Insight for Living

Bill Meyer: There's a chapter in the Bible most people skip. It's not comforting. It's not quotable. Nobody has ever called it their favorite. But if you've ever sat in the dark and wondered where God went, if you've ever felt so alone you wished you'd never been born, you won't skip it. You'll lean in.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll opens his Bible to a passage that portrays the mournful wail of a man at the absolute end of his rope. And it may be the most honest thing you've ever heard.

Chuck Swindoll: For a change, I would like you simply to listen, rather than to follow along in your Bible. You're free to do that, but the words will be different because I want to read for you from Job chapter 3 from Eugene Peterson's paraphrase known as The Message. Words changed a little, but the tone of it seems to emphasize the right kind of thing.

I'm calling today's message "The Mournful Wail of a Miserable Man." It's not my testimony, and it may not be yours, but more than most of us would like to believe, it has been on our lips in other ways at other times, if not now. Listen to some selections from this third chapter.

Job broke the silence. He spoke up and cursed his fate. Obliterate the day I was born. Blank out the night I was conceived. Let it be a black hole in space. May God above forget it ever happened. Erase it from the books. May the day of my birth be buried in deep darkness, shrouded by the fog, swallowed by the night.

And the night of my conception, rip the date off the calendar. Delete it from the almanac. Oh, turn that night into pure nothingness. No sounds of pleasure from that night ever. May those who are good at cursing curse that day. Unleash the sea beast, Leviathan. May its morning stars turn to black cinders, waiting for a daylight that never comes.

And why? Because it released me from my mother's womb into a life with so much trouble. Why didn't I die at birth? Why wasn't I stillborn and buried with all the babies who never saw light? Where the wicked no longer trouble anyone and bone-weary people get a long-deserved rest?

Prisoners sleep undisturbed, never again to wake to the bark of the guards. The small and the great are equals in that place, and slaves are free from their masters. Why does God bother giving light to the miserable? What's the point of life when it doesn't make sense?

When God blocks all the roads to meaning? Instead of bread, I get groans for my supper, then leave the table and vomit my anguish. The worst of my fears has come true. What I've dreaded most has now happened. My repose is shattered, my peace destroyed. No rest for me ever. Death has invaded life.

Bill Meyer: You're listening to Insight for Living. To dig deeper into Job's story, be sure to purchase a copy of our Searching the Scriptures Bible study workbook by going to insight.org/offer. Chuck titled today's message "The Mournful Wail of a Miserable Man."

Chuck Swindoll: Great people and grand accomplishments often have tragic beginnings. In fact, occasionally when you do a study in depth of those accomplishments or those great lives, you find that they really were birthed in wombs of woe. A couple of occasions this past week, I was reminded of that.

Cynthia and I attended a small Dallas Seminary banquet on a Monday night past, and to my delight and surprise, our chaplain, Bill Bryan, who has been at the school many years, told us his story, which was not only surprising, it was shocking to us. Anyone who knows Bill Bryan knows that he is the fun-loving, joyful, very competent trumpet-playing, singing pastor of the campus.

He has a personality that is borderline contagious. When you're around him, you think his life must have been laughter from beginning till now, as he always turns your attention to the bright side of things. The cup is always half full, never half empty. But that's not how things started for him.

This great life began in a season of woe. His father suffered deeply with depression, and back then, back when he remembers he was three and four years old, his father went through a dark tunnel in his battle with a mental illness. Back in those days, it rarely was brought out of the closet, and there was very little known to do for people who suffered in this way.

Bill said he remembered going week after week after week to the Medical Arts Building in Springfield, Missouri, where they would go up the elevator to the sixth floor, and he would sit and wait with his mother as his father was going through a time of struggle. As a little boy, he didn't understand what was happening. He just knew his dad wasn't at peace. He was troubled.

His life was dark. On one occasion, the father was brought out of the room and asked to stay with Bill as a little boy, age four, and the mother was brought in. They made plans as a result of his getting no better, in fact, getting only worse, that they would admit him to what was then called an insane asylum.

Unfortunately, you could hear through the walls, and the father heard of his future. In fact, the comment was made they didn't know that or if he would ever get out. Bill said, "I remember as my mother walked out with the doctors, there was more than one, that my dad picked me up and held me close and said, 'I love you, son.'

He put me down on the floor, ran and jumped from the window and broke, shattered the glass and fell to his death. That was the last memory Bill had of his father. He sort of went from home to home as his mother could not quite recover from that. A friend took him home that night, and another family or friend would take him for this period and that period.

Who would have ever expected a man like Chaplain Bill Bryan to come from such a woeful, heartbreaking setting? I'm now reading a fine book by Benjamin Zander and his wife, Roz. Benjamin Zander, in the writing of the book, was the Boston Philharmonic conductor. In the book, I came across a fascinating story of Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

Gustav Mahler lived in the last part of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century. He was a Bohemian composer, conductor, and director for 10 years of the Imperial Opera in Vienna. A wonderful, privileged position. The symphony enraptures music lovers. While talking with our minister of music about this particular piece, he says it just seems to contain everything.

