The Lord has called us in some measure into “the fellowship of His sufferings” (Php 3:10).
Not long ago, Job gave us a snapshot of his life before “there was a day” (Job 1:13). What an accomplished and attractive fellow! He now provides us an update of himself after his catastrophic collision with unyielding providence at very high speed. It’s not pretty. The wreckage is strewn everywhere. “And now my soul is poured out because of my plight; the days of affliction take hold of me. My bones are pierced in me at night, and my gnawing pains take no rest” (30:16-17). Pain management specialists speak of five classes of pain, and Job seemed to have them all. They use words like shooting, stabbing, burning, sharp, achy, or throbbing. And that doesn’t address the agonies that no surgeon’s scalpel can reach and no medicine can fix—the lingering pain of bereavement, the stab of an inflamed conscience, or the dull throb of doubts and fears. Who of us has been unable to bear the choking weight of clothing on our skin? “By great force my garment…binds me about as the collar of my coat” (v 18). We can hardly stand to look at him: “My skin grows black and falls from me; my bones burn with fever” (v 30). Yet his greatest pain is his sense of abandonment by God. “I cry out to You, but You do not answer me” (v 20). To all our fellow sufferers, you can go where Job could not. Who else cried out to heaven with no response (Ps 22:1)? Who else had His bones in agony (v 17) and His soul poured out (Isa 53:12)? There’s nothing meritorious or redemptive in our suffering, of course. But there is fellowship with Him and testimony for Him in it all. “We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed…always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” (2 Cor 4:8-10).