It’s Better to Be a Tree

This reads like total cynicism and complete despair. Like a treatise on the hopelessness of being a human being. One could almost imagine this as a pre-suicide note in a television police drama. And it is Job who is talking - Job, our biblical hero.

What does it mean to be a human being? A birth, a troubled and short life, and a death. A temporary pain to oneself and to others. “Life is solitary, poor, nasty and brutish and short,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. And this chapter seems to echo those sentiments.

We humans are so hopeless that maybe God should just look away and leave us alone. It would be better to be a tree. There’s hope for trees. Trees can recuperate, grow again; even when they’re seemingly dead, put them by the water and they’ll grow again (vv 7-9). But people die and simply disappear.

Or do they? Maybe they can be hidden from God’s anger in the land of Sheol. Maybe God will remember them . . . “If mortals die, will they live again?” (vv 13-14).

Is there the glimmer of hope here, the possibility of a maybe? Does Job have some idea about life after death, a temporary hiding place called Sheol, and then remembrance (v 13), release (v 14) and the end of guilt (v 17)?

Then it’s as if Job cannot allow himself the luxury of such thoughts, such flights of fancy, and he gives in to his despair and pessimism. “They feel but the pain of their own bodies and mourn only for themselves” (v 22).

Nasty, brutish and short. Now don’t we readers long for the New Testament, for Jesus, and the certain hope of resurrection? And for the grace and power to live in that hope this very day?

Respond in Prayer

Father God, we have every sympathy with those who are in despair, those who feel that there is nothing in life beyond their own pain and their own loss. Help us to help them with the sure and certain hope of the resurrection into everlasting life that comes to us through the life of Jesus Christ.

Michael Pountney