The Loneliness of Job: Job-The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 2:11-13]

Last week we saw the terrible heart break of Job. Job was a man of great power, great prosperity, and great piety and the testing of his faith took away the power and prosperity, yet the piety remained… in all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong. Were we ended last week, chapter 2:10, was the conclusion of the test, Job passed the test, he remained loyal to God and worshipped God not because of what God gives but because of who God is…God is worthy of our worship because He is God. Yet the book of Job continues for a long time.

Just as we said Job was an extreme book, Job was extremely wealthy and powerful, extremely pious and prosperous…so was his fall extreme, Job went from riches to rags in a day, from powerful and influential to poor and shamed, from surrounded by a wonderful family to alone and isolated. The book of Job gives us great insight and a look into real life problems like depression, grief, doubt, and loneliness. Today we’re going to focus on three verses and look into the loneliness of Job.

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Job 2:11-13]

Alone on the Rubbish Heap

Job is terribly, frighteningly alone. He sits on the rubbish heap. His wife has come and gone after a disagreement. His only companion, if we can call it such, is a broken shard of pottery with which he scratches himself (2:8). At this stage we can only guess what thoughts filled his mind. Did he think back to days of purpose, when he got out of bed with drive and desire, to work energetically, to manage his farm, and to govern his household? Did he remember the accolades given him for his justice, his care for his employees, and his business success?

Were there memories of his sons and daughters in their childhood? In London there is a bronze statue of a man sitting on a bench overlooking the River Thames. A few meters in front of him is a bronze figure of a little girl, his daughter who had died in childhood. It portray’s him as he sits, in his old age, his imagination plays tricks with him, and it is as if he sees his little daughter alive and playing there. One wonders Did Job’s imagination play those kinds of tricks with him? We cannot know.

A Visit of Friends

But what happens next presses home to us Job’s loneliness as never before. This is surprising because it seems to start so well. “Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil [harm] that had come upon him, they came.…” (v. 11). So Job has friends. The word “friend” in the Old Testament, and especially in the Wisdom literature, is stronger than our shallow use, in which we may have many so-called “friends” (especially on social networking sites). “A man of many companions [what we might call Facebook friends] may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother” (Proverbs 18:24). A friend is bound to you with bonds of steadfast love (the strong Hebrew word is chesed, which means pledged, unbreakable, covenant love and loyalty).

Many years later “Hushai the Archite, David’s friend” pretends to have gone over from David’s side to support and counsel his rebel son Absalom. Although Absalom is pleased to have Hushai’s counsel, he is surprised and chides Hushai: “Is this your loyalty [chesed, steadfast loyalty] to your friend? Why did you not go with your friend?” (2 Samuel 16:16, 17). Indeed as Job himself says, “He who withholds kindness [chesed, steadfast covenant loyalty] from a friend forsakes the fear of the Almighty” (Job 6:14).

It is therefore deeply encouraging to know that Job has three friends, men who are bound to him with ties of steadfast love and loyalty. Surely they will be able to help. It begins well. “Now when Job’s three friends heard … they came.… They made an appointment together to come” (v. 11). It must have taken weeks, if not months, for the news of Job’s afflictions to reach them, for them to communicate with one another and then to travel to visit Job. And all this time Job is alone on the rubbish heap with his shard of pottery for company. Job himself later refers to “months of emptiness” (Job 7:3), and the lament of chapter 30 indicates a long suffering.

Sympathy and Comfort

But at last they come. They come “together” rather than separately, perhaps because they sense that the task of comforting Job will be more than any individual can bear. They come “to show him sympathy”—that is, to enter into and share in his grief—“and comfort him”—that is, to find a way to ease his pain (v. 11).

We must not read back into their coming the later disappointment and anger that their words bring. So far as we can tell, these are “three good men and true.” They were bound to Job as Jonathan was to David. They were not fair-weather friends, Facebook friends who were glad to be able to “name-drop” Job’s acquaintance when he was rich and famous or to take vacations in his luxurious holiday villas. They were loyal friends who took the considerable trouble to travel and come to sympathize and comfort him when he was bankrupt and bereft. “Theirs was a noble, gentle spirit. They were sincere.”

