Day 005: The Weight of Grief, the Weight of Glory (Job 6:2–3)

“If only my anguish could be weighed and all my misery be placed on the scales!
It would surely outweigh the sand of the seas—
no wonder my words have been impetuous.”
— Job 6:2–3

Through the Bible: Job 6–9

In 1941, C.S. Lewis preached a sermon at Oxford that became one of his most famous essays, The Weight of Glory. In it, Lewis described the staggering truth that every human being is destined for eternity—either everlasting splendor or everlasting ruin. To be told that the Creator of the universe looks at us and says, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” is, Lewis wrote, “a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But it is so.”

Job knew a different kind of weight. His wasn’t glory but grief. He groaned, “If only my anguish could be weighed… it would surely outweigh the sand of the seas.” Can you picture that? Every grain of pain adding up until the shoreline itself couldn’t hold it. His suffering wasn’t abstract or theoretical. It was crushing, suffocating, oceanic.

And it wasn’t just his losses. Job felt the sting of abandoned friendships—his companions became like desert streams, gone when he needed them most (Job 6:15–20). He felt the silence of heaven—“When he passes me, I cannot see him; when he goes by, I cannot perceive him” (Job 9:11). And he felt the scrutiny of God—“What is mankind that you make so much of them… that you examine them every morning and test them every moment?” (Job 7:17–18).

Where David once marveled in Psalm 8, Job despaired. To Job, God’s constant gaze was unbearable. But Lewis reframed that same reality in Christ:

That’s the difference the gospel makes. Job only saw the weight of grief. Christ transforms it into the weight of glory. Isaiah says the Suffering Servant would bear our griefs and carry our sorrows (Isaiah 53:4). And Jesus Himself promises, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

Job didn’t know how his story would end. We do. The scales don’t stay tipped toward grief forever. On the cross, Christ absorbed the full weight of sorrow, and in His resurrection He placed eternal glory on the other side. One day, when we stand in His presence, the heaviness of this world will finally give way to the heaviness of heaven.

I remember in high school we were given a test on critical thinking. One of the questions was, “Which weighs more: A pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” The answer of course, is that they weighed the same. A pound is a pound, and whether it is made up of feathers or lead makes no difference.

Paul uses a different calculus in 2 Corinthians 4. It almost seems as though he had been reading Job in his quiet time that morning when he penned these words to the Corinthian church:

¹⁶ So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, ¹⁸ as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18

So yes—Job felt the weight of grief. But in Jesus, grief’s heaviness becomes a signpost pointing us toward the greater and eternal weight of glory.

Related Content for this Day

• Day 005: Job’s Prayer for a Mediator (Job 9:33-35)

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