Job 3:2

This is very remarkable. It does not appear that the friends had spoken a single sentence. They sat in total silence, with torn garments and covered with dust, gazing on a grief too deep for them to reach. It was Job himself who first broke the silence. The whole of the third chapter pours out the most bitter grief — sad evidence of a spirit that was not subdued.

If Satan is defeated (the grace of God having kept Job's heart from murmuring) God still has His own work to do. What the storm Satan raised against Job failed to do is brought about by the sympathy of his friends. Poor heart of man! Job's uprightness and even his patience had been shown, and Satan had nothing more to say. But God alone can search out what the heart really is before Him.

A man will bear grief and bow under it when he is alone. But then people come from whom he expects sympathy, and instead they show distrust. Job was quick to show that he could not stand that.

He opened his mouth and cursed his day. He did not curse God, note that. He called down a curse upon the day he was born, regretting that he had not died when his mother gave him birth. He thought that if he had never seen the light, he would have "been at rest," and not in this terrible suffering.

Job did not even now charge God foolishly, but he did curse the day of his birth. He was not blaming God directly. Yet, however little he realised it, he was blaming God indirectly, for it was God who gave him life… How could the day perish in which Job was born? How could history reverse itself? Later Job would thank God he had been born, and that thankfulness will last for eternity. But when trouble comes like the trouble Job had to bear, we do not tend to think calmly… He was moved by his anguish, not by faith.

As long as his sufferings were outward, or physical, Job was calm. But when he let doubts about God's goodness in, he collapsed.

Job did not know what was in his heart until he was put to the test. When God lets the light in, it will not do for the character; it is gone. These tests did not only bring Job into the light. They also brought out what was inside his heart… Trials come, and then self breaks out, because it was inside… Suppose it were so with any of us — every outward blessing taken away and Satan hedging up our way. What would we see in our own hearts, and in a hundred others? Things would simply come out, because they were within.

Job was a true saint of God; but he needed to learn himself, as we all do. He needed to see the roots of his own moral being laid bare, so that he might abhor himself and repent in dust and ashes. He also needed a truer and deeper sense of what God was. Then he could trust Him and justify Him in every circumstance.