All Shook Up

This is emotional exhaustion, but it is also physical.  Perhaps you have known the dehydration headaches that come from crying until you think you can’t cry any more.  In my younger days, I was well-acquainted with alcohol-induced hangovers.  The alcohol had absorbed the water in my body and moved it along to other locales.  I was profoundly thirsty.  

In my early experiences of profound grief I found myself thinking, “Wow, a hangover without the booze—what fun is that?”  How long did Job weep during those seven days of silence.  His groanings poured out of him literally “like water”—the tears of loss and pain.  He was so tired.  He had no resources left for the battle.

Job isn’t finished with the tiredness at the end of chapter three.  It comes back from time to time, and the descriptions are re-developed. As he resumes his complaints in chapter six, he requests that God would simply put him out of his misery: “that it would please God to crush me, that [God] would let loose [God’s] hand and cut me off” (Job 6:9).  Job has no strength left to deal with this on his own.  

In the verses that follow in chapter six, he makes it clear that his friends are not supplementing his strength.  Rather they are sapping it further with their foolish defenses of God.  Job has nothing more with which to defend himself.  “In truth,” he declares, “I have no help in me, and any resource is driven from me” (Job 6:13).

This is a profound description of Job’s helplessness and hopelessness in the face of Radical Loss.  The word in Job 6:13 for “help” ‘azr’.  This the word that appears in Psalm 46—“God is our refuge and strength, a very present^* help in trouble.” This is the word that appears also in Psalm 121.

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—

from where will my help come?

My help comes from the Lord,

who made heaven and earth.

The Psalmist proclaims that the Lord is the source of help, aid, comfort and support in times of trouble and distress.  For the Psalmist, “help” doesn’t come from inside, from “in me,” as Job describes it.  That help comes from the Creator of all things.  The Lord will not permit the chaos to overwhelm you, even when life gets slippery and it’s hard to stand up.  The Lord is the shield from danger and the traveling companion in troubles.  The Psalmist’s final words have comforted many a believer in the face of Radical Loss.

The Lord will keep you from all evil;

he will keep your life.

The Lord will keep

your going out and your coming in

from this time on and for evermore.

The word for “keep” is the Hebrew word for standing guard, watching over, and protecting the vulnerable.  It is clear that the Psalmist and Job have a different experience of God’s protecting power.  The last half of Job 6:13 can be translated something like “and all sense of reality has been overturned within me.”  Job has lost any sense of what holds things together, and he can’t muster up any sense of himself by himself. 

He is experiencing turmoil.  This is the Hebrew word “rgz.”  The verb form of that noun means to shake or quake something.  For Job, nothing is nailed down.  Everything is up for grabs.  There is no place where he can hang on.  There is no solid ground under his feet.  His world has been disrupted.  His identity has been detached from anything certain.  He almost ends it all in a flash of despair.

It may be fortunate that Job’s friends begin to speak at that point.  If nothing else, they engage him in a debate that begins to marshal his anger in a focused direction.  They provoke him into conversations that take him back out of the emotional black hole into which he plunges.