SLEEPLESSNESS

“When I lie down I think, ‘How long before I get up? ’ The night drags on, and I toss till dawn.” (7:4)

There are some aspects to the suffering of Jesus on the cross that are less obvious than others. To cite one example: He had not slept the night before. In fact He probably had very little sleep at all throughout the entire momentous week prior to His death. Certainly His disciples, by the time of that final evening in Gethsemane, were completely spent, not just overtired but “exhausted from sorrow” (Luke 22:45).

It is one thing to face the difficulties of life when well rested. But without sleep, even small problems can get blown out of all proportion. Most of us can survive one sleepless night without too much difficulty; we make up for it the next night by sleeping longer or more deeply. But two such nights in a row, or three or four, can be enough to cause even the healthiest, happiest, most resilient individual to come apart at the seams. Under pressure of prolonged sleep deprivation it is almost as though something in the very mind or character snaps, resulting in a temporary loss of sanity.

It is consoling to read in Psalm 127:2 that God “grants sleep to those he loves.” But perhaps such a verse needs to be set against Proverbs 10:5: “He who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.” Paul mentions “sleepless nights” (2 Cor. 6:5) in his catalog of the normal hardships to be expected in the service of God. For him, we know, such wakefulness would have been occasioned by everything from beatings to storms at sea, from prayer vigils to late-night ministry, from prison discomforts to the demands of constant travel, from physical illness to plain old anxiety and “the pressure of my concern for all the churches” (2 Cor. 11:28).

For Job too, sleeplessness would have been one of his most severe trials. Not only would the festering boils all over his body have made rest virtually impossible, but there was the added torment of the monstrous fears and lurid imaginings that must have come over him in the middle of the night. Any suffering tends to be worse in the darkness, and so Job complains, “When I think my bed will comfort me and my couch will ease my complaint, even then you frighten me with dreams and terrify me with visions” (7:13-14).

Is it any wonder if the same man who at the outset of his ordeal responded so nobly with the words, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (2:10) by Chapter 3 seems to have lost all perspective and to be unable to get a grip on himself? It is wonderful to read stories of the gloriously serene deaths of some of the great heroes of faith. But not every Christian dies that way. Many die like dogs. Many waste away in slums or in prisons or are butchered in back alleys. Thousands are killed in the womb. Many more go senile or insane; they become paralyzed, incontinent, comatose. Under conditions of grave illness or impending death, countless Christians are rendered incapable of glorifying God in any obviously meaningful fashion. They will never be written about in any Lives of the Saints or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

Nevertheless, are their names not written in the only book that counts, the Book of Life? Are they not heroes in the eyes of God? Can He not save and exalt even those who die without any inspired confession upon their lips, and perhaps without even a rationally coherent thought of Him in their heads? As Jonah prayed from the belly of the whale:

You hurled me into the deep,  into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me.  All your waves and billows swept over me. . . . To the roots of the mountains I sank down;  the earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up from the pit,  O Lord my God. (2:3, 6)

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