Job 21
Butler1. THEN Job answered and said, 2 Hear diligently my speech; And let this be your consolations. 3 Suffer me, and I also will speak; And after that I have spoken, mock on. 4 As for me, is my complaint to man? And why should I not be impatient? 5 Mark me, and be astonished, And lay your hand upon your mouth. 6 Even when I remember I am troubled, And horror taketh hold on my flesh. 7 Wherefore do the wicked live, Become old, yea, wax mighty in power? 8 Their seed is established with them in their sight, And their offspring before their eyes. 9 Their houses are safe from fear, Neither is the rod of God upon them. 10 Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; Their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. 11 They send forth their little ones like a flock, And their children dance. 12 They sing to the timbrel and harp, And rejoice at the sound of the pipe. 13 They spend their days in prosperity, And in a moment they go down to Sheol. 14 And they say unto God, Depart from us; For we desire not the knowledge of thy ways. 15 What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit should we have, if we pray unto him? 16 Lo, their prosperity is not in their hand:
The counsel of the wicked is far from me.
17. How oft is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out?
That their calamity cometh upon them?
That God distributeth sorrows in his anger?
18. That they are as stubble before the wind, And as chaff that the storm carrieth away?
19. Ye say, God layeth up his iniquity for his children.
Let him recompense it unto himself, that he may know it.
20. Let his own eyes see his destruction, And let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty.
21. For what pleasure hath he in his house after him,
When the number of his months is cut off?
22. Shall any teach God knowledge?
Seing he judgeth those that are high.
23. One dieth in his full strength,
Being wholly at ease and quiet:
24. His breasts are full of milk,
And the marrow of his bones is moistened.
25. And another dieth in bitterness of soul And never tasteth of good.
26. They lie down alike in the dust,
And the worm covereth them.
27. Behold, I know your thoughts,
And th devices which ye wrongfully imagine against me.
28. For ye say, Where is the house of the prince? And where is the tent wherein the wicked dwelt?
29. Have ye not asked them that go by the way? And do ye not know their tokens?
30. That the evil man is reserved to the day of calamity?
That they are led forth to the day of wrath?
31. Who shall declare his way to his face? And who shall repay him what he hath done?
32. Yet shall he be borne to the grave,
WE have traced the fierce and weary conflict to its final issue. We have watched him in his inward strife, in his piteous moans, his expostulations with God, his vain appeals to Him to declare Himself on his side. We have seen him driven to and fro in his tumultuous agitation, until, forced to the very edge of the precipice, and apparently about to fall hopelessly and helplessly into the awful chasm, he cleared it by one energetic act of faith, reaching forth into the unseen, and sustaining himself without any visible support. The personal question is now settled, and his intense inward agitation has subsided. He is in a much calmer and more tranquil state of mind. He has gained that unshaken conviction of the rectitude and goodness of God, which enables him to claim Him as his Redeemer in spite of all adverse appearances. This source of his disquiet is put to rest. The power of the temptation is broken. Satan cannot detach him from the service of God, seeing that he holds fast to his faith in Him, in spite of all the suggestions of sense and of reason. Job is safe from falling. But outward sense and human reason still present a problem which baffles him completely. He holds fast to his confidence in God, but he is bewildered nevertheless. The solution of his friends is no solution. According to their principles, indeed, there is no enigma in Providence. They see nothing but the evident and uniform reign of justice. Job shows, on the contrary, that this is not the case. He takes issue with them in regard to their fundamental principle, and exposes its falsity. It is not, as they allege, a fact of uniform experience that the righteous are rewarded and the wicked suffer. This is the point to which he addresses himself in his remaining speeches. W. H. G.
The three friends have all spoken in the same strain, portraying in violent and exaggerated terms the doom of the wicked; but to their arguments Job has deigned no answer until now. The present speech, however, squarely traverses what they have said, and indicates that he has merely waited for what all had to urge, that he might answer all of them at once. Not in anger—the problem is too awful for that
And men shall keep watch over the tomb.
33. The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him,
And all men shall draw after him, As there were innumerable before him.
34. How then comfort ye me in vain, Seeing in your answers there remaineth only falsehood?
—but in shuddering amazement Job portrays to his friends what indeed is palpable to every one who will be honest with himself and the world: the wicked prospering, becoming old, and dying in peace, apparently just as secure and just as favored as the righteous. J. F. G.
