Job 20

¹ Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ² “Therefore my thoughts answer me, because of my haste within me. ³ I hear censure that insults me, and out of my understanding a spirit answers me. ⁴ Do you not know this from of old, since man was placed on earth, ⁵ that the exulting of the wicked is short, and the joy of the godless but for a moment? ⁶ Though his height mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds, ⁷ he will perish forever like his own dung; those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’ ⁸ He will fly away like a dream and not be found; he will be chased away like a vision of the night. ⁹ The eye that saw him will see him no more, nor will his place any more behold him. ¹⁰ His children will seek the favor of the poor, and his hands will give back his wealth. ¹¹ His bones are full of his youthful vigor, but it will lie down with him in the dust. ¹² “Though evil is sweet in his mouth, though he hides it under his tongue, ¹³ though he is loath to let it go and holds it in his mouth, ¹⁴ yet his food is turned in his stomach; it is the venom of cobras within him. ¹⁵ He swallows down riches and vomits them up again; God casts them out of his belly. ¹⁶ He will suck the poison of cobras; the tongue of a viper will kill him. ¹⁷ He will not look upon the rivers, the streams flowing with honey and curds. ¹⁸ He will give back the fruit of his toil and will not swallow it down; from the profit of his trading he will get no enjoyment. ¹⁹ For he has crushed and abandoned the poor; he has seized a house that he did not build. ²⁰ “Because he knew no contentment in his belly, he will not let anything in which he delights escape him. ²¹ There was nothing left after he had eaten; therefore his prosperity will not endure. ²² In the fullness of his sufficiency he will be in distress; the hand of everyone in misery will come against him. ²³ To fill his belly to the full, God will send his burning anger against him and rain it upon him into his body. ²⁴ He will flee from an iron weapon; a bronze arrow will strike him through. ²⁵ It is drawn forth and comes out of his body; the glittering point comes out of his gallbladder; terrors come upon him. ²⁶ Utter darkness is laid up for his treasures; a fire not fanned will devour him; what is left in his tent will be consumed. ²⁷ The heavens will reveal his iniquity, and the earth will rise up against him. ²⁸ The possessions of his house will be carried away, dragged off in the day of God’s wrath. ²⁹ This is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.”

Job 21

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “Keep listening to my words, and let this be your comfort. ³ Bear with me, and I will speak, and after I have spoken, mock on. ⁴ As for me, is my complaint against man? Why should I not be impatient? ⁵ Look at me and be appalled, and lay your hand over your mouth. ⁶ When I remember, I am dismayed, and shuddering seizes my flesh. ⁷ Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power? ⁸ Their offspring are established in their presence, and their descendants before their eyes. ⁹ Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. ¹⁰ Their bull breeds without fail; their cow calves and does not miscarry. ¹¹ They send out their little boys like a flock, and their children dance. ¹² They sing to the tambourine and the lyre and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. ¹³ They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol. ¹⁴ They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of your ways. ¹⁵ What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’ ¹⁶ Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand? The counsel of the wicked is far from me.¹⁷ “How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? That their calamity comes upon them? That God distributes pains in his anger? ¹⁸ That they are like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away? ¹⁹ You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their children.’ Let him pay it out to them, that they may know it. ²⁰ Let their own eyes see their destruction, and let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty. ²¹ For what do they care for their houses after them, when the number of their months is cut off? ²² Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those who are on high? ²³ One dies in his full vigor, being wholly at ease and secure, ²⁴ his pails full of milk and the marrow of his bones moist. ²⁵ Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted of prosperity. ²⁶ They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them. ²⁷ “Behold, I know your thoughts and your schemes to wrong me. ²⁸ For you say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’ ²⁹ Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony ³⁰ that the evil man is spared in the day of calamity, that he is rescued in the day of wrath? ³¹ Who declares his way to his face, and who repays him for what he has done? ³² When he is carried to the grave, watch is kept over his tomb. ³³ The clods of the valley are sweet to him; all mankind follows after him, and those who go before him are innumerable. ³⁴ How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.”

