THE DARK SIDE

“May the day of my birth perish,  and the night it was said, ‘A boy is born!’  That day—may it turn to darkness;  may God above not care about it.” (JOB 3:3-4)

However we may try to sympathize with and rationalize Job’s black moods, from the moment he opens his mouth in Chapter 3 the reaction of the normal Christian reader is to squirm with distaste and to turn away from him in contempt. The thing we find particularly abhorrent is all this gloom-and-doom death-talk of his, this expressed longing not just for death but for total annihilation, this ache not merely to cease existing but never to have existed at all. Good Christians do not want to listen to this. We just feel that Job is wrong—terribly wrong—to “curse the day of his birth,” and we do not want to acknowledge that such ghastly and despairing words could ever actually be uttered by a believer in God, let alone by someone with a reputation for exemplary sanctity.

So it is not just Job’s wife and friends who pass judgment on him; we too, as readers, are inclined at this point to dismiss and reject him, or else to block our ears and pretend that he does not know what he is saying. Perhaps he is not such a great and holy saint after all, we think. For as soon as things get bad enough he takes to whining and cursing and crying in his cup, just like any old drunk in a bar. Apparently the Devil was right about him, and when the pressure gets too great he caves in and loses his faith.

In all honesty, however, as black and turbulent as Job’s thoughts are, is it really the case that they are essentially any different from the innermost thoughts of other believers? Or might the real difference simply be that Job speaks his thoughts aloud? Certainly he gives utterance to things which, we feel, ought not to be uttered— things which many people would not even admit to having inside them. But are they not there nonetheless, nightmarishly gnawing away in the subliminal murmurings of each and every mind? In Job such thoughts come out into the open and appear, shockingly, on the lips of a decent and upright man.

Being a believer in God necessarily implies grappling with the dark side of one’s nature. Many of us, however, seem to be so afraid of our dark side that far from dealing with it realistically, we repress and deny it. If we do so chronically, we need to ask ourselves whether we really believe in the healing power of Christ’s forgiveness and in His victory over our evil natures. Perhaps we have never frankly come to grips with the fact that we ourselves are evil. If we have not, then we are ill prepared for those times when believing in God is like being awake during open heart surgery. For our Creator is not yet finished with us; He is still creating us, still making us, just as He has been all along from the beginning of the universe. But for the short span of our life here on earth we have the strange privilege of actually being wide awake as He continues to fashion us, to watch wide-eyed as His very own fingers work within our hearts. Of course this can be a painful process, and there is no anesthetic for it. At least, the only anesthetic is trust—trust in the Surgeon. But trust is not a passive, soporific thing. When there is stabbing pain, trust cries out. It is only mistrust, fear, and suspicion that keep silent.

We must not blame Job, therefore, for giving verbal expression to feelings that in most civilized people emerge in other ways. He says out loud that he rues the day of his birth, and while most of us might never consciously think such a thought, let alone voice it, do we not often live as though it were true? Whenever we grumble, whenever we do anything unwillingly, whenever we say a bad word against someone else—are we not, in effect, rueing the day of our birth? Are we not being openly and rebelliously critical of God’s gracious gift of life? Even in the face of the tiniest frustrations, our reactions may betray the presence of a lingering resentment over the fact that we were ever created and brought into such a hard world in the first place.

Only the person who maintains an attitude of pure and unwavering thankfulness for every precious moment that the Lord has given, has any right to say a word of censure against Job in Chapter 3.

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