Job 7 - Job's Bitterness Revealed

Job’s Bitterness Revealed

Yesterday we looked at a man who is fully given over to sorrow. This man of God whom the Lord was so pleased with has been reduced to a spiritual beggar full of self-pity, self-hatred, anguish and bitterness. He doesn’t understand why this continues to go on for him. Instead of praising God he is now complaining and angry that he remains alive to suffer. Looking at verse 3 we can see that months have gone by and he is still in the same low place as when it had all begun. He finds no comfort in his sleep. His skin is such a mess he can no longer stand to be in it. Have you ever been in so much physical pain that you could not stand to be in your own skin? I know I have. After surgeries I had, two in particular, I wanted to be unconscious again after I awoke from the anesthesia. The pain was unbearable, like that of childbirth labor. It was so tormenting and it seemed all I could do was focus on the pain.

Maybe some of you reading this have known that feeling too. Perhaps you have experienced pain from a sickness, disease or an accident that made you out of your mind with the pain. It can overwhelm a person quickly, can’t it? So when we think about that, it is easy to see why Job is groaning. This episode had not lasted just a few days. By now he was months into this and he was growing angrier and more bitter by the minute. But what happens when we get angry and bitter? It can block our healing process. The word bitter in the dictionary is described as a “strong, unpleasant flavor; also, painful emotions.” Bitterness is like a cancer of the soul. Job thought his skin looked and felt bad, but what was worse is what was happening in his heart – his spirit.

In studying the Bible and other teachers like Dr. Henry W. Wright who has a wonderful healing ministry, we can see that spiritual roots cause physical sickness. It is noted and proven that auto immune types of diseases manifest themselves in various forms such as colon cancer, as well as other types of cancer; arthritis, diabetes, lupus, and several others. Spiritual roots of bitterness causes separation from God, from one’s self and from others. Things like self-hatred, guilt and condemnation can be tied back to these types of diseases.

Anger and hostility with deep roots of bitterness can cause aneurisms and stroke, because what is exploding in the heart (spirit of a man) will explode in the physical man, the heart and brain. When a person is attacking themselves, the body attacks the person. Many do not understand these truths and do not realize how spiritual sickness really is. It is sad. As the Bible clearly says…

 Isaiah 4:6a

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

Below is a ‘fast’ that pleases God. In doing what Isaiah 58 tells us, we can walk free of guilt on our hands…

“Cry aloud, spare not; lift up your voice like a trumpet; tell My people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. Yet they seek Me daily, and delight to know My ways, as a nation that did righteousness, and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
They ask of Me the ordinances of justice; they take delight in approaching God. ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and You have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?’

“In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure, and exploit all your laborers. Indeed you fast for strife and debate, and to strike with the fist of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day, to make your voice heard on high. Is it a fast that I have chosen, a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord?

“Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then your light shall break forth like the morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’

“If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.

Those from among you shall build the old waste places; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; and you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach, the Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.

“If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on My holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable, and shall honor Him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord; and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth, and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.
The mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

When we read this we can see that when people try to do life in a ‘religious’ way, they are not pleasing God. They may have roots of anger and bitterness in their hearts, while outwardly they think that starving themselves for one day and seeking God’s blessings will get them somewhere with God. Saints, this is not what pleases God! Every matter with Him is a matter of the heart. When we run to God just because we want something for ourselves (selfish) and still walk with strife in our hearts toward others, we cannot expect Him to respond to our whining and groaning’s. 

In this chapter we start to see things come out of Job’s mouth that are in his heart. You remember the word that says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. At some point in time, eventually anyone who has anger and bitterness will show themselves outwardly. This stuff doesn’t hide forever. Eventually what’s inside will come out and be revealed, make no mistake. In Job’s case, what was eating away in his spirit came out and ate away at his flesh. His bitterness of soul caused his boils on his skin. It is the soul of a man where the mind, the will and the emotions dwell. It is the fleshy part of our lives. It’s the place where we make our choices from, using the God given free will to live and react to life as God ordained it to be. None of us are created as robots.

