POURING OUT THE HEART

“Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath.” (7:7)

This may well be the most significant verse in the entire book. Why? Because this is where we first hear Job break into prayer. Even his great professions of faith in the Prologue were more in the form of meditations than prayers; for example, speaking of God in the third person he had reflected, “The Lord gives, the Lord takes away,” and, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” Here in Chapter 7, however, it is the direct, intimate vocative of true prayer that Job employs as he cries out, “O God!” And from this point on we frequently hear him slip into and out of this intensely personal form of language, as spontaneously as if a visible, incarnate God were sitting right there beside him, just one more participant in the discussion. Granted, Job’s prayers are more often concerned with God’s apparent absence than with His nearness. But the radiant proof of Job’s genuineness of faith is that he prays at all—especially in view of the fact that prayer is conspicuously missing from all the talk of his friends. Nowhere in the book does one word of prayer pass any of their lips.

Surely this is the crucial, telling difference between the speeches of Job and those of everyone else. Job regularly talks to God; his friends talk only about Him. Like Christ on the cross, Job even in his agony continues to speak—now to himself, now to others, now to God. Thus his language is a rich and compelling blend of meditation, conversation, and heartfelt prayer, with the three elements so closely interwoven as to make it impossible at times to separate them. By contrast, the speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are addressed only to Job himself, and we shall listen to them in vain for any demonstration of real intimacy with the Lord they so loudly proclaim. We can only presume that they must have felt terribly threatened by their friend’s habit of constantly intruding his messy, private prayer life into their intellectual debate.

It is worth reflecting on how unusual it is for anyone to speak openly to God while other, non-praying people are present, and how hurtful to Job must have been this coldly objective attitude of his friends. What would you think of fellow Christians who came to console you by telling you all they thought you needed to know about God, yet who declined to pray with you because they were not much in the habit of it themselves, and moreover because they looked on you as a person full of sin and warped theology with whom it might be dangerous to enter into spiritual communion?

The point should be clear: Job is the only person in the book (with the possible exception, as we shall see later, of Elihu) who has any direct communication with God. Quite obviously he knew the secret of Psalm 62:8: “Pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” Human hearts are full of many things: joy, anger, peace, weariness, anxiety, strength, bitterness, trust. To pour out the heart means to pour out not just some but all of these contents before the Lord, the bad along with the good. Would we try to conceal our bitterness from God? Or conversely, would we cling greedily to our joy? In either case we cannot really pray. In one sense joy is no better a thing than bitterness, because either can pass away in a moment. Yesterday’s joy will not do for today. A flower is beautiful, but in drought it withers just like a weed. Therefore in prayer everything in the heart must be poured out to the Lord like a drink offering, so that the heart is kept empty for Him. God only fills hearts that have been prepared for His residence like a clean, swept house with all the windows thrown open to the sun.

This is what Job is doing when he prays. He is sweeping out all that is in his heart, even to the point of groaning, “I despise my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone; my days have no meaning” (7:16). Are these good Christian sentiments? It does not matter. What matters is that Job is not afraid of true prayer. He knows it consists not in flowery language, nor in false humility, nor in pretending to possess any greater faith than we really have, but rather in simply trusting God enough to spill our guts to Him. Because Job does this, because he speaks his heart to the Lord as frankly, as familiarly, as crudely as any hapless drunk to his bartender on a lonely Saturday night, the Lord in His time speaks back.

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