Job’s Friends Were Right About Almost Everything

Job’s friends are the standing example of how not to comfort somebody, and they earned it. But I want to argue something that took me a long time to see, because it changed how I speak to people in pain.

Most of what Job’s friends said was true.

Check their theology

Read the speeches. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar say a great many things about God, and taken as isolated statements, they are largely orthodox.

God is just. God is not mocked. God does not pervert justice. He is greater than any man and does not owe us an accounting. Human beings are not innocent before him. Suffering is often the consequence of sin. Repentance is the right response when it is. God can restore what has been lost.

If you pulled those sentences out and put them in a book of doctrine, most Christians in most centuries would nod. Some of the lines are close to things said elsewhere in Scripture and meant approvingly.

That is what makes the book so unsettling. It is not a story about heretics giving bad advice. It is a story about people saying broadly correct things and being told at the end that they were wrong about God.

What God actually says

At the end, after the whirlwind, God turns to Eliphaz.

My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.

Read that twice. The friends defended God’s justice for chapter after chapter. Job accused God of hunting him, demanded a hearing, and said things no reverent person would say aloud.

And God says Job spoke rightly about him, and they did not.

So what went wrong

Two things, I think, and neither is a doctrinal error.

The first is that they applied a general truth to a particular case where it did not apply.

It is true that suffering often follows from sin. That is not a stupid observation; it is most of Proverbs. What they did was run it backwards. Job is suffering, therefore Job has sinned, therefore what remains is to identify the sin and get him to confess it.

The reader knows this is false, because the reader has read chapters one and two. Job’s suffering has nothing to do with his conduct. The friends do not have that information, but neither do they have the humility to consider that they might not have it.

Which is the actual failure. Not bad theology. Certainty about a case they could not see into.

The second is that they kept talking.

Their best moment is at the start. They travel to be with him, they see him from a distance and do not recognize him, they tear their robes and sit on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. And the text gives the reason for the silence: for they saw that his suffering was very great.

Chapter two is worth reading slowly, because every detail in it is a cost. They came each from his own place. They made an appointment together, which means messages sent, arrangements made, distance traveled. They wept out loud, tore their clothes, threw dust over their heads.

Seven days. Nothing said. That is the wisest thing anyone does in the entire book, and it is over by chapter three.

Then somebody speaks, and the speaking runs to chapter thirty-seven, and it gets worse as it goes, because each round has to escalate to answer Job’s rejection of the last one.

The uncomfortable part

I know why they kept talking, because I have done it.

Sitting with someone in unexplained suffering is unbearable. Not for them — for you. The silence puts a question in the room that you cannot answer, and every minute you do not answer it, the question gets louder.

So you say something. And the thing you reach for is almost always a general truth that would be fine in a sermon and is not fine here.

Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan. He does not give you more than you can handle. There is a purpose in this.

Some of those are true in some sense. That is precisely the problem. A true sentence delivered into a situation it does not fit does not comfort anyone; it tells the sufferer that you have decided their case is simpler than it is.

Job’s friends were not cruel men. They came. They sat. They wept. They stayed for weeks. Most of us would not.

They just could not bear the silence, and they filled it with correct things.

What Job did that was right

This is the part I find genuinely surprising, and worth sitting with, because it cuts against a lot of instinctive piety.

Job’s speech is not reverent. He says God has torn him in his wrath. He asks why he did not die at birth. He demands a court date. He says that if he called and God answered, he would not believe that he was listening.

And God’s verdict is that Job spoke rightly.

Job sees the problem before God names it. In chapter thirteen he turns on the three of them with a question that is hard to improve on: Will you speak falsely for God and speak deceitfully for him? Will you show partiality toward him? He calls their arguments proverbs of ashes and the men worthless physicians. Later, worn down: miserable comforters are you all.

Notice what he is not accusing them of. Not of getting God wrong. Of defending God with things that are not true, as though God required that of them.

Whatever the verdict means in full, it means at minimum that God prefers being addressed honestly to being defended dishonestly. Job talks to God, furiously, for thirty chapters. The friends talk about God, correctly, to a man who is dying.

One of those is a relationship.

The obvious objection

None of which means God let Job off.

When the whirlwind opens, the first thing out of it is not comfort. Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Chapter after chapter of questions follows, and not one of them answers Job’s. Partway through: Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?

Job does not hold his ground. He lays his hand on his mouth. He says he spoke of things he did not understand, and repents in dust and ashes.

So whatever it means that Job has spoken of me what is right, it cannot mean Job had it all correct. He is corrected, at length, in person, by God.

What it seems to mean — and I would not push this harder than the text does — is that his was the right kind of speech even where the content of it was wrong. He was talking to God, about his own actual situation, without managing his words first.

There is a fourth speaker, too. Elihu arrives in chapter thirty-two, talks for six chapters, and is never mentioned again — not in the verdict, not in the restoration. Readers have argued for a very long time about whether that silence clears him. The book does not say.

How it ends

The last thing the book does with the three friends is not a dismissal.

God tells Eliphaz to take seven bulls and seven rams, go to Job, and offer a burnt offering. Then comes the part that does the real work: and my servant Job shall pray for you.

The three men who spent thirty chapters explaining his suffering to him have to walk back to the ash heap and ask him to pray. And they do it. The text records it flatly: they went and did what the LORD had told them.

Then verse ten. And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends.

Not when he stopped arguing. Not when he understood. When he prayed for the men who had hurt him.

I do not think that timing is decoration. Whatever else the ending is doing, it refuses to let the reader leave with the friends as villains, Job as the wronged party, and everyone sorted. It puts them back in one room and makes the wronged man speak on their behalf.

What to do on Thursday

Someone you know is in something right now that has no explanation.

The instruction from this book is unusually concrete.

Go. Sit down. Stay longer than is comfortable. Do not explain it. If you must speak, ask a question rather than offer a reason. Come back next week, which is when most people stop.

And if you are the one in it, and you have been managing your language around God because you were afraid that saying the true thing would be a failure of faith — the man in this book said far worse than you are thinking, at length, in public.

At the end, God called him my servant Job, four times in two verses, in front of the men who had defended him.

Every tradition reads this book. Not one of them has found a way to make it comfortable. That is probably the point.