Wrestling in the Dark Text: Job 10:1-7
Introduction: The Courtroom of Affliction
We come now to a raw and difficult portion of holy Scripture. In our therapeutic age, an age that prizes emotional authenticity above all things, we are tempted to read a passage like this and applaud Job for "letting it all out." We want to pat him on the back for his honesty, for his vulnerability. But this is to read the Bible with modern, sentimental eyes, and not with the eyes of faith. The Scriptures do not present Job's speeches to us as a model of perfect piety. The Lord Himself will later tell Job to gird up his loins like a man because he had spoken words without knowledge. So we are not here to simply approve of everything Job says.
At the same time, we are not here to stand with his miserable comforters, clucking our tongues at his lack of decorum. There is a profound difference between sinful murmuring and righteous lament. The Israelites murmured in the wilderness, and God struck them down. David lamented in the Psalms, and God recorded it for our instruction. The difference lies in the direction of the complaint. Murmuring is horizontal. It is the sour grumbling of a malcontent who complains about God to others. It is the spirit of the back-bencher, the critic in the stands. But lament, true biblical lament, is vertical. It takes the confusion, the pain, the bitterness, and the anguish, and it brings it directly to God. It is a form of wrestling. It is what Jacob did at Peniel. It is what Christ did in Gethsemane. It is raw, it is honest, but it is always directed God-ward. It is a complaint filed in the right court.
Job is on the ash heap, scraping his boils with a piece of pottery. His children are dead, his wealth is gone, his wife has told him to curse God and die, and his friends have begun their master class in kicking a man when he is down. In this chapter, Job turns from arguing with his friends to argue with God directly. He is moving from the horizontal to the vertical. And in this raw, desperate prayer, we see a man grappling with the central problem of all suffering: the apparent distance between what we know of God's character and what we are experiencing in God's providence. Job is in the dock, but he wants to put God on the witness stand. And in his agonized questions, we find questions that echo in every suffering heart. We must listen carefully, not so that we can imitate Job's errors, but so that we can learn how to wrestle with God in the dark without letting Him go.
The Text
"My soul is loathed by my life; I will abandon all restraint in myself to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, 'Do not account me as wicked; Let me know why You contend with me. Is it good to You that You oppress, That You reject the labor of Your hands, And cause the counsel of the wicked to shine forth? Have You eyes of flesh? Or do You see as a mortal man sees? Are Your days as the days of a mortal man, Or Your years as man's years, That You should seek for my guilt And search after my sin? According to Your knowledge I am indeed not wicked, Yet there is no deliverer from Your hand."
(Job 10:1-7 LSB)
Unrestrained Bitterness (v. 1)
Job begins with a cry of utter despair, resolving to give his grief full voice.
"My soul is loathed by my life; I will abandon all restraint in myself to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul." (Job 10:1)
Job's life has become repulsive to him. The Hebrew is visceral; he is disgusted with his own existence. This is not a fleeting melancholy; it is a deep, soul-level nausea. And because of this, he declares his intention to "abandon all restraint." He is opening the floodgates. He is going to speak from the "bitterness of his soul."
Now, we must be careful here. The Bible warns sternly against the "root of bitterness" (Heb. 12:15), which is a poisonous thing that defiles many. That root is a settled, cherished rebellion against God's providence. Job is certainly on the ragged edge of that sin. But what he does here is crucial. He resolves to speak, and in the next verse, we see to whom he speaks: "I will say to God." He is not venting on an ancient near-eastern blog. He is not gossiping about God to his friends. He is taking his bitterness and his complaint and directing it straight to the throne of heaven. This is the first and most important step in sanctifying our anguish. If you are bitter, the most dangerous thing you can do is let it fester in the dark. The most righteous thing you can do is bring it into the light of God's presence and speak it to Him. God can handle your bitterness. What He will not tolerate is the two-faced hypocrisy of a smiling face in worship and a bitter heart in the car on the way home.
The Defendant's Plea (v. 2)
Having resolved to speak, Job now addresses God directly, making two requests.
"I will say to God, 'Do not account me as wicked; Let me know why You contend with me.'" (Job 10:2 LSB)
First, he pleads, "Do not account me as wicked." This is not a claim of sinless perfection. Job knows he is a man, and as he said earlier, how can a man be in the right before God? (Job 9:2). Rather, this is a legal plea. He is saying, "Do not condemn me as a hypocrite, as a secret, heinous sinner whose calamities are the direct result of some monstrous, hidden evil." He is rejecting the mechanical retribution-theology of his friends. He is maintaining his integrity, not his sinlessness. He is arguing that there is a gross disproportion between his suffering and his personal piety. And in this, Job is correct. God Himself declared Job to be "blameless and upright" (Job 1:8).
His second request is the cry of every saint who has ever suffered: "Let me know why You contend with me." This is a demand for an explanation. It is the heart of the book of Job. Job is not asking for relief as much as he is asking for a reason. He can endure the pain, perhaps, if he can only understand the purpose. This is a profoundly human cry. We are meaning-seeking creatures because we were made by a God who does everything with purpose. We cannot tolerate meaninglessness. And from Job's vantage point, on the ash heap, his suffering is utterly meaningless. It looks like a cruel, arbitrary act of a tyrant. And so he asks for the charges to be read. If he is in a fight with God, he wants to know what the fight is about.
The Indictment of God (v. 3-6)
From here, Job's lament sharpens into a series of audacious, almost blasphemous questions. He puts God in the dock.
