I will say to God, ‘Don’t simply condemn me—
    tell me the charge you are bringing against me. (Job 10:2)

A brief context refresher: Job has confessed to his friends that he believes he would be better of dead. They are trying to talk him down from the ledge. Their arguments include assumption of guilt, belief in input = output, expectation that God believes as they do, and absolute faith that Job’s integrity will come to fruition in health, wealth, and wisdom. “Just go say sorry and ask God for your stuff back and he’ll give it to you because you’re a good guy” is basically what their arguments amount to.

Another brief context refresher: Job is not convinced by their nonsense. He knows their arguments unhinge on one key point – there is no guilt. <boom! crash clatter clatter> There is nothing to apologize for, and no one who can stand in his defense (yet). He ardently wishes for the Savior we take for granted every day.

Doesn’t matter what I do, Job says. He probably wouldn’t listen to me anyway.

And even if I summoned him and he responded,
    I’m not sure he would listen to me. (Job 9:16)

This next chapter is Job suggesting what he would say to God if he could get God to listen. First, he wants to know what God’s got against him. This is considered, even in our modern court system, a fair and reasonable right. If the government takes any kind of action against you – arrests you, seizes your property, issues a fine, etc. – you have a right to know why. Job is feeling like someone who’s been beaten, arrested, imprisoned, and stripped of his assets without any communication of the charges brought against him. If I’ve done something wrong, he says, TELL ME WHAT!

But like a subject of a strong, oppressive government, he knows that if God has already decided the case against him, his own actions can have no effect on the outcome.

Although you know I am not guilty,
    no one can rescue me from your hands. (Job 10:7)

So from this viewpoint – God as a government that does what he pleases regardless of his subjects – he wants to know what God stands to gain from this destruction.

What do you gain by oppressing me?
    Why do you reject me, the work of your own hands,
    while smiling on the schemes of the wicked? (Job 10:3)

From Job’s perspective, this destruction is absolutely pointless. He can see nothing God could possibly gain from this – the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it already, so it’s not like he was after Job’s stuff, and anyway, Job would have given him anything he’d asked for. If it had been one of Job’s shortcomings that brought this destruction, then why were the truly wicked – those not even trying to be good – not likewise destroyed? Why was Job, of all people, so singled out? And it’s not like Job belonged to some enemy king, and therefore could be destroyed on the principle of a greater war!

You formed me with your hands; you made me,
    yet now you destroy me. (Job 10:8)

You worked hard to make me, God! Job says. I only exist because of and for you! Do you really want to throw away all that work so soon?? Did you really make me just so you could find all my faults and wreck me again?

As Job puzzles out what God’s possible motive could be, we get to another revelation of character. We uncover a piece of how Job sees God – in chapter 7, he calls God the “Watcher of all humanity” (vs 20), and then here in chapter 10 he accuses God of watching for the pleasure of criticizing, of finding fault.

Yet your real motive—
    your true intent—
was to watch me, and if I sinned,
    you would not forgive my guilt. (Job 10:13-14)

“You’ve just been waiting for me to screw up!” he accuses. Sometimes, when Job says stuff like this – even though he’s been dead for a few thousand years now – I still duck. I mean, he’s not the only person in history to think of God as this cosmic police force, constantly looking for someone breaking the rules so he can drag them off to be punished. A good majority of people who believe in God view him in this way, but I always thought it’s an entirely unfair portrayal of the loving father character of God (are the storm clouds gone? <phew>). God does punish, but not for the pleasure of punishment any more than a parent punishes their child for the fun of it. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” human parents are famous for saying. God punishes not because he wants to, but because we need him to according to the rest of the Bible.

Think about it: Just as a parent disciplines a child, the Lord your God disciplines you for your own good. (Deuteronomy 8:5)

For the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes each one he accepts as his child. (Hebrews 12:6)

But here Job goes accuses God of punishing him for God’s pleasure, not for Job’s growth. I wonder so much how God can say, at the very end of it all, to Eliphaz:

I am angry with you and your two friends, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has. (Job 42:7)

Umm. Hold up, Lord. Are we just – overlooking this moment? This isn’t accurate, right. You’re not just up there waiting for us to screw up so you can smite us, right. This isn’t paintball, right, you’re not just up there waiting for us to expose some vulnerable part of ourselves so you can redecorate us, right. Did I misunderstand the character of the Living God, or are we just ignoring this part? I need to know. I don’t want to believe I am nothing more than an animal hunted for sport.

Job, I think, is feeling the same. If this is true, if God has no interest in us other than in destroying us, then why –

Why, then, did you deliver me from my mother’s womb?
    Why didn’t you let me die at birth? (Job 10:18)

Why bother going to all this trouble to make me, Job imagines asking God, just to wreck me now? Like those Asian monks who spend hundreds of hours making beautiful, ornate pictures out of sand, only to brush them away as soon as they are through, Job feels like God’s wasted a lot of time and effort if his ultimate goal was just destruction. “Could’ve just destroyed me at the beginning!” he says. “Would’ve been more efficient!”

Job is acknowledging to God, in a way that his friends aren’t and won’t, that God’s choices don’t make sense to him. “God’s choices always totally make sense to us,” his friends have been arguing. “Well, they absolutely don’t to me!” Job responds in this chapter.

In short, Job 10 is an eloquent oration of Job asking the age-old question, “God, why?” There are few of us who have never asked that question. There is something about that question, that doubt, that… insubordinate attitude that feels dangerous to us, that feels somehow like if we have to ask, we must be the problem. We must not be good Christians, good believers, good followers, good servants of the Most High God. We must not know God very well if we don’t understand his actions.

The irony here is that the people who believe they do understand God are the ones who are most ignorant of him. The ones who don’t ask why, but assume they know – are the ones who earn God’s ire and rebuke. Job, who fully admits he doesn’t get why God has allowed these bad things to happen, is the one God praises for seeing God rightly. “You’re starting to get it!” God says to Job. “I am incomprehensible to you, and that doesn’t make me bad.” Because in all this, Job still has not cowed to the pressure to curse God. He has cursed his own life, cursed the day of his birth, and wished fervently for his own death, but he has not wished God ill. He has only wished for his own relief, not for God’s harm. In all this questioning – Job still has not sinned.

So what does chapter 10 mean? It means it is not unholy to be unhappy. It is not unholy to ask why. It is not unholy to desire comfort or relief from suffering. It is not unholy to be confounded by God’s choices. But wishing God harm, cursing him to his face and wanting him to suffer for them – that is the line Job simply will not cross.

You can feel what you feel. It’s still what you do, not what you feel, that determines who you are. This chapter reveals that Job feels the absolute worst feelings humans can feel – abused, victimized, powerless, hopeless, in pain with no way of getting out of it – absolute and utter despair.

But he still refuses to be spiteful.