Job 16:1

Eliphaz had claimed to be giving Job "the consolations of God." This moves Job to a bitter reply: "Miserable comforters are you all!" (v.2). Instead of comfort, they had given heartless accusations, which Job terms "words of wind." He says that if they were in his place, he could heap up words against them in the same cruel way. But he would not do that. He would use his words to strengthen and encourage them, and so give them some relief. He longed for this himself, but they had nothing for him.

His friends had been repeating the same basic idea in different ways: the disasters that had overwhelmed him could have only one explanation. He must have been a hypocrite, with evil hidden under his religious exterior. If this was the comfort they had to offer him, it was of a very miserable kind.

They had no true grasp of God's character, and so they could not understand His dealings with a soul. They had no proper sense of sin. So they did not know that if God blesses man, it must be entirely on the ground of grace. They did not know how to meet his case. They had said many true things, yet not one right thing that fit Job, because they did not understand him.

They turned him in the wrong direction; they engaged him with himself. He could not deny that he was afflicted. Measuring himself against other men, he could not see that he had done anything to bring such great affliction on himself. And his friends harassed him, holding his mind to this one point: that God's doings match man's acts, and so, since he suffered this much, he must have been wicked in an extraordinary degree. Job resists (Job 16) and calls his friends "miserable comforters" — and so they were... "My friends scorn me," he exclaims, "my eye pours out tears to God."

All human efforts to comfort, apart from God and the truth, fall short, because they are more or less ignorant. And the harder the trial, the plainer that failure becomes... They did not understand the ways of God with His own at all. By their false and unworthy suggestions, they made Job feel how completely unable they were to help him, and they threw him back on God Himself. So in the end he said, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (Job 42:5).

The words of his friends irritated him; he found neither wisdom nor comfort in them. But he could listen to Elihu. There was healing balm in his words... No one showed him his vileness as Elihu did. Yet the words that laid him low as a naked sinner before God were the only words he had the patience to listen to.

So when Job got right with God and with himself, he soon got right with his friends, for he learned to pray for them. Yes, he could pray for the "miserable comforters," the "physicians of no value" — the very men he had argued with so long, so stubbornly, and so fiercely! "And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends."