Job 16:5

Eliphaz had claimed to be giving Job "the consolations of God," and this moves Job to reply bitterly, "Miserable comforters are you all!" (v.2). Instead of comfort, they had given heartless accusations, which Job calls "words of wind." He says that if they were in his place, he could pile 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 to give them some relief. He longed for this himself, but they had nothing for him.

Just let them change places, if that had been possible. Let those three friends be in Job's position. Let them have not only their possessions but their families swept away… Let their bodies suffer too, in a way as visible and agonising as Job's… Put them in those circumstances, with Job as the friend who comes to speak to them: could he not have used words and looks just as harsh? I cannot help thinking that Job's answer here is a deeply moving appeal, especially when he goes on, "I could strengthen you with my mouth." There he clearly has the advantage in grace over them… Not one word of that kind or purpose had come from them.

He meets their wrong accusations with great skill. He brings out his suffering afresh, yet always with that horrible nightmare behind it: God is not for me, but against me! Such things as Eliphaz spoke he had heard before. What are you anyway? Nothing but miserable comforters. If they were in his condition, he would speak too. "I could strengthen you with my mouth, and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain." I would never treat you as you treat me.

And no doubt Job spoke the plain truth. He would have been a comforter of sorrow, not a physician with no 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.'

And what had his friends done for him during the sifting he was going 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 that if God was going to bless man, it had to 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 single right thing that applied to Job, because they did not understand him.

All merely human efforts to comfort, apart from God and the truth, fall short, because they are more or less ignorant. The harder the trial, the more obvious that failure becomes… They might have been of use if his were an ordinary case. But when a deeply righteous man lost every possession he had, in a way no one had ever seen, they had nothing to say. They did not understand God's ways with His own people at all. Their false and unworthy suggestions made Job feel how completely unable they were to help him, and they threw him back on God Himself.