Job 6:1-7:21

I have to say, I have never experienced anything like Job's ordeals.  I have lost family members, but not so many, and not at once.  I've never had a horrible, painful, wasting disease.  And, praise be to the Father, I've had very few friends like Job's friends.  I think Job has a pretty understandable response: "I am so miserable, I cannot find comfort anywhere, except in depth.  Not even in you, who calls yourself my friend!  You've attacked me, accused me of wrong, and this is your comfort?  Go away!  Soon, hopefully, I'll die and you won't bother me then."  Or, at least that's how I take Job's words.

Job's response to Eliphaz is a masterpiece of sarcasm.  Am I a monster, he asks, that you have to guard me?  You come, scaring me with tales of visions and ghosts so that I would want to die ever more.  Why do you care so much about me that you would come and sit with me and test me?  How long are you going to stay?  He calls Eliphaz "you watcher of mankind" and asks him why he's made Job his mark, why has Job become such a burden.  After all, Eliphaz doesn't have to stay.  Eliphaz can go.  Why bother to stick around if he's only going to accuse Job?   Job would rather have the cold comfort of a grave.

Part of me bubbles with nervous laughter reading this.  I feel like the proverbial fly on the wall, eavesdropping on these friends' conversations and wishing, rather, that I didn't.  It's like being a witness to an ugly argument and wishing you could really not notice it rather than pretending to.  It's painful to listen to Job's friends accuse him of sinning and telling him that he is suffering because of sin, and then to hear Job's sharp, sarcastic response.  If you learn nothing else from these chapters, you can at least see how not to comfort someone.  I had a professor in college that liked to say, "No man is ever a waste: he can at least be a bad example."  No one ever wants to only serve as a bad example.  Maybe Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu weren't only bad examples, but we can learn some things from them for our "not to do/not to say" list.

Tomorrow's Reading: Job 8:1-22