Instead of chiding his friends, he can only appeal to them to contemplate the awful riddle of Providence, at the thought of which he himself trembles (v. 6). This riddle, the prosperity of the wicked in God’s hand (v. 16), their peaceful death (v. 13), and even the renown of their memory (v. 33), he then proceeds to unfold: First (vs. 2-6), some words of introduction, in which Job bids his friends be silent till he unfolds before them the mystery which weighs down his own soul and the thought of which makes him tremble—then they may mock if they have a mind. Second (vs. 7-34), the mystery itself, the prosperity of the wicked, in four turns:
Vs. 6-16. The wicked are prosperous, themselves, their children, their possessions, and they die in peace. This is an undeniable fact of experience. Vs. 16-21. On the other side, how often is it that they are seen overwhelmed by calamity? There is no such invariable principle. They do not die sudden and violent deaths as the friends represented. Vs. 22-26. Why, then, should men—the friends—be wiser than God? Why should they impose their petty principles on God’s providence, and prescribe methods to Him which He does not follow? Vs. 27-34. Finally Job turns to the insinuations of his friends—he knows the meaning of their indirect allusions, when they say, Where is the house of the prince (v. 28)? but they only show their ignorance of the testimony of those who have travelled (v. 30), and their little sense of the unfathomableness of God’s ways, and even if possible less sense of the ways of men, who have no such horror of the wicked as the friends pretend, but who press forward in their footsteps, admiring their prosperity and forgetting their wickedness (v. 34). A. B. D.
In language of unparalleled boldness Job maintains that the wicked live, grow old, keep their power, their children are established, they and theirs live and die in prosperity, joyous, careless; they renounce God openly, and with complete impunity, a common fate awaits all, there is no sign of the temporal retribution of which dogmatists speak so confidently. This speech virtually closes the second day’s colloquy; its import seems to have been misunderstood; but what is the real object of the trials permitted by God but to demonstrate that goodness may exist, that a man thoroughly sincere, perfect, and righteous may hold fast his integrity though every shadow of hope connected with life be withdrawn? Job feels and declares not only that his own “hedge” has been removed, and that every conceivable calamity has befallen him, destroying the spring of life, and leaving him apparently blasted by God’s wrath, an object of loathing and scorn to the representations of humanity; but also that the whole scheme of the world’s history proves there is no general connection here between goodness and happiness; men who renounce God prosper to the end, and then but share the fate of all mankind; all lie down alike in the dust and the worms cover them. Thus also with regard to the fear and love of God; though quite convinced that it will bring no recompense, he abjures the “counsels of the wicked” (v. 16), and so proves that his innermost convictions are steadfast.
5,6. A very important and necessary introduction to the following statements. Job is quite aware of the horror and indignation which they must excite; none feels this more deeply than he. He trembles, is terrified at the contemplation of apparent injustice in God’s dealing with his creatures. Cook.—The friends have so revelled in their highly colored descriptions that they have almost exulted over the fate of the wicked; Job, on the other hand, full of sympathy with right and truth, must view with amazement the confused order of things; it is not what he wishes to see. J. F. G.
It is deeply interesting to observe, not merely that the difficulties concerning Providence felt by Job refer to the very subjects which painfully perplex the modern mind, but also that the friends of Job exhibit the instinctive tendency which is observed in modern times to denounce his doubt as sin, not less than to attribute his trials to evil as their direct cause. Farrar.
7. In every age, perhaps we might even say in every Christian experience, there are junctures in which it is difficult to reconcile the dispensations of Providence with the goodness of God. The controversy began in the patriarchal days, and is the grand argument of the Book of
Job. “Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?” The seventy-third Psalm is occupied with the clearing of the same paradox. Jeremiah, pre-eminently a sorrowful man, breaks forth thus: “Righteous art Thou, O Lord, when I plead with Thee, yet let me reason the case with Thee of Thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?” (Jer. 12:1.) The worst men are sometimes apparently happy, and the consequence is that the believer is envious at the foolish. Enemies of God appear to him to succeed in every undertaking. Wealth flows in on them; they arrogate to themselves an exemption from all reverses, and feel insured even against Providence; they fill the public eye, they build and decorate, they gather about them the gay and the revelling, they leave wealth to their children. J. W. A.
