Please turn; let no injustice be done. Turn now; my vindication is at stake.
His friends have explained his ruin as the harvest of his own wrongdoing. In this verse Job turns to them and pleads with them to go back and start again.
The Plea: Come Back to a Fair Judgment
Job asks the same thing twice: turn back. One writer explains what he wants them to turn back to. He quotes an older wording, "Return, I pray you, let it not be iniquity." The ESV puts it as a plea against injustice.
William Kelly"Return, I pray you, let it not be iniquity" — he begs them to return to a sound judgment of the case. Their poor friend was under a terrible trial and could not see why it had come upon him. "Let it not be iniquity." It has nothing to do with that.
What He Wants Them to Return To
He wants them to drop a sweeping theory and face a plain fact.
Samuel RidoutIn contrast with their injustice, let them look at him carefully. Is he lying when he insists that he is upright? Let them return from their wholesale charges of evil against him, to the plain and self-evident fact that he is upright. No iniquity in him can explain the tortures he now suffers. He can discern evil, and would not hide it, even in himself.
The Injustice He Names
The same writer names what made their treatment unjust.
Samuel RidoutThey are taking his poor, rash, desperate speeches, forced out of him by his suffering. They treat them as if they were the well-considered statements of someone putting forward a philosophic principle. Why could they not make allowance for the anguish that wrings from him words that are like "windy words"? They were treating him as unfeelingly as those who would rob orphans. Were they not trying to swallow up their friend, and make him out to be like the wicked?
The One Charge He Never Allowed
On this one point Job never gave an inch through the whole debate, and he was correct.
William KellyIn all the debate he never once allowed that his suffering came from hidden wickedness, or from the smallest tinge of hypocrisy. No, no, no; they were all wrong about that, and he would never give it up until weeds turned into barley. He knew perfectly well that that could not be.
Job read his agony as an attack from God. One writer says he had the source wrong:
C. StanleyHe felt the arrows of the Almighty inside him, and the terrors of God lined up against him. This was a great mistake. They were the arrows of Satan. God was not against Job. If Job had only known it, God was for him.
Right About the Charge, Wrong About the Ground
The verse ends with Job's righteousness; an older wording reads, "my righteousness is in it." His uprightness was real. But one writer says he began to rest his standing on it.
J. N. DarbyJob was upright, but he began to make this his righteousness. That clearly proves he had never really been in the presence of God.
Kelly takes the same verse one step further:
William KellyHe had to learn that his own righteousness, however real, could be no ground. He must have the righteousness of God to stand upon, though he hardly knew how it could be.
Clearing your name before people and standing before God are two different things.
A Warning for Anyone Who Comforts
The friends' mistake was not that they spoke falsehood. It was that they aimed truth at the wrong target.
J. N. DarbyAnd what had his friends done for him during the sifting he was passing through? Well might he say, "Miserable comforters are you all." They had no true grasp of God's character. So they could not understand His dealings with a soul. They had no proper sense of sin. So they did not know that if God deals with man in blessing, it must be entirely on the ground of grace. They did not know how to meet his case. They had said many true things, but not one single right thing that applied to Job, because they did not understand him.
Summary
- Turn back. Job asks his friends to reverse course and judge his case soundly, not by their borrowed theory.
- No injustice. They seized desperate words from a suffering man and weighed them as settled belief.
- No hidden sin. Job refused the charge of hidden wickedness or hypocrisy from first to last, and he was right.
- No enemy above. The arrows he felt were Satan's, not a God turned against him; God was for Job the whole time.
- No ground in self. His uprightness was real, yet he had begun to rest on it; what he needed was a righteousness from God to stand upon.