Reading: Job 12-15, Psalm 138
We’ve heard the arguments from all three of Job’s friends, and they all ascribe Job’s suffering more or less to an act of divine judgment. They have appealed to personal experience, tradition, and history. They have called on Job to trust that God will forgive and restore him. They are quite confident that they have been helpful to their suffering friend. The only problem is they are working from the wrong narrative, and Job has about had enough of them.
We get three chapters of Job blowing up at his friends and appealing to God, though he has already said he knows he has no standing with which to do so. In chapter 12, he lets his three friends turned accusers know that he does not need them to tell him that any of what they have said is true. He has said it himself! The problem is, his present experience does not tally with what he, they, and everyone “knows” about how God interacts with the world. He now sees that the righteous suffer and the wicked are at peace. He turns to the natural world for evidence of how blessing and suffering are arbitrary. It’s not like the birds and fish earn their good or bad results. They just happen. Job credits God with all this, and with all the good and bad things that happen to everyone and everything. Job’s theology is of a God that is bigger and more responsible than the one his friends seem to believe. They constrain God to act fairly. Job does not.
Chapter 13 finds Job calling for a hearing before God, despite his acknowledgement back in chapter 9 that he has no standing to accuse God of anything. Job knows that, as a created creature, he will never be right in conflict with his creator. But he wants to face him anyway. Though he slay me, I will hope in him. Job calls on God to make known my transgressions and my sin. While the three friends spoke in confidence of their knowledge of God, Job speaks in confidence of God’s knowledge of him. He is in pain, to the point that he despairs of life, but whatever hope he has he puts in his creator.
Speaking of pain and despair, chapter 14 is a study in both. Job, who has already declared how he despairs of life in chapters 3 and 10, now considers what being dead will be like. He wonders about the possibility of something after. If a man dies, shall he live again? He muses that perhaps he will answer God’s call to relationship again as in his life. But then he turns away from such possibilities in the last 5 verses, retreating to his despair in being afflicted by God.
In his three chapter rant, Job does not exactly deny his friends are right, but lets them know what he is experiencing is pushing his understanding of God and his sovereignty outside the bounds of what they have considered. Job begins to see that God in a new way, and though it is terrifying, he would know more. He asks God to call, and I will answer, or else let me speak, and you reply to me. Job knows God is responsible for his condition, it terrified by the realization that his understanding of God is insufficient, but remains committed to understanding. These are hard reading, but there is tremendous courage coming from Job in the midst of his despair. The reader might wonder if Job’s friends will admit there is something for them to learn here as well.
They do not. Eliphaz opens his mouth again and sticks his foot squarely in it. He picks up Zophar’s theme in calling Job a windbag, and kind of pulls rank on him as the elder of the two. He claims superior knowledge, and goes back to his original point from chapter 4 that the wicked suffer and the righteous are blessed and successful. Job’s suffering has taught him nothing, and he is unable to see God any differently than he does now. It is a bit of a spoiler, but this will be the attitude of all three friends, and it will not go well for any of them.