WHEN DEATH FEELS LIKE A GOOD OPTION by Dr. Shah, Clearview Church, Henderson, NC

Introduction: There is an old folk tale titled the “Appointment in Samarra” (retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933]). It is told from the viewpoint of Death – “There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, ‘Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’ The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me (Death) standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, ‘Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?’ That was not a threatening gesture, I (Death) said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.” Death is coming for all of us no matter how hard we try to run from it. But, there are times when people don’t run from death but run to it. When things get so overwhelming and the pain is so high, it feels that death would be a good option. In today’s message, in our series on Job, we’re going to see how Job longed for death to escape from the pain and suffering that he was feeling.

Job 3 (page #779) 1 After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 And Job spoke, and said: 3 “May the day perish on which I was born, And the night in which it was said, ‘A male child is conceived.’ 4 May that day be darkness; May God above not seek it, Nor the light shine upon it. 5 May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; May a cloud settle on it; May the blackness of the day terrify it.”

Context: What is going on? How can a man who two chapters over in Job 1:21 said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, And naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD.” Then, in the last chapter in Job 2:10b “…Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” And now, he is cursing the day of his birth and wishing that he had not been born! 

Furthermore, there’s also a shift in the genre of the book. Job 1-2 (page #776-778) = prose; Job 42 (page #831-831) = prose; and Job 3-41 (page #779-831) = poetry.

Some scholars have used this as an indication that the book of Job was compiled by different editors. They try to divide the layout of the book of Job in different ways: framework-core-framework; exposition-complication-resolution; or prologue-dialogue-epilogue (see Clines’ introduction). Thankfully, more and more research is coming out that this is not the case. 

What is going on? Let’s back up and understand what is happening. After Job’s friends arrived to see him (we saw last weekend that they were real historical people from real historical places), they saw the real situation, and listen to their response – Job 2 (page #778) 12 “And when they raised their eyes from afar, and did not recognize him, they lifted their voices and wept; and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven. 13 So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.” They were not only truly shocked and identified with his misery, but they also sat there in total silence for a week! In dealing with trauma, silence speaks volumes. I was really blessed to have two pastors in my life who demonstrated this very well – my dad and Nicole’s dad. Few weeks ago, Nicole explained this in our message on trauma that feeling numb after a shocking incident is God’s way of protecting us by giving us time to process the pain. Michelle Keener in her book Comfort in the Ashes writes: “Remember, one of the hallmarks of trauma is that it cannot be immediately categorized by our minds. We don’t have a label for something so far outside of our worldview and schemas. We literally don’t have any words to describe trauma, because we don’t really know what it is yet. So, silence should not be a surprise. Silence is the description because silence is all we have. Silence follows trauma because of the overwhelming nature of the traumatic experience and an accompanying inability to explain the experience.”

Application: To the person who got the cancer diagnosis, to the person whose spouse committed an affair, to parents who have been unfairly judged, to the person who was in a terrible accident, to the person(s) who just lost a loved one, silence is not wrong. It is the way God has designed us to process the trauma that we have faced. For those of us who are helping such people – just because they were talking earlier but not anymore does not mean that they are bringing things back up again. They are just beginning to realize the magnitude of the trauma, and they have no words to describe it…

Big Question: Does Jesus understand? Isaiah 53:7 “He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth.” Of course, the primary implication is that he did not fight back. I also believe that we need to take seriously the word “afflicted.” During his crucifixion, Jesus remained silent as he faced affliction after affliction.

Then, Job finally spoke in chapter 3, but it came in a different genre! This is exactly what happens when people face trauma. Again, quoting Keener, “Trauma represents an interruption in the flow of the survivor’s story. It cannot be experienced in a linear, logical way, and it cannot be forgotten. Thus, the trauma remains on the to-do list, waiting to be addressed, always open. The past event continually intrudes on the present, acting, essentially, as a rupture in the chronology of the survivor’s life. The missed encounter of the traumatic event becomes a lingering wound, dragging the past (where the trauma occurred) into the present, interrupting the chronology of the survivor’s life story and creating a crisis of temporality, Past and present blur. This rupture in a survivor’s life story gives the traumatic event an outside-of-time, out-of-reach quality that is noticeably out of place.” What is happening is cognitive dissonance where one’s experience is crashing against one’s belief. The hardest thing to deal with in trauma, after silence, is how to communicate what has happened. We have no words to describe the “new development” and the “new normal.” Why? We’ve never been here before.

This is where prose fails and only poetry can help. Poetry is the best way to speak when we don’t know how to explain what is happening. June Frances Dickie in writing about the value of poetry for trauma victims points out 4 things: 1. Poetry is nonlinear and does not require narrative coherence; 2) poetry is image based; 3) the form and rhythm of poetry and intentional interruptions in each create tension and space for transformation; and 4) the metonymic quality of poetry allows one word to represent the entirety of an experience. For example: tears for sadness; broken heart for hurt; bad dream for shock.

What is poetry? Samuel Johnson, the great literary critic, said, “To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer.” Very true. Some people have tried to give a definition:

• William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1802 – “Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
• Christopher Fry – “Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement.”
• Robert Frost – “A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.”
• T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, II (The Sacred Wood, 1922) – “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
• Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) – “(Poetry) is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.”
• Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821 – “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”
• Novalis (Georg Hardenberg) – “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
• A. E. Housman wrote in The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933): A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognized the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.’ (Job 4:15) Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water in the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’ last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’

In the brief time, let’s focus on Job’s poetry in chapter 3:

1. Job wishes that he had not been born – Job 3      1 After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 And Job spoke, and said: 3 “May the day perish on which I was born, And the night in which it was said, ‘A male child is conceived.’ 4 May that day be darkness; May God above not seek it, Nor the light shine upon it. 5 May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; May a cloud settle on it; May the blackness of the day terrify it. 6 As for that night, may darkness seize it; May it not rejoice among the days of the year, May it not come into the number of the months. 7 Oh, may that night be barren! May no joyful shout come into it! 8 May those curse it who curse the day, Those who are ready to arouse Leviathan. 9 May the stars of its morning be dark; May it look for light, but have none, And not see the dawning of the day; 10 Because it did not shut up the doors of my mother’s womb, Nor hide sorrow from my eyes.

2. Job wishes that he had died at birth – Job 3      11 “Why did I not die at birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb? 12 Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should nurse? 13 For now I would have lain still and been quiet, I would have been asleep; Then I would have been at rest 14 With kings and counselors of the earth, Who built ruins for themselves, 15 Or with princes who had gold, Who filled their houses with silver; 16 Or why was I not hidden like a stillborn child, Like infants who never saw light? 17 There the wicked cease from troubling, And there the weary are at rest. 18 There the prisoners rest together; They do not hear the voice of the oppressor. 19 The small and great are there, And the servant is free from his master.

3. Job again wishes that he would die – Job 3      20 “Why is light given to him who is in misery, And life to the bitter of soul, 21 Who long for death, but it does not come, And search for it more than hidden treasures; 22 Who rejoice exceedingly, And are glad when they can find the grave? 23 Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, And whom God has hedged in? 24 For my sighing comes before I eat, And my groanings pour out like water. 25 For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, And what I dreaded has happened to me. 26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes.”

Job is longing for rest from his pain and suffering, from his trauma. Listen to Jesus in Matthew 11     28 Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

Have you come to Jesus? Are you daily casting your burden upon him? Are you saved?