Job’s First Reply to Eliphaz: God-Forsaken [Job 6,7]

{Pray}

Sometimes the exterior of something doesn’t truly reflect the interior properly. Years ago my dad had a 1992 ford ranger pick up that he loved but it was parked in the shed not being driven. He had considered fixing it up for one of the grand kids to use but upon a closer look at the frame of the truck, it had rusted in two and was going to be quite a project to try to fix. While the exterior of the body looked in good shape, the interior frame showed a damage not easily seen from the outside.

We begin now the first of Job’s eight speeches in these three cycles of speeches with his friends, fourteen whole chapters (chapters 6 and 7, 9 and 10, 12–14, 16 and 17, 19, 21, 23 and 24, and 26). As we begin, we will see a deeply unimpressive exterior peeled back to reveal an interior of infinite value. We are going to watch as a true worshipper of God is revealed. We will see some surprising and paradoxical marks of the real believer unveiled. These marks will cut right across all human instincts about religion. These hallmarks of a true worshipper are utterly contradictory to what we might expect.

We’ve been introduced to Job’s comforters and last week we listened as Eliphaz gave his first speech, which was no help to Job at all. Now we begin to hear the force of Job’s reply to Eliphaz. Now we’re going to start to unveil the real purpose of Job. And we begin by asking a question...

What is the only sure test by which the world will know who are real worshippers of the true God and who are just pretending? Answer: loss and suffering. The only sure test is to strip from worshippers something of value, and then we will see if they really worship the living God and bow down to him simply because he is God. Only when worship comes at a cost can we tell if it is true. Suffering is the fire that refines and reveals the heart of worship.

We see this again and again in church life when there is a cost to follow Christ. A Christian wants to marry a non-Christian, knowing it will be a union in which at the deepest level they will pull in opposite directions. It will cost to break the relationship off and worship God wholeheartedly. That is when true worship is revealed. It costs to be a Christian openly at school or college or in the office. Perhaps there will be a loss of face, a loss of prestige or reputation. It is loss that reveals the true worshipper and separates the fair-weather Christian from the true worshipper.

We are going to see in Job’s speeches a true worshipper revealed. And we may be surprised by the hallmarks that mark him out as the real thing. To the visible eye Job is alone, scratching at his agonized skin, sitting on the rubbish dump outside the city gate (2:8). He has no status, no job, no family, and no hope. And yet we will see here, despised and rejected, outside the city wall, the pure gold of a real believer.

We are going to see the precious jewel of real worship in the midst of ugliness and pain. And as we see this precious jewel unveiled, we will remember a later man hanging naked outside the city wall, despised, rejected, and yet precious beyond compare.

So as we listen to the first of Job’s side of the cycles of speeches we shift our focus away from the three comforters, so confident, so impressive—and so wrong. And we listen to Job in his laments, so pathetic, so confused, so full of doubt—and so deeply right with God. These are rich and poignant speeches with much to teach us.

The structure of Job’s speech is, sometimes Job speaks to his friends and sometimes to God. It is not always easy to be sure which parts of his speeches are which. Sometimes it doesn’t much matter. He speaks aloud for all to hear. But sometimes it is clear, especially when the Hebrew verbs are in the plural (addressing his three friends) or the singular (addressing God). In this speech he addresses his friends to start with, and then he directs his speech to God.

Job’s plea to his friends is in two parts. “I want you to understand,” he says, “that the wrath of God is an unbearable pain [vv. 1–13] and that religion brings no comfort [vv. 14–30].”

The Wrath of God is an unbearable pain [Job 6:1-30]

In the first part of verses 1–13 Job begins with an exclamation (vv. 2, 3) and follows this with an explanation (v. 4) and then an illustration (vv. 5–7). The explanation (with three lines instead of the usual two) would seem to be the central point.

Then Job answered and said: (v. 1)

Exclamation [6:2-3] “Oh, that my grief [vexation] were fully weighed, and my calamity laid with it on the scales!”

Eliphaz said that “vexation” is the kind of angry speech that marks a man out as a fool and therefore condemns him to death (5:2). This is not the way wise people speak. Wise people have a clear and logical system by which to understand how things work. They don’t get all hot and bothered by what they think is innocent suffering, because they know there is no such thing.

