Job’s losses and his first response: Job 1–3

The book of Job is known for its very human depiction of a man’s grief in response to loss. It’s a demonstration of how we can have emotions and express them without fear of offending God.

Although Job believed the series of calamities—in which he lost everything except his wife and his life—came from God, he heroically refused to curse God for any of them.

He started by wishing he’d never been conceived:

^Job3:3 Let the day of my birth be erased,and the night I was conceived

And then that he’d never been born:

^Job3:3 Why wasn’t I born dead? Why didn’t I die as I came from the womb?

And then, that he’d lived long enough to see such misery:

^Job3:20 Oh, why give light to those in misery, and life to those who are bitter?

And finally, he described how he felt now:

^Job3:24,26 I cannot eat for sighing; my groans pour out like water. … I have no peace, no quietness. I have no rest; only trouble comes.

Including that this loss was something that he had feared for some time:

^Job3:25 What I always feared has happened to me. What I dreaded has come true.

Through that raw, but poetically expressed, emotion, Job didn’t sin as he refused to curse God for the calamities:

^{Job 2:10} ‘Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?’ So in all this, Job said nothing wrong.