Job's Wife

People often use today's verse to shut someone up, and that complaint is fair, so it should be heard first. Someone's world falls apart, and they say something raw about God. Then a Christian in the room quotes Job: "shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" And the conversation is over.

Look at who Job is answering. His wife had lost the same ten children on the same day he did. She had watched everything they owned disappear. Then she watched her husband sit down among the ashes, covered in sores, scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery. What she says is, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die." It is the only line the book gives her, and it is the cry of a grieving woman who wants her husband's suffering to end.

Job's own record is not clean of the very thing he warns her against. In the next chapter he curses the day he was born: "Let the day perish wherein I was born." His complaints run on through most of the book, and later he says far harder things, such as "Know now that God hath overthrown me." The book prints every word.

So this verse cannot be a rule that grieving people must keep quiet. The clearest proof is the ending. When it is all over, God is angry, and not with Job. He speaks to Eliphaz and his two friends, who had been careful with their theology the whole way through: "ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath."

The man who argued with God is the one God says spoke rightly of Him. God gives that verdict in writing, calls Job "my servant" while He gives it, and never takes it back. So you may bring your rawest words to Him. He can bear your honest grief, and He does not stop calling His hurting people His own.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 52 is Known and Trusted (Psalm 9:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two