The Righteousness of the Howl Text: Job 3:1-10
Introduction: The Sanitized Saint
We live in an age that does not know what to do with honest grief. Our brand of Christianity is often too shallow, too clean, too polite for the brutal realities of a fallen world. When confronted with profound suffering, our first instinct is to rush in with a Hallmark card theology, full of pious platitudes and tidy little answers. We want to pat the sufferer on the head and say, "There, there, all things work together for good," as though that were a spiritual anesthetic instead of a profound theological truth that must be wrestled with.
And then we come to Job chapter 3, and all our neat categories are blown to pieces. After seven days of silent, sympathetic grief from his friends, Job finally opens his mouth. And what comes out is not, "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord." He has already said that, and he meant it. But that was the doctrinal statement made in the shock of the moment. Now, after a week of sitting in the ashes, scraping his boils with a piece of pottery, the raw, visceral reality of his pain erupts. What comes out is a howl. It is a poetic, structured, theologically dense howl, but it is a howl nonetheless.
Many modern Christians read this and get nervous. They think, "This is where Job started to lose it. This is where his faith began to crack." But that is to fundamentally misunderstand what is happening. This is not the cracking of faith; this is the wrestling of faith. Job's lament is not a sign of his unbelief, but rather a testament to the depth of his belief. An atheist cannot lament like this. An atheist can curse his luck, he can rage at the impersonal cosmos, he can shake his fist at the blind, pitiless indifference of the universe. But that is like yelling at the wallpaper. It is meaningless. Job knows exactly who is in charge. He knows there is a sovereign God in heaven who has permitted this, and so his anguish is directed. His pain has an address. He is not wrestling with fate; he is wrestling with God.
This chapter is a necessary corrective for us. It teaches us that biblical faith is not stoicism. It is not a stiff upper lip. It is a full-throated, honest engagement with the living God, even when, and especially when, life is unbearable. God is not a fragile deity who is threatened by our questions or shattered by our pain. He would much rather have His children screaming at Him in honest anguish than have them mouthing empty pieties while their hearts are dead. This is not a fall from grace. This is the crucible.
The Text
Afterward Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job answered and said, "Let the day perish on which I was to be born, And the night which said, 'A man is conceived.' May that day be darkness; Let not God seek it from above, Nor light shine on it. Let darkness and shadow of death redeem it; Let a cloud dwell upon it; Let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let thick darkness take it; Let it not rejoice among the days of the year; Let it not come into the number of the months. Behold, let that night be barren; Let no joyful shout enter it. Let those curse it who curse the day, Who are ready to rouse Leviathan. Let the stars of its twilight be darkened; Let it hope for light but have none, And let it not see the breaking dawn, Because it did not shut the opening of my mother's body, Or hide trouble from my eyes."
(Job 3:1-10 LSB)
Cursing the Container (v. 1-3)
The lament begins with a carefully aimed curse.
"Afterward Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. And Job answered and said, 'Let the day perish on which I was to be born, And the night which said, 'A man is conceived.''" (Job 3:1-3)
Notice the precision here. The narrator is careful to state that Job "cursed the day of his birth." He does not curse God. This is the crucial distinction that his wife failed to make and that Satan predicted he would fail to make. Job maintains his integrity. He directs his venom not at the Creator, but at a unit of creation: a 24-hour period. He attacks the container of his existence, not the Giver of it.
He wishes for that day to "perish." He wants to retroactively annihilate it. This is the language of un-creation. He is taking the divine fiat of Genesis 1, "Let there be," and is desperately trying to reverse it into "Let there not have been." He extends this curse to the night of his conception, the very moment his existence began. He is in such agony that non-existence seems infinitely preferable to this existence. This is not a philosophical argument for suicide; it is a profound, poetic expression of a pain so total that it makes the blessing of life feel like an unbearable curse.
A Prayer for Un-Creation (v. 4-5)
Job then elaborates on how he wants this day to be erased from the cosmic record.
"May that day be darkness; Let not God seek it from above, Nor light shine on it. Let darkness and shadow of death redeem it; Let a cloud dwell upon it; Let the blackness of the day terrify it." (Job 3:4-5 LSB)
This is a direct inversion of the first day of creation. God said, "Let there be light," and saw that it was good. Job says, "Let that day be darkness." He wants to pull the plug on the original creative act. He then asks that God Himself would forget it, "Let not God seek it from above." He is asking for his own birthday to be blotted out of the divine memory, to be disowned by its Creator.
