Context No. 4045 of 4322 · Job
Context · Reflection
Job 3:1-16: in context
1After this Job opened his mouth, and cursed the day of his birth. 2Job answered: 3“Let the day perish in which I was born, the night which said, ‘There is a boy conceived.’ 4Let that day be darkness. Don’t let God from above seek for it, neither let the light shine on it. 5Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for their own. Let a cloud dwell on it. Let all that makes the day black terrify it. 6As for that night, let thick darkness seize on it. Let it not rejoice among the days of the year. Let it not come into the number of the months. 7Behold, let that night be barren. Let no joyful voice come therein. 8Let them curse it who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up leviathan. 9Let the stars of its twilight be dark. Let it look for light, but have none, neither let it see the eyelids of the morning, 10because it didn’t shut up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor did it hide trouble from my eyes. 11“Why didn’t I die from the womb? Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me? 12Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breast, that I should nurse? 13For now I should have lain down and been quiet. I should have slept, then I would have been at rest, 14with kings and counselors of the earth, who built up waste places for themselves; 15or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver; 16or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been, as infants who never saw light.
Broken by suffering, Job breaks his long silence, and his first words are a bitter lament: he curses the day of his birth, wishing he had never been born, longing for the quiet of the grave. Let the day perish on which I was born, he says; why did I not die at birth? For then I would have been at rest.
We read Job's words soberly and with compassion, for they come from the depths of genuine anguish, a pain so great that he wishes he had never existed. There is something important to notice, though, even in this dark outpouring. Job curses the day of his birth, but he does not curse God. In all his agony, and even as he questions and laments, he does not do the one thing his wife had urged and the accuser had predicted; he does not turn against God himself. His faith, battered and bewildered, holds a line even in the depths. Scripture gives room for the honest voicing of even our deep despair; Job's raw lament is not censored but recorded, a companion for all who have known such depths. And there is a difference between pouring out our anguish, however bleak, and turning against God. Job did the first without the second.
In my own dark hours of anguish, can I pour out my honest grief before God, even my deep despair, as Job did, without letting go of him or turning against him, holding the line of faith even in the depths?