Job 21:6

It was a great relief to the tried man to speak out. He had failed completely to win their sympathy. Still Job preferred to speak plainly, and had no trouble meeting anything they had to say... "As for me, is my complaint against man?" While all this was going on he has the deep sense of having to do with God, and that is true piety. "And if it were so, why should not my spirit be troubled?" (ESV: "Why should I not be impatient?") — that is, I do not understand it; that is what makes it so terrible.

His difficulties have not vanished. They may well be astonished, for he himself trembles to speak of what he is now going to lay before them. What he will say disproves much of what Zophar had just set out so well.

Now what made Job tremble so when he saw wickedness prosper?... He says, "I can understand it so far. I can fully understand God casting down wicked men — it is only what they deserve. But that is not the fact. Most of them seem to flourish in their wickedness for the time."... A robber breaks into many a godly man's house. Many a godly man's house burns over his head. And here might be wicked men of the worst character, who do not come into these troubles at all!

"Look at me," he says, "and be appalled, and lay your hand over your mouth." They might well keep quiet. They were not answering for God — the God who had allowed (or caused) his terror and trembling. If they truly cared for Job, could they not have prayed to God about how to help the poor sufferer? Probably they never thought of praying for him. They felt sure they already had the right answers for God, with no need of prayer.

They had assumed that, under God's government, no wicked man prospered, and no righteous man could fail to prosper. No view of the world as it now is could be falser... But how did these godly men come to make such a strange mistake? There are none who make stranger mistakes than the godly when they are not walking in dependence on God. Their very godliness gives them a stronger hatred of evil. But if the power of grace is missing, and the sense of their own need of God's grace guarding them, none will be more severe, and none less just.

The wicked know nothing of the painful experiences Job had. They live their whole life without them, then die without suffering. Asaph observed this also, as he records in Psalm 73:3-9. He added in verses 16-17, "But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end." He learned that God's accounts are not settled in this life: there is a future to be considered.