Those who are serious about classical music are students of Mahler's Ninth. As Zander writes, there's a richness and a depth of orchestration and harmonies and melodies and countermelodies, and you would think the genius who wrote such orchestration would have lived a privileged life. It must have been a magnificent thing to have had such a training.

But the fact is, says Zander, Gustav Mahler's childhood was marked by tragedy. He lost seven brothers and sisters as he was a child growing up. In fact, Zander says the coffin became a regular piece of furniture in their house. His father was a cruel and brutal alcoholic, and his mother was a vulnerable invalid at the mercy of her husband's blows.

Mahler himself, growing out of that womb of woe, grew up and married and had a lovely daughter in whom he placed so much of his affection, and he lost her at age four and never really got over that loss. On top of all that, because he was Jewish, he was forced to quit his work as director of the Vienna Opera House.

Shortly thereafter, he was told that he had a bad heart and didn't have long to live. In all of that, he composed his magnificent Ninth Symphony. Benjamin Zander adds, Mahler wasn't sad all the time. He had a great love of nature. He was a powerful swimmer, had a magnificent laugh and a huge love of life.

All of this is in his music as well as sadness and anger about his illness and the brutality of his father and the vulnerability of his invalid mother. In fact, Mahler thought he should put everything in life into his symphonies. He wrote a Tenth Symphony that was never finished.

Yet his music, while his life sadly dropped into the cloud of a premature death, his music lives on to thrill the hearts of classical music lovers the world over. Is it any wonder that the man Job has ministered to the hurting for centuries?

Is it any surprise that those who go through times of deep, dark depression, is it any surprise that they turn, after a few of the Psalms, quickly to the work of Job? No surprise. None but the lonely heart can feel such anguish. When you read Job, you have an affinity for his anguish if you have known such.

Now, I need to warn you ahead of time as we turn to the third chapter. This will not be a pleasant sermon. This is not easy preaching. I don't know of a person on earth that has ever said Job 3 is their favorite chapter in the Bible. I don't know of anyone who has ever memorized a verse out of Job 3.

It's one of those chapters you get to and you find yourself saying, "Well, let's see what else there is in the book of Job, surely there's something." Unless, unless you have known the black hole of depression yourself. And you read not with shock, but you read nodding with understanding, because you've been there.

Here the scabs are pulled from the sores, and the pus of reality runs down Job's life. If his story were made into a movie and you had rented it for tonight, when you came to this part of the story, you wouldn't want your children to watch. It's unedited and it's raw, and it doesn't sound nice. In fact, some of it is downright offensive.

You don't want to believe a man as great as Job in chapter 1 and 2 is the same man who wrote chapter 3. You just don't want to believe it. Why? Partly because we have this "anybody who comes to Christ lives happily ever after" concept. That God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, and you'll almost sprout wings before your conversion is a week old.

The wonderful plan of God is wonderful from His perspective, not yours and mine. Wonderful for us is comfortable, healthy, preferably rather well off, happily married with two well-behaved children—I'm now dreaming—and in the joy of nothing but blessing and favor and success and prosperity.

In fact, you say as you go to bed at night, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, naked I shall return. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." And you are the one who says to your mate, "Shall we not accept good from God and also not accept adversity as well?" And in all this you don't sin with your lips.

The same man who wrote that in chapters 1 and 2 wrote this in chapter 3, and don't you doubt it. The same man. And we don't want him to write what he writes in chapter 3 because it doesn't seem like he's really walking with God. I mean, he has the audacity to say at the end, "I am not at ease. I am not quiet. I am not at rest. I am in turmoil."

And we are given entrance into a slice of Job's life that is as real as more testimonies who fill this room than any of us would ever believe. Even the godly can be depressed. One of my favorite chapters in one of my favorite books is "The Minister's Fainting Fits" by Charles Haddon Spurgeon in his book, *Lectures to My Students*.

In it, he admits to depression. He admits to not always being vigorous and wise and ready, not always being courageous and happy. In fact, he even declares in one place, "Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual for me. Such was my experience when I first became a pastor in London," writes Spurgeon.

"My success appalled me, and the thought of the career which it seemed to open up, so far from elating me, cast me into the lowest depths, out of which I uttered my misery and found no room for a gloria in excelsis. Who was I that I should continue to lead so great a multitude? I would betake me to my village obscurity or immigrate to America and find a solitary nest in the backwoods.

Where I might be sufficient for the things which would be demanded of me. This depression comes over me whenever the Lord is preparing a larger blessing for my ministry." And so it does me. Maybe not as deep as some of you, but I have known a deep sense of depression at times.

At times when others would think I might be caught up in pride of all things, I have known times when I wondered should I even stay at it. But I've never known a depth like Job experiences here. If Job were in the hospital, he would have written a small sign and hung it on the doorknob when he got to this segment of his life and said, "No visitors today, please. I don't want to see anybody else."

When I get to chapters like this, I'm always glad that God is no longer writing His Word. I'm always glad that He stopped with people like Job or David or Paul. I'm so grateful there isn't a First and Second Book of Chuck, or Bob, or Frank, or Mark, or Bill, or Shirley, or Doris, or your name, or your mate's name.

