Job 7:15

Was he a sea, or a sea-monster, so uncontrollable that he must be allowed no relief, not even at night? The horrors were enough to make him prefer strangling — any death — rather than that such bones as his should live on. What was mortal man, that God should make so much of him, and try him as he was tried without a break?

When he looked for comfort in lying down in his bed, then he says, "You scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions." He refers to the vision Eliphaz claimed to have had. Job took it as meant not for his comfort but to frighten him, and this moved him all the more to choose to die.

Day gave him no pleasure, night no rest; he prefers death to life, which he "loathes." (vv. 15, 16.) Yet he is unbroken. In prosperity his goodness is a basis for self-satisfaction, and now in adversity — sent to remove this — he complains! Such is man under instruction. Not until he says, "now my eye sees you," does he say, "therefore I despise myself."

He gives us a history of his troubles, with disappointment in his friends added to the list. He is occupied with defending himself, though at the same time only the more convinced that his days are worthless, saying, "My soul chooses strangling and death rather than life." What lessons of anguish one has to learn before one sees the wisdom of giving up self! How tormented the soul is by one suggestion after another — suggestions that could never reach or trouble it except for the amount of self that exists. It is the possibility that a charge might be true which makes it painful and irritating.

There was no question of Job's end. There was no question that God would receive him, and He had already received him in spirit. So there was no fear of death in Job; he looked at it and even desired it. But that would spoil the great lesson. God would allow him to be tried thoroughly, but would not allow Satan so to torment him as to end his life.

The first thought after waking to a full sense of one's misery, and the most bitter one, is to curse one's day. Where God is not known, that leads to suicide. But where God is known, as in Job's case, it is the beginning of healthy action — not in the discontent it uncovers, but because the sense of death, of utter removal from everything, is known and felt... Death, because of such present misery, is preferred. To live in it has no attraction for the heart. This Job feels. He does not know that God is seeking to make him a witness of dependence on Himself against Satan. But this is God's way. Discipline may have the effect of making us feel that death is preferable to life, but it is working out God's purpose.