In Job, chapter three, verse one, he was bereaved, humiliated, and in pain. His utmost hurt was that God seemed to have left him. In his speech from chapter two, verses two through twenty-six, Job told God exactly how he felt. He began by cursing the day of his birth and his miserable existence. However, in all this, Job did not curse God. His cry was an expression of pain and despair, not a cry of defiance against God.
It is always best for believers to express their doubts and honest emotions to the Lord in prayer. To go to God with our misery and heartache to find Him and evoke His pity is never wrong. Jesus Christ Himself asked God, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This response was from Matthew twenty-seven, verse forty-six. Other scriptures are Jeremiah twenty, verses fourteen through eighteen, and Lamentations three, verses one through eighteen.
For seven days, Job’s friends sat by him in silence, without offering consolidation: at the same time, Satan assaulted his mind to shake his confidence and to fill him with solid thoughts of God. The permission seems to have extended to this, as well as to torturing the body. Job was a type of Christ whose inward sufferings, both in the garden and on the cross, were the most dreadful and arose in a great degree from the assaults of Satan in that hour of darkness. These inward trials show the reason for the change in Job’s conduct, from the entire submission to the will of God to the impatience that appears here and in other parts of the book. The believer, who knows that a few drops of this bitter cup are more dreadful than the sharpest outward afflictions, while he’s favorable with a sweet sense of the love and presence of God, will not be surprised to find that Job proved a man of like passions with others; but will rejoice that Satan was disappointed, and could not prove him a hypocrite; for though he cursed the day of his birth, he did not curse his God. Job doubtless was afterward ashamed of these wishes, and we may suppose what must be his judgment of them now he is in everlasting happiness.