1 ¶ After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed
his day. 2 And Job spake, and said,
3 Let the day perish wherein I was born,
and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. 4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard
it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. 5 Let darkness and the shadow of death stain
it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. 6 As for that night, let darkness seize upon
it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the
number of the months. 7 Lo, let that
night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. 8 Let them curse it that curse the day, who are
ready to raise up their mourning. 9 Let
the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have
none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: 10 Because it shut not up the doors of my
mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.
Job has done what others have done, cursed the day he was
born. It is an old lament, “I wish I’d never been born.” This is the cry of
George Bailey, in the movie It’s a Wonderful
Life based on the short story The
Greatest Gift by Philip Van Doren Stern. But, the typical twentieth century
humanistic response to Bailey’s existential crisis is how important and
wonderful he is and not how great and powerful and sovereign God is. In
addition, in the story and the movie, life, not a relationship with one’s
Creator and eternal life with Him, is the greatest gift.
Job’s response is classic from someone who cannot or will
not curse God. He curses himself and the very fact that he is alive. Is this
not a back door to cursing God? When we
hate our very existence we are saying, “God, you made a mistake.”
You may have been an abject failure in life. Nothing may be
right at this time. Your sin may have consumed you, or like Job, your calamity
came out of left field, as the saying goes. However, we are to not be looking
backwards as Christians, but always forward.
Philippians 3:13 Brethren, I count not myself to have
apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind,
and reaching forth unto those things which are before,
14 I press toward the mark for the prize of the
high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Renewal and revival lie ahead of you, not behind you. There
is no rewind button on life and we can only look ahead of us for the crooked
way to be made straight and the hills to be leveled out, depending at all times
on God to do that very thing for us. You should not be looking back at that
special time you had with the Lord years ago but looking forward to what He is
going to do with you now and in the next few minutes or few hours.
In the same way, your loved ones who have passed on in the
Lord do not lie at some place in your past, frozen in time, with your memory of
them slowly dimming and the sharp edges of pain and grief becoming dulled. They
have gone on ahead of you and are waiting for you to catch up.
We do cling so hard to the ones we love as we fear in our
hearts that they might go ahead. It is a strange thing for Christians who
believe in the Resurrection to experience.
The prophet, Jeremiah, who didn’t seem to gain a single
convert to the instructions God had given him, expressed a similar sentiment to
Job’s.
Jeremiah 20:14 ¶ Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not
the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed. 15 Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my
father, saying, A man child is born unto thee; making him very glad.
Job’s cry in verse 10 says that one reason for despairing of
life is that if we had not lived we could not have known great sorrow. Solomon
made a similar claim about the peril of seeking knowledge and wisdom.
Ecclesiastes 1:17 And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to
know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. 18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
11 ¶
Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I
came out of the belly? 12 Why did the
knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck? 13 For now should I have lain still and been
quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, 14 With kings and counsellors of the earth,
which built desolate places for themselves; 15
Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver:
16 Or as an hidden untimely birth I had
not been; as infants which never saw light. 17
There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.
18 There the prisoners rest together;
they hear not the voice of the oppressor. 19
The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.
Job wishes he had been a miscarriage, a child who never saw
the light. A sorrowful Christian today might wish he or she had been aborted by
their mother and never had the chance to experience the pain and agony they are
experiencing now. He wishes he was in the grave where everyone from the
greatest to the lowest in life are at rest, free from their burdens and free
from their oppression, a wish made in grief without depth of thought.
It is in verses like these where the fundamentalist’s view
of the Bible being God-breathed, as if that actually meant anything, rather
than as it says, given by inspiration, falls apart. Job is expressing his grief
and his feelings, and God has preserved it, as Paul said, for our learning. The
statements of a man viewing life from the center of his grief and misery cannot
be doctrine for us to follow but only heartfelt sorrow for us to acknowledge
and be aware of in our own lives. This is not evidence that Job didn’t believe
in a resurrection of the dead, Heaven, or Hell. It is evidence that Job is
distraught, although he makes several true statements.
Job makes an important point here in that, in death, social
distinctions are eliminated. “The servant is free from his master.” This is
true in spite of the feelings of the rich man in Hell in Luke 16 who pleaded
with Abraham to send Lazarus, who was his social inferior in life, to serve
him. As well, although throughout history Christianity did its best to serve
the social status quo and was hijacked by the wealthy and powerful, social
distinctions as well as distinctions of gender and ethnicity are not to be regarded
within the body of Christ.
Galatians 3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in
Christ Jesus.
Colossians 3:11 Where there is neither Greek nor Jew,
circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ
is all, and in all.
No king or queen or man of wealth and influence will have
any greater part in the life after physical death than the soul who was the
poorest beggar in this life. Nor are they supposed to have any greater part in
the assembly of the saints on earth in spite of their ability to fund buildings
and buy pews.
Job’s great wealth is gone. But even if he had it still he
couldn’t buy his children’s lives back.
20 ¶
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the
bitter in soul; 21 Which long for death,
but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures; 22 Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad, when
they can find the grave? 23 Why is light
given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in? 24 For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my
roarings are poured out like the waters. 25
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I
was afraid of is come unto me. 26 I was
not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.
Job expresses that life is a
bitter thing and for the person in his misery death is something to be hoped
for, to be sought. People who have suffered long with a painful and eventually
mortal disease might get to a point where they just want it to be over, where
they want their pain to end. It is reported that people who suffer from the
mental illness called Bipolar Disorder have a high death rate from suicide and
physical disease caused by their choices compared to the death rate for cancer
and heart disease for the rest of us. (11) Truthfully, when a person’s life
becomes such a burden and consumed with so much pain it is not hard to see how
they can view death as an escape, preferable to the suffering that they feel.
If you think this can’t happen to
you, remember, the thing you fear and dread the most hasn’t happened. If, and
when it does, you may feel differently. Job wasn’t sitting back taking it easy
and ignoring God, cluelessly thinking things would go on as they always had. He
offered sacrifices and was careful to be faithful to his religious practice. He
can’t understand that, in spite of that faithfulness, he has been crushed.
(11) Rick Nauert, “Mortality Among
Bipolar,” PsychCentral, http://psychcentral.com/news/2009/02/03/mortality-among-bipolar/3876.html.
(accessed 8.4.2014).
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