Job 10:13

"Your hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet You destroy me" — after all the love You have shown me. "Remember, I beg You, that You have made me as the clay." He had not made him an angel. He had not made him someone above such suffering... "You have granted me life and favour, and Your visitation has preserved my spirit. Yet these things You hid in Your heart." "You had that in Your heart before I was born. You meant me to come into this, and I do not know why."

And now the darkest of all. The worst of it is not the physical agony — the boils and running sores that torture him. It is the bitter awareness that he is losing his hold on God. He begins to look on Him no longer as a loving friend, but as a harsh, unmovable tyrant... He charges God that He planned his calamity and destruction (verses 6-13).

No words can describe the misery that would make Job speak like this against God... He pours out all those thoughts before the eye of God. Might this very outpouring of misery point to the root of faith in his heart?

Much of what this book teaches depends on one point. God's estimate of Job and Satan's trial of him were made known only in heaven. The reason for the trial stayed a secret for the time being — a secret not in heaven, but here on earth. Neither Job nor his friends knew anything of what God had said about him.

God had shown Himself most kind and thoughtful toward Job in the past. So Job could not understand why God would now act so differently from the way He had dealt with him before. "Yet these things You hid in Your heart," he says (v.13). But since this was true, God must have a good reason for hiding His plans. Job should have realised that God would show His mind in His own time.

The real secret of all Job's false reasoning is this: he did not understand the character of God, or the purpose of all His dealings. He did not see that God was testing him. God was behind the scenes, using many agents to carry out His wise and gracious ends... God was dealing with Job. He was testing him in order to teach him, to turn him from his own plans, and to keep him from pride. Had Job seized this grand point, it would have saved him a world of strife and contention.

So Elihu does not misrepresent Job, nor snatch at a random expression. Indeed, Job's chief sorrow was that he seemed to be losing the kind Being in whom he once delighted. It will not do to say that Job also admitted God's power and knowledge, and voiced his confidence in Him. How could that be squared with the statements Elihu quotes? Such charges had to be met, and Job convinced that they were false. Otherwise he could never have peace in his own soul, and a dark blot would rest on God's honour.