How long was Job's suffering?

Three friends then, pious men too, heard of all this evil that was come upon him, and "they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him." The trouble must have evidently gone on for a considerable time. We are not to suppose that Job's trial was measured by a few days. It was limited by God, but this was not necessarily of a brief time. The terrible disease which had followed after the destruction of his property, family, everything here below, was known to friends who lived at comparatively distant points; and so they had to make an appointment to come together. This alone supposes the lapse of some time, and what we find in Job's complaints afterwards entirely falls in with and corroborates it. "And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not" — so extreme the change in what, after all, could have been no long while, so distressing the change, whatever the time might be — "they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven." Those wrong them who deny their true affection for Job: the failure lies altogether elsewhere. It is an entire mistake of the point and instruction of the book to conceive that their feelings were shallow, or that they had but little love for their friend. Not so: God is showing us the insufficiency of every one and every thing but Christ. This the book of Job proves; and consequently, the more you lower Job or his friends, you gather the less of its profit. Let us give them each and all their value, still they are immeasurably below Him in and by whom we know the Father. We are told then that they came and; "sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights" — one does not often find such friends with such reality, or at any rate such depth and display of sympathy — "and none spake a word to him: for they saw that his grief was very great."

Here begins the great action of the book. Job, who stands such a model of patience up to this point; Job, who had bowed to God under such a weight, and such a breadth, and such a rapid succession of calamities as never met a single individual from the beginning of the world till then; Job, who had honoured God even more in his trouble than in his prosperity — who could find fault with him? Had the trial stopped at this point the lesson of the book would have been lost. We should have missed the ways and the end of the Lord. We should have heard of the patience of Job and seen him honour God as unflinchingly in abject misery as when blessed on every side. We should have seen what Satan is in his unwearied and audacious and causeless malice, and seen him defeated utterly; but we should have lost that which it was the great object of this book to communicate in what follows.

There can be no question that all three were, like Job, God-fearing men. They formed with Job in the patriarchal age a kind of intellectual and religious aristocracy, in the midst of the surrounding idolators. How long their journey took after the news of Job's condition had reached them we do not know. It must have been months later after Job was first stricken, that they came to visit him. During that time the disease of Job developed fully; his misery did not become less. At last the friends arrived. And as they saw the ash-heap and the miserable figure upon it, they knew him not. He was so disfigured and distorted by the suffering and the disease that they failed to recognize him. They had known him in the days of his great prosperity, when young men were held by his personality in awe, when old men arose to do him honor, when princes refrained from talking and nobles held their peace (29:7-10). What a sad spectacle to see him in this deplorable condition. Their sympathy is expressed by weeping, the rending of their garments and the sprinkling of dust upon their heads toward heaven. What pain it must have given them when they saw that his grief and suffering were so great! Then follows an impressive silence of seven days and seven nights. They are stricken dumb and find no words to utter. But while their lips did not speak their minds were deeply engaged with the problem which ere long they would take up in controversy with the afflicted one. And the question uppermost must have been, "How can God, a righteous God, permit this good man to be in this condition?"--"Why is he stripped of all and in this horrible condition?"

"Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth?" (Job 7). There he has another ground; his trial was so prolonged. It was not merely a tremendous trial, which is usually very brief in this world. If people have great agony, say in the foot or the head — well, very often they become insensible if it is the head; and if it is the foot no doubt it is very trying, but it passes; the paroxysm passes. 'But how is it that I from head to foot am nothing but a mass of sores, and inwardly suffering the deepest agony? Oh that God had taken it away; that God had terminated this terrible suffering.' "As a servant earnestly desires the shadow" — of the evening, when he has done his work — "and as an hireling looks for the reward of his work; so am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me." They had each day their relaxation from labour; it may be hard labour, but still they had their night of ease and rest. 'But I have nothing day or night, it is all the same terrible unremitting suffering.' "When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro until the dawning of the day."

Sometimes we have a little of that experience; but how little it is compared with Job's; and how very quickly it gives place. But God was putting him into the furnace in order that he might come out purer than ever. "My flesh is clothed with worms." Think of that; not merely with woollen or linen — "My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome. My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope." That is, it was always something coming just like the rapid process with which a weaver passes his shuttle every moment. "Oh, remember that my life is wind; mine eye shall no more see good. The eye of him that has seen me shall see me no more; thine eyes are upon me and I am not. As the cloud is consumed and vanishes away" — that is what he compared himself to — "so he that goes down to the grave shall come up no more" — that is what he wanted, that it should terminate. "He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more. Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Am I a sea, or a whale" — a sea monster — "that thou settest a watch over me? When I say, my bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my complaint; then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions; so that my soul chooses strangling, and death rather than my life." It is not that he would have done it, but that is what would have terminated his suffering. That is what the merely natural spirit would have done — terminated it violently. Oh, no; he had no thought of such a thing. He was under the hand of God, but he begs God's hand to close it. "I would not live alway; let me alone; for my days are vanity."

