Job 16:6

Whether Job spoke or remained silent, he found no relief. He feels that God has worn him out by leaving all his company — his friends — with no help to give, so that Job shrivelled up.

If I speak my pain is not assuaged, and if I forbear, what departs from me? Surely now He has exhausted me.

And no doubt Job spoke the plain truth. He would have been a comforter in sorrow; he would not have been a doctor 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."

He certainly did not deny what they read against him — the depth of his desolation. Had they pressed on him that God had permitted it all? That was the very thing he felt so sharply. Up to this point Job was, beyond dispute, godly. He accepted the truth. He does not blame his ruin on the Chaldean raiders or on any other second cause. He saw God's hand. But he never entered into God's mind about the trial, still less into His love. That was exactly why it all made no sense to his soul at the time. He holds fast to his integrity, completely sure that there was nothing of what they imagined against him — no dreadful secret, no crushing sin that God was punishing. His conscience was good. He could not tell how or why, while he sadly felt that God was in it all. But he was just as certain that his friends wronged him badly, and that if they stood in his shoes his words to them would have been very different.

The state of the soul must always depend on how one looks at God, or fails to look at Him. So how vital it is to know God as He really is, and to enjoy that knowledge — so that the soul is at ease and at home with Him, judging itself and resting in His love.

Job turns to God, where he should have found plenty of comfort. Instead he charges Him as the author of his misery and suffering. But his complaint and hot words give him no relief. "You have made desolate all my company," or household. He counts his wasted body as evidence of the wrath of God, which tears him as a wild animal would! Job does not measure his words. He sees only bitter suffering inflicted for no reason, and he is unwilling or unable to trust God in the dark. This is Job's great error, and tied to it is a claim of his own righteousness, as if he deserved credit for it. Here lies something that needs probing, which all the hints and accusations of his friends cannot touch.

Turn to another Sorrow, next to which Job's anguish was nothing. What do we find there? Meekness, patience, and confidence in God — and all of it in the face of bitter hatred from people who charged Him with things He knew nothing about. "When He was reviled, He did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly." In this, as in everything else, there is none like Him.