And he has shriveled me up, which is a witness against me, and my leanness has risen up against me; it testifies to my face.
Job has just called his three friends "miserable comforters." Now he turns from them to his own body. His wasted body has become evidence in the case against him. But who is producing that evidence, and does it prove anything?
What the words describe
Job longs to look up and find God all brightness and love. Instead he looks at his own wasted body, and it speaks against him in public.
William KellyHe returns to his deepest grief. If he could only look up and find Him all brightness and love! But it was not so. He had worn him out with afflictions, emptied his whole circle, and tied him up. His bodily state, his emaciation, testified against him openly.
A witness the friends were already using
Job's body testifies "to my face" because his three visitors had made it speak against him.
Samuel RidoutThey have violated all the God-given safeguards of friendship. They have gone back on all their former confidence. They have treated Job as a stranger they knew nothing about, and they judge his whole past life only by his present condition. It was an outrage on the name of friendship. We can well sympathise with Job's disappointment and anger at such treatment. He had lived his life in front of them in complete uprightness. Now they accused him of hypocrisy, and that was bitter indeed.
Job neither hides his state nor explains it away
Job admits every inch of the ruin. He will not hand the blame to raiders, accidents or anything else standing between himself and God.
William KellyHe does not lay his ruin on the Chaldeans or other secondary causes. He does not explain it away by circumstances. He saw God's hand in it. But he did not in the least enter into God's mind about the trial, still less into His love. That was exactly why everything was so puzzling to his soul at the time. He holds fast his integrity. He is perfectly sure there was nothing of what they imagined against him: no dreadful secret, no burdening sin that God was avenging in this.
Where the reasoning goes wrong
Job also reads his own wasted body as evidence. The verdict he draws from it is the anger of God.
Samuel RidoutHe counts his emaciated body as evidence of the wrath of God, which tears him as a wild animal would. Job truly does not measure his words. He sees only bitter suffering inflicted without cause, and is unwilling or unable to trust God in the dark. This is Job's great error, and tied to it is a protest of his own righteousness, as if he deserved credit for it.
Commentators differ over how directly Job is accusing God here.
William KellyHe does not say it was God. I think it is rather too much to suppose he means that. But he does mean God allowed it. So, in a softened way, he says "He." It was God allowing the devil to do it — his enemy.
Another Sufferer, another answer
One other Sufferer faced the same false charges. He answered them in a completely different way.
Samuel RidoutIf we turn to another Sorrow, compared with which Job's anguish was nothing, what do we find there? We find meekness, patience and confidence in God. And this in the face of bitter hatred from those who "laid things to my charge which I knew not." He is the One "who when He was reviled, 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.
Faith still stirring under the complaint
A few verses later, the same man looks up. He names a witness of a completely different kind.
Arno Clemens GaebeleinBut in all these wild words, faith, sleeping in his heart, asserts itself and tries to wake up. He says, "my witness is in heaven, and He who vouches for me is on high." So he clings to God.
Summary
- Witness one: the body. Job's wasted body speaks against him in public. His friends read it as proof of guilt.
- Witness two: the friends. They treat him as a stranger and judge his whole past by how he looks now. Friendship becomes accusation.
- Witness three: his conscience. Job hides nothing of the ruin. He blames no second causes, and he stays sure God is not punishing a hidden sin.
- The wrong verdict. His error is not the pain but the conclusion he draws from it. He reads his wasted body as proof of God's wrath, and will not trust God in the dark.
- Witness four: heaven. Faith wakes under the complaint and appeals past every earthly witness to the One on high who vouches for him.