Sermon Tone Analysis

Job finally speaks.

He gives voice to his anguish and his grief and his pain.

After weeks or months of loneliness, agony, and despair; after sitting in silence for seven days since the arrival of his three friends- Job, like a torrential rain, opens his mouth and with broad heavy brush strokes paints a picture of his despair.

Our cat is an outdoor cat.

Most animals sit at the door and beg to go out.

Our cat sits at the door and begs to get in.

She sits at our back deck door, we have the quality glass door from Ben and it is completely sound proof, so she meows but you can’t hear anything coming out of her mouth.

She ends us look like some strange kind of cat mime.

She is walled out.

She wants to get in, but she cannot.

There is a door or a window at ever turn, and no matter what she does she is walled off from getting inside.

This is how Job feels right now.

He is on the outside looking in the window wondering where God is, but there is no one there for Job to see, or to make any kind of sense out of this situation.

He is simply on the outside completely walled off from God’s blessing.

He is in anguish.

But the source of Job’s anguish comes from an unlikely location.

After loosing everything, his possessions, his honor, his family, one would think that Job despairs entirely because- the lose of these things just hurts too much.

But in Job 3 we discover that he is ultimately grieving because of the loss of the favor of his God.

He is not saying, “I wish I was never born because this hurts so much,” but “I wish I was never born if I have to live without God.”

Doesn’t suffering of such magnitude signify something?

It is not merely the affliction itself that Job finds so hard to bear; it is the sudden and inexplicable change in God’s posture toward him that circumstances seem to signal.

How can anyone endure such disaster and not assume that God has turned against him?

Look at Job 3:23:

Light here is synonomous with life or existence.

Why is light given (by God) to anyone whose way is hidden?

(What does Job mean when he says “whose way is hidden?”)

This is a type of Hebrew parallelism, and specifically it is a focused parallelism.

Two phrases are similar in meaning to each other, but the second phrase carries the thought forward, and is more specific.

1) whose way is hid 2) whom God has hedged in

So someone whose way is hidden, more specifically is someone whom God has hedged in.

For Job to say that his way is hidden means that his future is without purpose.

Just as he cannot see the correct way on a path, so his life has no purpose, and why is this?

Because we discover that Job believes that God has hedges him in.

The word “hedged” means to enclose or surround completely as with a fence or a wall.

But now an anguished Job complains that God has fenced him about to keep any help from reaching him.

To Job it appears that God has locked him into turmoil and thrown away the key.

This is an ironic twist from Satan’s earlier accusation of God.

Satan’s complaint was that God had walled Job off from any kind of trouble and had blessed him at ever turn.

Now Job laments that God’s favor had fled far from him, and it seems that God has walled him off from blessing or aid of any kind.

The key to note in v. 23 is that Job is lamenting the loss of God favor above all else.

Job’s lamentation ultimately magnifies God by articulating the immeasurable value of His favor and the irrelevance of life without it.

If God means this much—that man is better off not to have lived at all than to live without Him—then this God must be supremely desirable above life itself.

Securing His pleasure must be the single worth-while ambition in life

So to Job securing the pleasure of God was the “single worth-while ambition.”

Satan first accused Job that his single worth-while ambition was what?

His possessions, his family.

Then secondly Satan accused Job that his single worth-while ambition was what?

His health.

But Satan was wrong on both accounts and God was right.

Job ultimately laments God’s favor.

God meant that much to Job.

Oh that God would mean that much to me as well!

In Job’s agony over losing God’s favor Job asks a series of questions in an attempt to deal with his suffering.

I. Why Was I Born?

A. His Wish

V 3. Mirrored word pair- day and night.

Job wants to eradicate all nine months of his existence in the womb.

His wish is very strong it is on a cosmic scale.

Job forms his wish that he had never been born in contrast to the original creative act of God- light.

God’s first creative act on day one (after creating matter in general) is to make light, that which differentiates between day and night (Gen 1:3).

Darkness, indicates undoing God’s original creative act to remove his existence from memory.

Job formulates his wish that he never exist in terms of that original creative day – as a total envelopment that day by darkness.

Vv. 5-9 are an intensification of Job’s wish to show us the depth of Job’s emotion.

V. 8 “Their mourning” could also be translated at “Leviathan” Oddly, he invokes cursers who may rouse Leviathan in support of his wish (vs.

8).

B. His Reason

Regarding the content: he is effectively wishing that the primordial chaos of Genesis 1:2 would continue as it related to him, and that there was no statement “Let there be light,” at least as it applies to Job himself.

Regarding the strength of his emotion.

It is one thing to say that I wish God had never created me.

It is another thing to state that wish so strongly in terms of an undoing of God’s creative activity during the creation week.

All because that day, the day of his birth, did not close his mother's womb- which ultimately meant that Job now has to endure all of this suffering- this loss of God’s favor- therefore sorrow was not hid from his eyes.

Application:

1.

Most people who go through something like this, there is a desperate wish to undo the events so that they never happened.

This is a wish that at some point along the line, he would never had to endure this.

But who is the one that allowed this to happen in Job’s life?

God did.

So even though it hurts, and we don’t understand it, and we feel lost and alone- we must not wish that the things God brings into our lives would have never happened, rather as difficult as it is- we must trust in the mysterious wisdom of God.

2. Should we follow Job as a pattern for how to grieve?

We are privileged to see behind the scenes of Job’s suffering, but Job doesn’t see and he doesn’t understand, and so Job grieves.

This is surprising to us.

Job, by God’s own admission, is a spiritual giant.

His initial responses to suffering were amazing, and even here what Job mourns most (the loss of God’s favor) is commendable.

We hardly expect less from such a man.

And then we hear Job cursing the day of his birth, and wishing that it be eradicated from the creation event.

And suddenly Job no longer sounds so much like a super saint.

He unleashes a spirit of anguish that threatens to contradict his earlier resolve.

As the dialogue progresses, Job expresses both anger (18:4) and despair (6:26).

“Grief is an almost unavoidable consequence of bereavement, maltreatment, or pain.”19

Is Job, then, a positive or negative example of grieving?

Neither, really.

Job is a realistic example of grieving by one of the godliest men in Old Testament history.

This is what grief looks like, sometimes even for spiritually mature saints, because even spiritually mature saints are human.

Andersen, 101, summarizes: “The grammar is difficult, almost to the point of incoherence.

Translators spoil the art by making it smooth.

These features, which present themselves as difficulties to the purist, probably preserve the intentional effects of the author, and are not to be blamed on later deterioration in the text.”

Do not underestimate the severity of the emotional pain that some people experience.

The severity of the pain is usually not understood by those who haven’t experienced it.

3. As we will see as we develop the rest of chapter 3, Job is going to continually ask God, why? why? why?

This is the question hunting people want answered.

Guess what- Job never does get an answer.

The better question for hurting people to ask is, who?