When God Becomes the Enemy Text: Job 30:16-23
Introduction: The Logic of the Ash Heap
We come now to the heart of Job's lament. And we must be very careful here. It is one thing to sit in a comfortable chair, with the book of Job open on our laps, knowing how the story ends. We have the benefit of the prologue in heaven and the epilogue on earth. We know God is sovereign and good. But Job did not have that benefit. Job was sitting on an ash heap, scraping his boils with a piece of pottery, having buried all his children, and his theology was not an academic exercise. It was a bleeding wound.
The book of Job is in the Bible to teach us many things, but one of the chief things it teaches us is that there are only two ultimate possibilities when we are faced with profound suffering. Either the suffering is meaningless, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or, the suffering is packed with a meaning assigned to it by the sovereign God of the universe. There is no third option. The one truly incoherent position is to believe that God exists, but that He is doing a very bad job of being God. That He is fumbling, or incompetent, or cruel in a pointless way.
Job, in his anguish, is wrestling on the very edge of this third option. He knows God is there. He knows God is powerful. But from his vantage point, the only conclusion he can draw is that God has become his adversary. This is not the sneering unbelief of an atheist. This is the agonized cry of a believer who cannot make the ledger of his life balance. He knows God is righteous, and he believes himself to be righteous, and yet God is treating him like an enemy. The math does not add up. And in these verses, he lays out his case with a raw, brutal honesty that should make us tremble. This is what it sounds like when a saint feels hunted by God.
The Text
"And now my soul is poured out within me; Days of affliction have seized me. At night it pierces my bones within me, And my gnawing pains take no rest. By a great force my garment is distorted; It seizes me about as the collar of my tunic. He has cast me into the mire, And I have become like dust and ashes. I cry out to You for help, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You carefully consider how to be against me. You have become cruel to me; With the might of Your hand You hunted me down. You lift me up to the wind and cause me to ride; And You melt me away in a storm. For I know that You will bring me to death And to the house of meeting for all living."
(Job 30:16-23 LSB)
The Internal Dissolution (vv. 16-18)
Job begins by describing his internal state, a complete unraveling of his being.
"And now my soul is poured out within me; Days of affliction have seized me. At night it pierces my bones within me, And my gnawing pains take no rest." (Job 30:16-17)
When a man says his soul is "poured out," he means he is coming apart. He is losing his form, his substance. He is like water spilled on the ground. This is not just sadness; it is dissolution. The affliction is not a visitor; it has "seized" him, like a predator taking its prey. The pain is relentless. It is not just a daytime trouble. At night, when a man should find rest, Job finds his bones pierced. The gnawing pains, like rats in the walls of his body, never stop. This is a total, all-encompassing agony, physical and spiritual.
He continues this theme of being seized and distorted in the next verse.
"By a great force my garment is distorted; It seizes me about as the collar of my tunic." (Job 30:18)
This is a strange and powerful image. Some commentators believe his garments are distorted by the constant discharge from his boils, making them stiff and tight. Others see it as a metaphor for his whole life being twisted out of shape. But the key is the feeling of being constricted, choked. The very clothes on his back, which should be a comfort, have become a straitjacket. He is being throttled by his own life. Everything that once defined him is now suffocating him. And notice, he attributes this to a "great force." Job knows this is not random. Some great power is doing this to him.
The Divine Adversary (vv. 19-21)
In the next verses, Job stops speaking of an impersonal "great force" and names his assailant. The pronouns shift, and the accusation becomes direct. It is God.
"He has cast me into the mire, And I have become like dust and ashes. I cry out to You for help, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You carefully consider how to be against me." (Job 30:19-20)
"He has cast me." This is a deliberate act of violence. God has thrown him down into the mud. Job's identity is now reduced to "dust and ashes," the symbol of mourning and utter worthlessness. He is sitting on an ash heap, and he has become what he sits on. This is a complete degradation. And in this state, he does what a righteous man is supposed to do. He cries out to God for help.
