Job 10:1

He had now given up hope of any sympathy from them... "Here I am alone with all my sorrows. Here are three dear friends who have not one particle of sympathy with me! No feeling, no compassion at all for everything I am suffering. They are quite comfortable having none of it, and quite astonished that I should have any of it. So they think I must be very wicked. It is all false."

They turned him in the wrong direction; they made him busy with himself. He could not deny that he was suffering. Measuring himself against other men, he could not see that he had done anything to bring such great suffering on himself. And his friends wore him down, forcing his mind onto this one point: that everything God does matches what a man has done.

It is not so much the physical agony, the boils and running sores that torture him. It is more the bitter awareness that he is losing his hold on God. He begins to see Him no longer as a loving friend, but as a harsh, unmovable tyrant. He is passing through a death struggle.

He is weary of life, and might as well pour out all his thoughts against God... yet he pours out all those thoughts before the eye of God. Might this very outpouring of misery hint at the root of faith in his heart? He will at least tell God to His face that he doubts Him.

Since there was no mediator, from verse 2 on Job speaks all his words straight to God. He reasons with Him about why God should treat him the way He was doing. He starts his complaint by repeating that his soul loathes his life. So he lets his bitter complaint run free and speaks straight to God... In one sense it was true that God was contending with Job, and Job did not learn why until the last chapter of this book. He needed this painful experience to learn that his own nature was sinful, and to learn the pure grace and goodness of the Lord Himself.

In this same translation, one chapter (Job 10) speaks of all three parts that make up a person, and it keeps the same distinction between the words. "My soul (psukee) is weary of my life. I will speak in the bitterness of my soul (psukee)." (v. 1.) "Your care has preserved my spirit (pneuma)." (v. 12.)

Of course Job's words are ill-considered, the expressions of a tortured mind. Yet it is as well that what is in the heart comes out.

This discipline is given to set self aside and to bring the heart into its true relation with God, apart from self. So the discipline exposes the secret workings and feelings of self. Without it, they would never be spotted or known — and what a man does not know, he never gives up.