Commentary on the Book of Job part eight

                                        Job 3:1-26

Job yielded himself to great depression and despair. God often allowed His Word to record the deep feelings of humans because He wants us to know that He understands and has compassion for our emotional responses to all the vicissitudes of life. Many suppose that God endorses such deep feelings in His people as anger and hatred. God desires that His people hate evil, such as hatred, but not the people who have such feelings. God understands that hatred, and other deep feelings, can emerge from a natural response to oppressive situations. God wants us to know that He empathizes with our deep emotions. Hebrews 4:15. For example, critics of the Bible contend that God endorsed the feelings of the Psalmist about killing babies in Psalm 137:9. Actually, God only recorded the temporary, natural feelings that the Psalmist had about an enemy that had conquered and oppressed his people. In these kinds of verses, God simply wants people to know that He sympathizes with our warranted feelings. God condemns hatred for no good reason as a sin. One of the ways that God expresses His Love for us comes from His sympathy for our deep feelings. In the words of the proverbial statement, "God hates the sin but loves the sinner." Ephesians 6:12.

Job's deep despair caused him to wish he had never been born. But Job's despair did not cause him to lose his love for God and faith in Him. Job 1:21-22; Job 2:10. In his misery, Job did not feel the presence of God, but God was with him nevertheless, revealing truths to him that he, and we, need to know. Job imagined that if he had died as an infant, he would have found rest in a dark place. He imagined that the wicked rest there whether rich or poor, small or great. Job did not realize that God had revealed to him that such a dark place actually exists to which God consigns some of the wicked when they physically die. Hebrews 9:27. God calls this place Death in Revelation 20:13. This verse also reveals that God consigns some of the wicked dead to a place called the Sea and the worst of the wicked to a fiery Hell. These wicked dead are always unbelievers whom God punishes because He cannot accept the sin and evil that still soils the righteousness that he created them to be. Isaiah 64:6. God cleanses and saves believers from sin and evil so that He never allows them to have to go to one of these places. Isaiah 64:5. But Job happened to be wrong about Death being a place of rest. It is a place of great anguish and remorse. Jesus described it as a place of "weeping and gnashing of teeth." Matthew 8:12.

Job then began to question God about why God gives any light, which is truth, to humans at all since all they have to look forward to is death and darkness. God allowed Job, and any of His people, to question Him because that shows that they have faith enough to rely on God's revelations in order to find the truth. Job was actually praying, seeking answers from God. God honored Job's faith with more revelations of His truth. God's people have always found truth in the revelations of God's Word and in prayer.