My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends.
Job’s friends condemned and he acquitted
These words suggest the following reflections.
I. God is an auditor to all the discussions of mankind. If men realised this, all frivolous, vain, ill-natured, deceitful, profane, irreverent, and untruthful speech will be hushed.
II. The professed advocates of religion may commit sin in their advocacy. These three men were engaged in an endeavour to vindicate the ways of God. They considered Job a great heretic; and they took on themselves to stand up for God and truth. Notwithstanding this, they had not spoken of Him the thing that was right. There are professed advocates of religion who speak not “the thing that is right” concerning God.
III. A practical confession of sin is the duty of all sinners. “Take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to My servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering,” etc.
IV. Intercession of one man for another is a Divine law. “Go to My servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and My servant Job shall pray for you; for him will I accept.”
1. Intercessory prayer is an instinct of the soul. Nothing is more natural than to cry to heaven on behalf of those in whom we feel a vital interest.
2. Intercessory prayer is a blessing to the soul.
V. The life of a good man is a blessing to a community. “My servant Job shall pray for you; for him will I accept; lest I deal with you after your folly.” For Job’s sake these men were forgiven and blessed. God educates, saves, and ennobles man by man. (Homilist.)
As My servant Job hath.
My servant Job
Look at Job in his misery. Now comes the problem. Why this sudden, this awful change? Morally, spiritually, religiously, this man is just what he was before. The friends vainly tried to account for it on the score of his own ill-doings and moral defects. Job victoriously repels all their charges and insinuations. Elihu tries to meet the case by arguing that “God is greater than man.” How can the finite have the infinite made simple? You cannot pour the ocean into a pond. Though we cannot understand His matters, yet He has revealed enough of Himself and His doings, and more than enough, to show us that trust in His providence, loyalty to His rule, and hope in His Word is gloriously certain to result in our safety and security, our sustentation and deliverance, our ultimate prosperity and peace. “My servant Job.” God calls him by that name in the days of his wealth and prosperity. Riches and grace can go together. God calls him by the same name before ever the days of testing, trial, and calamity came upon him. The expression is used by the Almighty at the end of the book as well as at the beginning, and what was Job’s condition then? Just before this was said, Job bad uttered hard things of his God,--of His government, of His dealings with himself. Even when God came to speak to him he was sullen under a sense of wrong. And yet, in spite of all his faults, infirmities, and sins, the Lord lays His hand lovingly on his bended head, and fondly owns him, in the presence of his three friends, as “My servant Job.” (J. Jackson Wray.)
In the wrong
It is not the first time in the history of the world that the majority of religious professors have been wrong. The solitary thinker, the philosopher, the heretic, the forlorn monk, the rejected of his day, has been sometimes, even in spite of many errors, in the right, That little group in that unknown land of Uz, who tried to silence the one among them who was in his wild cries and low wails the herald and the apostle of a truth that was one day to be embodied in the symbol of Christ’s religion--they warn us against thinking that truth is always to be found on the side of numbers, that the God of truth marches always with the largest battalions. How startling to those who heard them, how instructive to us who read them, are the words which we shall find when next we meet, “Ye who have been so earnest, so rigid in justifying My ways, and asserting My righteousness; ye have not spoken the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath.” (Dean Bradley.)