Job 3:9
May its twilight stars remain dark,
May it hope for day light in vain,
May it not see the glimmer of dawn.
My mind tends to prefer things in balance. One on the right side, one on the left. Seven verses about day and night. One about both and three each, right? Not here in Job. The day only gets two verses, and the night gets four. Currently, I have no thoughts on why, but I noted it.
This last verse in the sequence has three parts and give an impression of astronomy. The first is twilight stars. For those of us in Houston, we could almost get a feel for twilight when the power was out, except for the snow and the clouds reflecting all the light available for many miles and hiding the stars. One summer we went to camp out in the mountains in west Texas and the brightness of the stars was even better than in the big city of San Angelo. For me, twilight is not so much as when the stars start to come out, but when the night is far enough along that you have no impact from sunlight, and it is just the stars and maybe the moon. It can almost seem as if there is enough light to see with no moon. It is a beautiful time to sit and appreciate the beauty God gave us in the night sky. This is the loss that comes from the night’s twilight remaining dark. Dark is just dark. The faint light of stars is beauty and dark is not.
Skipping to the end, the other end of the night is picked up in the last of the verse. The glimmerings of dawn. (Note the balance of the beginning and the end of the night.) For me dawn is sitting in your tent, ready for the day, waiting, watching the horizon to see that first hint of sunlight so you can get up and go run around like a kid in a candy store. There was just something about the anticipation that was better than waiting for your alarm to go off so you can set off for school. For the night to never have the glimmerings of dawn is so depressing. I wonder if that is what living at the planets poles is like in winter.
The greatest part of the verse is in the middle. It is hope. It is drive that makes you watch the horizon rather than make coffee or throw logs on the fire or pull out the bacon and eggs. The first Star Wars movie was subtitled or renamed A New Hope. Forty two years later the story wrapped up with as much mystery as one could dream of to match the goal of “Always leave them wanting more.” Contrast this with how the Bible ends 66 books later. Jesus wins. Job calls for the condemnation of the night to be prevented from having any hope of an end of a rising of something better. God tells us that we are not to always hope for more. We are to expect it, knowing it is coming, that day when the night of sin is over and we will rejoice with the victory of Christ over sin and death in new bodies for a new heaven and a new earth.
This verse contains the glimmer of the hope that we have in Christ and that we yearn for desperately. Job is not a story about a man who lost everything. It is the story about how God gave us everything.