In the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on the idea of evil men (speaking presumably of the men who perpetrated the horrors of the Russian gulag) escaping punishment in this life. Solzhenitsyn said of this:

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.

It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country![1]

There is something within us that agrees with Solzhenitsyn’s desire for justice for the wicked. We very much believe that in a just society those who commit atrocities will be duly and rightly punished. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s despair that this was not happening is something we can also understand. In fact, Solzhenitsyn believed that so many who had done so much evil were avoiding punishment that the young were beginning to think that this was normal and perhaps even good. As a result, Solzhenitsyn feared what the future would look like when the absence of justice in this life was accepted and then celebrated: “It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”

What Solzhenitsyn feared for the future is in fact a part of the past, a part of the whole tragic story of human wickedness. In truth, we might say that every age of man has seen a lack of justice for the wicked. It seems like the wicked “get away with it” all too often and, conversely, that the good often find themselves in the midst of inexplicable hardship.

This argument was marshaled by Job in Job 21 to refute Zophar’s latest offensive launched in Job 20. Zophar will argue that Job is being punished because he is wicked. Job will respond that, in point of fact, Zophar is mistaken in his premise: the wicked often seem to prosper instead of suffer.

Zophar restates his thesis with renewed vigor: (a) the wicked suffer, (b) Job is suffering, therefore (c) Job is wicked.

Stephen Chase has offered a stinging indictment of Zophar, his personality, and his theology, describing Zophar as “the youngest, the most brash, the most dogmatic and assured in his theological perspective,” a man whose “own emotional state seems out of control,” “a traditionalist with what he understands to be an impeccable story of balance between the fate of the wicked and that of the righteous,” a man who “never lets the facts of what he sees get in the way of his precious theory,” and a person who is “like a thoughtless child torturing a bug by directing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass until the bug slowly shrivels, crisps, and burns.”[2]

That is brutal, but it appears to be an apt description. I will remind you that in the account of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, John tells us in verse 9 that, upon having their hypocrisy and self-righteousness revealed by Jesus’ masterful response to their query about stoning the woman, “they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones.” The older ones were the first to drop their punishing stones, or, to put it another way, the younger ones were the last to drop theirs. Perhaps we are seeing something of this phenomenon in Job 20: the impetuous and cocksure arrogance of a youthful ideologue who refuses to have his thinking changed by the facts.

Zophar offers yet another defense of the idea of retributive justice in Job 20. He argues that (a) the wicked suffer, (b) Job is suffering, therefore (c) Job is wicked.

¹ Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ² “Therefore my thoughts answer me, because of my haste within me. ³ I hear censure that insults me, and out of my understanding a spirit answers me.

Job’s most recent defense of himself stirred something deep and primal within Zophar. It did so because it dared to question the theory that Zophar held so very precious concerning the wicked and the good. In short, if Job was correct, then everything Zophar thought he knew was incorrect. J. Gerald Janzen explains Zophars language in verses 2 and 3 like this:

Zophar’s “frame” is his embodied self. The “spirit of my frame” refers to the way in which his cultural feelings, thoughts, sensibilities, values – the heritage of generations of cultural shaping…are so deeply ingrained as to form an organic extended part of his embodied self…Zophar voices the same objection at the level of human culture as he is formed by it. What he hears literally shakes and jars his whole structure of existence. The protest of his whole being – the spirit of his frame, in its agitation – gives him his answer to Job. For in and through Job he feels himself threatened by a chaos which must be overcome.[3]

Out of the depths of his own soul and therefore out of the depths of his own biases and assumptions and presuppositions, Zophar struck out at Job with ferocity.

