, they are not right at the bottom of the heap; there is one lower than they are.

How terrible to be laughed at by these, of all people! Job is “an outcast even among the outcasts”; he is laughed at by thieves and robbers. He is like a sex offender in a high-security prison full of serial murderers who regard him as worse even than they are. Here is a man who by character ought to be right at the top but experiences the indignity of being right at the bottom.

Does that sound like someone? In his indignity Job foreshadows the Lord Jesus who was cursed and mocked by a violent robber who hung on the cross next to Him in (cf. Luke 23:39).

The Substance and Significance of Their Mockery (vv. 9–15)

Having described the mockers, Job repeats the refrain “And now” and describes the substance and significance of their mockery.

And now I have become their song;

I am a byword to them.

They abhor me; they keep aloof from me;

they do not hesitate to spit at the sight of me.

Because God has loosed my cord and humbled me,

they have cast off restraint in my presence.

On my right hand the rabble rise;

they push away my feet;

they cast up against me their ways of destruction.

They break up my path;

they promote my calamity;

they need no one to help them.

As through a wide breach they come;

amid the crash they roll on.

Terrors are turned upon me;

my honor is pursued as by the wind,

and my prosperity has passed away like a cloud. (vv. 9–15)

Verse 9 is the headline and echoes verse 1a (“they laugh at me”). He has become one of their jokes, a laughingstock among them (their “song” in the sense of a taunting song). To “become a Job” is now an idiom or “byword” among them to refer to someone utterly cursed and worthless.

In verses 10–14 the substance and the significance of their mockery alternate. First, in verse 10 the substance is that they regard Job as utterly despicable. These men who are despised and rejected by society in their turn utterly despise and reject Job. There may be camaraderie among outcasts, but this does not extend to Job. They keep their distance from him and “spit” when they see him (or, more likely, spit in his face).

How can they get away with this? Verse 11 uncovers the significance of their mockery. It happens because God has “loosed” Job’s “cord” and brought him low. The idiom to “loose the cord” may refer to human life as a fragile tent (so that when the tent cord is loosed, the tent collapses, as in 4:21) some translations say “loose my bow string” referring to human strength as being like a bow (so that when the bow is unstrung, human strength becomes weak). Either way it is God who has done this. He has unleashed the dogs of war, so that the proper order of human society is removed and God’s “restraint” is taken away.

As a result in verses 12–14 Job’s mockers become his attackers. In vivid imagery of a siege, this “rabble” rises against him, trips him up, and builds siege ramps against him (this is the meaning of “cast up against me their ways of destruction”). Verses 13, 14 use wild metaphors to portray their crashing in on Job’s life to destroy him.

Verse 15 points back to the significance of all this, with the evocative word “terrors.” This word speaks of the terrors of death and has supernatural connotations. Bildad has said of the wicked man, “terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels.… He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the king of terrors” (18:11, 14).

Job himself has said that “terrors overtake” the wicked man (27:20). The indignities suffered by Job speak of a creation order disordered and therefore of death breaking into the world. The effect of this mockery is not just to hurt Job’s feelings but to take away Job’s “honor” (30:15), his reputation, his name as God’s servant. All is blown away.

The two words “God” and “terrors” are the key to verses 9–15. Job rightly understands that the disorder he experiences is God’s doing and that it has a supernatural dimension, the unleashing of death into a world that he had known as a world of order and life. He is experiencing the judgment of God. He cannot understand why this should be so.

But this side of the cross of Christ, as we look back at it today, Job’s indignity begins to make sense when we see that it foreshadows the redemptive suffering of the cross of Christ, when one greater than Job endured indignities even deeper than Job’s.

And it makes sense too when we grasp that Christian people today are called to fill up in their own sufferings what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, as Paul says, that in the unfair sufferings of Christian believers are felt the aftershocks and in their sufferings are heard the echoes of the sufferings foreshadowed in the indignities of Job. We see this playing out in front of our very eyes in Ukraine. Where because of evil men, people suffer.

But if redemptive suffering turns God’s order upside down, the remainder of Job’s lament takes us deep into the heart and pain of this suffering, for it is a suffering that is so necessary that God will not heed the calls of the sufferers until it is accomplished. So Job moves from the experience of indignity in his relationship with his fellow human beings to reflection on what this must mean for his relationship with God.

Redemptive Suffering Is Absolutely Necessary (vv. 16–31)

In the remainder of Job’s lament he focuses on two facets of his pain: there is no answer from God, and there is no justice in his sufferings. Each of these, in their shock and surprise, point to a deep and divine necessity.

Redemptive Suffering Is So Necessary That There Must Be No Answer from God to Job’s Cries (vv. 16–23)

And now my soul is poured out within me;

days of affliction have taken hold of me.

The night racks my bones,

and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest.

With great force my garment is disfigured;

it binds me about like the collar of my tunic.

God has cast me into the mire,

and I have become like dust and ashes.

I cry to you for help and you do not answer me;

I stand, and you only look at me.

You have turned cruel to me;

with the might of your hand you persecute me.

You lift me up on the wind; you make me ride on it,

and you toss me about in the roar of the storm.

