Monday
Monday
Job’s Comforters
The LORD … said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”
Job 42:7
The Bible does not claim to solve the problem of suffering, but it does take it seriously, and it provides a perspective from which to face it. To this the book of Job makes an important contribution.
The book begins with a double glimpse—firstly, of Job’s righteousness, family, and wealth, and secondly, of the heavenly council chamber in which God and Satan discuss Job. It is clear from this that Job’s sufferings happened by God’s permission. Only then is he overwhelmed with a series of disasters in which he is deprived of his livestock, servants, sons and daughters, and health.
Then his three so-called comforters arrive. At first they sit on the ground with him for a whole week and say nothing. One wishes that they had continued to keep their mouths shut! Instead, one after another they trot out their conventional orthodoxy, which they repeat ad nauseam, namely that Job is suffering for his sins. “All his days the wicked man suffers torment,” says Eliphaz (15:20). “The lamp of the wicked is snuffed out,” adds Bildad (18:5), while Zophar’s contribution is that “the mirth of the wicked is brief” (20:5).
Although Job was certainly wrong to wallow in self-pity, he was not wrong to reject his friends’ doctrine or to call them “worthless physicians” (13:4) and “miserable comforters” (16:2) who talk nothing but “nonsense” (21:34). And God later confirmed Job’s verdict. He refers to their “folly” and twice insists that they have not spoken of him “what is right” (42:7–8).
The book of Job is also important for our understanding of Scripture. It tells us that we may not quote anything out of the comforters’ speeches as Scripture, for their speeches are included in order to be contradicted, not affirmed.
For further reading: Job 42:1–9