Here’s a question you won’t find in any Bible trivia book. What ailment did Moses, Paul, Jonah, Elijah, Jeremiah and Job all suffer through at one time in their lives?

The answer’s depression. In the Book of Job, for example, Job actually expresses his desire to die, saying, “Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed and my calamity laid in the balances together! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea. . . Oh that I might have my request; and that God would grant me the thing that I long for! Even that it would please God to destroy me; that he would let loose his hand, and cut me off!”

In one of the studies my pastor gave in a series he did on the problem of depression in the late ’90s, he profiled in detail the emotional struggle Job endured.

“One of the great men in the ancient world was the patriarch Job,” Jordan started off by explaining. “The Bible says he was ‘the greatest of all the men of the east.’ He was a great prominent figure filled with wisdom.

“But all of a sudden in Job’s life, everything changed overnight. All his livestock was either stolen or slain. A tornado came and destroyed the house of his oldest son while they were having a party and all of his children are killed. Job lost his health. His wife turned on him.

“He got right down to the bottom and then these three friends showed up to give Job some counsel about what was happening to him. They actually sat with him for seven days in utter silence, just looking at him, and then they began to talk.

“By Job 3, when he first begins to address his friends, he’s in the gall of bitterness. Self-pity has overtaken him.”

Job 3:1-3 reports, “After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”

Jordan explains, “We’re talking about despair and despondency. His friend Eliphaz starts out talking to him in rather rough way. Basically he says, ‘You need to sit up and shut up Job and let me give you some instructions.’ He’s trying to help Job in his depression and it doesn’t do much good.”

Later, in Job 7, Job complains, “When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.

“My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.

“My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope.is there not an appointed time for man upon the earth.”

Of this passage, Jordan explains, “Job’s saying, ‘I can’t sleep at night. My mind won’t quit working. My emotions are all torn apart. Even in the night when I ought to be able to sleep it’s murder to me; it’s torment to me.’ In verse 7:11, he says, ‘Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.’

“Eliphaz had suggested to him that he shouldn’t be complaining. You know, the ‘Three Cs’—criticize, condemn and complain. Job says, ‘I’m so miserable I can’t do anything else and I’m just going to complain in the bitterness of my soul.’ He goes on down and describes God’s pursuit of him. In verse 12, speaking about God, he says, ‘Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?’

“It’s, ‘Let me alone, Stop the world, I want to get off.’ And you just thought that was a song written in the 20^th century! That’s a cry from the very first man that ever was written about in the Bible.

“Job’s the first book in Bible ever written. When the children of Israel came out of Egypt they had the Book of Job in their hand. Moses quotes it to them. And that ancient patriarch’s suffering under the throes of depression. He’s casting his hand up, crying, ‘Even God’s against me. When I go to sleep he terrifies me with dreams about all these things.’ His mind won’t quit working. His emotions are all wrenched out of shape.

“Job was depressed, frankly, from the same sinful mental attitude that causes depression today. It all focuses on the issue of self-pity. The path to depression is real easily identifiable: Improper thinking patterns, unreal expectations of life, misplaced dependencies. Your trust and your dependency is not on truth but it’s on error.

“Then when problems, the insults, the rejections, the adverse circumstances and trials come into your life—and the disappointment that comes because of it—you respond to that.

“God gave us some wonderful emotions. Fear and anger are to be motivators, but when you respond to the insult, to the injury, to the rejection, to the trial that comes into your life by adding into the equation self-pity, your self-consciousness becomes self-importance. Self-pity gets in there, and that improper thinking pattern about it all revolving around you, and that middle letter of the word ‘sin’ becomes the issue in life, then it always winds up in depression.

“The real culprit is not the circumstance—it’s not the trial—it’s the attitude you take toward it. If you’re going to handle your emotions in general, you have to understand the relationship between the way you think and the way you feel; the relationship between your emotions and your thinking.”

“To understand that you need to understand how you as a person have been created by God to function. You need some real biblical analysis of your makeup; a biblical picture of who you are as a person, what your makeup is, how you were created by God to function, how it is you come to the place where you feel like you feel and where you do what you do and think like you think. If you can understand how God created you and how He made you to work and function, then you’ve got a leg up on things.”