Bible Commentaries
Job 6

Verses 1-30

Job 6:1 f

The sixth and seventh chapters are molten from end to end, and run in one burning stream.... Everything which can be said by a sick man against life is in these chapters. The whole of a vast subsequent literature is summed up here, and he who has once read it may fairly ask never to be troubled with anything more upon that side.

Mark Rutherford, The Deliverance, p. 13 f.

'When He does smite,' wrote General Gordon to his sister from the Red Sea in 1879, 'His arrows are almost too sharp for one to bear: I will not say too sharp, for He tempers His wind to the shorn lamb, but it is a wearisome life, and I am tired.... The spite in my own heart and in those round me fills me with hatred of any human being. A more detestable creature than man cannot be conceived, and yet you and I are cased, or sheathed in man. But do not fear for me, for, even if He multiplies my woes a million times, He is just and upright, and will give me the necessary strength. What enrages the flesh is, that I am in a cul de sac, a road which has no débouche, a hole out of which I see no exit. Everything I do will be misconstrued. This shows I have not faith. I do care for what man says, though, in words, I say I do not. I have not overcome the world. Read Job 6:4 ; that is the bitter feeling I have. Job was a scoffer vide chap. 12:2, 3 and so am I in heart and tongue.'

Reference. VI. 6. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1730.

Job 6:8-9

In describing Dr. Donne's grief after his wife's death, Izaak Walton writes: 'How grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy. If it did, it was a joy to be alone, when, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself, without witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days of his affliction: "Oh that I might have the desire of my heart! Oh that God would grant me the one thing that I long for!" For then as the grave is become her house, so would I hasten to make it mine also, that we two might then make our beds together in the dark.'

Reference. VI. 10. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1471.

Job 6:15

'I have many friends and many enemies,' Swift wrote to Stella, 'and the last are more constant in their nature.'

Never man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had; but I expressed my own feeling as to the mode in which I had gained them, in this very year 1829, in the course of a copy of verses. Speaking of my blessings, I said, 'Blessings of friends which to my door unasked, unhoped, have come'. They have come, they have gone; they came to my great joy; they went to my great grief.

Newman, Apologia, chap. 1.

References. VII. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvi. No. 2705. VII. 1 . W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches, p. 89. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 286. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1258.