May 12, 2025 - Job 4-7

Job’s friends have come and sat with him.  And I do believe that they are friends, just misguided and ignorant friends.  When all others had deserted Job, they came to him there on the trash heap and sat silently with him for a week (2:13).  And, I think, they tried honestly to wrestle with the meaning of Job’s sudden misfortune.  Each in turn essentially argued that Job must have done some great evil in order to experience such misfortune, sort of a one to one ratio thing:  you commit sin A, you suffer punishment X; you commit sin B, you suffer punishment Y; you commit sin C, you suffer punishment Z.  Always an exact correspondence.  Eliphaz:  "Remember:  who that was innocent ever perished?  Or where were the upright cut off?" (4:7)

This is the argument that the Pharisees made about the man born blind:  Blindness is a bad thing.  Blindness from birth, never seeing anything, is even worse.  How terrible this man must have sinned, apparently in his mother's womb.  And if not him, then his parents must have sinned a great sin.  Jesus gave the lie to that reasoning.  And so it is with Job.  In the end, he is proven genuinely righteous and a faithful follower of God.  There must be some other explanation for his suffering.  We’ll see.

Ah, how shall fallen man

Be just before his God?

If he contend in righteousness,

We sink beneath his rod.

If he our ways should mark

With strict inquiring eyes,

Could we for one of thousand faults

A just excuse devise?

Ah! how shall guilty man

Contend with such a God?

None, none, can meet him and escape,

But through the Saviour/s blood.   -- Isaac Watts (1826)