Job 27:12

Although Bildad had very little to say, Zophar had nothing. He is completely out of the debate... Job has it now all to himself. They began with great energy, full of confidence that their judgment was a sound one. But Job had answered all their foolish talk completely, and there they were silent. They were not yet convinced that they were wrong. They simply did what many people do: they stopped talking, with not a word left to say, and still held the same opinion.

Job realised that his friends needed teaching about the hand of God, so he would teach them (v.11). They did need such teaching. But Job himself needed a different kind of teaching from the kind he thought his friends needed, because "the hand of God" is a huge subject. What Job knew about God's hand he would not hide. Yet there was much he did not know, as we all must realise in our ignorance.

Still, he tells his friends that they had seen God's hand at work. Instead of thinking soberly about what these actions of God involved, they were behaving with complete nonsense! (v.12).

'You know very well that I have been holding on to God; you have heard my confession, and why do you charge me with a thing like hypocrisy?'

Their error was by no means unusual. You find it especially among the righteous, who know God but have never been thoroughly broken down about themselves... Here is where they went astray: they assumed that the present state of the world is an adequate expression of God's judgment of men's ways. This assumption runs through the speeches of the three friends. At first they expressed it calmly enough, but at last it hardened into severity.

Is not all this self-evident? Job asks them. Do they not know the Lord's ways? Why then do they indulge in such foolish and wrong thoughts as they had expressed, and charge him — a man whose uprightness they knew, and who was conscious of his own integrity — with having a character like the one he describes?

As he affirmed his own integrity and truth, he charged his friends with being the ones who spoke falsehood and deceit. He held fast to his righteousness with the utmost resolution. This "righteousness," as Job 29 will show us, was about his outward conduct. The searching light of God had not yet entered his soul. He had been charged with being a deceiver and a hypocrite. He knew he was not this, and he was not going to plead guilty to it for a moment. We too know that he was not. But outward correctness does not in itself count for righteousness in the presence of God.

Up to now he had resisted the friends in their arguments about the wicked. They always linked him with their descriptions. He will now take up the same language himself. It shows how impossible it was to confuse a man like himself with the wicked they identified him with, and so it becomes a most powerful reply to their charges.