Still life goes on with the worldly soul, deepening and widening in its flow, and holding in itself manifold and still multiplying elements of interest. Increasingly the man is caught and held by these—like a ship from which many anchors are being cast into the sea. He strives among the struggling, rejoices with the gay, feels the spur of honor, enters the race of acquisition, does some hard and many kindly things by turns, multiplies his engagements, his relationships, his friends, and then—just when after such preparations, life ought to be fully beginning, and opening itself out into a great restful, sunny plain—lo! the shadows begin to fall, which tell, too surely, that it is drawing fast to a close. But he is not ready. He has thrown out so many anchors, and they have taken such a fast hold of the ground that it will be no slight matter to raise them. He is settled. He has no pilgrim’s staff at hand; and his eye, familiar enough with surrounding things, is not accustomed to the onward and ascending way, cannot so well measure the mountain altitude, or reckon the far distance. The progress of time has been much swifter than the progress of his thought. Alas! he has made one long mistake. He has “looked at the things which are seen,” and forgotten the things which are not seen. And “the things which are seen are temporal,” and go with time into extinction; while “those which are not seen are eternal.” And so there is hurry, and confusion, and distress in the last hours, and in the going away. Raleigh.
8-12. Of course Job does not mean to say that they have all this material welfare because they are wicked; that is not the issue. His point, made against the whole tenor of the friends’ arguments, is simply that, being wicked, they are not treated according to their wickedness. J. F. G.
14,15. Their prosperity continues to the very last. Experiencing no reverses and no unusual calamity, with no check upon their good fortune, and no term of suffering that could be regarded as a penalty for their misdeeds, they go down peacefully and quietly to the grave. Their life is filled up with pleasure and with every form of earthly good to its very close. And the natural consequence follows. In their arrogant and impious presumption they refuse all subjection to the Most High. W. H. G.—These men live and die in practical atheism—are simply secularists; they do with impunity, in their day of enjoyment, just what Satan had affirmed Job would do in hopelessness—they “renounce God.” The threefold rejection should be noted—they care not to know His ways, nor to serve Him, nor to be in communion with Him. Cook.
Unbelief is human nature shutting closely her eyes lest she should perceive and love; human nature making her ears heavy lest she should hear and be saved. Man, ruined, wretched, complaining, dying man, is haughty and unbending, still clinging to his own miseries, aggravating his own sufferings, provoking the doom which he sincerely dreads, and refusing to “come to Christ, that he might have life.” Heaven urges by all its joys, and hell by all its terrors; the cross of Christ pleads by all its wonders of justice and of grace, and unbelief replies to every commandment, “We will not have this man to reign over us;” and to every gracious overture, “Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways.” E. M.—What condition of a human soul can be thought of more unnatural or more destructive than to live perpetually in panic with respect to its Creator, its Portion, its Saviour, than to hate the thought of the Greatest, Best, and Loveliest! What more hopeless than to shrink with horror from the countenance that is always turned on us, and be impatient of the searching eye which we can never escape! This is what impenitent men are preparing for themselves in greater measure than they have yet experienced. Even now they sometimes shake with terror, or avoid it only by a violent force put upon the thoughts; but the great mystery of fear is yet to be revealed to them. J. W. A.—The Eternal departs from them. By this is meant not that the Almighty withdraws from man His life-sustaining energy, or forgoes any of His claims to human love and homage. No, He will keep the human spirit in existence and bind it by the laws of moral obligation to His throne forever. But it means a discontinuance of the overtures of His love, and His agencies to restore; it is leaving man to himself, to reap the labour of his own hands. The first stage is probation; the second stage is retribution. In the first stage man says to God, “Depart from me, I desire not the knowledge of Thy ways;” in the second stage God says to man, “Depart from Me.” In the first stage all is Divine mercy; in the second stage all is justice. Anon.
