NOTES for Job 10:2-3
The most terrible thing for Job is an existential catastrophe, as a modern philosopher would call it. It had always been obvious to him that he is God's creation. God did not merely create him: He accompanies Job at every moment of his life. It would seem that with such relations one should already speak of something much deeper than mere human religiosity. In many ways that is true, if not for one "but."
Job is sure that God carefully tracks every righteous or sinful act of his and is ready to reward him for righteousness and punish him for sin. He is sure that evil appears in the world not by chance and that it is nothing other than punishment for sinners. That is why his own situation paralyzes him: the issue is not suffering as such, but the suffering of a righteous man, which for Job is a moral absurdity. By definition sinners are the ones who should suffer. And Job's friends only confirm this with all their arguments: it is not by chance that they keep returning to the theme of sin.
Meanwhile Job's ideas about righteousness and sin, about recompense for the righteous and sinners in this world, do not fit very well with his own relationship with God, at least as Job himself sees it. If God knows him, as they say, "inside and out," what is He waiting for? Or does He not know what Job is capable of, how righteous he is and how sinful? Job is precisely sure that God knows everything about him, and therefore prosperity as a reward for righteousness in life should be taken for granted. Or did God overlook something?
God is not at all going to play at rewards and punishments. For Him all such human accounts and calculations are like a sandbox in kindergarten: serious and deep relations with God cannot be built in a sandbox. And in God's world, when it comes to a person's relationship with God, the question "for what purpose?" is always more appropriate than the question "for what offense?" But Job himself does not yet see this contradiction between the desired quality of relations with God, where everything is grown-up, and the childish sandbox of God's "rewards" and "punishments," where candy alternates childishly with the strap. A moment will come when he sees it.