Job 30:3

Even in physical strength they were worthless, for want and hunger had destroyed their prime. What else could you expect from people who had been gnawing at whatever they could find in the desert? This was not in places where green, pleasant spots grew, but in unbroken waste and wild land. There they plucked saltwort in the thickets when they could find it, and found food, wretched as it was, in the roots of broom or juniper. How sad to think of such degradation for members of the human race even in those early days!

Withered up from hunger, they gnaw the roots of weeds growing in the waste. That land stopped yielding true food for man long ago.

Job's disdain for such men reveals another side of his character. He spoke before of delivering the poor and the fatherless and those who had no helper. Was it love for them that really moved him? If so, where was his love for this class of people, whom apparently he had looked at with contempt?

Job's words about his former greatness described his generous pity for the wretched outcasts he comforted and cheered. Moving to the present, he seems to have changed places with these people, or with others like them. He in turn speaks of them not with the language of sympathy but of deepest contempt… But in Job there is no turning to God under such unjust treatment. Clearly the wound to his pride, in having such a rabble mock him, is the deepest of his mental sufferings.

Job does not consider that some such people may not be to blame for their condition. He seems to think they were not worth considering, because they have to scrounge their food from unhealthy sources and are driven from other people to live in caves or clefts in the valleys. For he calls them sons of fools and sons of vile men. Can God not save sons of vile men? Indeed He can, and often does.

But let it be well remembered that much more is needed than the stripping of self and the discovery that the world is hollow and deceitful. A person may go through all of this and the result be nothing but frustration and disappointment. In fact it can be nothing more if God is not reached. If the heart is not brought to find its all-satisfying portion in God, a reversal of fortune leaves it desolate. The discovery that people are fickle and hollow fills it with bitterness… Once Job got into God's presence, there was an end to the self-centredness of chapter 29 and the bitterness of chapter 30.

We can only compare his anger at their taunts with the meekness of Him "who when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten." All through His life our Lord had the shadow of man's rejection falling on Him. But in His darkest hour — "your hour, and the power of darkness" — they poured out their curses and their taunts. But He, like one who did not hear, said: "I gave my back to those who strike, and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard; I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting." Who is it that said this? Not a man lamenting his former grandeur, but One who had voluntarily given up His glory in love for His enemies.