9.1 Job’s final speeches
Once Job interrupts Bildad and terminates the debate he speaks at length. His two speeches are a hybrid of continuing replies to his friends’ brutal castigations and announcements to the universe at large: a curious mix of ingenious insight, heartrending testimony, and the poisonous interference of contagious Satan. We must appreciate that the Satan is best defined as the spirit of the friends, pride, more than the friends per se, because it limits the finger-pointing. Any one of us can be Satan at any time — and frequently we are! It also enables our understanding that Satan spreads as a virus. Too long in his presence, and anyone of us can be infected, even blameless Job. It takes more than a righteous man to resist Satan in the Wilderness, as we shall ultimately see.
On the central theme of the book — speaking about God — Job does not speak wrongly about who God is. He does not, as the three friends, assume he can predict what God can do or why God has acted the way He appears to have done. Job expresses his immense displeasure with his circumstances. But his discourse always allows God to be supreme, in a way that the Satan, right from the start, does not:
“God understands the way to it
and he alone knows where it dwells,
for he views the ends of the earth
and sees everything under the heavens.
When he established the force of the wind
and measured out the waters,
when he made a decree for the rain
and a path for the thunderstorm,
then he looked at wisdom and appraised it;
he confirmed it and tested it” (Job 28:23-27).
Chapter 29, the beginning of the following speech, is a chapter of great poignancy, in which Job reflects on the great pleasures he enjoyed in what seems now to be a former life. As with his plea for restoration (Job 19:25-27), we can be encouraged by Job’s incredibly God-centered life. The central tenet of his former happiness is the proximity he felt with God. He mentions the pleasure of his children’s company, as well as the honor he was afforded in the city’s social and governmental structure. But it is the closeness of his Heavenly Father that is at the forefront of his comments and the forefront of his desires (Job 29:2-6).
Thereafter Job’s thoughts turn to the negative again, as he considers the dire consequences his afflictions have had on him in a society thoroughly imbued with the doctrine of exact retribution. Exacerbating his pain is the knowledge that he has helped others in the time of their distress, yet now that he is in need, reciprocal charity is nowhere to be found (Job 30:24-26).
I’m intrigued by the contrasts in Job’s words. Every time he considers God, his spirits rise; every time he considers man, they fall. Job speaks well of God (ch 28) and remembers fondly the time when he felt God’s blessings clearly (ch 29). But as his thoughts turn to the world of men (ch 30) they darken appreciably. His mistreatment at the hands of the Satan provokes him to embitterment and, when he remembers his good deeds, the Satanic force of pride is finally unleashed. The prideful comments of his own justification, to which the friends provoked him (ch 27), are now revisited and augmented (ch 31).
Thus we see the Satanic beast of human pride rearing its ugly head in Job’s speeches. Job is right to rebut his friends’ slanderous insults. But where this could provoke him to speak of God’s inscrutability and faith in His inherent goodness, which he initially does in his dissertation on wisdom, Job cannot resist proudly forming his conclusion around his own integrity, not God’s (Job 27:2-6). This spirit burgeons in Job until he challenges God — never a wise move — to account for Himself, while he is so confident in his own righteousness he can stride into God’s presence with the self-assurance of royalty:
“I sign now my defense — let the Almighty answer me;
let my accuser put his indictment in writing.
Surely I would wear it on my shoulder,
I would put it on like a crown.
I would give him an account of my every step;
like a prince I would approach him” (Job 31:35-37).
Satan’s work is done. Job has named God a false accuser (cf Greek: ‘diabolos’!). And though his friends doubtless never intended to hinder Job’s relationship with God, their prideful arrogance has so incensed Job that he has, tragically, become infected by it. Job parades his presumed innocence before God and man and, ironically by that very mechanism, is innocent no longer.
We should not be harsh with Job. It is only because he is convinced that his God is just and loving that he rages against the heavens. If Job had believed God were malicious or indifferent, he could have no anger, because all that happened would make sense. Nevertheless, Satan has fought with the righteous man. And Satan has won. Let me be clear: the three friends have not won the debate — they have lost, since Job has exposed their arguments as folly. But the Satan, the pride the three friends exhibited (which pride had possessed the three friends before the debate began), has now grasped Job. When Satan struggles with a righteous man, Satan wins. This is not the result we may have anticipated or hoped for, but it is one from which we must certainly learn.
As always with the endeavor of the disciple, there are glimpses of brilliance amongst the failings. Job’s poem on wisdom in chapter 28 is a transforming insight into Job’s appreciation of the inaccessibility and supremacy of God’s wisdom. Some expositors define this chapter as the center-point of the drama,1but that is surely overstating the case, since this book contains two speeches from Almighty God! But Job’s ‘Ode to Wisdom’, as it is commonly called, certainly contains a humbling and alluring picture of the inaccessibility of God’s wisdom:
“But where can wisdom be found?
Where does understanding dwell?
Man does not comprehend its worth;
it cannot be found in the land of the living.
The deep says, ‘It is not in me’;
the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’
It cannot be bought with the finest gold,” (28:12-15).
Job’s uses some of the language God Himself will use in His forthcoming revelations. This is a fine testament to Job’s insight; although Job will proceed to darken that fine counsel with the infections of his own pride. Above all, Job declares the wisdom of God inaccessible to man, which is paramount to speaking that which is right about Him.
