The Illusion of Rest for Sinners in Death

Article #3 on Mortality in the Book of Job 

The Book of Job has been a focal point of much philosophical and theological discussion for thousands of years. The depth of what is communicated about human suffering has clearly struck a chord in the human heart.  Why do you think this book has garnered so much attention over the years? Literally, as Job grapples with the justice of the suffering that he is going through, and Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar render accusations against Job in an attempt to vindicate the divine justice of it all, many hurting and depressed readers look on with bated breath in wonder about their own experiences in life.

The Book of Job is a treatise of doctrine that eloquently unveils to the reader the Mortality of Men. Mortality by definition is the state or condition of being subjected to death. The language and vocabulary employed to communicate mortality is profound and shocking. These mighty men of God were able to verbally discourse on these things with ease! Their fluency in amplifying the Doctrine of Mortality through the use of a variety of terms, rich metaphors, and real historical events in their pastime was used by God to provide for the saints a treasury of divine truths. The saints of the forthcoming generations put this treasury to good use for thousands of years. Hence, many everlasting doctrines of Holy Scripture appear in Job for the very first time. 

“Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of the months. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein. Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up their mourning. Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.” - Job 3:3-10

As a prominent theme of the Early Church, physical life and death are associated with light and darkness (Job 3:20). When Job cursed both “the day” and “the night” in which he was born (Job 3:3-10), wishing that he would have died (Job 3:11-12), he declared that this day and night should have been ones of total darkness; not only that the day should have no light, but that the night should be pitch black through the darkening of the stars (Job 3:9). This is how Job communicated his desire to die as an infant in the womb. However, Job wasn’t the only one to covet this lot. Solomon spoke of the exact same desire while he was backslidden. 

“If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good, and also that he have no burial; I say, that an untimely birth is better than he. For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his name shall be covered with darkness. Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing: this hath more rest than the other.” – Eccl. 6:3-5

Being backslidden, Job was suffering badly under the sting of death, which is sin – thus Job’s soul was tormented under the guilt of unforgiven sin working death in his members (1 Cor. 15:56, Job 3:23, James 1:15, Rom. 7:5). The enormity of his suffering seemed unbearable to him, like the scattered souls of the Jewish Captivity in Babylon would one day be made to feel (Deut. 28:65-67; Rev. 9:6), because this is how a just God pleads with backsliders to bring them to repentance (Ezek. 5:12-17, 20:32-44). In the process, these fallen souls are overcome with a twisted desire to die, only inasmuch as they stubbornly persist in rebellion (Job 7:4; Rev. 9:6).

Somehow, someway, they become delusional in the midst of their physical suffering to think that death would grant them some sense of relief. On the physical side of things, there is some truth to this, but delusional backsliders always tend to exaggerate things according to their own lusts. In Job’s case, he thought that death would bring him stillness, quietness, and rest from his present circumstances (Job 3:13), and he wasn’t talking about what is to be enjoyed in the afterlife when redeemed souls are ushered into paradise through physical death. The emphasis being made was not at all about what happens to the soul but rather the body at the moment of death – not the stillness, quietness, and rest of the soul but of the body. 

“I should have slept” – Job 3:13

Job’s perspective here turns out to be a prominent manner of speech when talking about death in the Bible. In fact, the universal experience of physical death – as one falling asleep – is something that is experienced by the righteous and the wicked in bodily presence. Only from this vantage point, people are speaking about what is to be gained through death strictly from a physical sense. Of course, Job wasn’t speaking about his desire to inherit the lot of the wicked whose souls are in the domain of the dead in the afterlife.

Have you ever wondered why the inspired authors of the New Testament identified the dead as those who had fallen asleep? The most ancient origin of this doctrine can be traced back to the Book of Job. Explicit references of this can be found in Job 3:13, 7:21, & 14:12. There was something more to this manner of speech than the ramblings of backslidden Job. Consequentially, the same figure of speech was used in the New Testament to describe physical death (John 11:11-16, Acts 13:36, 1 Cor. 11:30, 15:6, 18, 51, 1 Thess. 4:13-18, 5:10, 2 Pet. 3:4). 

“For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver: Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light. There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master.” - Job 3:13-19

The discourse of these ancient saintly men uniquely focused upon the experience of physical death and the consequences of it from an earthly perspective, like how worldly “kings”, “counselors”, and “princes” leave behind “desolate” houses when they are taken away through death (Job 3:14-15); and while the major points of the conversation were rarely accompanied with visions of the afterlife, when they came it was like a staggering burst of light in the discourse (Job 14:7-14; see “sleep” in Job 14:12). These men knew about how death happens instantly, the moment the body “give[s] up the ghost” (Job 3:11), so that the conscious being of the person through the soul lives on in the afterlife. They knew that the bodies and souls go downward into the earth upon death (Job 3:21) – the bodies to the grave (Job 3:22) and the souls to Sheol (Job 7:9, 11:8, 21:13, 24:19, 26:6). However, rather than emphasizing where the departed souls of the dead go in the afterlife, the emphasis often centered on what was left behind in the world, and what becomes of the physical bodies of the dead immediately, and upon decomposition.

Literally, when men die their bodies becomes lifeless and still in a total loss of animation, so that whatever they were doing before is halted immediately. Strictly from a physical perspective, Job went on to say: this is when the oppressive Master ceases from troubling his Servants, and is silent, and thus the weary Prisoners under rule are brought to rest and quietness (Job 3:13-19). Job reflected upon this, howbeit in a twisted way, because in wishing for his own death, he was desiring to be released from what he erroneously perceived to be the oppression of the Almighty. The “rest” being glorified here illustrates the stillness of the physical body upon death, as one that is sleeping, rather than the potential conscious torment of the soul, spiritually speaking, in the afterlife.

Accordingly, “sleep” is employed in Scripture to describe the physical death of both the righteous and the wicked, as can be observed in 1 Corinthians 11:30, where those who had fallen asleep died because of the “damnation” (1 Cor. 11:29) and “condemnation” (1 Cor. 11:34) of God, which means that this experience of death in context is something dreadful to be avoided (1 Cor. 10:12). On the contrary, remarkably, both Job and Solomon obsessed over this topic while in the spiritual darkness of a backslidden estate. They glorified death rather than life, only because they were tormented by the sting of death (1 Cor. 15:56). They became mad for its poison and began to hate life itself (Job 3:20-24, Eccl. 2:17).