He convinces himself that it would be better for him to die outright, than to suffer this lingering torment, and therefore asks that God would despatch him with one blow. Yet as Calvin says, ‘Could any worse thing befall him than death, especially a death sent by God by which he knew that God would utterly overwhelm him? Wasn’t that the most extreme of all miseries?’ (Calvin – English updated). This was not a legitimate prayer. How should we pray in extreme situations? We should ask nothing that is inconsistent with the will of God (1 John 5:14), and we should follow the example of Christ who in Gethsemane expressed the agony he was experiencing to his Father, but nevertheless asked that the Father’s will be done. The remedy to illegitimate prayers is not to fall silent in prayer, but to open our hearts before God – from whom nothing can be hidden – and to express our awareness of our weakness, and to ask for the aid of God’s Spirit to submit to him and to ask what is right. We should examine and check our desires and only put forward to God desires which we see are legitimate.
‘But Job speaks like a man who is so carried away with passion that he no longer knows where he is, and therefore (it seems to him) there is no better comfort than to be utterly destroyed as soon as God lays his hand upon him. When we have any strong feeling, we imagine that there is no other misery in the whole world but that. When a man is pressed with a sorrow that is great and excessive, he thinks nothing at all of other men’s griefs, and they are nothing to him. If he is in the heat, he would be happy to be cooled, yes even in ice. And yet if he is numbed with cold, that too will also be hard for him to bear, and as bitter as the heat that he suffered previously. If a man has either heat or cold, or any other thing that troubles him in his body, you see him so agitated that he thinks that all opposite miseries would be a relief to him, and that is because our passions carry us away. See how Job speaks. Let us note than that when we imagine reliefs and releases, they are not what we think they are, even if God were to send us exactly what we wanted. We would find that we went from one misery to another, and that the only real relief is to have God favourable to us’ (Calvin – English updated).
How thankful we are that when we utter foolish prayers to God, he does not immediately answer them, but he continues to watch over us for good, and denies us the foolish thing we ask for. He sees that it is our weakness and unbelief that is speaking and does not immediately hand us over to our own folly. He loves us as a Father who protects his child from self-harm.