15. What profit if we pray unto Him? Any unperverted mind will conceive of the scriptural idea of prayer, as that of one of the most downright, sturdy realities in the universe. Right in the heart of God’s plan of government it is lodged as a power. Amid the conflicts which are going on in the evolution of that plan it stands as a power. Into all the intricacies of Divine working and the mysteries of Divine decree, it reaches out silently as a power. In the mind of God, we may be assured, the conception of prayer is no fiction, whatever man may think of it. It has, and God has determined that it should have, a positive and an appreciable influence in directing the course of a human life. It is, and God has purposed that it should be, a link of connection between human mind and Divine mind, by which, through His infinite condescension, we may actually move His will. It is, and God has decreed that it should be, a power in the universe, as distinct, as real, as natural, and as uniform as the power of gravitation, or of light, or of electricity. A man may use it as trustingly and as soberly as he would use either of these. This intense practicalness characterizes the scriptural ideal of prayer. The Scriptures make it a reality, and not a revery. They never bury it in the notion of a poetic or philosophic contemplation of God. They do not merge it in the mental fiction of prayer by action in any other or all other duties of life. They have not concealed the fact of prayer beneath the mystery of prayer. The scriptural utterances on the subject of prayer admit of no such reduction of tone and confusion of sense as men often put forth in imitating them. Up on the level of inspired thought prayer is PRAYER—a distinct, unique, elemental power. A. Phelps.
Every man who believes in matter and force and natural law must logically believe in the possibility of miracle and the efficacy of prayer, provided that there is an architect of the universe, and that we can obtain access to him. Bible miracles do not involve the suspension of natural laws, but only arrangements under these laws, or the operation of unknown laws; which, however, may be as inexplicable to us as if they were contraventions of law. Prayer, in the scriptural sense of it, is an appeal to One whose knowledge of and power over His own works are capable of effecting results to us not only impossible, but inconceivable. In maintaining the possibility of miracle and the power of prayer, along with the unchangeable law of God, the Bible is thus on higher scientific ground than that of any of those who call these in question. Dawson.
Among all the moral instincts of man there is no one more natural, more universal, more unconquerable than prayer. Among all peoples, renowned or obscure, civilized or savage, one meets with acts and set forms of invocation. Wherever man lives, under certain circumstances, at certain hours, under the dominion of certain impressions of the soul, his eyes raise themselves, his hands seek each other, his knees bow, to petition or to give thanks, to adore or to deprecate. With joy or with fear, openly or in the secrecy of his heart, it is to prayer that man betakes himself, in the last resort, to fill up the void of his soul, or to bear the burdens of his destiny. It is in prayer that he seeks, when all is failing him, support for his weakness, comfort in his afflictions, encouragement for his virtue. Guizot.—Grant God and man (God’s yet unfallen creature) standing in His presence, conscious of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness, and of his own dependence upon Him, and prayer is an intuitive idea. It remains intuitive when man stands before God as a fallen creature, conscious how far he has gone from original righteousness, though it requires reassuring under his thus altered moral circumstances. It remains intuitive, though it requires redirecting, when man has slighted the one true God, and addressed himself to other objects of worship, whether instead of Him or beside Him. It remains intuitive, though, when the fulness of time was come, Christ was plainly set forth as the medium through whom it is to be offered, and the Holy Spirit was made known as cooperating with the human spirit in its utterance. By such revelations it is sublimed, indeed, and purified, but it is not thereby rendered less an intuitive effort on the part of man. These several and successive interworkings gave prayer a larger scope, or reassured or extended it, or recalled it from abnormal movement, or rescued it from utter perversion, or showed man the most appropriate channel through which it should pass, and the most effectual aid by which his own effort might be sustained. They did not originate it. Man found the faculty or tendency toward it within him, and practised it from the beginning. Hessey.
