“My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Ps 73:26).
For twenty-four verses, Job pours out his lament. It’s too late to unbirth himself or wish he were stillborn. So now he turns his thoughts to the welcomed relief that death would bring to his tortured body and soul. Many of God’s great servants, in times of deep anguish, have expressed a death-wish. Moses did it when the care of several million complainers in the desert became too much for him (Num 11:13-15). Elijah did it when the revival he had hoped and prayed for was superficial and short-lived (1 Ki 19:4). Jeremiah, like Job, wished he had never been born, after preaching for 40 years with no noticeable results (Jer 20:14). And Jonah wished to die when he saw that his prophecy of judgment would not come true against Nineveh because of God’s mercy (Jon 4:8). Jonah would have preferred drowning to having to take God’s message to Israel’s foes! Here it’s vital to note that the believer has the most to gain and the least to lose by dying. That’s why we must always have a deep-seated reverential awe of the Lord. “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life, to turn one away from the snares of death” (Prov 14:27). There should be a massive red barrier between saying, “Lord, take my life,” and personally ending one’s own. A great gulf is fixed between submitting to God’s sovereign will and purposefully denying it. Job uses words like misery, bitterness, groanings, fear, dread, unease, and trouble. But think of this. If God had answered his desire to die, the book of Job—a book that has offered comfort to multitudes— would never have been written. You’ve probably noticed that water is nowhere nearly as hard as rock, but the stream that keeps flowing will still make a channel—because it perseveres.