⁴ Do you not know this from of old, since man was placed on earth, ⁵ that the exulting of the wicked is short, and the joy of the godless but for a moment? ⁶ Though his height mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds, ⁷ he will perish forever like his own dung; those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’ ⁸ He will fly away like a dream and not be found; he will be chased away like a vision of the night. ⁹ The eye that saw him will see him no more, nor will his place any more behold him. ¹⁰ His children will seek the favor of the poor, and his hands will give back his wealth. ¹¹ His bones are full of his youthful vigor, but it will lie down with him in the dust. ¹² “Though evil is sweet in his mouth, though he hides it under his tongue, ¹³ though he is loath to let it go and holds it in his mouth, ¹⁴ yet his food is turned in his stomach; it is the venom of cobras within him. ¹⁵ He swallows down riches and vomits them up again; God casts them out of his belly. ¹⁶ He will suck the poison of cobras; the tongue of a viper will kill him. ¹⁷ He will not look upon the rivers, the streams flowing with honey and curds. ¹⁸ He will give back the fruit of his toil and will not swallow it down; from the profit of his trading he will get no enjoyment. ¹⁹ For he has crushed and abandoned the poor; he has seized a house that he did not build. ²⁰ “Because he knew no contentment in his belly, he will not let anything in which he delights escape him. ²¹ There was nothing left after he had eaten; therefore his prosperity will not endure. ²² In the fullness of his sufficiency he will be in distress; the hand of everyone in misery will come against him. ²³ To fill his belly to the full, God will send his burning anger against him and rain it upon him into his body. ²⁴ He will flee from an iron weapon; a bronze arrow will strike him through. ²⁵ It is drawn forth and comes out of his body; the glittering point comes out of his gallbladder; terrors come upon him. ²⁶ Utter darkness is laid up for his treasures; a fire not fanned will devour him; what is left in his tent will be consumed. ²⁷ The heavens will reveal his iniquity, and the earth will rise up against him. ²⁸ The possessions of his house will be carried away, dragged off in the day of God’s wrath. ²⁹ This is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.”

I have learned over the years as a pastor that oftentimes when a church member comes to tell me that “some people” are unhappy about this or that, those people are usually the one who is telling me this and his or her spouse or closest friends. That is, people try to soften their condemnation with the language of obfuscation. That is happening here. Zophar launches a terrifying broadside against the wicked who he refers to throughout as “he.” But the “he” in Zophar’s speech should more accurately be rendered “you,” for Job is clearly the wicked man who Zophar is condemning.

And condemn he does! According to Zophar, the wicked:

• will see their celebrations cut short,
• will see their joy cut short,
• will perish like refuse and be forgotten,
• will evaporate into the air,
• will become invisible to the world,
• will see his children become destitute,
• will be inwardly poisoned by his own evil,
• will be bereft of joy,
• will see his prosperity come to an end,
• will be distressed,
• will be destroyed by those he oppressed,
• will receive the anger of God,
• will be destroyed by the weapons of God,
• will be terrified,
• will lose his wealth,
• will be condemned by heaven and earth.

“This,” cries Zophar, “is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.” In other words, “This is what happens to the wicked…and so this is what is happening to you!”

It is a vicious categorical syllogism:

Major Premise:           The wicked suffer.

Minor Premise:           Job suffers.

Conclusion:                Job is wicked.

There is a tight logic to Zophar’s argument. It is so tight, in fact, that it shut out compassion, understanding, humility, and the possibility that he might be wrong.

Beware haughty dogmaticians who traffic in their own certainties! Beware those who are so sure that they have figured out the mysteries of suffering that they do not flinch at the agony their theories cause those upon whom they foist them! Zophar was indeed a young, certain theologian, but he was not much of a friend. And, as Job will argue, he was not really much of a theologian either.

Job refutes Zophar’s major premise by arguing that, in reality, the wicked often prosper until the end of their days.

In Job 21, Job takes the interesting track of disproving Zophar’s major premise. Remember Zophar’s syllogism:

Major Premise:           The wicked suffer.

Minor Premise:           Job suffers.

Conclusion:                Job is wicked.

If the major premise is true, then so is the minor premise and conclusion. If it is true that the wicked suffer in this life, and it is certainly true that Job is suffering, then it is also true that Job is wicked. That is the logic of Zophar’s argument. Job, however, turns on the major premise with the same ferocity with which Zophar asserted it, arguing that it is simply not true, or certainly not always true! In fact, the opposite often appears to be the case.

