Job chides his friends: “miserable comforters are you all!” (Job 16:2). He asks, “Have windy words no limit? Or what provokes you that you keep talking?” He is not afraid to say that God is picking on him: “God gives me up to the ungodly, and casts me into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, and he broke me in two; he seized me by the neck and dashed me to pieces; he set me up as his target” (16:11-12).

This accusation against God may not be pretty, and some of Job’s language is exaggerated: but from the narrative at the beginning of the book we know that Job essentially has it right. Yet Bildad feels it must be wrong: he feels he must criticize Job. He insists that Job is the one who tears himself in his anger (18:4), and like all sinners Job has brought his suffering on himself: “Surely the light of the wicked is put out … they are thrust into a net by their own feet, and they walk into a pitfall” (18:5-8).

Job responds, “How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with your words? … If indeed you magnify yourselves against me, and make my humiliation an argument against me, know then that God has put me in the wrong, and closed his net against me” (19:2-6). But even though God has “kindled his wrath against me,” even though God “counts me as his adversary” (19:11), Job still has confidence that he will be found innocent: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I will see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another” (19:25-27).

It is an astonishing combination: I know that I am not to blame for this suffering, which God has brought upon me without cause; and I know that God will vindicate me in the end. Job doesn’t yet know any way to reconcile these two facts; but he is confident that both of them will somehow prove to be true.

[Here’s my own comment on this. To my mind, the book of Job fits well with the four centuries when the people of Israel lived in Egypt, with their role devolving from honored guests to despised slaves. It was composed as a way of asking, “Why has this happened to us? Have we been such great sinners?” The book as a whole forms a parallel with the lament from Exodus: “Their cry for help rose up to God from their slavery. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Exodus 2:23-24). Several centuries of crying to God for deliverance, but no rescue came. Almost as if God and the Satan had a bet going, as to whether Job / Israel would remain faithful, if all their blessings were taken away … ]

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We do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, of the affliction we experienced in Asia, for we were so utterly, unbearably crushed that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death so that we would rely not on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead (II Corinthians 1:8-9).
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Our flesh is frail, O Lord, and the road is hard: so many times we are so close to despair. Yet we set our faith in you, the Living One who will indeed rise up and defend us and enable us in the end to see you face to face.

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