Daily Devotion for Lent 2025, Day 3

Today's Reading: Job, Chapter Three

Job’s suffering is such that he would wish that he was never born.

When Tennyson expressed, “Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” it seems that Job does not agree.  At least in this moment.

We begin to get an idea of the understanding of Sheol or the ancient Jewish understanding of the afterlife in chapter three.  It is there that the prisoners are at ease (and not made to toil) and slaves are free from their masters.  We get a sense of egalitarianism in Sheol.

Job expresses his anguish by saying it would be better to blot out his existence.  If we can look at this from a patriarchal understanding, if one’s belief is that all go to a similar dreary afterlife, then one establishes oneself through descendants.  By having a lots of offspring, one’s name is assured for generations.  From an evolutionary perspective (of which they had no knowledge), this actually makes a lot of sense – only its one’s DNA rather than one’s name that lives on.  Before the tragic news of the loss of his children, Job had thought he had secured a future for himself long after he ceased to walk this earth. 

In a time when infant mortality would have been high, he must have thought himself successful with seven sons and three daughters that lived past childhood. To lose his children was to lose everything. 

To give us an understanding of this mindset, Abram questions God’s promise while still childless when he states in Genesis 15:3, “You have given me no offspring, so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.”

What would it look like for you to lose your entire future in one fell swoop? 

Prayer for the day:

O Comforting One, Compassionate One, be with us all when we suffer loss and ache with the pain of grieving.  Give us a glimpse of the way it will be when love will never be taken away, when life itself will not be diminished, when all that we hold most precious will live and remain with us for ever.  Amen.

 

Prayer by Miriam Therese Winter, Roman Catholic Church, 20^th Century

Quoted Scripture: New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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