Job 3 Devotional

Room for the Question Why

“I am not at ease or quiet; I have no rest, for trouble has come.””Job 3:26 (BSB)

After seven days of silence, Job speaks, and what comes out is not praise but anguish. He curses the day he was born and wishes darkness had swallowed the night of his conception (3:3-10). Why did he not die at birth (3:11)? Why is life given to people who long for a death that never comes (3:20-21)? Why is life given to a man whom God has hedged in (3:23)? The chapter ends without an answer, with no rest and only trouble (3:26).

Notice what Job does not do. He curses his birthday, but he does not curse God, as Satan said he would (1:11). And Scripture does not edit his words out or hurry past them. God made room in his book for a man who wished he had never been born. That does not make despair good, but it means despair is not a place where God's people are forbidden to speak. Grief does not have to be tidy before it can be spoken in God's hearing.

To think about: What grief or question have you been reluctant to speak honestly, and what would it mean to say it in God's hearing?