who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures,
Job has broken a week of silence by cursing the day he was born. Now he asks why God keeps giving life to people who hunt for death like treasure-seekers digging for gold — and never find it.
A prayer God refused
Job's wish is plain, and so is the fact that it went unanswered.
Leslie M. GrantHere Job comes closer to facing facts as they actually were. He was in misery and bitterness of soul. He questions why life should be given to someone in such a state, when he longs for death and it does not come. It is good, however, that he does not even consider suicide, as many would do today who are in such a condition. God had told Satan to spare Job's life, while allowing him to make Job suffer terribly. God knew Job's sufferings were needed to bring about great blessing. So Job's wish for death was not according to the will of God. Job would not die until God ordained it so.
Death mistaken for a friend
Job wants out. He is not the only man in Scripture who has wanted it.
Arno Clemens GaebeleinWe see from these expressions that his mind turned to death as the great emancipator. Moses and Elijah show the same trend of thought and weakness; so did disappointed Jonah when he said, "It is better for me to die."
The first complaint against God
Job cannot reach death, so he begins to blame the One he thinks is blocking the way. A later sufferer used almost the same words and drew a very different conclusion.
Samuel RidoutHe asks why one so wretched as he should be shut out from the rest he seeks. He adds to this the first of his charges against God, calling himself "the man whom God has hedged in." Jeremiah uses similar language in Lamentations: "He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light… He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; He has made my chains heavy" (Lamentations 3:2-7). But he goes on: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies never come to an end… It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD" (verses 22 and 26). We fail to find anything like this in Job's words.
Both men sit in the same darkness. The difference is whether the sufferer waits for God inside it.
What Job was really asking for
Just before this, Job described the grave as a place where everyone rests alike. Pressed to its end, that picture becomes something worse than rest.
Samuel RidoutBy blurring the future this way, Job shows how far his soul had drifted from the truth of God. Put plainly, he is longing for annihilation. We know how materialists and believers in conditional immortality have turned to words like these to support their unscriptural views.
Job would later say the opposite. Jesus also corrected people in His own day who held this same view of the dead.
Samuel RidoutJob's own words are a refutation of 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" (Psalm 17:15). Our Lord answers the Sadducees, whom Job unknowingly sides with here, about what the Old Testament teaches on the state of the dead: "He is not God of the dead, but of the living" (Matthew 22:32). He also points out the fearful contrast between the careless rich man and the believing beggar, Lazarus (Luke 16).
The answer Job did not have
Job's question — why give life to a man who only wants to lose it — has an answer he could not yet see.
William KellyThe full answer could only come in a dead and risen Christ: if it were not so, the most miserable of all men would be the Christian. But now He is risen, and has become the first-fruits of those who sleep. Fear of evil is gone for ever for the one who now walks by faith… So the Christian can glory in troubles, and die daily. Job, by contrast, can only say that the moment he imagined a fear, it overtook him.
The problem was never that Job wanted relief. The only relief he could imagine was the grave.
Arno Clemens GaebeleinWeighed in the light of the New Testament, all these expressions 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 promise of the New Testament, "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" (1 Corinthians 15:52), is unknown in the Old Testament.
Summary
- Digging — Job hunts for death like a man digging for buried treasure. Yet he never reaches for suicide: God had set a limit on what could touch his life.
- Drifting — The grave he digs for is a blank one. Longing for rest slides into longing for nothing at all, which is how far grief had carried him from the truth.
- Blaming — Death will not come, so Job makes his first charge against God: God has fenced him in. Jeremiah knew the same darkness, but Jeremiah waited quietly for God.
- Dawning — Job's later cry, that his Redeemer lives, overturns these words. Despair is not his teaching; it is his lowest point.
- Delivered — The full answer to "why go on living?" arrives in a Christ who died and rose. Death is an enemy, not a rescuer, and the Christian's hope is the Lord's coming, not the grave.