Job replies that his troubled, hot outburst (chapter 3), far from showing him to be a fool, is a natural and understandable response to the depth and weight of his misery. His speech reveals his misery, not his folly. The word translated “vexation” (6:1) is used of Hannah when cruelly provoked by Penninah in 1 Samuel 1:6; it is the anger that fuels her urgent prayer in 1 Samuel 1:16 (where she prays “out of my great anxiety and vexation”). It is a tiring anger that drains us of energy for living and can make us depressed, as in 17:7 where Job says, “My eye has grown dim from vexation.”

“I want you to grasp,” says Job if we were to put it in modern terms, “that if you took the miserable unfairness that has caused my anger, if you could bottle up all the calamity that has befallen me, and if you were to put them on some machine that weighed human pain, you would find it ‘heavier than the sand of the sea’ ” (6:3a). Sand is both literally and proverbially heavy. “A stone is heavy, and sand is weighty” (Proverbs 27:3). “If only you grasped the burden of my pain,” says Job, “then you would know why I have cried out with such an extreme lament.” The word translated “rash” (v. 3b) means something like “impetuous” or “wild.” “The extremity of my words, far from revealing me to be a fool, opens up to the world the depth of my pain.”

Explanation [v. 4] “For the arrows of the Almighty are within me; My spirit drinks in their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me.”

Verse 4, gives the root reason why Job is hurting so deeply. “If you want to know the cause of my pain,” he says, “it is not because I have lost my wealth; nor is it because my greatness and power have come to an end. It is not even because I have been terribly bereaved of my children. It is because the Almighty God, who controls everything that happens in the universe, has been firing poisoned arrows at me.”

There may be an allusion to the Canaanite god of pestilence sometimes called “the archer”, Job may be making a contrasting point here. “The arrows that have pierced through the ‘skins’ of my possessions, my family, and now my own body and health are not ultimately to be understood as arrows fired up from the underworld [the “sons of Reshef” of 5:7, flying upward]; they are the arrows fired down from Heaven by the Almighty God. That is why it hurts so deeply.”

Another way of describing these is to call them “the terrors of God,” God’s supernatural harbingers of death. The word translated “terrors” is only used here and in Psalm 88:16: “Your wrath has swept over me; your dreadful assaults destroy me,” where the phrase “dreadful assaults” translates the same word translated “terrors” in Job 6:4. Notice that in Psalm 88 these terrors are expressions of “your wrath.” Job sees himself as experiencing the wrath of God, God’s hot, settled anger against sinners. And that makes his life unbearable.

Illustration [v. 5-7] “Does the wild donkey bray when it has grass…can flavorless food be eaten without salt?…they are loathsome food to me.”

The illustration is easy enough to understand, but what does it illustrate? In verse 5 Job makes the commonplace point that an animal that is properly fed does not bellow and bray; it brays and bellows because it is not fed or is not fed an edible diet. In the same way Job’s wild outburst, a kind of wild human bellowing, is because the diet he has been given is inedible. Verse 6 continues the picture of inedibility. If something is “tasteless,” so bland as to be disgusting, it has to be made palatable with salt or spices. This is why (v. 7) Job refuses to eat the diet that is set before him.

But to what is he referring? There are two possibilities. He may simply be using the metaphor of diet to refer to the terrible circumstances of his life, the diet God has set before him. But since he is speaking to his friends and will soon be explicitly rebuking them for their unhelpful speech, it seems more likely that the diet Job is referring to is the unpalatable words of his friends, exemplified so far by Eliphaz’s first speech. All they have said, and will say, to him is no more than, as one commentator put it “insipid pious pap.”

Comfort and sympathy is what Job hoped to receive from his friends. Instead they give him an insipid explanation of what has happened. The point of Job’s illustration, therefore, is that if his friends had given him a diet of true (edible) words of comfort, he would not be screaming in anguish. What is unbearable is to suffer the wrath of God and to be given neat religious explanations.

Job goes on to make a request [v. 8,9], give a reason [v.10], and stress the urgency [v.11-13]

The Request [v.8,9] “Oh, that I might have my request...”

