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Friday, March 31, 2006

Job 3:11-19

“Why did I not die at birth,
come out from the womb and expire?
Why did the knees receive me?
Or why the breasts, that I should nurse?
For then I would have lain down and been quiet;
I would have slept; then I would have been at rest,
with kings and counselors of the earth
who rebuilt ruins for themselves,
or with princes who had gold,
who filled their houses with silver.
Or why was I not as a hidden stillborn child,
as infants who never see the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling,
and there the weary are at rest.
There the prisoners are at ease together;
they hear not the voice of the taskmaster.
The small and the great are there,
and the slave is free from his master. (ESV)

by Dale E. Rood

These are not the rational views of an objective outsider. These are the anguished cries of a man who is in the midst of great personal struggle. It is not just that he has lost his substance, lost his family, and is now afflicted with painful sores, but that in this he feels that God has left him. That is the agony of suffering: the sense of isolation from God. The good news of the book of Job is that God has not left him, even though it feels like he has. This book helps us understand what is happening in the unseen spiritual realm when we get to those times of great anguish.



Copyright Information

Daily Bible Meditations are taken from The Helping Hand,a Sabbath School student quarterly for youth and adults. Copyright © 2008, Seventh Day Baptist Board of Christian Education, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked "ESV" are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Text provided by the Crossway Bibles Web Service .