Job's questions in verse 1 indicate why he was so distressed at God's dealings. No doubt too his friends would agree to his questions. "Is there not a time of hard service for man on earth? Are not his days also like the days of a hired man?" How many people are like Job in this matter. They consider their relationship to God as being like that of a hired man working for a righteous employer. If they do right, their recompense should be good: if they do wrong, they expect a painful recompense. But Job was suffering agonising pain. Was this the recompense for the good he had done? He had looked eagerly for his wages for doing good (v.2), and found himself enduring months of futility and wearisome nights, tossing to and fro in his bed, his flesh caked with worms and dust (vv.3-5).

Thus, Job was inferring that God was unfair in recompensing evil for good. Of course God is not unfair, and his friends, in trying to defend God's righteousness, were guilty of deciding that God was recompensing Job for his secretly doing evil. How sadly wrong in their thoughts were both Job and his friends! God was seeking to teach Job that his relationship to Him must not be that of one working for wages, but that of one whom God loved and who loved God, therefore doing good simply out of a heart of love, expecting no payment for it. Job did not at this time understand this, and neither did his friends.

(5) Having challenged his friends to test him, Job now returns to dwell upon his sufferings in view of the brevity of life. These sleepless nights of "tossings to and fro" through months of unrelieved pain, make him long for that "appointed time" for all flesh, with the eager desire of a hireling waiting for the close of his day's work. Already there are the harbingers of the grave upon him, the worm and the clod; any slight healing of his sores is but the signal for a fresh outbreak of loathsomeness. Like the swift passing of the shuttle in the weaver's loom, so pass his painful days. Soon they will see him no more, and his life will melt away as the cloud in the blue sky.

Job's reply continues into Job 7, and here his discourse seems to divide into two parts verses 1-10, and, 11-21. One cannot read the first section without being struck by the pathos of his plight. He felt it deeply himself and hence expressed it in moving fashion. "Months of vanity" and "wearisome nights" had been his portion, so that, just as a servant or hireling longed for the shadow of evening and the wages, he was longing for the end. Like the weaver's shuttle his days fled away and he was hopeless. His pathetic state is most vividly described and his friends should have been more filled with compassion.

Job subjects his third assailant to a closer examination, after a call to hear, not without severity. It would console him most for them to listen attentively. After he had spoken, Zophar might continue what he cannot but call mockery. Job felt far more truly than they that his was no common trial, and that they had wholly failed to help him in discerning its ground, character, and object. That it came from God he doubted no more than they; that it looked, yet could not be, penal he felt; yet was he wholly unable to divine the how and wherefore of his strange, and profound, and prolonged sufferings. They might complain if he complained as to man. But that God should so try one who held fast to his integrity to Himself, and who utterly denied their surmises of hidden wickedness, did try his spirit to the utmost, and account for his impatience. But he summons with marked solemnity to hear what he admits made himself shudder, yet an undeniable truth, in flat contradiction of their narrow thoughts, and wise saws, and uncharitable dogmatizing, that the wicked, instead of being cut down young, live on, grow old, become great in power, with their posterity established round about them, and their offspring before their eyes; that their households are free from fear or scourge; that their farms flourish; that they enjoy life to the full, spending their days prosperously, till, in a moment, not with lingering disease or racked with agony, they sink to Sheol; yet, spite of every good, not only not owning God in thankful praise, but desiring no knowledge of God, yea distance from Him, and accounting prayer wholly useless.

For seven days he has sat silent with his friends, and when he begins to speak, it is not words of submission or trust that we hear, but curses and imprecations upon the day of his birth, and longing for death! What has made this great change?

It might be thought that it was the long continuance of his sufferings which broke Job down; when first afflicted, he bore up under it, but as weary days and nights followed each other with unvarying wretchedness, he gave way. But this hardly seems consistent with the calm dignity of the man as shown in the first two chapters.

There is another thing that contributes also to help us to the date, and that is the age of Job. He was 140 at least. There are some people who seem to think that he lived 140 years after all his troubles; but there is no ground for that. It is merely the manner of speech in the last chapter, and I presume it really means that that was his entire age, the period of his life — not the time after these disasters purposely fell upon him — for reasons that I am going to explain in a moment. Now, if that age be the age of Job, it shows we need not imagine more than what God's word declares, and he would therefore be rather a younger man when he died than Jacob. Jacob lived less than Isaac or Abraham. So that this would appear to point to the time of the patriarchal age, and all the circumstances fall in with that.

"After this lived Job an hundred and forty years." I do not mean by that, and I do not think the words are intended to convey, that Job lived 140 years after this was over, but that the whole life of Job was 140 years; a very respectable age — very. It was not so long as that of Abraham or Isaac; but it was, I think, something about as much as Jacob's, thereabout in a general way, and greater than that of Moses. So it was before Moses, who in his psalm (Ps. 110) tells us, that "the days of our years are threescore years and ten," etc. Moses seems to have been the writer of the Book. He and his brother Aaron did not arrive at 140, but Job did. But if you suppose him to have lived 80 years before the 140, it would make him far older than any of the patriarchs. I do not mean some of the elders before the Flood, but after the Flood people did not live to such great ages — except immediately. And so the Book ends with Job dying full of years.