Job wanted to die in chapter 3. He counted himself among those “who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they find the grave” (3:22). He still wants to die. This is his “request”; indeed, paradoxically, it is his “hope” (6:8). Eliphaz shallowly says that Job’s integrity and piety ought to be his hope (4:6). But Job’s cosmology is turned upside down. It is “a sufferer’s cosmology” in which bad things come from above and good things are to be hoped for in the place of the dead below.

It does not occur to Job to take his own life, for he knows that life is God’s to give and God’s to take. He understands that the only reason he is still alive is that God has stayed his hand. So he longs that it would please God to “crush” him (v. 9) to death. And yet Job will not be crushed to death. The sufferings of Job, terrible as they are, are but a foreshadowing of the sufferings of one who will be “crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). Job can think of nothing that will ease his pain except being crushed to death.

The Reason [Job 6:10] “though in anguish…I have not concealed the words of the Holy One.”

The reason Job longs to die is surprising and revealing. Even in the midst of “pain unsparing” (v. 10b), if God takes his life soon, then he will have “comfort” (v. 10a). How so? He would die not having cursed God; he would have stayed faithful to God right to the point of death itself. “He would die knowing he had maintained his spiritual integrity.” Like a prisoner undergoing torture, he fears the moment he will break; he longs to die without betraying his faith in the goodness of God.

In this reason given something of the heart of Job the believer is revealed. He longs for God to be honored by his life and by his death. Somethings are being peeled back for us.

The urgency [Job 6:11-13] “What strength do I have, that I should hope?”

As with a prisoner under torture, there is an urgency to Job’s prayer. He is very weak. He knows he has so little physical strength, and with his physical weakness there is a psychological fragility. To hold on and not curse God he feels he will need to be as strong as a stone or as bronze, and he isn’t. Here is the sense of verse 13: “Do I have the inner resources to help myself, now that all success has been denied me?” That is, “There was a time when I could do things and succeed at them; I had those inner resources. But no longer. Now it is just a case of trying desperately to hang on to being faithful to God in desperate weakness. If only my suffering could come to an end.”

The wrath of God brings an unbearable pain to the believer who hoped and trusted that God is good and gracious and this experience seems to destroy this conviction. It is because Job is a believer that he feels this pain so keenly.

Job’s not finished speaking to his friends. The rest of chapter 6 he rebukes them for being disappointing friends and to state that human

Religion brings no comfort [Job 6:14-30]

Their Responsibility [6:14] “to him who is afflicted, kindness should be shown by his friends.”

“Kindness” here is chesed, covenant loyalty, sympathy, and love (v. 14). Friendship in the Old Testament carries with it a strong obligation, even a covenant, to show loyalty, especially when the friend is suffering. Not to show such loyalty is a mark of impiety, of forsaking “the fear of the Almighty” (v. 14). Job implicitly accuses his three friends of failing to show him loyal sympathy and love.

An illustration [6:15-21] “My brothers have dealt deceitfully like the stream of the brook that pass away.”

His illustration is of a valley area where icy waters from melting snows tops melt…but in summer are bone-dry. When weary travelers turn to them in hopes of finding refreshment, they only find a parched stream, they had high hopes but now only disappointment. “That’s what you are like to me,” says Job. “I had such high hopes when you arrived, three wise men who care for me. But ‘you have now become nothing’ (v. 21). Your words are empty and vacuous. Instead you look at the depth of my distress and ‘are afraid’ (v. 21), frightened by the terrible suffering you see before you.”

A Request [6:22-30] “Teach me...”

In verses 22, 23 Job says that his hopes are not demanding or selfish; he has not asked them for money or actually to do anything. All he has hoped for is words that will unlock his perplexity and settle his anxiety (vv. 24–26). “Teach me,” he pleads; “make me understand how I have gone astray” (v. 24). In other words, “Tell me where I have gone wrong because I cannot see that I have.

Your words might hurt [v. 25a], but they will do me good in the end if they are true and ‘upright’ (v. 25). But the words you are speaking don’t prove anything [v. 25b].” Verse 26 is not easy to understand. The sense is, “ ‘Do you want to put right what I say and treat my despairing words as empty wind? You are not taking me seriously when you try to impose your simple system of religion on my pain.”

He goes on, “You do not love me. I am just a pawn in your religious discussions [v. 27]; you are playing a game with me, rolling dice, tossing ‘the problem of Job’ to and fro as you sip your coffee in comfort. Please just look me in the face [v. 28] and listen to me; take me seriously. I am speaking the truth.”