The language is stark and powerful. "Let darkness and shadow of death redeem it." The word for redeem, ga'al, is the word for the kinsman-redeemer, the one who buys back a family member from slavery. It is a covenantal term, full of hope. But Job twists it. He wants the deepest gloom, the very shadow of death, to be the kinsman-redeemer for his birthday, to buy it back and claim it for the realm of chaos and nothingness. He wants it to be a day of absolute terror, a black hole in the calendar.
The Sterile Night (v. 6-9)
Job continues his poetic un-creation, focusing on the night of his conception.
"As for that night, let thick darkness take it; Let it not rejoice among the days of the year...Behold, let that night be barren; Let no joyful shout enter it. Let those curse it who curse the day, Who are ready to rouse Leviathan. Let the stars of its twilight be darkened; Let it hope for light but have none, And let it not see the breaking dawn," (Job 3:6-9 LSB)
He wants this night to be joyless, sterile, and cut off from the rhythm of the year. The "joyful shout" he wishes to silence is likely the cry of a father upon hearing the news, "It's a boy!" It is the shout of blessing, of posterity, of hope. Job wants to reverse it all. He wants the night to be barren, fruitless.
Then he summons the ultimate forces of chaos. "Let those curse it who curse the day, Who are ready to rouse Leviathan." In the ancient world, there were thought to be sorcerers who could "curse the day," perhaps by incantations that would cause an eclipse. Job is saying, "Hire them. Hire the professionals of cosmic cursing." And who are they to rouse? Leviathan. In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea dragon, the symbol of the primordial, anti-creation chaos that only Yahweh can crush (Psalm 74:14). Job is reaching for the most potent symbol of destructive power he can imagine and is aiming it at his own beginning. He is saying, "Let the chaos monster devour the night I was made." He wants the stars to go out, for that night to hope for a dawn that never comes.
The Heart of the Matter (v. 10)
Finally, Job gives the reason for this torrent of anguish.
"Because it did not shut the opening of my mother’s body, Or hide trouble from my eyes." (Job 3:10 LSB)
Here is the simple, heartbreaking logic behind the poetic rage. "Why was I born for this?" The womb should have remained sealed, he says. Why? To "hide trouble from my eyes." His suffering is not just a physical sensation; it is a theological crisis. He is seeing a world of trouble that he cannot reconcile with the God he thought he knew. The goodness of his own existence has been fundamentally called into question by the sheer magnitude of his suffering. It would have been better, he thinks, to have never been born than to be born into a world where this kind of trouble is possible under the government of a good God.
The God Who Hears the Howl
It is essential that we understand this chapter correctly. This is not Job's sin. This is Job's lament. The prologue has already certified him as righteous, and the epilogue will have God Himself confirming it, saying Job has "spoken of me what is right" (Job 42:7). This howl is part of what is right.
This is what true faith does when it is pushed to the absolute limit. It does not pretend. It does not put on a plastic smile. It cries out to the only one who can do anything about it. The Psalms are filled with this kind of language. Psalm 88 is a prayer that ends in complete, unresolved darkness. This is a legitimate part of the believer's vocabulary.
But we read this on this side of the cross, and so we see something Job could not. We see the ultimate answer to his cry. Job wished for non-existence to escape his suffering. Another man, the God-man, willingly embraced existence in this fallen world in order to embrace the ultimate suffering for us. Job cursed the day of his birth. Jesus Christ, on the cross, became a curse for us (Galatians 3:13).
Job cried out for darkness to cover his beginning. On Calvary, a supernatural darkness covered the whole land as the Son of God was un-created, as it were, for our sake. Job felt abandoned by God. Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He experienced the ultimate dereliction, the ultimate trouble, so that we would never have to.
Because of Christ, our laments are not cries into a void. They are cries to a Father, through a Son who has been there. Jesus is the true and better Job who suffered unjustly and yet did not sin. He entered the belly of Leviathan for three days and broke its power from the inside out. Because He did that, our honest, raw, and even angry prayers are not a sign of failing faith. They are the sound of a faith that knows who to run to, even when it feels like running into the whirlwind.