Job 3:13

We hear the outburst of passionate grief at last from Job. He could not stand the presence of his friends. He had borne many sorrows and bitter suffering. But these friends came and looked at his misery without a word. It was too much for Job. Did they suspect him? He could not endure doubts about God's view of him, especially from them. Were they not friends? If they loved him, why that silence — that ominous silence for seven days and seven nights?

Job had never really been brought into the presence of God. There had been a certain work in his soul, which produced fruits... He was resting in what he was to others, and not in the favour of God Himself... So God goes on dealing with Job, till in the very thing in which Job was most famous he is brought to nothing. Job, the most patient man, curses the day of his birth. Why is this? Because we must be broken down. We must come to a sense of what we are, as well as of what we have done. Then God can deal with us out of His own heart.

Death is described here as a rest that all share equally. The old and the young, even the unborn baby, are at rest. So are the great and the small. Kings whose palaces have crumbled into ruins, and princes who left all their wealth behind, lie here at last in deep and equal rest. The wicked cannot trouble them. No master can demand work from his slave. Prisoners and their captors are no different in the presence of death, that great leveler of mankind.

Everywhere the righteous and the wicked stand in contrast, morally unlike each other. This points clearly to very different futures: "The wicked is overthrown through his evildoing, but the righteous finds refuge in his death" (Prov. 14:32). In blurring the future in this way, Job shows how far his soul had drifted from the truth of God. In plain language he is longing for annihilation.

But here I see no reason to blame these words on the unbelief that worked in Job's heart alongside much right feeling. This was simply how death appears. A man died, and no one saw him again until the end of all things... he uses words that fit with ignorance of another world and of the state between death and resurrection. But they certainly do not say the dead have stopped existing. They imply the opposite.

So Job's words do not contradict what we have seen elsewhere to be the revealed truth about those who have died. To a man as weary as he was, the unseen world was indeed a place of "rest". But "rest" is not extinction. And even if it were also a "land of darkness", darkness and non-existence are completely contradictory ideas.

Job's own words refute his unbelief here: "For I know that my Redeemer lives" (Job 19:25). David also said, "when I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness" (Ps. 17:15)... The New Testament letters speak of being "away from the body and at home with the Lord," and of "My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better." Do such words echo Job's unbelieving laments?