Each of us has the ability to respond to life’s circumstances, be they good or bad according to one’s own heart - the inner man. And we all have a spirit. This is the part of us that gets regenerated when we get born again and filled with the Holy Spirit. Here is what the Bible says about the flesh verses the spirit…

Matthew 26:41

Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

A person can do lots of good deeds toward others and still be walking around with a heart full of bitterness. We can be bitter toward living people and we can be bitter toward people long since passed on from this life to the next. It doesn’t matter where the person is, because the bitterness is carried in you or in me – a living breathing soul and spirit man or woman. That is why we need the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. He can reveal to us what is laying way down deep in our hearts that needs to come out.

Job no longer praised God. He had now moved beyond the state of praise in an attitude of “Why God, why me?” It is as if he is saying to God, “Why don’t You just turn me loose and let me die? Why do You keep tabs on me anyway?” This is a mere mortal man talking to our Creator - the one true God who created the planets, the solar system, the sun, moon and stars, the angels, the cherubim and seraphim. Here is Job complaining to Him wondering why God even pays attention to a mere mortal man anyway. By now Job is wondering “What’s the point of it all?” Does that sound like bitterness and discontent to you? Hmmm… 

In verse 14 Job accuses God of scaring him with dreams and terrifying him with visions in the night so he can’t even find escape from his misery in sleep. Here he is supposing to know more about what God is up to than any other person on the planet. What do you think the root of that is? Yes, you guessed it – pride. He is telling the Lord in the next verses that he hates his life (that God had given him) and tells God outright to leave him alone! That is a dangerous place to be indeed. What’s really happening here saints? Why has Job gone from praising to anger and bitterness? Did he think that the rest of his life would be a walk in the park with no trouble ever coming his way? Did he think he was immune to enemy attack above other people because he had a seemingly good relationship with God?

The Lord was not one bit surprised about this – we talked about that yesterday. The Lord knew there was an open door. Job had fear which allowed the enemy access, and now he was allowing his trial to take him deep into bitterness. If a person is not very careful when they enter a trial by surrounding themselves with the word of God and faith filled believers, they can sink in despair and allow spiritual forces that are the negative ones to get in and begin to control their thinking – very bad place to be!

Once we get there, we will find it impossible to receive from God. The bitterness gets right in between God and man and will block a person’s healing. The Lord will never put His stamp of approval on bitterness. Everything He tells us in His word is to forgive our fellow man and walk uprightly in the sight of God and others, forgiving each other just as God through Jesus Christ has forgiven us…

Ephesians 4:32

And be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.

If we meditate on the Isaiah passage above a little more, we see that God wanted the people to show love and mercy to others. This was the kind of sacrifice that would mean something to Him. Just showing up in a church and being polite to people in passing does not cut it. I remember that I carried a lot of bitterness toward my mother for a very long time – maybe about 18 years. I thought she was the blame for all my problems, and though I was going along living my life, I was carrying around this block of bitterness toward her as well as other family members. The next thing you know I ended up with arthritis, cysts on my ovaries and a lump in my left breast – all signs of problems with the females in my family. When breast cancer erupts on the left side of the body it means we are carrying something against a blood relative like a mother or sister. If it is on the right side, it is a mother-in-law or other in law relative.

My issue was on the left – the closest to the heart. It never developed into cancer – praise the Lord, but it was certainly trying to. I had to go through a healing and forgiveness process that quite frankly took me quite a while. It was as if the Lord was peeling away the layers of an onion with me. Once we dealt with one thing, we would move on to another.

A person can have a lifetime of bitterness in their heart that has never been dealt with. Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, they begin to develop disease. I developed a skin discoloration issue similar to what Michael Jackson had. I developed bone spurs (from arthritis) and several other issues that I won’t bother you with right now. Needless to say, there was a lot in my heart that needed to be purged.

