“I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, but trouble comes.” Job 3:26
I don’t know what’s worse, physical suffering or emotional suffering. The physical brings an immediate interruption to the synapses signaling bad in the body, it runs deep, it cuts the to the quick. Physical suffering drives you to places that you never want to return to, and the travel there leaves a lasting scar. Yet emotional suffering is on a different plateau, and mostly physical suffering elevates you there. Both are realms of pain that can wrack the body, try the mind, and test the merit. But what about spiritual suffering? By far the most intense suffering for the believer in Christ is the very moment when the physical and emotional suffering combine to deliver them to the feet of the question, “God where are you?”
Job chapter 3 is a poem of mourning. Painful lament in poetic form and prose. A chapter that openly displays a man that has undergone intense and relentless physical suffering. As a result, it has catapulted him into a spiral of emotional agony. And those two ingredients easily combine into a mixture, that when consumed, can take the individual into dark places of spiritual reasoning. And it is in this dark spiritual abyss that we meet Job in chapter 3. His three trusted friends have heard of his plight and come to console him. As they approach this apparition of a man, sitting in the city dumps tending his sore flesh with a pottery shard, they fail to recognize his frail form. They wail, weep, and howl in agony for their friend. Without a word to console, they simply sit with Job in silence for 7 days. This specific time frame doesn’t escape Job, seven days being the typical time of mourning for the dead. Job’s own friends openly mourned for him as if dead. At the end of the seven days, Job breaks the silence. And as he does, you hear a man brutally honest before God. You hear a man honest before himself and before the world in which he suffers. You see suffering fully deliver him to the dominion of honesty.
I’ve heard it said that any true servant of Christ must truly and fully suffer before understanding what is required in their service to the Lord. God clearly alerted us to this fact in 1 Peter 5:10, “And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.” Job’s suffering called him to question his life, his birth, and his conception. Job’s suffering was a rough trail ride into a forlorn territory in which he did not want to travel, he did not want to reside, and he desperately desired to depart from. Yet, it is in this rough territory where God teaches the lessons that cannot be gleaned elsewhere. In the throes of suffering are lessons that will not leave the bearer. In the travails of suffering come the forced shedding of your humanity. In the agony of suffering comes the rebuilding of a life that now finds itself one step closer to the Messiah they faithfully follow. Today, if you are in the boughs of agony, know that the pain faithfully brings the lesson Christ has for you. There is no easy way out or around, only forging directly through. For only within the pain of the forger’s fire, does the purest gold emerge.
“Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” Romans 5:3-5
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