CALLING A SPADE A SPADE

After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. (3:1)

After seven days of saintly silence, seven days of commendatory restraint and of “not sinning by anything he said” (2:10), we may wonder why Job at the beginning of Chapter 3 suddenly cuts loose and “curses the day of his birth.” Why does he have to ruin everything by opening his big mouth and sticking his foot in it? However much we may strive to sympathize with Job’s suffering, his expression of it now becomes so dark and shocking that we cannot help but ask, What is really going on here? Must we hold the whole of this chapter at arm’s length, chalking it up to the misguided ravings of a man who has essentially lost control of himself, a tortured mind gone haywire?

Yet surely one of the most distinctive impressions we have as we read through the speeches of Job is that here is a man who has not gone haywire at all, but who knows exactly what he is saying and means every word of it. True, at the end of the day he will recant his strong language and “repent in dust and ashes” (42:1-6). But this latter perspective is gained under entirely different circumstances, as the result of a direct encounter with the Lord, and it is difficult to imagine that Job would ever have repudiated the process by which he was drawn step-by-step into that transcendent experience. This process, admittedly, was one involving various moods and mental states that at times presented all the appearance not only of godless despair, but of an unbalanced mind veering towards total breakdown. And yet, one of the grimmest aspects of this story is that Job never does teeter over the brink into madness, but rather faces his entire ordeal with eyes wide-open. Even when utterly broken, he somehow retains not only his faith but his sanity, while at the same time managing, at the cost of incredible anguish, to give voice to the insanity and the denial of God that reside in us all.

In pondering, from this point on, the question of Job’s lack of verbal restraint, one fact worth considering is that we have no way of telling exactly how long his trials may have lasted. The events narrated in the Prologue, we know, comprised at the very least ten days, and probably closer to two or three weeks (although the suggestion of “months” in 7:3 may point to an even longer duration). The poetic dialogue, on the other hand, while it occupies the vast majority of the physical space in the book, may easily have taken place over as short a period as a single afternoon. In that case we might more readily understand why Job, after a lengthy siege of silent agony, should finally have broken down and given vent to a one-day (or a one-hour) outburst. Even the Lord Jesus, after all, was known to give way to apparent bouts of frustration, as when He complained of His poor scruffy band of stupid and incompetent disciples, “O unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?” (Matt. 17:17).

The fact is, there is a point at which any man simply throws in the towel. He does not abandon his faith, necessarily; he just gets thoroughly sick and tired of trying to put a good face on things, when the things he is facing do not have anything good about them at all. This is not sin; it is just plain honesty. It is calling a spade a spade. Job is a forthright and plainspoken man, the sort of person who is not afraid to say what is on his heart, and at the outset of the Dialogue section we need grudgingly to acknowledge that such uncommon honesty may be one of the greatest virtues a saint can possess.

The third chapter of Job may well be the bleakest chapter in all of Scripture—more so even than Psalm 88, which after eighteen bleak verses ends abruptly with the line, “Darkness is my closest friend.” Here it seems obvious that the psalmist reaches the end of his prayer without receiving any answer, without so much as a crumb of comfort. Yet for this very reason, there can be a strange comfort in the reading of this psalm in times of deep trouble. It is good to be reminded that such a black outpouring really is Scriptural, that prayer need not be upbeat and optimistic. The true believer does not always rise from his knees full of encouragement and fresh hope. There are times when one may remain down in the dumps and yet still have prayed well. For what God wants from us is not the observance of religious protocol, but just that we be real with Him. What He wants is our heart.

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.