And here is the core of his torment. God is silent. "You do not answer me." But it is worse than silence. It is a hostile, observant silence. "I stand up, and You carefully consider how to be against me." The Hebrew word for "carefully consider" can mean to gaze at, to scrutinize. Job feels that when he tries to rise, to make his case, God is not just ignoring him; He is staring him down, studying him like a tactician studies a battlefield, looking for the next point of attack. This is a terrifying thought. The one who should be his advocate is now his prosecutor, his enemy, watching his every move with malevolent intent.
The accusation becomes even more blunt.
"You have become cruel to me; With the might of Your hand You hunted me down." (Job 30:21)
There it is. Job says to God, "You are cruel." He is not pulling any punches. He feels that the omnipotent hand of God, the hand that fashioned the stars, is now being used to hunt him, a single, broken man. It is an entirely mismatched contest. It is the Almighty against a man of dust and ashes. The word "hunted" is the same word used for persecution. Job sees himself as the target of a divine persecution.
The Inevitable End (vv. 22-23)
Job sees no escape. This divine hostility can only have one conclusion: his utter destruction.
"You lift me up to the wind and cause me to ride; And You melt me away in a storm. For I know that You will bring me to death And to the house of meeting for all living." (Job 30:22-23)
God is toying with him. He lifts him up on the wind, not to save him, but to make the fall more spectacular. He is being tossed about, helpless, only to be dissolved in the storm. The language is one of complete disintegration. He is being un-created. And Job accepts the finality of it. "For I know that You will bring me to death." He has no hope of deliverance in this life. God's intention, as far as he can see, is to kill him. The grave is the "house of meeting for all living." It is the one appointment that everyone keeps.
This is Job's honest assessment from the ash heap. God is his enemy. God is hunting him. God is going to kill him. What are we to do with this? We must first acknowledge that the Bible is not afraid of this kind of language. The Psalms are filled with similar cries. This is not faithless blasphemy; it is a faith that is being torn apart and is screaming in the process. Job still believes in God enough to argue with Him, to accuse Him. The opposite of faith is not this kind of agonized doubt; the opposite of faith is indifference. Job is anything but indifferent.
The Cross on the Ash Heap
So where is the truth? Is God cruel? Is He a divine hunter of men? Job was wrong in his conclusion, but he was not wrong in his premise. His premise was that God was sovereignly and directly responsible for his suffering. And in this, Job was more orthodox than many modern Christians who want to protect God from the difficult passages of Scripture by blaming everything on the devil or on chance.
Job was right that God was doing this. He was wrong about the why. He could not see the purpose. He interpreted God's inscrutable providence as personal malice. And from his perspective, what other conclusion could he draw? He was a righteous man, and he was suffering unjustly. He was crying out to God, and God was silent.
But there was another man who would come, another righteous man who would suffer unjustly. There was another man who would be cast into the mire, who would be lifted up, not on the wind, but on a cross. There was another man who would cry out to God and receive only silence. "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"
Jesus Christ endured the ultimate reality of what Job only felt in part. On the cross, God the Father did, in a very real sense, become the enemy of His Son. He did hunt Him down. With the might of His hand, He did crush Him under the storm of His wrath against our sin. Jesus was not just melted away; He was made sin for us. He was brought to death, to the house of meeting for all who would live through Him.
And He did it all so that the accusations Job hurled at God could never ultimately be true for us. Is God cruel to you? Look at the cross. He gave His only Son for you. Does He hunt you down? Yes, but as the Hound of Heaven, to bring you into His fold, not to destroy you. Does He cast you into the mire? Yes, the mire of repentance, so that He can wash you clean in the blood of the Lamb. Is He silent when you cry? It may seem so, but His silence is not the silence of hostility. It is the silence of a Father who knows that the trial is producing an eternal weight of glory. Because of the cross, we know that God's sovereignty is always a good sovereignty. It is a hard sovereignty, but it is always good.
Job's suffering was a dress rehearsal for Calvary. He was a signpost pointing to the greater Sufferer to come. And because that greater Sufferer has come, we can face our own ash heaps with a confidence Job could not yet possess. We know that our suffering is never meaningless, because we are in Him whose suffering meant everything. All things, even the days of affliction, even the gnawing pains, even the hostile silence, work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose. And that purpose was sealed not on an ash heap in Uz, but on a bloody cross in Jerusalem.