Job 20:21

The last of the three speakers comes forward once more. He even admits the haste, if not the irritation, that drove him to deal with Job. Zophar's main point is how short-lived the wrongdoer's triumph is. Such a man may seem to rise fast to the highest peak of prosperity. But that rise ends only in a sudden fall to the lowest pit of misery and disgrace, where he is the obvious object of God's anger.

What he had worked for he gives back, and does not swallow it. The wealth he traded for gives him no joy. For he ground down and abandoned the poor. He seized a house he was not to build, and was cut off before his plans were ripe and he could enjoy them. Inside him is a greed that nothing satisfies. So he would not escape with what he values most — nothing was left over from his eating — and his prosperity does not endure.

Reading Job 20, we can see what runs underneath his statements about various acts of wickedness. He is hinting that Job had been guilty of them. It was Job who had worked to swallow down other people's property and to oppress the poor. It was Job who had violently taken away a house he had not built, and so on. The fact is that a man who bases his argument on his own intuition is always very dogmatic and cocksure. He has to be, to make up for the lack of outward evidence that would back up his claims.

There is, as already noted, an intensity in Zophar that gives his words a distinct character. He fiercely denounces evil, leaving no doubt that he means Job. He paints the certain doom of the wicked in language so heated that it soon uses up everything he has to say... Everything he says is true. His own unforgivable error is that he tries to apply it to a righteous man.

"Nothing is left for him to eat," Zophar says. His prosperity will not last. His self-sufficiency will only mock him, and misery would come at him from every side (vv.21-22)... Job felt that this was in effect what God was doing to him, and Zophar seemed glad to rub it in, to make Job all the more miserable. But this could not convince Job that he was wicked, for he knew such accusations against him were false.

Sometimes wicked men are cut off, but some wicked men live and grow old and become mighty in power above others (v.7). Why? Their children often get on well with hardly a setback (v.8)... They seem to have nothing to fear, and the discipline of God's rule seems not to apply to them (v.9)... Asaph observed this too, as he records in Psalm 73:3-9. In verses 16-17 he added, "it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end." He learned that God does not settle His accounts in this life: there is a future to reckon with.

Zophar would discourage Job from ever expecting any good to come out of his afflictions. How little he knew the heart of God! God later moved Paul to write, "For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Cor. 4:17).