Prayer is a Divine institution for human training on the side of character, and is related to Divine providence, not to natural causes. That Providence is ordered with entire reference to the education of the human race in love, faith, humility, reverence, and obedience, and is made to hinge largely on prayer, or the application of individuals and communities to God for aid. The idea is not that prayer enlightens God as to the fact, or as to the supply of human wants; or that it persuades Him to change His mind at man’s entreaty; but prayer is a wise condition for God to annex to benefits which He is already inclined to bestow, in order that when given they may be attended with the best results. For spiritual ends it is often better that a thing should not be given, than that it should be given to a state of mind different from that which is secured by prayer, and by prayer alone. For God’s great object is to draw the soul as much as possible into a felt connection with Himself in all things; that by a perpetual faith it may consciously live and rejoice in Him. W. W. Patton. Because life is so subtle an intermixture of dependence and action, prayer is the most practical of all forms of work; it is at once the activity of man’s freedom and the expression of his dependence; and the answer which it wins is not less, in one sense, the result of human effort than in another it is the work of God. And thus it is in and by prayer that the two governing elements of religious life, thought, and work alike find their strongest impulse and their point of unity. Such is our weakness that we are either absorbingly speculative and contemplative on the one hand, or we are absorbingly practical and men of action on the other. Either exaggeration is fatal to the true life of religion, which binds the soul to God by faith as well as by love; by love not less than by faith; by a life of energetic service not less truly than by a life of communion with light and truth. It is in prayer that each element is at once quickened in itself and balanced by the presence of the other. It is prayer which prevents religion from degenerating into mere religious thought on the one side or into mere philanthropy on the other. Thus it is that prayer is of such vital importance to the well-being of the soul. It is indispensable, alike for workers and students, for the educated and unlettered. For we all have to seek God’s face above; we all have souls to be sanctified and saved; we all have sins and passions to beat back and conquer. And these things are achieved pre-eminently by prayer. H. P. L.
Though it be not in the same thing that we desire, yet when the Lord changes our petitions in His answers, it is always for the better; He regards our well more than our will. We beg deliverance; we are not unanswered if He give patience and support. L.—God may answer prayer in what seems to us its denial. We pray for the process, and He gives us the result. A man prays to be delivered from trouble, God sends the trouble, but sends also courage of heart and calmness of mind. Is not the intent of the prayer more completely met than if the form of it had been granted? So God answers our prayers often, not by giving the thing we ask, but by leading us to the end we seek. We cannot doubt that He careth for us. But He may relieve us by removing the occasion of our cares or by so increasing our courage and faith that they shall be no longer a care to us. He may lift our burden from us or so strengthen us under them that they shall no longer be a burden. R. Cordley.
16. Having drawn in such attractive colors the prosperity of the wicked, a prosperity given from the hand of God, Job, even in the midst of his own misery, which is also from God, cannot refrain from repudiating their principles—far be from me the counsel of the wicked. A. B. D.—After quoting the words of the ungodly, Job feels himself compelled, by his deepest personal revulsion, to declare his own inmost abhorrence of them—how he himself is wholly unable to believe that they thus really possess their best weal, and how he does not in the least justify (or sympathize with) such language. Ewald.
17,18. Job challenges his opponents to prove their assertions. How often, he asks, does it happen, as you say, that the torch of the wicked is put out? that calamity comes upon them? that God apportions sorrows (or snares) to them? that they are as straw before the wind, as chaff which the storm takes suddenly away? Cook.—How often is it that the wicked are made like stubble? You say that God deals with men exactly according to their characters, and that the wicked are certainly subjected to calamities; but how often does this, in fact, occur? Do they not live in prosperity, and arrive at a good old age? Barnes.
19-21. The first clause states the dogma: God, you say, reserves His guilt—i.e., its punishment for His children; nay, Job answers, let God requite the man himself, and he shall know it; his own eyes would then see his ruin; he would, as he deserves, drink himself the wrath of the Almighty. If the number of his own months be completed—i.e., if he has lived out his allotted time—what cares he about the prosperity of his house after him? Throughout the preceding statement the references to the arguments of Job’s friends are clear and unmistakable. Cook.
21. What careth he? It is from the depth of Job’s unselfish love that the foregoing demand comes; for he sees that in the cold selfishness of the wicked, punishment reserved for posterity does not touch his soul at all—it does not punish sin of that kind. J. F. G.
22-26. By insisting on a doctrine of Providence which did not correspond to God’s providence as actually seen in facts, Job’s friends were making themselves wiser than God and becoming His teachers—Will any teach knowledge unto God? Shall we insist on His method of government being what it plainly is not? This is what it is: One man dieth in his full prosperity—wholly at ease and quiet. Another man dieth in the bitterness of his soul and has not tasted pleasure. They lie down alike in the dust and the worm covers them. Their different fortune is not determined by their different character. The one is not good and the other wicked. But God distributes to them as He chooses. A. B. D.
27. Your thoughts. All the speakers had insinuated Job’s guilt; none as yet had openly charged him with crimes committed before his ruin; but he felt every blow, and understood the exact bearing of every remark. Cook.
