I have told people they had the patience of Job when what they had was a habit of saying nothing, and some of them were being wronged at the time. So, was Job patient? Not if patience means keeping quiet. Job worshiped first, then cursed the day he was born and, chapter after chapter, took his complaint to God. What James praises is that he endured.
His first words
The losses came in one day: the oxen, the asses, the sheep, the camels, the servants, and then his sons and daughters under a fallen house. In Job 1:20-22, in the King James Version: “Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”
Then came the sores, and his wife’s “curse God, and die.” He answered her, “What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” and Job 2:10 adds, “In all this did not Job sin with his lips.” Those two answers are where the picture of patient Job comes from, and the picture is right about them. After that his friends sat with him on the ground for a week without a word.
After seven days
After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.
Job 3:1-3 (KJV)
From there Job does more of the talking than anyone else in the book, and much of it goes straight to God. At 7:11: “Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.” At 10:2: “I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou contendest with me.” And at 13:3 he tells his friends what he wants: “Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God.”
This is a man who keeps turning toward God while he complains, and that is the thread to follow.
What James praised
James’s paragraph begins, “Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord,” with a farmer waiting for rain, and it forbids grumbling against one another. Then it turns to the prophets and to Job.
Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience. Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.
James 5:10-11 (KJV)
The word beside Job’s name is endure. The World English Bible prints “the perseverance of Job,” which says plainly what James is pointing at: he held on, and at the end he was still there, still facing God. James names him for enduring, and he does not single out the seven silent days. And “very pitiful” is old English for full of pity: the Lord James points to at the end of Job’s story is tender.
What Job took back
When God finally answered out of the whirlwind, he asked Job questions Job could not answer, among them, in 38:4, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Job said in 40:4, “Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” Then, in 42:3, he took up God’s charge and named what he was taking back: “Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.” He had talked as if he knew what God was doing to him. Those are the words he took back when he repented in dust and ashes.
He did not take back bringing his pain to God, and God never rebukes the crying itself. What God pressed him on was a different thing, in 40:8: “wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?” In 42:7 God turned to Eliphaz: “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.” The friends had spent the book explaining God. Job had spent much of it crying out to him, and he is the one God called his servant.
The Bible keeps room for that kind of crying. It keeps laments like Psalm 88 that end without any resolution at all, and it does not tidy them up.
Still facing him
So you may bring your complaint to God out loud, bitterness and all. Job did stop arguing at the end, but only after God had spoken to him, and not instead of speaking to God. And if someone calls your silence patience, you can tell them kindly that James was praising something else.
James praises one thing, and it has nothing to do with how much you have held in. Through all of it, are you still facing him?