Despair for the Day of One's Birth (Job 3)

“You’re going to wish you’d never been born.” We’ve all heard this phrase before, if only in a movie or a story. It is the fate worse than death. To have such despair that you would desire, not to be dead, but to have never lived in the first place. Here, we see this state of mind coming from someone who God described as uniquely, “blameless and upright!” 

That is not something we are conditioned to accept in western Christianity. We think of greatly religious and pious people as not having any problems. The health and wealth heresy has given us a false impression of the way the world (this fallen world) is. The truth we find in the Bible is quite different. The wisdom literature is partly about godly men experiencing despair. David, a man after God’s own heart, was constantly having a crisis, fearing for his life, or despairing of that life. Solomon, a man endowed with godly wisdom, talked ceaselessly about the vanity of life and its lack of fulfillment. And here Job wishes he had never been born. 

We will all have bad days. Some people have terrible lives. Such is the nature of life in a world corrupted and torn with sin. If we believe that repenting and turning to God will shield us from bad times, we are mistaken. If we merely “trust” in Jesus for the fringe benefits, we likely haven’t really trusted at all. 

Hopefully this year has not been one of tremendous pain and sense of loss for you. But for many people it has been. Every year is such a year for someone. To judge people for grief—or to live in some form of denial regarding our own pain, out of a false expectation of the spiritual life—is an unbiblical position. We are about to see a series of such reactions from Job’s “friends.” Let’s see how that goes for them…