Scripture Daily

Context No. 880 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 10:17-22: in context

17You renew your witnesses against me, and increase your indignation on me. Changes and warfare are with me. 18“‘Why, then, have you brought me out of the womb? I wish I had given up the spirit, and no eye had seen me. 19I should have been as though I had not been. I should have been carried from the womb to the grave. 20Aren’t my days few? Stop! Leave me alone, that I may find a little comfort, 21before I go where I will not return from, to the land of darkness and of the shadow of death; 22the land dark as midnight, of the shadow of death, without any order, where the light is as midnight.’”

We are deep in Job's suffering, in one of his speeches to God. Stripped of children, health, and standing, he has stopped being polite. Here he tells God he feels hunted, fresh witnesses renewed against him, new troops of trouble sent in waves. Then he says the thing that scandalizes comfortable readers: better if I had never been born, carried straight from the womb to the grave. He asks God only to look away and leave him alone for a moment before he goes down to the land of darkness where the light itself is like midnight.

What is startling is that this is prayer. Job is not cursing God from a distance; he is saying all of it to God's face. He wishes he had never existed, and he says so to the One who made him exist. Scripture does not edit this out or scold him for it. This is the bible, and it lets a suffering man speak to God from the floor of despair without pretending the despair away. Job's picture of death is bleak, a land without order where light is as dark as night; he has no clear hope of resurrection to steady him, only the raw complaint. And yet the complaint is aimed at God, which is itself a strange kind of faith. He will not let go of the God who seems to be crushing him. The book will not answer Job with an argument but with God's own presence, and the fact that Job kept talking to him, even like this, is part of why God later says Job spoke of him rightly.

When I am at the bottom, do I turn my complaint toward God and keep talking to him, or do I go silent and treat him as someone I can no longer address?

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