It is worth pausing to ask how “comfort” works. The Hebrew word is nacham. It is not the same as empathy. Empathy may be inarticulate, because it focuses on entering into the feelings and experience of the sufferer as best we can. But comfort must be articulate and active. Empathy may be silent, but comfort must include speech. To comfort involves speaking to the mind and heart of the sufferer in such a way as to change his or her mind and heart. Comfort is an action, sometimes called “speaking to the heart,” that hopes and intends to bring about a change in how the sufferer thinks and feels about his or her suffering. For example...

When Joseph “comforted” his brothers, he did so in such a way as to reduce their fearfulness (Genesis 50:21); his words lowered the level of their fear. The Levite in Judges 19 spoke “kindly to” (“spoke to the heart of”) his wife with a view to changing her mind and bringing her back home (Judges 19:3). Boaz cheers Ruth up when he comforts her with his words (Ruth 2:13). Joab tells David that unless he will “speak kindly to” (“speak to the heart of”) his army by speaking words to them, they will abandon him (2 Samuel 19:7). His comfort will change their minds. King Hezekiah “spoke encouragingly to” (“spoke to the heart of”) his army to make them strong and courageous (2 Chronicles 32:6, 7). Both the verb nacham and the expression “speak to the heart” refer to speaking words that bring comfort and change someone’s mind or feelings. This is what we expect Job’s friends to do.

The Wisdom of the World

And so “they came each from his own place,” and we might wonder what resources of comfort were available in the places from which they came (v. 11). We are told their names and places—“Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.” Eliphaz is from Teman, Bildad from Shuah, and Zophar from Naamah.

Naamah appears in Genesis 4 as the daughter of one of Lamech’s wives (Genesis 4:22), but this is a remote hint and tells us very little about Zophar. Shuah is one of Abraham’s sons by his wife Keturah, one of a group who (because they were not to inherit the promise through Isaac) were “sent … away from his son Isaac, eastward to the east country” (Genesis 25:1–6). This all fits with Job being “the greatest of all the people of the east” (1:3), somewhere to the east of the promised land.

The clearest clue is about Eliphaz. Teman was one of the most important towns of Edom (Jeremiah 49:20; Amos 1:12; Obadiah 9). Eliphaz himself bears an Edomite name. One of the sons of Esau is called Eliphaz (Genesis 36:4). He is even described as “the firstborn of Esau” (Genesis 36:15). Whether the Eliphaz of Job is the same Eliphaz or not, we cannot know. But he does seem to be an Edomite.

Edom was renowned for its wisdom. In Obadiah the Lord says he will “destroy the wise men out of Edom” (Obadiah 8). And in Jeremiah this wisdom is especially associated with Teman: “Concerning Edom. Thus says the LORD of hosts: ‘Is wisdom no more in Teman? Has counsel perished from the prudent? Has their wisdom vanished?’ ” (Jeremiah 49:7). So it is no surprise that one of the friends who will, we hope, bring wise comfort to Job is an Edomite.

It is a reasonable assumption that the other two also represent traditions of wise counsel. Certainly they think of themselves as such, as becomes evident when they begin to speak. We have here not just three kind and loyal friends but three wise friends who between them represent, as it were, the combined resources of the wisdom of the world. The question is... Can the world’s wisdom with the world’s kindness and loyalty help this lonely sufferer?

An Unbridgeable Gulf

As they catch their first glimpse of their old friend they are appalled: “And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him” (v. 12). The smoking rubbish heap was often piled higher than the city itself, so we may imagine them approaching the city and spying this lonely figure crouched on the landfill pile in the distance. They knew it was Job. Probably they had been told in advance that was where he was; we may suppose he was by now a well-known sight in the region. But they could hardly believe it was really him. “Is that Job?” we may imagine one saying to another, “so thin, so pale, so harrowed with pain and grief?” And as they approach him, they shrink back in horror.

