Job 16:2

Eliphaz had called their speeches to Job "the consolations of God" — at least the part that promised restoration if he repented. Job calls them "miserable comforters." Is there to be no end of windy words? Had the friends not used up their stock of accusations? What stirs Eliphaz up to speak further, with nothing new to say? Job could easily treat them the same way if he were in their place. Instead, he would have tried to give real comfort.

I have heard many such things, / And comforters of distress are you all. / Are windy words at an end? / Or what vexes you that you answer?

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were real friends, though they proved to be only "miserable comforters." They came to Job when everyone else had deserted him — children mocking him, young men pushing away his feet, his relatives failing him, his close friends forgetting him, his servants giving him no answer, and his wife refusing him, though he begged her for their children's sake. They were true-hearted friends, who said they would go and comfort their afflicted brother. And they did go; and they sat with him in his place of ashes and broken pottery for seven days.

And what had his friends done for him during the sifting he was passing through? He had good reason to say, "Miserable comforters are you all." They had no true grasp of God's character. So they could not understand His dealings with a soul. They had no proper sense of sin. So they did not know this: if God is going to bless man at all, it must be entirely on the ground of grace. They did not know how to meet his case. They had said many true things. But they had not said one single right thing that applied to Job, because they did not understand him.

All purely human efforts to comfort, apart from God and the truth, are useless, because they are more or less ignorant. And the more bitter the trial, the more obvious that failure becomes... They might have helped if his had been an ordinary case. But here was a deeply righteous man, stripped of every earthly possession in a way no one had ever seen. Their tongues were dumb. They did not understand God's ways with His own people at all. By their false and unworthy suggestions, they made Job feel how unable they were to help him. So they threw him back on God Himself. So that eventually he said, "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you" (Job 42:5).

And no doubt Job spoke the simple truth. He would have been a comforter of sorrow. He would not have been a doctor without any medicine. They brought poison into his wounds instead of something to soothe them. He said, "I have been pouring out my sorrow, but I am no better for it."

So we find that when Job got right about God and himself, he soon got right about his friends. 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 strongly, and so fiercely! "And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends."