Zophar now spoke up….”You’re all talking too much and getting nowhere! Job, you think you know all the answers! If only we could hear what God has to say, He would tell us what this is all about……”     How often we feel like this!  In times of trouble, God seems to be far away. “You must have done something wrong, Job, for this to happen to you. If you put your sin away, then God will make things come right, there will be light at the end of the tunnel. That’s the way to be safe from further trouble”.

     Job was getting fed up with all these accusations and assumptions that he was a secret sinner. “It’s alright for you to talk! But I’m just as good as you are! There’s no need for people to laugh at me….just ask the animals, they know that God exists! We all know that He is in control of everything on earth, and that He makes the nations great and then pulls them down. I just wish I could speak directly to God, I would present my case as if I were in a court of law! You are all no help at all to me, you just condemn me out of hand!”      Job now makes a great statement of his faith in God….”Even if He kills me, I will still hope that He will listen to my reasons. I just want two things from Him…relief from this pain and then Him calling to me so I can answer! I know that we only live a few days and are then gone like a flower that withers away. A tree has more hope than we do…if it gets cut down then it will sprout again from its roots! But when we die, is there any hope?” Job seems to have reached the pit of despair…..”All this pain is like the wearing away of a mountain face by the continual running of water….nothing else counts in the face of this affliction!” What a lesson to us! Let us never waiver in our faith in times of trouble!

Then Eliphaz tries again,  and is even more condemning this time than the first time… “The trouble with you Job, is that you talk as though you know everything! You say wrong things, and you condemn yourself while you talk!”     He carried on in his rhetoric… “Were you the first man to be born? Do you know more than we do? You just listen to me! Those who turn against God get nowhere, all that they do turns to dust! You can’t get anywhere fighting against God.”    Job was fast losing patience with his friends and replied to this by saying, “I’ve heard all this before…a miserable lot of comforters you all are! You don’t know what it feels like…I feel full of wrinkles, and it’s as though God has taken me and shaken me to bits. I’ve cried until I can cry no more, and my friends all scorn me. It won’t be long before I’m dead, and then I can be buried. I feel just like a shadow, and there’ll be nothing of me left by the time this is all over!

     Perhaps you have felt like this at times….but take heart, God never leaves His own. In the midst of all these trials, Job was learning things that he would never forget, and that he would be able to pass on to others in the future. . (Job, chapters 11-17)