For I know that you will bring me to death

and to the house appointed for all living. (vv. 16–23)

Verses 16, 17 press home how long Job’s suffering lasts. The miserable “And now” extends to “days of affliction” (v. 16b) and “the night” of bone-racking agony, with gnawing pain that “takes no rest” (v. 17); it goes on so long that his “soul” (v. 16), his whole inner being, is poured out, drains away, ebbs away until there will be nothing of Job left to lament. Verse 18 seems to describe the experience of being strangled by his own shirt and verse 19 the slippery deathly mud so familiar from the laments in the Psalms.

So in verses 20–23, in verses right at the heart of chapters 29–31, Job addresses God directly for the only time in chapters 29–31. Trapped in this seemingly eternal “now” misery, Job cries out to God for help, but God gives no answer (v. 20a). Job stands (v. 20b) in the posture of urgent and earnest petition, but God just looks at him with silent inaction.

Here is a man who prays as he has never prayed before, and his prayers are met with silence from Heaven. He experiences God as “cruel” (v. 21a), as one with a persecuting hand (v. 21b). He sees God as one who lifts him up, exalting him to a great position, and yet it turns out he has only done this as a tornado might sweep a man up high in the air, only to dash him to the ground; this is what has happened to Job. In a parody of Psalm 18, God has been a cruel storm-god to him.

And so (v. 23) Job concludes that God has in mind bringing him right down to death. The silence of Heaven in response to Job’s prayers must mean that God intends to kill him. What are we to make of this?

At one level Job turns out to be not quite right, for God does not—quite—kill him. He is restored without going right down to death, although he has endured a kind of living death for a while. And yet at a deeper level Job is right, for his sufferings foreshadow the pain of a man who had to go right down to death, even death on a cross, before his cries would be answered.

There is a terrible divine necessity about redemptive suffering. God is doing something so ultimately wonderful that unanswered prayer is the necessary price of achieving it, and Job begins to experience this. His prayers will be answered, but only when his sufferings have achieved that for which God purposes them.

In a deeper way it was the same for Jesus Christ, who prayed in the garden let this cup pass from me, the cup of suffering on the cross and yet those prayers were only answered after He cried “it is finished”.

In a similar way it is yet the same for Christian people today; when God remains silent in answer to our urgent cries, it is not that he does not hear, but rather that it is somehow necessary for us to cry in vain and wait in hope until he achieves in us, and in his world, what he wills to achieve.

Redemptive Suffering Is So Necessary That Job Needs to Endure Unjust Suffering (vv. 24–31)

At the heart of verses 16–23 is the pain of unanswered prayer. At the heart of verses 24–31 is the misery of injustice.

Yet does not one in a heap of ruins stretch out his hand,

and in his disaster cry for help?

Did not I weep for him whose day was hard?

Was not my soul grieved for the needy?

But when I hoped for good, evil came,

and when I waited for light, darkness came. (vv. 24–26)

The main point of verses 24–26 is that God has not treated Job as Job has treated others. When Job, as a regional ruler, came across sufferers (“him whose day was hard … the needy”), he wept for them, his soul was “grieved,” and he took pity on them (v. 25). That is the right and, one might suppose, the godly thing to do, because it is the response we expect from God. And yet when Job’s day was hard and Job was needy, God did not seem to weep for him or to take pity on him. On the contrary, God sent him yet more evil and deeper darkness (v. 26). In these three verses Job is contrasting how decent people generally behave with how God has behaved toward him.

My inward parts are in turmoil and never still;

days of affliction come to meet me.

I go about darkened, but not by the sun;

I stand up in the assembly and cry for help.

I am a brother of jackals

and a companion of ostriches.

My skin turns black and falls from me,

and my bones burn with heat.

My lyre is turned to mourning,

and my pipe to the voice of those who weep. (vv. 27–31)

So in verses 27–31 Job continues to describe the depth and the endurance of his misery. He is all churned up inside (v. 27a), with day after day of affliction as it were coming to meet him; each morning he wakes to another day of affliction. He is “darkened” by grief (v. 28a), “cry[ing] for help” (v. 28b), lonely and mournful like the jackal or the ostrich (or possibly the owl). He is outwardly decaying (v. 30a, “skin”) and inwardly fevered (v. 30b, “bones”). His whole life is consumed by mourning and weeping (v. 31).

There is a divine necessity about the sufferings of Job. There is something so deeply necessary that it justifies injustice and the unanswered prayer of a righteous man.

Centuries later, after Job, it will justify the most unjust action in human history, when a man without sin, the Lord Jesus Christ, is falsely accused, unfairly condemned, and unjustly stripped of his dignity, excluded from society, and submitted to the utterly disgraceful death of sinners.

It will justify this righteous man’s “loud cries and tears” going unanswered until his task is completed (Hebrews 5:7). And if this was ultimately necessary for Jesus Christ, it remains necessary that Christian people should know what it is to have their prayers for rescue unanswered in the present (“But now …”) as they suffer unjustly in this age.

Ultimately, in glory, we shall see that there is a good purpose and a great purpose achieved by these sufferings, the sufferings Christians endure even today. But not now, not yet.

When people ask me, “why doesn’t God intervene and relieve this or that suffering or injustice?” I honestly don’t know, I don’t claim to know the mind of God. But I do know it’s nothing new, believers have been suffering injustice since the fall and that doesn’t really give much help to those asking that question.

But I also know, that God did not spare His own Son, by send Jesus into the world to suffer the greatest indignity any man could know. The fact that Christ died in disgrace upon that cross, yet rose in victory and glory that third day gives us the hope that, those in Christ, no matter what we may suffering in this life will pale in comparison to the glory of awaits us in glory.