Job: Who Darkens God's Counsel?

Suffice it to say now in a brief survey of the friends' arguments leading up to this, Job is suffering, and his friends posit that Job must have done some kind of guilty, deserving sin to merit the kind of suffering that he is enduring.

Or you could also say it the other way, that his suffering proves that he is in sin and needs to repent.

Job maintains his innocence that not that he is equal to God in blamelessness or comparable to Him in righteousness and justice or glory or holiness, no, but that he has not sinned in such a way that God must be punishing him for it as, uh, some kind of retributive forensic exchange.

Neither does he have something so horrible in himself presently or in the past or even in the future that this suffering is some kind of warning that he needs to turn away from something in his life or something he's going to do.

He's also refuted that it's not that his kids have sinned, and therefore this is happening.

He's been making intercession for them.

That's not the, that's not the argument.

And so again and again, Job holds on to two realities, and maybe it's three.

He holds on to the reality that he is innocent.

He's blameless in a sense.

God says that of Job himself.

He holds onto the fact that he's suffering, and it's horrible, and he holds onto the fact that God is good and above reproach.

His friends refuse that tension, and they say that if Job holds onto his innocence and he's suffering, it must mean that he's accusing God of mismanaging the universe, that God is not upright.

He's not righteous.

And they don't have a category for if Job is suffering and he's innocent, that God is then not unjust.

They don't have that category, but Job maintains that the category exists.

So, like, that's a bit of the argument.

Is there any w- way else you would round out the friends' arguments as we jump into Elihu?

Yeah, I think, I think you said it all really well.

I think the main thing there is the insistence that Job must be sinful to suffer as badly as he does, and interestingly, Job and his friends pull from the real world to support their case and therefore make a case for how God runs the world and reasons for why suffering can happen.

And his friends will bring up examples of how the wicked get their just desserts, and that is what God does in the world.

And Job says, "That doesn't make me wicked.

This is not my just desserts." And Job also never wanted to have this conversation.

[laughs] He was just extremely sad and grieving, and then his friends try to comfort him or help him with these solutions.

They try to fix Job's problem, something Job did not ask for.