27-34. He reproaches them for identifying the fall of his house and estate, who was a prince among them, with the retribution due to an oppressor or a tyrant. He rebukes the misinterpretation, and gives the true solution of it, that there is a day of wrath and judgment coming—a pretty clear intimation of his faith in a future state. Before that day comes there may not be power in any man here to inflict or declare a just sentence on him who prospers in an evil way; we do not even see the punishment of such in their death, for the quietness of the grave also is alike to all; your argument, therefore, against me is vain, and if intended for comfort through the hope that if righteous I shall be still happy in this world, it is based on a principle which, as false, ought to be rejected. T C.
29. Those “that go by the way” were undoubtedly travellers, particularly such as came from distant journeys in caravans, a mode of travel which is shown by chap. 6 : 19 to have existed in the time of Job. In the paucity of written knowledge, as well as of epistolary communications between distant parts, they were the chief sources of information respecting the circumstances of foreign countries. The idea of Job clearly is that the friends could resort to the testimony of travellers as to what they had observed of God’s dealings with men, and what they had heard of the sayings of the wise in other lands. As to the “tokens,” the reference appears to be to the memorials of persons and events which they had seen in their travels. Kitto.
30. As he had before stated his own hope of a gracious sentence from his Redeemer, so now he closes and completes his masterly argument with a declaration that the wicked who prosper in this life, and leave their proud monuments behind them, shall receive a dreadful recompense in the future day of judgment Peters.
Day of wrath. Wrath and threatening are invariably mingled with the love; and in the utmost solitudes of nature the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven. It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous whirlpools of the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, and of all strength into dust—have these no language for us? The good succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but so also the evil to the good. Gerizim and Ebal, birth and death, light and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence of man and his futurity. Ruskin.—One dark world is to career forever. No sun is ever to arise upon its night. Its people few, compared with the infinite numbers of the universe, they are never to increase or decrease while God endures. They are imprisoned for life—the life of eternity. Reid.
31. The evil-doer stands unreproved because of his prosperity—there is none to repay him what he hath done; he goes to his grave unscathed, and even there his prosperous career continues to watch over him; the very earth that covers him is, by a strong figure, rendered conscious of the preciousness of its trust, and his influence lives after him. Curry.—So great is his power that no one ventures to rebuke his injustice, or is able to punish it. Conant.
32,33. The wicked man came to an honored grave, and the clods of the valley lay softly on him; and his example, so far from being shunned, was followed by the mass of men, as there were multitudes that preceded him in the way he walked. A. B. D.—The rich man lives luxuriously, dies without any mark of judgment, is buried honorably, and leaves his substance to his family. What men saw and knew of him was just what Job and his opponents knew of the wicked; the after awakening was unrevealed. Job sees all this; but it neither leads him to give up the cause of goodness, nor tempts him to turn away from God.
34. Falsehood. Stripped of all artifices, reduced to the ultimate principle, there remains nothing but deceit, a false pretence of honor to God, and real treachery to your friend. Thus ends the second colloquy. Cook.
Job has hitherto answered the accusation of the friends, which they express in ever-increasingly terrible representations of the end of the godless, presenting only the terrible side of their dogma of the justice of God, with a steadfast attestation of his innocence, and with the ever-increasing hope of Divine vindication against human accusation. In him was manifested that faith which, being thrust back by men, clings to God, and thrust back by God Himself, soars aloft from the present wrath of God to His faithfulness and mercy. The friends, however, instead of learning in Job’s spiritual condition to distinguish between the appearance and the reality in this confidence which comes back to itself, see in it only a constant wilful hardening of himself against their exhortations to penitence. It does not confound them that he over whom, according to their firm opinion, the sword of God’s vengeance hangs, warns them of that same sword, but only confirms them still more in their conviction that they have to do with one who is grievously self-deluded. Delitzsch.
True consolation could be founded only on correct views of the government and dealings of God; but such views Job says they had not. With their conceptions of the Divine administration they could not administer to him any real consolation. Truth alone sustains the soul in affliction; truth only can inspire confidence in God; truth only can break the force of sorrow, and enable the sufferer to look up to God and to heaven with confidence and joy. Barnes.