Here is the thing we must realize. If we want to be free on the inside of bitterness, anger, hatred toward self or others, we must be willing to take those burdens to the Lord and lay them at His feet and ask Him to deliver us from them. If we are willing to repent and live His way, just like our Isaiah passage above, then our light and healing will break forth and when we call on the Lord He will hear us. If we expect our prayers to be answered we have to be free of sin. Job was crying out to God in our chapter today, but we can clearly see that his heart was not right.

That kind of prayer will get us nowhere. Bitterness is a great big block between us and God. It disables Him from hearing and responding to our requests. It doesn’t mean God doesn’t know what we are saying. He knows all things that have or will ever go on. But when the Bible says He can’t hear us, it simply means that because of our guilt, He cannot respond to our requests. If He did, He would be an unjust Judge – and that will never ever happen!

Saints, let’s let Job’s example really be ours today, OK? God gave us this conversation in His word for a reason. He expects us to read the Bible every day and learn from it. He wants us to apply it to our own lives. In His word – the Bible, He has drafted a love letter that helps us to see what to do and what not to do in our lives. And do you know what? Your life and mine will be the direct result of our response to God’s word – plain and simple. If we respond to His word positively and allow Him to direct and correct us, we will be healed, prosperous, successful in every good work that He leads us to do. But if we do not heed the word and value it, He will lightly esteem us. Look at this…

1 Samuel 2:30

Therefore the Lord God of Israel says: ‘I said indeed that your house and the house of your father would walk before Me forever.’ But now the Lord says: ‘Far be it from Me; for those who honor Me I will honor, and those who despise Me shall be lightly esteemed.

We get the choice saints. We can honor God by honoring His written and His spoken word to us each day, or we can show that we really don’t value Him very much. In that case we will be lightly esteemed. To esteem is to respect – to show affection. If we don’t value Him He isn’t going to value what we do much. And we don’t want that, do we? So what about a person who didn’t sin and yet is afflicted with a disease or blindness for example? Let’s look at a scripture with this example…

 John 9:1-3

Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.

In the case above, the man came into the world blind – he had done no wrong. Jesus said it Himself. In this case, God would show His mercy on this man and heal him that day. In so doing God would be glorified. The Lord would use this instance not only to restore his physical sight, but to restore his spiritual sight. Let’s look a little further in the passage…

John 9:13-38

 They brought him who formerly was blind to the Pharisees. Now it was a Sabbath when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also asked him again how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and I see.”

Therefore some of the Pharisees said, “This Man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner do such signs?” And there was a division among them. They said to the blind man again, “What do you say about Him because He opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”

But the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been blind and received his sight, until they called the parents of him who had received his sight. And they asked them, saying, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?”

His parents answered them and said, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but by what means he now sees we do not know, or who opened his eyes we do not know. He is of age; ask him. He will speak for himself.” His parents said these things because they feared the Jews, for the Jews had agreed already that if anyone confessed that He was Christ, he would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

So they again called the man who was blind, and said to him, “Give God the glory! We know that this Man is a sinner.” He answered and said, “Whether He is a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see.” Then they said to him again, “What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?”

He answered them, “I told you already, and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?” Then they reviled him and said, “You are His disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses; as for this fellow, we do not know where He is from.”

The man answered and said to them, “Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes!  Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him. Since the world began it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.”They answered and said to him, “You were completely born in sins, and are you teaching us?”

And they cast him out. Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when He had found him, He said to him, “Do you believe in the Son of God?” He answered and said, “Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him?”

And Jesus said to him, “You have both seen Him and it is He who is talking with you.” Then he said, “Lord, I believe!” And he worshiped Him.

In this passage we see what the blind man said himself – if anyone is a worshipper of God, He hears them. We also see a lost sinner converted that day when Jesus clearly revealed Himself to the man. Hallelujah! What about you? Have you really seen Jesus, in your heart that is? Is He more to you than just a ticket to heaven? Is He the love of your life? Are you willing to do anything He asks you to do? What we say and what we do makes all the difference. Our words are meaningless unless they are backed up with action – amen!

