I do wrong when how I feel today, is an assessment of my whole life. Job’s life consisted of years of patient witness, being the mainstay of justice, the upholder of morality. When today is all we can see, we get things very wrong. It is nearest thing to blasphemy: ‘No good has ever come, or ever will come from my life.’
When in grief, even legitimate grief, we mustn’t let it take possession of us. This is a mistake we all make under far less trials than Job. He never cracked in one respect; he never denied God. He vented out, he criticised, but he never denied. He was always looking for an answer from God as to why this was happening.
‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’ No one can speak like this except one who knows he is lost eternally. Of one such, Christ says, ‘Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had never been born’ (Mark 14:21). All others must speak more modestly and look for reasons to thank God for their lives. But Job speaks in this extreme way because in his anger he refuses to recognise anything good that he has received.
‘We cannot sufficiently value the inestimable benefit that God has bestowed on us in giving us this present life, because by maintaining us in it he makes us to feel by experience that he has a care of us and will not by any means forsake us, whatever happens’ (Calvin – English updated).