We've all heard the saying, "With friends like that, who needs enemies?" And, with the exception of perhaps Judas, nowhere in the Bible does this seem to apply more than to the friends of Job. Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. What jerks, huh? Yes, they have a bit of a bad reputation for being some of the worst comforters this world has seen.
As a person who has absolutely no problem airing my frustrations and woes of this life with people I trust, I am certainly not trying to redeem these three men somehow. Much of what they say is quite unhelpful, at least. And when one first examines this story, it would appear that they don't have a lot of good lessons to teach us since all they do is reiterate that which we know to be untrue; they say everything is Job's fault. However, in a similar vein, there are at least three things Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar do correctly that we can take lessons from when our own friends are confiding in us.
1. They don't start in on Job until he's said his peace.
"Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and nights. No one said a word to Job, for they saw that his suffering was too great for words." (Job 2:13, NLT)
Not only in the passage before this have they cried with Job and genuinely grieved for his misfortune, but then they shut up and let him grieve. I mean, these guys are here for a flipping week! No one speaks. No one moves. Do they even have to use the restroom during this time? I guarantee I would have snapped and said something within the first five minutes. Yet I believe this is a lesson on the value of silence.
Sometimes, when we or our friends are grieving, all we need is silence. We don't need those around us to try to make us feel better because they can't. In the past year of my life, I have had so many instances where all I needed was to be held and know that no matter what happened, the people around me were there. Some griefs go too deep for words. Yet so often, in our society, we place such an emphasis on advice and always having the right thing to say.
It's because of this I've often taken to asking a friend who is confiding in me what it is that they need. Do they want my advice, or do they want me to be silent and just be there? Sometimes hugging is involved, other times they are just satisfied with my presence. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure if Zophar had gone to embrace Job in this instance, Job might have run screaming in the opposite direction.
2. There is a minimal amount of interrupting.
"Will you be patient and let me say a word? For who could keep from speaking out?" (Job 4:2, NLT)
No matter how fed up Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar get with Job's ramblings about how he's been wronged, they never once cut across him. The closest they get to interrupting is saying, once he has finished, that they can no longer hold their peace and must correct him. And let's face it, it must have been tempting. Job was kind of a long-winded dude. This is, admittedly, something I, too, am guilty of when I'm in distress.
For all that they insist that he must have done something to deserve this, for all that they are awful at the whole comforting thing, these three men we encounter in this passage have, in fact, learned the grand gift of listening.
3. In any other situation, they actually have some good pieces of advice.
God is a good Father, but because he is a good Father, sometimes our suffering does come because we've been disobedient and have wronged him in some way. This was not the case with Job, so he had every right to throw on sackcloth and ashes and cry out, "Woe is me!" However, I know there have been times in my life where I could benefit from the words of Job's friends. Here are just a few tidbits.
"Doesn't your reverence for God give you confidence? Doesn't your life of integrity give you hope?" (Job 4:6, NLT)
"Does God twist justice? Does the Almighty twist what is right?" (Job 8:3, NLT)
"Can you solve the mysteries of the Almighty? Can you discover everything about the Almighty?" (Job 11:7, NLT)
These men have a solid understanding of the sovereignty of God, and it shows in what they say.
There is a reason, of course, all of these pearls of wisdom tend to be toward the beginning of the book. Because as we get farther and farther inward, the men get more and more irritated with Job and what they say starts to be less wise and more biting. And, for that matter, decidedly inapplicable. Because for all that they understood God's sovereignty, they also had a juvenile grasp of his justice.
Yes, in spite of these lessons we can learn from the friends of Job, I still hold firmly to the fact that they were not speaking truth into his life. And that is the most important thing we can do in comforting our friends. So I'm not trying to hold them up as paragons of virtue. They still rather irritate me. But, at least toward the beginning of their story, they were doing a few things right.
