Job 11:1 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Job 11:1

Comments

Zophar is the third of the friends to speak; they speak in strict order in each round of the dialogue. He has less to say than the others and in the third round he is silent, so that Job, after a brief pause, continues to speak himself.He is the most arrogant of them all. He condemns Job outright. Although this is the first time that he has spoken, he starts with an attack on Job. He is a blunt man, who today would have disliked sermons lasting longer than fifteen minutes. He is impatient with Job. It is clear he has not listened carefully to what he has said, nor thought about it at any length. He responds as he had always intended to respond making the most superficial evaluation of Job’s troubles. He has not put himself in Job’s position, or tried to understand the enormous pressure he is under. There is prejudice in him that allows him to lightly dismiss Job’s complaints. Without considering Job’s words in detail he dismisses them as a mere stream of words. The Hebrew is ‘a man of lips’. He charges him with loquacity and long-windedness and says there is no substance to his talk. By now the line which the three friends take is well established and Zophar ploughs the same furrow. He is blunter than the other two, but the dialogue has moved on and given that he has made up his mind in advance that Job is guilty, it is not surprising that he dispenses with the introduction found in Eliphaz’ speech. He is not completely without words of encouragement, but only on condition that Job admits his guilt and repents – in effect agreeing with the comforters’ theology.

Application

Everyone who takes it upon himself to counsel another must at least listen carefully to what they have to say and dispense with bias. He should indeed recognise faults when they occur in others, and should not make excuses for them, and yet he must work hard to see the substance of a lament, and that, in the believer, there may well be a mixture of spirit and flesh at work in a response to suffering. It is too easy to judge a case with an extreme judgment that doesn’t bother to see the full picture. It is laziness to jump to a conclusion, but in the case of Zophar it is also prejudice against Job, a true man of God. We may conclude this from the nature of his attack on Job in this chapter. He holds to ideas which are commonly seen in liberals today. The book could have been written to teach us about liberal theology and expose it. There is an enmity between Zophar and Job which is bound to come out into the open as a result of Job’s trials.

These are ideas that many people hold naturally, things they want from religion – those without light from the word of God. They learn features of religion based not on the Bible, but on natural understanding, human religion. Some worship according to opinion picked up over the years. The book of Job holds this contrast before us. If this is the way we think, we need to learn God’s diagnosis of the human condition, his remedy for man. One of the most serious things that can happen to a person is that they should have a lifelong habit of worship, and find out on the last day that they never knew God.

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Job 11:1 Commentary and Bible Study