Job 6:1-3

1 But Job ['Iyowb] answered [`anah] and said ['amar],

2 Oh that [luw'] my grief [ka`ac] were thoroughly [shaqal] weighed [shaqal], and my calamity [havvah] [hayah] laid [nasa'] in the balances [mo'zen] together [yachad]!

3 For now it would be heavier [kabad] than the sand [chowl] of the sea [yam]: therefore my words [dabar] are swallowed up [luwa`]. KJV-Interlinear

1 Then Job answered, 2 'Oh that my vexation were actually weighed, And laid in the balances together with my iniquity! 3 'For then it would be heavier than the sand of the seas, Therefore my words have been rash. NASB

Eliphaz spoke for some time. Job did not interrupt him, even though what Eliphaz had to say did not apply to Job.

Once Eliphaz stopped speaking. There was a pause. Probably Eliphaz would be expecting some type of acknowledgement from Job, that he, Eliphaz was right, and that Job was wrong with respect to his life.

But we do not have any guilty pleas, nor self-defensiveness coming out of Job. Instead, what we are going to receive is an explanation of the intensity of Jobs misery.

When you sit down bedside someone who is hurting, you can't feel their pain as they feel it. You might recall a similar pain if you were sick as they are, but that is as close as you can get to a person's pain.

You might want to go back and read the details of Jobs misery, in chapter two.

Job does not look good, what with all of his maggot-infested sores. Sores that cover his entire body. And he does not smell very good, to boot. But here Job will go into the description of his pain, which far surpasses anything that any of his friends, who are present, can imagine.

Jobs remarks will be expressed with deep feelings of emotion.

Jobs vexation or exasperation with his misery was expressed with phrases like, not wanting to have been born, in order to escape his misery, and so forth.

Here he tells us that if you placed his expressions of misery on a scale against his actual misery, the misery would far outweigh his words. In fact his words would be swallowed up into virtual non-existence being so overpowered by his misery.

Likewise, Job tells us that if you were to place his sins on a scale, and weight them against his misery together with his previous expressions, his sins would weigh far less than his misery.

In so doing, Job is beginning to describe the pressures and sufferings of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who suffered on the Cross, for the sins of the world. Sins were bad enough, but they are nothing when compared to the suffering that Christ had to endure for the Cross.

If you haven't seen that movie, 'The Passion of the Christ,' then you should see it. If you have seen it, then you can just begin to understand the tip of the iceberg of the sufferings that Christ had to endure.

In this world we can only see the human side of His suffering, we cannot see His spiritual side. And that is the side, which is far greater and far outweighs anything imaginable.

Job uses the sands of the seas to describe the weight of his sufferings.

In the balances of a set of scales, when an item is weighed, certain weights or rocks are placed in an opposite side of the scale to obtain a perspective. But sand can weigh far more than mere rocks. And this is not just any sand, but wet sand from the beaches and seas of the world.

The use of sand from the seas, is an idiom indicating something that cannot be measured, its substance is so vast that it is impossible to weigh it.

Jobs' suffering is vast. His friends were sitting right next to him, and yet they could not comprehend the magnitude of his suffering. Likewise none of us can conceive of the magnitude of Christs suffering, when He went to the Cross.

Did Job deserve his suffering? No. Did Christ deserve His suffering? No. Can we understand either of their sufferings? No. But through Bible study, we can eventually come to a beginning of an appreciation of what they went through.

Anyone who thinks that they are suffering as Job did, is delusional.

Any suffering that we might experience is due to our own failures in life, or due to God application of His tests of our faith. Our sufferings will be limited, and never beyond that which we can bear.

Job was pushed to the limit, and Christ was pushed beyond human limits. No one can stand in Christ's sandals, for none of us is God. Jesus Christ is God. But He became a normal human being just like you and I are human, and it was in that capacity, with only the support of the Holy Spirit, that He endured the Cross.

So we, together with the power of the Holy Spirit aiding us, can be taken to endurances far beyond the human norm. This also means that we can be taken far beyond the limits of human toleration. That means that when we grow up to spiritual maturity, we can endure the nonsense of this world without getting upset.

At least we should be able to maintain our poise and attitude when faced with the pressures of life. Whether those pressures are kids that don't pick up after themselves, or whether those pressures are of some higher type, should make no difference.

When you can maintain yourself when under pressure, then you are indeed growing up. Not to say that you won't blow your stack from time to time, but the mature believer has the ability to recover his demeanor quickly. And it is that internal stabilizing self-control which is important to the pattern of ones life.

What others might see in you is irrelevant. Others will never remember your lifetime of self-control, but they will remember your one or occasional loss of control. But then their opinion is unimportant anyway. Only Gods opinion of you is important.

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