FOUR DARKNESSES

“Turn away from me so I can have a moment’s joy before I go to the place of no return,  to the land of murk, of deep shadow, to the land of deepest night,  of deep gloom and disorder,  where even the light is like darkness.” (10:20-22)

For the second time in the book Job’s mood plunges to a nadir as his language dons the same black sackcloth as in Chapter 3. It is difficult to translate (let alone to talk about) this passage without sounding trite and redundant, for even English with all its somber shading and its Anglo-Saxon crudity seems not to contain enough darkness to express such deep despair. One senses here that Job himself is nearly at a loss for words, and the wonder is that he is able to speak at all. Finally he resorts to using no less than four different Hebrew words for “darkness,” translated variously as “midnight black,” “the shadow of death,” “the land of murk and chaos,” “where confusion reigns,” “where light itself is like the dead of night,” and so on. Job masses these words together, piling one on top of another for a cumulative effect as solemn and impressive as anything in Shakespeare. The author of Job makes language toll like a bell.

Yet once again the question must be asked: does such despair, as artistically sublime as it may be, really have anything to do with faith in God? Perhaps the book of Ecclesiastes, so replete with pessimism, provides a necessary perspective when it reflects, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven”—including “dying,” “uprooting,” “killing,” “mourning,” and even “hating” (3:1-8). The Preacher is not so much advocating these negative extremes, as soberly allowing for their inevitability. Even Jesus, remember, made allowances for darkness. Night figured in His plans, as when He stated, “Night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9:4), or when He warned, “Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you” (John 12:35). And during those appalling days while He waited for His friend Lazarus to die before going to him, He explained His delay by saying, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? A man who walks by day will not stumble, for he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light” (John 11:9-10).

Darkness, let us face it, is a fact of life, and the message of Job (and ultimately of the cross of Christ) is that we zealous and competent Christians must make way for the inevitable incursions of evil into our pleasantly unrealistic worldview. Even so valiant a saint as Paul had to confess to one of his churches, “We wanted to come to you . . . again and again—but Satan stopped us” (1 Thess. 2:18). Since when is an apostle of Christ stopped in his tracks by Satan— and not just once, notice, but “again and again”? Perhaps it is these very experiences of defeat and constraint that teach us how very different are the Lord’s ways from our own, and that therefore lay the foundation for worship. Certainly we would never worship the Lord if He had not drawn near to us and freed us from darkness; but neither would we worship a god whose light and power were so accessible that he became for us a kind of divine bellhop, always at our beck and call.

Do we Christians leave sufficient room in our lives for chaos, for meaninglessness, for the awful “waste” of long seasons of sorrow and temptation? Or are we too intent on always being cheerful, capable, and energetic? Do we know how to lie low? Or do we keep on pushing ourselves round the clock and thus defy Jesus’ clear admonition to walk only in the light? Have we got time in our busy week’s schedule for a bad day or two? Or are we too busy living victoriously?

One thing is certain: we will have bad days. We will have horrible days (whether or not we fully acknowledge to ourselves just how wretched they are). And something else is certain too: if we do not have time in our life for bad days, we will never have time to minister truly and deeply to others when they are having bad days, or when they are having bad lives. We may not even see that darkness can be precisely where the Lord is most gloriously at work. In the words of Francis Bacon, “The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.”

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