Job’s Suffering
While reading the book of Job, it can be hard to fully comprehend the loss God allowed in order to prove the faith of a godly man. Job was a man blessed in many ways. He had many flocks of animals and servants to care for them. His children, despite having moved into homes of their own, stayed close and involved in his life.
Certainly, he wasn’t morally perfect, but when Satan came to accuse mankind of being altogether wicked God gave Job as an example of a good man. The Accuser contends that it is because of the blessings that Job is loyal to God. To show that is not the case, God allows these blessings to all be stripped from him.
First, he loses his livelihood through a combination of raiders and fire from heaven. Then, even more devastating, he finds out all of his children died when a house collapsed. Having handled such massive loss without cursing God, Satan demands to be allowed to make him sick as well.
He is then cursed with a sickness that leaves him in constant discomfort so bad that his own wife suggests it would be best for him to just curse God and die.
Poor Comforters
Having gone through even a fraction of this, anyone would be desperate for someone to mourn with them. Instead, the men who come to him offer no comfort.
I have written some about the issues with their failure to comfort Job in the past. Sometimes wicked people can prosper and people like Job can experience hardship, but God has also affirmed that a wicked life often results in more troubles and that a life lived for God often results in blessing.
Instead of having a balanced understanding of these things, they assume that Job would only suffer if he had some horrible sin. That they had no evidence of his wrongdoing didn’t slow them down. They simply accuse him of somehow keeping it secret.
Impossible Standards
However, what I wanted to focus on in this post is that we can see that their explanations for Job’s suffering sound like honor to God but really are things which the men themselves don’t believe in any meaningful way! While they offer these cheap, easy answers for Job’s problems, they themselves defend evidence to the contrary with standards which completely invalidate them.
Eliphaz starts out explaining Job’s suffering as avoidable:
Remember: who that was innocent ever perished?
Job 4:7=11
Or where were the upright cut off?
As I have seen, those who plow iniquity
and sow trouble reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish,
and by the blast of his anger they are consumed.
The roar of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion,
the teeth of the young lions are broken.
The strong lion perishes for lack of prey,
and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.
He offers his observations and claims his experience is that those who sow trouble reap the same. However, that first set of questions is perhaps the most bold of them all! Where is he finding these innocent men who never died?! He explains shortly after.
‘Can mortal man be in the right before God?
Job 4:17-21
Can a man be pure before his Maker?
Even in his servants he puts no trust,
and his angels he charges with error;
how much more those who dwell in houses of clay,
whose foundation is in the dust,
who are crushed like the moth.
Between morning and evening they are beaten to pieces;
they perish forever without anyone regarding it.
Is not their tent-cord plucked up within them,
do they not die, and that without wisdom?’
How quickly Job’s problems go from totally avoidable to the plight every man deserves under a God who supposedly doesn’t even trust holy angels! Sure, according to the perfect standard of God’s righteousness Eliphaz had never witnessed the innocent perishing but only because nobody he met was ever innocent!
Same Empty Words Today
Often, in a rush to have answers people can offer advice which sounds high minded but which invalidates itself when fully examined. In this case, the friends of Job simultaneously contend that if Job would just live righteously that his problems would go away and that God is so good that nobody can possibly live righteously enough!
Not only does that leave Job with no comfort or advice but it also begs the question of why their own lives are so great. If held to the same standard they insist God is using on Job, would they not also likewise be in great suffering?
What they were offering were empty words that sounded like they glorified God yet they immediately undermined their own words in their very efforts to create a context in which they would be true!
What this book teaches us, by the end, is that Job was right after he humbled himself and admitted that God’s ways were greater than his own while his friends had done evil by offering shallow, empty platitudes for his suffering.
