Job 10:19

If Job was living only for trouble, he thought, why then had God allowed him to be born? He thought it would have been much better if he had died before birth. Then no one on earth would have seen him. He would have been carried from the womb to the grave instead (vv. 18-19). His days were few enough without having troubles multiplied. So he tells God to "cease" — that is, to leave him alone (v. 20). Did he not stop to think that this was an insolent way to speak to his Maker? But he was too distressed to think soberly.

It is not the physical suffering that has wrung this bitter cry from him. He has lost, or is in danger of losing, faith in God's goodness. There is barely a gleam of light in his whole speech. In the closing part (Job 10) he lets himself loose in the dark despair that has settled on his soul. He is weary of life, and might as well pour out all his thoughts against God... May not this very abandonment of misery suggest the root of faith in his heart? He will at least tell God to His face that he doubts Him.

I am not trying to prove that everything Job says agrees with what Scripture reveals about the state between death and resurrection. He might have been mistaken... They are given as Job's words, that is all. They are the words of a believer from those old days. No doubt they carry the dimness and uncertainty of that time. Next to Paul's language, they show death not yet abolished, and "darkness" not yet driven away by light. Yet no one can fairly press these words into the service of materialism. Take the strongest expression of all: "I should have been as though I had not been." He was speaking of the world and its sorrows. In relation to those, it was simple truth.

Weigh all these expressions in the light of the New Testament, and they fall short. Death is not a friend whose visit we should want; it is an enemy. The hope of God's people in affliction and sorrow, in the light of the gospel, is not relief by death, but the coming of the Lord. The Old Testament does not know the promise of the New: "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (1 Cor. 15:52). It is one of the mysteries hidden in past ages. Job speaks as a man in despair. He seems to have forgotten the bright and blessed days of the past, and he fears a hopeless future.

Job thought the thing appointed for him was only the misery and suffering he was going through. In fact it was the "needs be" that was to work patience. Job did not see the appointed "end of the Lord; that the Lord is compassionate and merciful." It is the end of a love too great to be turned aside from His purposes of blessing by our complaint and unbelief... the path for each of His children is different, but the end is the same.