Empty Consolation

Job 3-5

            I know that Job 3 was part of yesterday’s reading, but I addressed the book in general yesterday. So, let’s start with Job’s initial complaint: he wishes he had never been born. His unhappiness is profound; he sees no bright side; he doesn’t buy into the line, “Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.” If he were dead, he says, he would be equal with kings and rulers. If he were dead, he would be free and at rest.

            Before we get too hard on Job, let us remember that a lot of people feel that way—maybe not to such an extreme, but I’ve ministered to a lot of people who have wished the Lord would let them die so that they could be free of their pain and seeming uselessness. This is the danger of a faith that has too much an other-worldly focus; we can start to scorn the life we already have for a perceived life to come. A healthy view of the resurrection reminds us, though, that this life is the same as the life to come and that it diminishes the life of the age to come when we scorn the beginnings of that life in this age.

            Still, Job’s grief, his suffering, is palpable.

            Eliphaz, Job’s friend, feels the need to address Job’s musing. In some ways, that’s the big mistake of this book. At the end of chapter 2, Job’s friends sat in silence with him, and sometimes that’s the best thing you can do for someone who is suffering: be a supportive presence for them without descending into explanatory platitudes.

            Eliphaz seems to start off in a complimentary mode, acknowledging how Job has been a source of comfort for others. But then he wonders why Job can’t have the same wisdom in his own trouble. “Should not your piety be your confidence?” He implies that Job’s grief actually betrays a guilty conscience. “It’s the guilty who get punished,” he says. He rightly observes that a mortal cannot be more righteous than the Lord, and he rightly notes that Job should accept the Lord’s discipline (cf. Hebrews 12). Yet his words about having a secure tent and property accounted for and many children are needlessly cruel for a man who has just lost everything. Eliphaz may be right in theory, but in practice he offers little of value to Job.