As one writer put is, “Many have had this experience, of visiting a familiar friend or family member and of being shocked at the altered appearance. It is not just the physical features that have altered, but something deeper. It is as though the calamity or the suffering has claimed the other in an experience alien to us. The other is no longer fully or even primarily in our familiar world, but inhabits a realm whose terrain is strange and foreign to us. We sense a chasm across which we cannot or will not venture and from which we draw back in self-protective fear onto the safe ground of our familiar world. Or we attempt to cross the chasm somehow through sympathetic, perhaps symbolic, identification, hoping to draw the other back with us into the familiar world.”

Their not “recognizing” him was a painful thing for them, but no doubt it was also a painful thing for him. No longer could there be the old natural friendly embrace, the hug or handshake, the smiles of friendship rekindled, the delighted warmth of welcome into his home. Instead they did not “recognize” him. They found themselves behaving toward him as to a stranger. There was something painfully strange about his appearance, the emptiness in his eyes, the lines in his face, the brokenness of his demeanor. This is a sad assembly, very different from the happy family gatherings that punctuated the ordered life of the introduction (1:4). This one is marked by alienation rather than fellowship, and loneliness rather than joy.

“And they raised their voices and wept” (v. 12). Weeping here (bakah) is not the shedding of silent tears. It is “the sound of … weeping” (Psalm 6:8), something done with the mouth as well as the eyes. But they weep at him and not with him. This cannot be the “weep[ing] with those who weep” of Romans 12:15. They cannot sit “with” him in any meaningful sense. He is unrecognizable. He has been taken away into a different realm, a realm of suffering so deep they cannot reach him.

Silent with a Corpse

Job has torn his robe in mourning (1:20), and they too tear theirs. And they “sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven” (v. 12). Dust speaks of mortality and death. God says to Adam after the fall, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). Joshua and the elders of Israel tear their clothes, fall to the ground, and put dust on their heads after the disaster at Ai (Joshua 7:6). The Israelite who reports the capture of the ark by the Philistines comes to Shiloh with his clothes torn and with dirt on his head (1 Samuel 4:12). After Tamar has been raped by her half-brother Amnon, she tears her clothes and puts ashes on her head, mourning for her lost innocence and future (2 Samuel 13:19).

To throw dust in the air (toward Heaven) so that it falls on their heads is vividly to identify themselves in their grief with Job’s dead children and probably also with Job himself, who has been grasped by death and is already being dragged down into the realm of the dead. Job is to them like a friend being sucked down by quicksand in the desert; they long to draw him up, but he is beyond their reach. He is as good as dead.

“And they sat with him on the ground” (v. 13). They do not sit on a carpet or on cushions but directly on the ground. The ground is the place of the dust of death; it is the closest men on earth can get to Sheol. After the sack of Jerusalem, “The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground in silence; they have thrown dust on their heads and put on sackcloth” (Lamentations 2:10).

They sat down with Job. Then comes silence, seven days and seven nights of silence! “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” Job’s suffering was, as we shall see, deeper than merely physical. It was made sharper by mental and spiritual grief. It was an anguish and an agony. This man who had been a very great man (1:3) now suffers a very great suffering.

What are we to make of this silence? It is at best ambiguous. Preachers often say that this long silence was the best thing that they did. And certainly, as we shall see in chapter 4, when they begin to speak they do no good at all. So one writer concludes, “If for the most part Job’s friends got things wrong … here, at the beginning, they do it right.” “Here is genuine friendship. Here is deep ministry.” He calls this “the compassion of a silent presence.” Another says, “Their silence is a further expression of their genuine empathy.”16 Others say, “They do honour by profound silence to his vast grief,” for “when grief is so crushing, what form but silence can sympathy take?” “They were true friends, bringing to Job’s lonely ash-heap the compassion of a silent presence.”

But while their silence may initially have been appropriate, it seems unlikely that it continued so. To sit quietly with a sufferer, to hold his or her hand, to listen patiently as he or she pours out his or her grief is one thing. But this silence is “hugely extended.” To refuse to speak a word to a sufferer for seven days and seven nights is eerie and not comforting. It is interesting that we are told they did not speak a word “to him” (v. 13). For all we know, they may have spoken with one another. So it may not have been silence after all, but just a refusal to speak to Job, which is quite another thing.

