“For God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me:”
God has made Job's heart faint, and the Almighty has terrified Job, asserting that Job's emotional and spiritual disturbance originates in divine action rather than circumstance alone. The causative structure—God has made, the Almighty has terrified—indicates that Job experiences his own psychological response to suffering as itself a form of divine action upon him. This attribution of Job's inner devastation to divine agency suggests that the terror is not incidental to suffering but central to it, that God works not only through circumstance but through the psychological and spiritual overwhelm that accompanies unexplained affliction. Job's vulnerability before the Almighty becomes simultaneously a recognition of divine power and a form of complaint about how that power manifests toward the suffering.
Church Fathers on Job 23:16
O that one would grant me that I might know and find Him, that I might come even to His seat! An elect person if he did not know God, assuredly would not love Him. But it is one thing to ‘know’ by faith, and another to know by His own Form, one thing to find by trustfulness, another to find Him by contemplation. In consequence whereof it is brought to pass that Him Whom they know by faith, all of the Elect long to see by His own Form as well. With the love of Whom they burn…
Nicene & Post-Nicene / Ante-Nicene Fathers translations · public domain
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