In our last devotion, I suggested that Job speaks with the heart of a believer. He is certainly struggling, and he says a great deal of confused words, yet these come from a desire to make sense of his circumstances before a God whom he knows is his only hope, yet seems to be against him at the same time.

Read Job 6:1-10

When we read Job’s first reply to his friends in Job 6, we get a strong sense of his anguish- his is an anguish which cannot be weighed, heavier than all the sand in the sea! (Job 6:2-3, cf. Proverbs 27:3). Job feels as though God is attacking him (Job 6:4), and his comforters are giving advice that he just cannot stomach (this is the sense of Job 6:5-7, cf. Psalm 69:20-21).

In Job's opening speech (chapter 3), we find a man cursing the day of his birth and wishing that his life would end. He counts himself as one who would “rejoice when they reach the grave”! (3:22). These are extreme words. Here in Job 6:8-9, somewhat paradoxically, Job requests death as his only “hope”- that "God would be willing to crush me, to let loose his hand and cut me off!"

Back in Job 4:6, Eliphaz glibly says that Job’s "piety" and "blameless ways" are his only hope. But for Job everything has turned contrariwise. His is “a sufferer’s cosmology” where bad things come from above and hope comes from the place of the dead below. Yet while it may sound like it, Job is not categorically suicidal: he knows that life is God’s to give and God’s to take. (Job 1:21)

So why is Job speaking this way? What his his motivation in hoping for death? Job 6:10 is both surprising and revealing: For Job, what would be his "consolation"? His "joy in unrelenting pain"? It's that He would die not having cursed God: "that I had not denied the words of the Holy One". In other words, Job would have stayed faithful to God right to the point of death itself; he would die knowing he had maintained his spiritual integrity.

To use an illustration from Clines, Job is:

"like a prisoner undergoing torture, he fears the moment he will break; he longs to die without betraying his faith in the goodness of God."

In this motivation we see something of the heart of a true believer. Job longs for God to be honoured by his life, and by his death (see Philippians 1:20). And yet Job will not be crushed to death. The sufferings of Job, terrible as they are, are but a foreshadowing of the sufferings of one who will be “crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5), indeed for whom "it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer" (Isaiah 53:10). Job leads us to Jesus, in whom we find full hope in life and death, in suffering and in rejoicing.