Even if it was total silence (which seems more likely), a seven-day silence symbolized mourning for the dead. It is what Joseph did for his father Jacob. It is what the loyal city of Ramoth-Gilead did for King Saul (1 Samuel 31:13). “Job’s friends mourn for him as one already dead.”

It is as if they call for the hearse and sit by Job with the coffin open and ready for him. There is no point talking to a corpse; one just weeps by it. To them Job is no longer a living person. Their silence may be not so much a silence of sympathy (although it may have begun as such) but a silence of bankruptcy. They say nothing because they have nothing to say that will bring him comfort. It seems to them too late for that.

The Loneliness of Suffering

Whatever the meaning of their silence, the book of Job brings home to us the loneliness of suffering. The friends came with kind intentions. They came together. They brought with them the wisdom of the world, all the resources available within the world to comfort their suffering friend. But they were bankrupt, able to sympathize up to a point but utterly unable to comfort. Before they came, Job was all alone on the rubbish heap. After they came, he was yet more deeply alone as he sat alongside them but was utterly ignored by them with not a word addressed to him as a person. Before, there was no one physically or emotionally close to him; now he has proximity (they sit by him) but is still without intimacy.

Sometimes in Scripture there are corporate laments. Psalm 137 is one such. But this is so personal, and Job is so alone. Suffering does that. Even a non-serious illness cuts us off from others; we have to miss out on a family outing, a party, or a gathering. There is (in the title of an old play) “Laughter in the Room Next Door.” And if even a trivial suffering begins to isolate the sufferer, heavy suffering isolates acutely.

Even a shared loss is experienced uniquely by each bereft person. When a child dies, the father alone knows what it is to be the father of this dead child; only the mother enters the unique depths of loss as the mother of this son or daughter. However much they share, at the deepest level they suffer alone. In his book The Anatomy of Loneliness Thomas Wolfe writes, “The most tragic, sublime and beautiful expression of loneliness which I have ever read is the Book of Job.” We need to recognize that those who suffer, suffer alone. And Job is terribly alone.

The Loneliness Job Foreshadows

Job in his awesome aloneness foreshadows another one, an even greater man who endures an even deeper suffering. This one too was with his dearest friends, in a garden outside Jerusalem. He told them to sit and wait while he prayed. He took with him his three closest friends “and began to be greatly distressed and troubled.” He said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch.” He went on a little farther, fell on the ground, and prayed “with loud cries and tears.” But when he came back he found them sleeping. “Could you not watch one hour?” he asked sadly (Mark 14:32–42; Hebrews 5:7).

Jesus prayed and wept alone. And the next day he suffered alone, stripped of his clothes, robbed of his friends, with even his mother having to keep her distance from the cross. He had said to his friends that although they would leave him alone, he was not alone, “for the Father is with me” (John 16:32). But in the deepest intensity of his suffering he cried out in anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). As the old hymn “I stand amazed in the presence” puts it, “He bore the burden to Calvary, and suffered and died alone.” But the beauty of the gospel is...

There is a deep sense in which the lonely sufferings of Jesus Christ mean that no believer today is called to enter Job’s loneliness in its full depth. As someone has put it:

Suffering encloses a man in solitude.… Between Job and his friends an abyss was cleft. They regarded him with astonishment as a strange being.… But they could no longer get to him. Only Jesus could cross this abyss, descend into the abyss of misery, plunge into the deepest hell.

However alone the believer in Christ may feel today, the reality is that he or she is not ultimately alone as Job was. Christ is with us.

Perhaps you feel alone today, perhaps you’ve felt abandoned and isolated…and maybe you are and have been, but know, if you are in Christ you will never be alone as Job was, Christ promises to be near us until the end.

If you are not a believer and you have not confidence or comfort that Christ is with you but have known this feeling of being alone … turn to Christ in repentance and faith. I plead with you to turn to Christ now in this moment.