Why Are Job’s Friends Such a Disappointment?

Job’s friends are wise men in the eyes of the world. They appear to be well-motivated, coming to bring “sympathy and comfort” to Job (2:11). But they prove deeply disappointing, intensifying Job’s pain rather than bringing life. They are like a dry valley to a thirsty traveler.

The reason is that only the gospel of the cross ultimately makes sense of suffering. A world in which there is no such thing as redemptive suffering, suffering that brings glory to God, is a world in which there will be no comfort for the suffering believer.

It is a world without grace, and in the end it is a world without love. Human philosophy and all human religions impose upon the human condition a framework of simple cause and effect in which there can be no such thing as suffering that simply and necessarily brings glory to God because it expresses the obedience of the believing heart that bows down to God simply because he is God. And yet it is precisely this obedience, the obedience of the one man (Romans 5:19), that will bring the redemption of the world. The sufferings of Job foreshadow the redemptive sufferings of Christ.

Job protest to God [Job 7:1-21]

Job now turns to address God with whom he grapples.

Always he has loved and feared God. He is a true believer. He has never doubted the sovereignty of God. He knows that the imprisoning “hedge” (3:23) has been put in place by God. But up until now he has not explicitly spoken to God. Now he does.

We may perhaps sum up Job’s protest with a question and a plea. The question (vv. 1–10) is in essence, “Why do I matter?” The plea (vv. 11–21) is in essence, “Leave me alone!”

Why do I matter? [7:1-10] “Is there not a time of hard service for man on earth?”

Job piles up vivid imagery to draw a portrait of his life under the sun—except there isn’t much sun. This is Ecclesiastes on a rainy day.

In verses 1–3 Job compares himself to conscripted labor. The word translated “hard service” (v. 1) refers to military or conscripted slave labor such as Solomon used (1 Kings 5:13, 14). “A hired hand” was a poor domestic or agricultural worker, badly paid, in desperate need of each day’s pay at the end of the day.

The reference to “nights of misery” at the end of verse 3 leads to the miserable picture of sleepless nights in verse 4. The night just seems so long, so desperately slow to pass; he tosses and turns, exhausted and longing for rest but unable to find it.

While the dark nights seem so slow, the days pass “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle” (v. 6), which moves to and fro, to and fro too quickly to watch. The prime of Job’s life is passing him by with no achievements, no delight, no relationships, no hope. Another birthday, another year of misery gone. This is one of the paradoxes of suffering, that it can be at the same time a slow pain and a fast running away of life itself. It is a life that is disordered in every way.

So in verses 7–10 he laments that he is an insignificant thing, a nonperson with a one-way ticket to nowhere. In essence he says one morning he’ll leave and die and his life will have been irrelevant.

The central idea in verses 1–10 seems to be that Job feels instinctively that he ought to matter, but everything about his sufferings suggests that he doesn’t. His assumption, indeed his past conviction, is that he lived life in covenant relationship with the Almighty, whom he feared with loving reverence.

And yet everything about Job’s experience points to insignificance and transience. This is why he says in effect, “You will look for me, but I will not be here anymore” (v. 8b). Job is engaged in holy argumentation with God. “You, the eternal God, are watching over me, and yet I shall go to Sheol and never come back. Is this consistent with your power and your eternity? Surely this cannot be.” This is the language of a believer.

Because there seems to be no answer from Heaven, Job goes on to a desperate and paradoxical plea to be God-forsaken. He says to God in essence,

Leave me alone! [7:11-21] “Therefore I will not restrain my mouth...”

Because of this terrible tension between his convictions and his experience, Job must speak (v. 11): “Therefore I will not restrain my mouth”—as Eliphaz and the others wish he would—“I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.” He has spoken in 3:20 of “the bitter in soul.” One of the strange signs of hope in Job is that he must speak. And it is precisely by speaking that Job is going to argue and almost preach his way toward the truth.

