Job 19:5

They used Job's disgrace as evidence that he was guilty, so they felt safe in taking a superior position over him (v.5). But he insists that God has wronged him and has all but tied him up in a net (v.6).

The men who heard of Job's disasters seem to have taken this ground: that God's ways and dealings must always be read by whether a man deserves them or not. They clearly had certain standard cases in mind. Some men were godly, and their circumstances showed every mark of God's favour. Others were wicked, and public judgments swept them away. Their knowledge of the wisdom of the Almighty, and of the reasons for His discipline, was shallow. Yet they worked out their own conclusions and pressed them on Job in a galling way: that he fully deserved all he was suffering.

Bring Christ in. Was it any lack of God's delight in Christ that allowed Christ to be the greatest sufferer, far beyond Job? So it was a completely false judgment, resting on a false principle, to imagine that there must be evil in the person who came to this depth of suffering.

What proof did they have of sins in his past? If he had really done wrong, the secret lay in his own heart, where they had no right to intrude. They goad him into saying again what he had already said: that the wrong was not his but God's! This root of suspicion of the Almighty is what must be dug out, and these men's false charges will never do that.

"If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me" — they were too quick to seize on his deep, piled-up afflictions — "know now that God has overthrown me." How boldly he speaks! And this, as far as it goes, could not have come without real faith, though it was far below the meek submission of our blessed Lord. Did they say that God was against Job? "God has overthrown me," he acknowledges. If it was any comfort for them to know, he confesses that his trouble came from His hand.

Job throws off the charge that he was caught in his own snare. He says, "Know now that God has overthrown me, and has hemmed me in with His net." He traces it to God, but cannot see any reason for it. Yet even while this probing of the wound deepens his sense that God is afflicting him unfairly, his spirit is still growing stronger in hope, as we can see in his words: "I know that my Redeemer lives."

A man does badly in business, has illness in his family, loses loved ones — and people jump to the conclusion that God is chastening him for some imagined faults. How cruel this is, and how contrary to the plain direction, "Every charge must be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses." Let us be slow to suspect, and slower still to charge someone with evil we do not know about. Leave that to the Searcher of hearts.