October 8
Reading: Job 17
1 “My spirit is broken; my days are extinct;
the graveyard is ready for me.
2 Surely there are mockers about me,
and my eye dwells on their provocation.
3 “Lay down a pledge for me with you;
who is there who will put up security for me?
4 Since you have closed their hearts to understanding,
therefore you will not let them triumph.
5 He who informs against his friends to get a share of their property—
the eyes of his children will fail.
6 “He has made me a byword of the peoples,
and I am one before whom men spit.
7 My eye has grown dim from vexation,
and all my members are like a shadow.
8 The upright are appalled at this,
and the innocent stirs himself up against the godless.
9 Yet the righteous holds to his way,
and he who has clean hands grows stronger and stronger.
10 But you, come on again, all of you,
and I shall not find a wise man among you.
11 My days are past; my plans are broken off,
the desires of my heart.
12 They make night into day:
‘The light,’ they say, ‘is near to the darkness.’
13 If I hope for Sheol as my house,
if I make my bed in darkness,
14 if I say to the pit, ‘You are my father,’
and to the worm, ‘My mother,’ or ‘My sister,’
15 where then is my hope?
Who will see my hope?
16 Will it go down to the bars of Sheol?
Shall we descend together into the dust?”
Job is walking through the “valley of the shadow of death” as David speaks of it in Psalm 23, though it does seem like he is rehearsing some of what he has said in chapters 3, 7, 10, and 14. The word “sheol” in Hebrew simply means the place where the dead go. The word really answers no questions regarding eternal life or the righteousness or unrighteousness of those who die.
Job is here overwhelmed with grief.
C.S. Lewis writes in his little book, A Grief Observed, “In grief nothing “stays put.” One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?”
Later in the same book Lewis tells us, “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
We see in this chapter a confusing jumble of ideas from Job. God has attacked him, his friends mock him, his own protestations of innocence have opened him up to the charge of hypocrisy, and he sees the grave opening before him. He is not in a good place, but he can only move onward.
There is no shortcut in the process. This is why, now 14 chapters after Job began his lament, it seems as though he is making little or no progress. In fact, he seems more afraid, fearful of God and what He is doing now than when the pain was fresh. He has had time to think about it.
Lewis looks at his own condition as he mourns the loss of his wife, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”
You might think that we ought not be afraid of God. Lewis writes, “What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never even been to a dentist? It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.”