Job 30:9

And now Job had become their song and their byword. Even people like these — wretched cave-dwellers, if not worse in their origin — dared to make him their entertainment and the object of spiteful abuse. They loathed him so much that they kept far away; and if they did come near, it was to heap on him the lowest mark of shameful contempt.

Now Job describes the misery and disgrace he has suddenly been brought down to. First, he dwells on the contempt he had to take — not from the proud and powerful, but from the most wretched and despicable of men. No one was so low that he could not look at Job with mockery and scorn.

Now he turns to the present. He seems to have changed places with these people, or with people like them, and now he in turn speaks of them not with sympathy but with the deepest contempt. Pride speaks of them as those "whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock." Their elders were beneath his contempt, and now the younger ones laugh at him... It is clear that the wound to his pride, in having such a mob mock him, is the deepest of his mental sufferings.

He spoke before of his delivering the poor and the fatherless and those who had no helpers (ch. 29:12). 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? Now they are treating him with contempt, and he feels deeply insulted. Again this shows the pride in Job that needed to be broken — and later it was broken.

They could not bear to look at him — at the agony, and the terrible effect of all these sores on his body. They could not go near him... "Because He has loosed my cord." There was, after all, what grieved the heart of poor Job more than anything. It was God. He does not mean the devil; it was not the devil.

However much he scorns them, Job has to admit that they mock him, that he is their song and their byword. 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."... But He acted as One who did not hear: "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" (Isaiah 50:6). Who is it that said this? Not a man mourning over his lost greatness, but One who had given up His glory by His own choice, in love for His enemies.

Mourning over greatness that is gone, and bitter attacks on other people, will not do the heart much good... He could turn from the rebuffs of men to His resources in God, and then come back with those healing words, "Come to me … and I will give you rest."