It is with a sympathetic sadness, therefore, that we witness Job collapse from this beautiful poem into his embittered entanglement with the Satan. However, we cannot be critical of Job until we have at least attempted to understand the direness of his circumstances. He has been under sustained pressure from those he had previously thought to be his friends while wrestling to cope with the bereavement of all his ten children, the material losses of all his flocks and herds, his collapsed health, and his social estrangement. Job’s world must be joyless indeed: he is in constant pain married with the awareness that, by any realistic calculation, he is shortly about to die. An armchair philosopher might readily discount these factors as irrelevant to the main thrust of the debate; and if the account of Job is merely allegorical we can demand these matters be irrelevant to our hero. But this account details real life experiences of an actual man, so how carefully we must weigh them against his conduct in replying to his accusers!
Only once we have absorbed these thoughts, are we truly qualified to reflect upon Job’s final commentary where pride at last had grasped him. His closing comments, unfortunately, do not set this amazing disciple in the best light. But then, at our most pressurized moments, who amongst us would volunteer for the microscope on our conduct?
9.2 Reflection
The debate has proven fascinating. This isn’t just four humans taking up valuable Scriptural space calling each other names. By the divine Hand, this is a presentation of a pure distillation of righteousness pitted against a distillation of human opposition to God. The righteous man versus the Satan at its most basic level! What an immensely valuable text for any who would be a disciple: to see this battle played out move by move, like a divine chess game, in all the complexity that the humanized form of that battle necessarily adopts. And how sobering to see that Satan wins! McGee also notices Job’s Pyrrhic victory: “To all intents and purposes, Job has won the debate. But he hasn’t won.” 2
Yet the friends of Job began by sitting in silence for seven days alongside him. This was a valuable act of friendship: a submissive and cooperative act. It is submissive in that it does not attempt to explain answers to the sufferer of why he finds himself in that condition — which good deed they tragically proceed, later, to confound. It is cooperative in that they participate in Job’s suffering as much as they are able, their participatory presence doubtless a source of strength and comfort to Job upon the ashes pile.
The friends’ vigil is exhortational. Ultimately intense suffering is not going to be salved by logical reasoning. Since emotional or physical pain does not commonly have its root in logical argument, it is ironically illogical to attempt to remedy it with logical argument. I have noted even in preaching exercises how inadequate it is if all the preacher can do is demonstrate logical articulacy. A human connection needs to be made! And if that is true in a preaching scenario, how much more true in times of comfort! Active comradeship, the presence of a comforter alongside, is more powerful than all reasoned arguments, or intonations to count one’s blessings. Beyond this we learn to trust in God, who can directly influence emotional wellbeing.
The Word of God, who knew these things, promised:
“And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:16,17, KJV).
Even this good deed of camaraderie, sadly, the three friends also promptly proceed to undo. Undoubtedly, the seven days of silence are the wisest things the friends ever said. Afterwards they sink into the folly of the doctrine of retribution and their explanation of the God they believe they can define through it.
Yet God is working with them, too. He brings these three mentally infected children into immediate proximity with Job (just as the physically diseased were brought to the priest for cleansing, e.g., Leviticus 14), and induces circumstances in which the effects can be played out, and God’s truth ultimately revealed. I’m not suggesting that the principal explanation of why sufferings befall Job is to expose the falsehood of the doctrine of retribution. But it’s entirely in keeping with God’s character that He would work at many levels at once, including working the salvation of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar: the very embodiments of the Satan themselves.
This provides great reason why the debate is included in the Scripture record. A good friend of mine articulately described the reason in an email I received:
“But if the book is as much about the conversion of Job’s friends as it is about the conversion of Job, then the time spent revealing their thinking makes sense. If the Satan mentioned at the beginning of the book is Job’s jealous friends, then how wonderful God is revealed to be in this book. The pages I ‘suffered’ through reveal God’s patience with us in the foolishness of our own thinking. It shows a lot about God that He would be willing to work with these men to bring them to salvation; (literally that God is willing to work with Satan to save even him — just as He worked with Peter after he betrayed Jesus, or Israel after they turned from God in the wilderness and after entering the Promised Land). And it shows how God can use the sufferings of a good man to help him to grow, while also saving the lives of others in the process. It seems to me that, if Satan is Job’s friends, then God’s grace is glorified through this book. Rather than being a depressing book about a good man who had to suffer a lot at the hands of an evil superpower, God allowed Job to be tempted for his own benefit, but also for the salvation of three adversarial men. So this would mean that the book of Job is trying to show us that just because we are in opposition to God, God doesn’t immediately write us off. He will work with us to bring us back to Him. What an amazing picture of God that paints!”
Amen!
9.3 The debate’s conclusion: the subpoena
We’ve reached a vital point in the drama. Job has subpoenaed God (Job 31:35). Job has not solicited God to speak with him, he has demanded it. Interestingly, that’s something Job earlier suggested would be a fruitless thing to attempt (Job 9:16).
This has very important implications. If God were now to speak with Job, then it would inadvertently propagate the falsehood that God is answerable to man; that the Creator’s presence is required when demanded by His creation. So God does not speak at this point; and I speculate that God will not speak whilst this dynamic remains, with Job having summoned the Almighty to his ashes pile. It is not that God cannot speak — that would be a foolish statement; nor is it God who needs the stalemate broken. Job has essentially cornered himself by setting up a situation where the one thing he truly desires, a proximate experience of his Maker, is now something he cannot receive. It is Job, who needs a way out of this mess, though he would not currently perceive it that way. Job needs someone to cancel the subpoena he has so unwisely issued, so that he will be able to hear from his God in a way that he understands has not come at his command.
Nor can this subpoena be cancelled by any of the three friends. The relationship between them and Job has decayed to the point where walls of pride have been erected, and neither will take instruction from the other. Thus someone else is now vitally needed to release Job from his own trap.
Enter Elihu the Buzite, seemingly out of the blue; a newcomer to our drama. An entrance so timely, it was as if it were a gift from God…
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One