Our Mutual Friend is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens. It contains some particularly evil rogues. Mr Riderhood is perhaps the worst. There is nothing redeeming about this dreadful blackmailer, murderer, and deceiver. He is utterly terrible.

In this next part of Job's summing-up speech, we will see him being treated worse than a man such as Mr Riderhood deserves. A man who was, and deserves to be, the highest of the high, will descend so low that he becomes the lowest of the low.

Job 29 had looked back to a glorious past. Chapter 30 is trapped in a miserable present; notice the refrain: ″But now . . . And now . . . And now . . .″ (vv. 1, 9, 16). Verses 1-8 describe the people who now laugh at Job and mock him. They are ″younger″ (v. 1) than Job in a culture that rightly honours seniority. The focus in verses 2-8 is not so much on their poverty as on their moral worthlessness. These are not the virtuous poor; these are good-for-nothings, unemployable, ″base″ people (v. 8), the kind who are rightly kept far from society. And yet, Job is treated as lower even than them!

In verses 9-15, we hear these people singing rude songs about Job, spitting at him, kicking him, and terrifying him. And all because, as they judge, ″God has . . . afflicted me″ (v. 11). Job is treated as a God-forsaken man.

Poor Job will cry out to God in desperate prayer (vv. 20-23), but God will not answer him. He cries for help (v. 24), he weeps for others, but his weeping for himself is not heard.

In some strange way, it is necessary that this great and good man should suffer as he does. We who have read the heavenly scenes in chapters 1 and 2 know that Job's suffering is necessary to demonstrate the genuineness of his faith. But Job does not know this, and may never know it until after his death. To him, it is bewildering. The descriptions of his sufferings are achingly sad. He is so lonely, and has become the companion of jackals and owls howling and crying in the night (v. 29), but nobody hears him.

And so we see God's good order of creation turned inside out and upside down. We know that these sufferings foreshadow the terrors of the cross of Christ, and that they share the character of Christ's redemptive suffering. But, for Job, it is a prison of present-tense misery, and he laments with great depth and pathos.