Job 3:3

But nothing had yet reached the depths of Job's heart, and God's purpose was to reach them, whatever Satan's thoughts may have been. Job did not know himself. Up to this time, for all his godliness, he had never been in the presence of God... Satan is defeated, because the grace of God kept Job's heart from complaining. But God still has His own work to do. What the storm Satan raised against Job failed to do, the sympathy of his friends does.

If the trial had stopped here, the book would have lost its lesson. We would have missed the ways and the end of the Lord.

Job mourns and curses his day — not God, nothing of that kind. Yet he speaks in a way he should not, showing his horror of the day that announced his birth. The whole scene of his birth stood before him in gloom. Everything to do with his coming into the world looked horrible to him... He asks why he was ever born, when he was destined for such misery.

Even now Job did not accuse God of wrong, but he did curse the day of his birth. He was not blaming God openly. Yet, little as he saw it, he was blaming God all the same, because it was God who gave him life... How could the day perish on which Job was born (v.3)? How could history run backwards? That day had passed long before, and at the time it was a day of light, because a boy had been born into the world... Later Job would thank God that he had been born, and that thankfulness will last forever... But anguish moved him, not faith.

To poor Job his birthday seemed a moment to mourn and curse. In his days of plenty he had feared that some trouble might come. Now it had come on him with a force beyond anything known. His words of agony in Job 3 still move us to sympathy, some four thousand years after he spoke them.

Only of one man has it ever been said — by our Lord — "It would have been better for that man if he had not been born" (Matthew 26:24). Judas had turned away from the faith. Satan entered his heart, and he sold his Master for thirty pieces of silver... For a child of God to wish he had never been born shows a total, though only temporary, eclipse of faith.

But the great point is his mourning over this terrible lot of his: that he was ever allowed to come into the world to bear such awful suffering. Where do you find that in Christ? "I was sent for this purpose." The Lord accepts it. He felt it, and felt it deeply. He was troubled in spirit. He felt it, and yet He accepted it. This was why He had come. Job was different. He could not understand why a holy God should allow such suffering, though his own sufferings were nothing beside those of Christ.

Job had begun to take pleasure in his own goodness and to trust his own righteousness. So, to destroy Job's confidence in himself, God allows Satan's malice, within set limits, to sift him with terrible trials. The result was twofold. Job triumphed over all the power of the enemy. He also learned, through the trials, to judge the secret and unsuspected evil of his own heart.