Job 20:8

"So my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste." Yes, and that is just where haste generally lands us. It is easy for those who are not in trouble to speak. It is easy to suspect evil of a man who is in the depths… "Do you not know this from of old, since man was placed on earth" — are you the only man who knows the mind of God? — "that the exulting of the wicked is short, and the joy of the godless but for a moment?" Is that all Zophar had ever learnt? Did he know of no dealings of God for the trial and good of His children here below?

In his imagination his hopes may have risen to the heavens and his head to the clouds. But he is burned up like fuel stored for the winter. In the East people prepared cattle dung for fuel, and that well-known custom explains the picture used here. Men will miss him and ask in vain, Where is he? Like a passing dream of the night he is gone. The eyes that once looked on him see him no more… The section begins with heaven and ends with the grave!

This is the fullest contrast with the positive blessing of faith. The one who does the will of God abides forever. The one who does not is like a dream, or a vision of the night. Seen once, he is not before the eye again; his place knows him no more.

There is an intensity in Zophar that gives a distinct character to his words. He denounces evil with force, and leaves no room for doubt that he means Job. He describes the certain doom of the wicked in language so intense that it soon uses up all he has to say… All that he says is true; his own unpardonable error is that he tries to apply it to a righteous man.

Zophar limited himself simply to the particular cases where God deals judicially with some especially wicked men. And there are such cases every now and then. A man swears to a downright lie, and occasionally he drops down dead after it. Well, that is a very unusual thing. Other people swear to a lie, keep their money, and try to keep their reputation. All the while they are storing up wrath for the day of wrath… As a general rule the wicked were not passing away like a dream at all, whatever Zophar pretended. It was the opposite. "Their houses are safe from fear."

Things that are true, but misunderstood and misapplied, may do more harm than many a thing that is false. Misapplied truth gives the apparent authority of God to an error. That error carries all the more weight because it comes as the truth. If someone says a foolish thing, or something clearly false, people despise it. But no believer can dismiss the truth of God. So what if someone uses the truth of God wrongly? What if he uses it to crush a person who at that moment is an object of intense interest to God? How foreign and offensive that is to His mind! How hateful that His name should be twisted in that way!