The force of depression is that you think and feel things are against and you even revel in this. Job feels he is ready to die. But no matter how much we feel this, we hold on to what we know. No matter what we feel, we assert the opposite, even if we cannot feel what we say. Depression is irrational: it makes you hold what you do not feel. The believer can never say, ‘There is no future for me.’ At any time God can so alter our circumstances that we have a new lease of life. The believer knows there is a plan of God for him stretching into eternity. How many believers have felt life was hopeless, and yet God has completely changed it (Genesis 42:36; 46:29-30; 47:28).
We remind ourselves that depression can arise from sickness, tiredness, guilt, or grief, or may be interwoven with our personality. It may even be the price paid for certain gifts. Job is saying these things even though he does not believe them completely. One part does believe the worst, and another part does not. We can depress ourselves even more by what we say. All is at an end, Job says; his spirit is broken. But the spirit of the believer is in the safekeeping of God. In spite of this we can behave as if everything is hopeless. We can never say what God’s plan is – he may raise us up again to new usefulness after we think we have done our last work for him. Even on the edge of the grave we can’t say this, though we naturally experience apprehension because of this.
It is right of course that Job should set a high value on his life, for the Lord counts the life and death of his children as precious, and certainly there is nothing more valuable in this physical world than a human life. We are created in the image of God and the eternal loss of the life of a believer would be a strange and meaningless event. In saying this, Job does not set too high a value of his life. The believer needs comfort in death and this comfort is provided by Scripture which tells us that our lives are hid with Christ in God. If they are hidden there then, although men count us as nothing, as the filth of the world and the offscouring of all things (1 Corinthians 4:13), and as having nothing (2 Corinthians 6:10), we nevertheless possess all things. The world may scatter our remains and believe they have put us beyond the reach even of the Lord to help us, but they do not know the power of God. Our insignificance on earth and the disdain with which the church of God is treated by the world is only the stark backdrop to the glorious resurrection that we will experience at the last day.
‘Job does not speak here entirely as a faithful man, but he speaks according to his passions, as all of us find by experience that although he rests on God’s promises, and comforts himself with them, he does not cease to be disquieted in himself. We will not overcome temptation at the first push, but we need to fight with great force and with much difficulty … Seeing that it pleases God to keep our life, let us walk our course without excessive carefulness. Though there were a thousand deaths ready to swallow us up, God is strong enough to pluck us out of them’ (Calvin – English updated).
‘Have we not Jesus Christ as our guide? Then let us [face] death. Do we not know that it is the entrance to the glory of heaven? Seeing that the resurrection was joined to the death of God’s Son, was that not in order to assure us that God will not allow us to continue in corruption. Do we not know that what is written in Psalm 16 was fulfilled in him: namely, that God preserved him from corruption so that we should be made free from it, and in time drawn completely out of it? Since we have such promises at God’s hand, and such assurance in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, we ought to fight manfully against the fear of death’ (Calvin – English updated).