But Job is hung out here for all to see. We all have our unguarded moments. We all have times when we reach the end of our tether, when the clouds of doom seem greater than the sun of tomorrow, and our view is blocked, and out gushes how we really feel. Thankfully, no one is there to hear.

But with Job, there were three friends who sat and stared and heard every word and began to put together their thoughts so they could set him straight as soon as they got a chance to talk. How tragic. Allow me a couple of somewhat technical comments as we get underway, may I?

At this point in the Hebrew text, poetry begins. In the prologue, chapters 1 and 2 are written in prose, just as they appear in your Bible in a narrative form. As you would pick up a novel to read it, that's prose. As you would read a newspaper article, that's prose. It reads just like a book.

But when you get to chapter 3, in the Hebrew, you begin to read poetry, and it appears in meter. It appears as poetry. And that runs all the way through chapter 42, verse 6. So the greater part of this book is poetry. That's why the book falls in the category of the poetry section of the Bible. It is mainly poetry.

Now, you remember from your English literature classes that poetry was full of, is full of allegory and wonderful word pictures and duplication of similar thoughts, repetition, as the author, as the writer of the poetry turns thoughts over in his mind and revisits them from several different angles.

No good student of poetry tries to make every line walk on all fours. Some things you leave said, and you simply say it's poetry. I've memorized lines of poetry and I love them, and sometime when I quote them to myself or to someone patient enough to listen to me when I quote it to them, I often think, though I've quoted it many times, I don't really know the full depth of what he was getting at there.

But he's a poet. So please give yourself the freedom to say when you come to certain things in the poetry, "I just don't know. I'm just not sure exactly what he had in mind." And you let yourself off the hook by saying it's poetry. Now the second little technical comment: Job's outburst, get this, is not prompted mainly because of physical suffering.

It's prompted because he's lost touch with God. Major difference. He doesn't write like he does or he doesn't say what he does in chapter 3 because he has these sores, though that's certainly a part of it, but that's not the cause. It isn't because he can't sleep at night.

These are not nocturnal meanderings that come because he's restless. He is miserable because he's lost his best friend. How close he had been with God when he got married to Mrs. Job. How happy their relationship was, meaning his and God's, as the first of the few children were conceived and as the babies were born and as the seven boys and three girls filled their home with laughter.

How near God seemed to him, and as the business grew and the caravans multiplied and the profit began to come in, and as he was blessed with the joy of prosperity, and as he and God walked together in the cool of the evening, how close God was until that day everything broke loose. Everything broke loose.

And he lost camp, he lost livestock, he lost all of the animals, he lost home, he lost all 10 children, and he lost his health. And worst of all, the heavens were brass, and God no longer walked with him in the cool of the evening. And God no longer came alongside to say, "My son, let me explain what this is all about. The devil came and he dared Me to do and I want you to know I'm trusting that you'll..."

No, he knew none of that. You and I know all of that. He's never read the first two chapters of Job. He's just living out the result of the chapters. And he's reached the end of his rope. This is the day you slam the door shut. This is the day you say to those even close to you, "Leave me alone." This is the day in his life when he cannot find his friend, his heavenly Father.

Bill Meyer: Job didn't lose his faith in God. He lost his sense of God. And for anyone who's ever walked through a season where the heavens felt like brass, where the one you've known most intimately seemed suddenly, inexplicably silent, you understand why that can be more devastating than any physical loss.

Chuck Swindoll will continue this message next time on Insight for Living. He titled his message "The Mournful Wail of a Miserable Man." If today's message has stirred your heart, we invite you to visit our website where resources are waiting for you to walk you deeper into this transformative series. For instance, we're highlighting a popular book that Chuck's written that pairs beautifully with Job's story. It's called *Finding God When the World's on Fire*.

Most of us carry a fear we don't talk about, the fear that the worst might actually happen or already has. The fear that God is distant in the very moments we need Him most. If that's where you find yourself today, Chuck's book *Finding God When the World's on Fire* was written to meet you there. Chuck draws on the deep wells of Scripture to remind us that God's Word does not waver, not in tragedy, not in uncertainty, not ever.

When you support Insight for Living with a donation today, we'll send you this book as our thank you because we believe it will bring genuine comfort and unshakable hope to your life. You can address your contribution and request for the book to Insight for Living, Post Office Box 5000, Frisco, Texas, 75034. Or call us at 800-772-8888. That's 800-772-8888.

Did you know that Chuck Swindoll recently sat down with his friend, Pastor Greg Laurie, for an unfiltered conversation about their lives and ministry? To see and hear the entire interview between Chuck and Greg, visit us online at insight.org/conversations. That's insight.org/conversations.

I'm Bill Meyer. Join us when Chuck Swindoll continues to tell the harrowing story of Job and what it teaches us about life Monday on Insight for Living.

Guest (Male): The preceding message, "The Mournful Wail of a Miserable Man," was copyrighted in 2002, 2004, and 2025, and the sound recording was copyrighted in 2025 by Charles R. Swindoll, Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.