We can show God our love and respect for Him by always coming before Him with a clean heart. And if we don’t know if we have something boiling under the surface – remember, He does. We can just ask Him for help, with an attitude of gratitude and praise, and He will come to the rescue every time. Only Jesus can deliver us from long past hurts, again, only if we are willing. That is the key that unlocks the floodgates. We must have faith and trust God to do His good work in us so we can be free of any bitterness. Once we have a merry heart, well…

Proverbs 17:22

A merry heart does good, like medicine, but a broken spirit dries the bones.

Friends, we need to understand the deep meaning of this verse. If we are content on the inside, it will be as a medicine to our bones. Here is some more biblical wisdom about bitterness…

Acts 8:23

For I see that you are poisoned by bitterness and bound by iniquity.”

Bitterness is sin and it binds us. It is a very destructive force in our lives that must be reckoned with. Here is great advice from the Lord through Paul…

Ephesians 4:31

Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice.

Proverbs 12:25

Anxiety in the heart of man causes depression, but a good word makes it glad.

Bitterness can cause lots of anxiety which also causes its own set of problems. So let’s decide today that we are going to walk in love, free of all bitterness toward anyone and everyone, amen?! At the end of the chapter, Job is asking God if he had sinned and if so why had the Lord not forgiven him. That is important to address. In many churches the congregants will stand up and read off of a typed bulletin in the service each week that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. When we do this by vain repetition each week with no conviction of the heart by Holy Spirit, we are just talking and achieving nothing. It is a religious act. Then we ask God to forgive our sins as a group, not even knowing how or if we have sinned.

And how can we be forgiven if we don’t even know we sinned? I spent years in church doing this. Stand up – read off the bulletin and repeat after the pastor or a lay person and then sit down, listen to a 20 minute ‘feel good’ story and go home. It wasn’t until that day in 2005 when I heard the Ten Commandments preached that I, Hanny, realized that I had sinned against God in my own way, and that I, Hanny, needed forgiveness for idolatry, lying, stealing, you name it. I had to understand how and when I had wronged God personally so I could confess my sins to Him and receive His forgiveness – glory to God! Look at this verse as you consider going before the Lord with any unconfessed sin…

1 John 1:9

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Oh hallelujah! As long as we are living and breathing on this planet, it is never too late to confess our sins and receive our forgiveness – praise the Lord oh my soul and all that is within me – bless His holy name forever!

Questions:

What did Job say about his life in the first few verses??

What did he want God to do to him?

What was going on in his heart during all of this?

Was Job aware of his sin personally?

Do you have any bitterness in your heart toward anyone at this time? If so, will you take it to the Lord in prayer right now? You’ll be so free when you do.

John 16:1-4

“These things I have spoken to you, that you should not be made to stumble. They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service. And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor Me. But these things I have told you, that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you of them.

And these things I did not say to you at the beginning, because I was with you.

There are three main points to consider from today’s study…

Bitterness is a spiritual root that causes physical illness

Going to God is the best way to be healed of unresolved issues

A merry heart will do good like medicine

Heavenly Father,

I ask You to show me if there is any bitter root in me. Expose anything that is simmering down deep in my soul. Father, I desire to walk clean before You and others so I can be used by You to be a blessing to others. If I have sinned, I ask You to show me how I have sinned so I can confess and repent before You immediately. Thank You for Your Son Jesus who has already paid for all my sins. I know that once I confess them before You I will be cleansed from all unrighteousness and healed in my body accordingly. Thank You Lord in advance for Your help and tender mercy that is new every morning. Oh how great is Your faithfulness Lord. In Jesus name! Amen! 

Is there any bitter root in your heart that needs to be pulled out right now?

And God Said… You fill in the blanks.

Malachi 4:2

But to you who fear My name The Sun of Righteousness shall arise With healing in His wings;

And you shall go out and grow fat like stall-fed calves.