He protests to God (v. 12) that he is not “the sea, or a sea monster.” This seems a strange protest until we remember that in the stories the Canaanites and others told about the gods, Sea (Yam) was a hostile god, closely allied to The Sea Monster (Tannin, whom we have met as Leviathan in 3:8, and will meet again in chapter 41). Job is not referring to “the sea” in general or any old sea creature. He speaks of “the Sea” and “the Sea Monster”. Job is protesting that the Almighty is attacking him as if he were the personification of supernatural evil, that the Almighty has “set a guard over” him as if he were a danger to the order of the cosmos (v. 12).

This sets the scene for the terrible picture of God that follows, as the hostile Watcher from whom Job cannot escape. Even in sleep he cant’ escape, he goes to sleep thinking God will send him nightmares. His plea is to be left alone by God. But then

Verses 17, 18 parody and turn upside down the wonderful positive theology we later find expressed in Psalm 8. “What is man?” asks David, and he answers that to be human, to be entrusted by God with dignity and responsibility over the world, is a wonderful thing. For Job it is the opposite: “What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him …” (“set your heart” has the sense of “pay him so much unwelcome attention,” [v. 17]). “Why do you keep paying inspection visits to test me, always watching to find fault [v. 18]? Why won’t you give me a moment’s peace [v. 19], just looking away for long enough for me to swallow my spit?”

The burden of Job’s protest is this: “If I am as insignificant as I appear to be, why do you pay me so much hostile attention?” So he says (v. 20), “If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of mankind?” “Sure, I sin. I am not perfect. But does my sin really justify this constant unrelenting ‘hostile attention’?” Usually in the Bible God’s watchful eye is a source of hope for those who trust in him.

But for Job God’s “eye” is a terrible thing. “Why are you to me like Big Brother, picking on me, making me ‘your mark’ (v. 20)? I feel like God’s punching bag; it is as if he goes to the gym to practice hitting me.” Or to put it another way, “I seem to be a terrible ‘burden’ (v. 20) to him, so that all God’s time is taken up with watching me, guarding me, finding fault with me, striking me.”

It is all deeply sarcastic. “And anyway, why don’t you forgive me (v. 21a)?” We must remember that Job is a penitent sinner who understands sacrifice, who believes in a God who forgives those who repent and believe. Job knows—and he is right—that he should not be punished for his sin since the sacrifices have taken away his sin. Or so he had been led to believe. Job is beginning to drive toward the truth that will be revealed in Jesus, that one day a man will fulfill the sufferings of Job; and when he does, he will suffer not for his own sins but for the sins of all who trust in him.

What can we learn from Job 6,7?

We learn first that the wrath of God is an unbearable pain. Job is a believer; the deepest pain he endures is that it seems to him he has fallen under the judgment of God. And he discovers, as do we, that the kindest and most well-meant religious or philosophical counsel can ultimately provide no comfort.

Only the truth of the cross can do that, for only the cross reveals redemptive suffering, and only the cross prepares believers to walk in the way of the cross, knowing that in our suffering we fill up in our bodies what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, we are partners with God in ushering in the new heavens and new earth. That realization transforms suffering, knowing it’s all part of God’s ultimate redemptive plan.

We learn also that honest grappling with the perplexities [sufferings/pain] of the believer places him or her on the path to ultimate enlightenment. Eliphaz has a simple and logical system. He will never let the evidence get in the way of this system. In a cold way it provides him with a kind of reassurance. Job began with the same system, but he is learning that it is not true, as anyone who has suffered knows these tidy little systems fall apart. And by honest belief grappling with this, the believer is on the path to truth.

The speech presses home to us also the power of words to heal or to harm. It is words of truth and grace that Job longs for from his friends. It is words of a man made religious system that they give him. The words of truth and grace would bring gospel comfort; the words of man would deepen and sharpen his pain.

We learn also that Job’s speeches give us a language of lament, as do the Psalms of lament. We need to know how to lament, how to put into words the pain of walking in the way of the cross. So long as we remember that Job’s words become Christ’s words before they are our words, and that they are only our words as men and women in Christ, we may appropriate them to put our pain into words. We have here a believer being very candid with his pain and openly expressing it to God.

Perhaps we haven’t done the best job as the church of addressing how to speak to God in pain…our prayers always seem to be so filled with positivity and not much pain expressed and yet Job and many of the Psalms are filled with painful words. This shouldn’t be avoided, we need to know how to bring our pain to the Lord for He cares for us.