Job 10: The Shining in the Dusk
Monday, December 15, 2025
In the opening of this chapter, Job’s frustration is evident with the lack of answers from God for the fundamental question concerning his guilt or innocence. He is in the darkest yet brightest of places – he is in that luminal space between day and night, heaven and earth, joy and sorrow, well-being and pain. He stands at the moment of a new creation . . . In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the dark from the darkness. (Genesis 1:1-4) Job yearns for God to separate him from the darkness that has descended upon him; Job wants to know if he is innocent or guilty. Job wants to know why he is suffering so deeply.
Job sees a darkness yawning before him and does not know why he stands on this threshold. “Discouraged, worn down by pain and by the assaults of friends and deity alike, [Job] closes his part of this cycle of speeches (v. 18) by returning to the theme of his beginning: ‘Why did you bring me out of the womb?’ In chap. 3 he thought it would be better to be dead, and in 7:16, 19 he proposed to be left alone. He ends with a figure of the darkness to which we will go, ‘deep shadow, all disordered, which shines like dusk’ (10:22). It is the mirror image of his beginning in 3:4: ‘That day, let there be darkness.’ But Job has come to a different point. Then being alive was too terrible; now he wants to be dead because his structure of assumption has fallen apart. Divine power is not correlated with divine justice, and, though he deserves the latter, he is subjected to the assaults of the former.” (Mays 375)
We watch Job struggle and we are fascinated because we see our own flailing against pain in this story. We see that he stands on the verge of complete exhaustion and decomposition. We hear that he looks for an end to his existence. Job demands answers of God as night threatens, and as he sinks into deep despair he runs the risk of missing the luminosity of this moment between worlds. As the shadowy dusk approaches we suddenly see the smallest glint of light in the gathering darkness and we sense something here. Job stands not on the edge of destruction but rather on the brink of an incredible new beginning. There is a shinning in the dusk that harbingers a new and indecipherable rebirth rather than a horrible and ignoble end.
Job’s suffering will end and he will experience God’s goodness in a way he had not imagined; but today we see him on a precipice of cataclysm, stunned by a belief that God’s power does not appear to be accompanied by mercy. Job will struggle with the misguided advice from his companions; he will persist in searching for answers to his questions. A new dawn will burst upon him instead of the nighttime he fears. We know that Job will come to find that the bottomless well of nothing over which he is poised to fall is in fact a bottomless well of safety, surety, and limitless love. This is the liminal space in which Job finds himself today. It is a space that we too may sometime occupy.
With God, even the night sky holds a starry luminosity that guides us back to the light of day. In God, all harm turns toward good, all disaster becomes rescue. Through God there is a shinning in the impending dusk because God separates the darkness from the light. And God sees that it is good.
So let us remember and pray . . .
When we stand on the brink of disaster, let us close our eyes, fold our arms across our lungs that gasp for air, and allow ourselves to sink into the shining darkness of God’s arms. And let us allow God to bring us out of the abyss into the eternal light of God’s love. Amen.
Also see the “Falling Down the Well” page on this blog.
Mays, James L., ed. HARPERCOLLINS BIBLE COMMENTARY. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1988. 375. Print.
A re-post from November 20, 2011.
Images from: http://reflectivedust.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html and http://deadpoet88.wordpress.com/category/love/
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