"Is it good to You that You oppress, That You reject the labor of Your hands, And cause the counsel of the wicked to shine forth? Have You eyes of flesh? Or do You see as a mortal man sees? Are Your days as the days of a mortal man, Or Your years as man's years, That You should seek for my guilt And search after my sin?" (Genesis 10:3-6 LSB)
In verse 3, Job questions God's very character. "Is it good to You that You oppress?" He is asking if God derives some sort of perverse pleasure from crushing His creatures. Does God enjoy rejecting "the labor of His hands," the very man He formed? And worse, does He enjoy doing this while simultaneously allowing "the counsel of the wicked to shine forth"? This is the age-old problem. The wicked prosper, lounging on their couches, while the righteous man is scraping his sores in the dust. From ground-level, it appears that God's providence is rewarding the wrong team. Job is essentially accusing God of being an unjust sadist.
Then, in verses 4 and 5, he questions God's nature. "Have you eyes of flesh? Or do You see as a mortal man sees?" This is the root of Job's error. He is projecting human limitations and, worse, human sinfulness onto the Almighty. He is suggesting that God might be mistaken. Perhaps God sees things incorrectly, like a fallible human judge. Perhaps God is short-sighted, limited by time. "Are Your days as the days of a mortal man?" A mortal man might act with frantic haste because he knows his time is short. Is God acting this way? Is God in a hurry to find some fault in Job before it's too late?
This leads to the accusation in verse 6. Because God is, in Job's frantic reasoning, like a man, He must be hunting for a pretext. He is seeking for guilt and searching after sin. The picture is of a corrupt prosecutor, desperate to find some fault, any fault, to justify the brutal sentence he has already carried out. Job is accusing God of a cosmic frame-up. He is implying that God is insecure, needing to find some flaw in Job to vindicate His own cruel actions.
The Maddening Paradox (v. 7)
Job concludes this section with a statement of maddening contradiction, the central tension of his entire predicament.
"According to Your knowledge I am indeed not wicked, Yet there is no deliverer from Your hand." (Job 10:7 LSB)
Here is the nut of the problem. "According to Your knowledge I am indeed not wicked." Job appeals from God's actions to God's own omniscience. He is saying, "You, God, know everything. You know my heart. And You know that I am not the kind of wicked man who deserves this. Your own perfect knowledge acquits me." This is an astounding statement of faith, buried in a mountain of confused complaint. He appeals to God against God.
And yet, the second half of the verse states the brutal reality. "Yet there is no deliverer from Your hand." God knows he is innocent of any great crime, yet it is this same God whose hand is crushing him, and from whose hand there is no escape. The judge is also the executioner. The one who knows the truth is the one inflicting the pain. The paradox is complete, and it is tormenting. If God were merely ignorant, Job could appeal to the facts. If God were merely weak, Job could appeal to a higher power. But God is omniscient and omnipotent. He knows the truth and has all power, and He is still doing this. This is the whirlwind that Job is in, long before God speaks from the whirlwind.
The Cross and the Accuser
So where do we take this? Job is right about his foundational integrity, but he is desperately wrong in his accusations against God. He is right that his suffering is not a direct punishment for some secret sin. But he is wrong to conclude that God is therefore acting like a petty, insecure, mortal tyrant. Job sees his own righteousness and God's sovereign power, and he cannot reconcile them. He is missing the third piece, the piece that makes sense of it all.
That third piece is the wisdom of the cross. Job wanted to know why God was contending with him. The ultimate answer to that question would be nailed to a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. God contends with His righteous servants in this way to prepare the world for the ultimate contention, when God the Father would contend with God the Son.
Look at Job's questions in light of Calvary. "Is it good to You that You oppress?" On Good Friday, it pleased the Lord to crush His only Son (Isaiah 53:10). He rejected the ultimate labor of His hands. Why? Not for some sadistic pleasure, but to save us. Job accused God of having "eyes of flesh," of seeing like a man. But at the cross, God in human flesh, the Lord Jesus, saw with eyes of flesh. He saw the mocking crowd, He saw His weeping mother, and He saw the sin of the world that He was bearing.
Job asked if God's days were like the days of a mortal man. At the incarnation, the eternal Word took on mortal days. He had a numbered span of years, and in those years, He was hunted and sought after. They did "seek for his guilt" and "search after his sin," and they found none. Unlike Job, who was a sinner saved by grace, Christ was utterly spotless. And yet, this truly righteous one was not delivered from God's hand. The Father handed Him over.
Job's maddening paradox is resolved only at the cross. At the cross, we see the most righteous man who ever lived, Jesus Christ. And God's own perfect knowledge declared Him to be so: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." And yet, there was no deliverer from God's hand. The Father forsook Him. Why? So that we, who are truly wicked, who deserve nothing but contention, can say to God, "Do not account me as wicked."
Job was wrestling in the dark. He was fighting a battle with God without the rules of engagement. We have those rules. We have the answer to his "why." The answer is Christ. God allows suffering in the lives of His people to kill our pride, to teach us to trust Him in the dark, and to display to a watching world of men and angels the all-sufficiency of His grace. But most of all, He does it to make us look like our elder brother, Jesus, who was made perfect through suffering. Your suffering is not meaningless. It is your participation in the sufferings of Christ. It is the chisel in the Father's hand, shaping you into the image of the Son. Therefore, bring your complaints, bring your bitterness, bring your wrestling. But bring it to the foot of the cross, where God's justice and mercy kiss, and where every one of Job's agonized questions finds its final, glorious answer.