Today's passage is Job 7.
Job is in full complaint about life, how hard it is, how futile, how wretched he is, how much he wants to die, how meaningless his life is. He questions God. Why, he wants to know, does God pay such attention to mankind, testing him at every moment. Soon I will be dead, he says, and you won't find me anymore.
I first read Job when I was studying existentialism in university.
Sartre and Camus had nothing on Job.
They were just blathering French intellectuals, but Job was the real thing.
He knew the pain of a diseased body, the emotional trauma of his children dead, the loss of self-worth with all success gone, and the spiritual vacuum of God turned into vindictive drill sergeant or maybe having left the scene altogether.
Job knew the pointless, purposeless, meaningless round of waking up to feel pain and the going to sleep to dream of terrors. Unlike the French existentialists, Job knew he couldn't manufacture his own meaning.
When Job complains of "months of futility and nights of misery" (v.3) I think he was lucky. I had five years of it. Like Job, I too said, "my eyes will never see happiness again" (v.7).
"Therefore," he says, "I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul." I did that too, shouting at God, throwing rocks at the sky, trying to wound him. Oh, how I complained!
At the recent conference for school heads I shared my Job-experience with a rich, successful, non-believing head of school. I told him how God took everything away and drove me down to bedrock.
"What do you mean by bedrock?" he asked.
"Bedrock means just me and God," I said. "Nothing and nobody else."
He looked a little puzzled.
"Bedrock is God," I said. "When you hit bottom, when you hit God, you begin to know who you are."
I shared that with my Sunday School boys today. They didn't look as puzzled as my friend did.
What I learned through my experience is that if I had loved God less, I would not have screamed at him or thrown rocks at him. If my faith had been as lukewarm as I thought it was, I think I would have just shrugged my shoulders and walked away.
In my dire straits, I hated God because I had loved him so much and trusted him so much. It's taken me another five years beyond my time of misery and meaninglessness to understand that. If I hadn't cared so much about my relationship with God, I would not have felt so deeply about my grievous sense of loss.
In the midst of considerable suffering when I was a young man, God called me to faith. Twenty-five years later I couldn't believe my spiritual journey had taken me to a place that made my young suffering seem like a cakewalk.
Bedrock is God. I hated being there but I'm glad God took me down there. It's a mark of favor. I don't enjoy being "examined every morning and tested every moment" (v. 18). But it's a blessing I don't think I can live without anymore.
Lord, let me stand always on the bedrock you took me down to. Let me always remember that you are that rock of my salvation, the rock of my life. Keep me true to you, Lord. Bring me back to repentance every time I go astray.