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “Keep listening to my words, and let this be your comfort. ³ Bear with me, and I will speak, and after I have spoken, mock on. ⁴ As for me, is my complaint against man? Why should I not be impatient?

Verse 4 is significant because it reminds us that, though Job is arguing with Zophar and his friends, his complaint is really against God and not man. Job also reveals the depths to which their argument had plummeted by forecasting yet more mockery from his friends: “Bear with me, and I will speak, and after I have spoken, mock on.” It would be interesting to approach the book of Job primarily from the perspective of how to and how not to disagree, of how to and how not to argue even. But that is another task for another day.

⁵ Look at me and be appalled, and lay your hand over your mouth. ⁶ When I remember, I am dismayed, and shuddering seizes my flesh. ⁷ Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?

Verse 7, in a nutshell, is Job’s attack against Zophar’s major premise. Far from being punished in this life, Job suggests that more times than not “the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power.” “The longer I live,” wrote Kierkegaard, “the clearer it becomes to me that the real crimes are not punished in this world.”[4] This is Job’s position as well. Job next offers an alternative list to Zophar’s. Whereas Zophar sought to catalogue the suffering of the wicked, Job catalogued their prosperity.

⁸ Their offspring are established in their presence, and their descendants before their eyes. ⁹ Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. ¹⁰ Their bull breeds without fail; their cow calves and does not miscarry. ¹¹ They send out their little boys like a flock, and their children dance. ¹² They sing to the tambourine and the lyre and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. ¹³ They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol.

Verses 8-13 are pregnant with heart-rending anguish. In these verses, Job begins his listing of the blessings of the wicked by pointing to their happy children, their prosperous homes, and their strong livestock. These are precisely the areas in which Satan struck Job. What makes this so very galling, however, is that Job is here describing the peace of the wicked. He next turns to their spiritual lostness and callousness.

¹⁴ They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of your ways. ¹⁵ What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’ ¹⁶ Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand? The counsel of the wicked is far from me.¹⁷ “How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? That their calamity comes upon them? That God distributes pains in his anger? ¹⁸ That they are like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away? ¹⁹ You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their children.’ Let him pay it out to them, that they may know it. ²⁰ Let their own eyes see their destruction, and let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty. ²¹ For what do they care for their houses after them, when the number of their months is cut off?

Job seems to ratchet up the intensity in verses 17-21 by actually mocking the suggestion that the wicked are punished, that the wicked are suffering. He seems almost to be asking Zophar to provide him an example of when this does happen. Janzen argues that verses 22-26 should be read as “a quotation of the views of the friends” and that verse 22, “Will any teach God knowledge…” is what his friends were saying about him.[5]

²² Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those who are on high? ²³ One dies in his full vigor, being wholly at ease and secure, ²⁴ his pails full of milk and the marrow of his bones moist. ²⁵ Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted of prosperity. ²⁶ They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them. ²⁷ “Behold, I know your thoughts and your schemes to wrong me. ²⁸ For you say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’ ²⁹ Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony ³⁰ that the evil man is spared in the day of calamity, that he is rescued in the day of wrath? ³¹ Who declares his way to his face, and who repays him for what he has done? ³² When he is carried to the grave, watch is kept over his tomb. ³³ The clods of the valley are sweet to him; all mankind follows after him, and those who go before him are innumerable. ³⁴ How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.”

Job surveys his friends’ challenge to him, but, in verse 29 and following, he says that everybody actually knows that the wicked do not suffer, that they prosper. He next reasserts that, contra Zophar’s syllogism, the lives and deaths of the wicked are “sweet” and, as a result, Zophar’s words and, by extension, the words of all of his friends, are “empty nothings.”

What are we to take from this intense exchange? For starters, we should agree that, at least to an extent, Job was right. Where Job went too far was in his seeming suggestion that there was no justice anywhere to be had. That is simply wrong. But in arguing that the wicked often do not see justice on this side of heaven, Job was correct. In fact, this truth is recognized elsewhere in scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. For instance, we find it in Psalm 73.

¹ Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. ² But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. ³ For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. ⁴ For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. ⁵ They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. ⁶ Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. ⁷ Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. ⁸ They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. ⁹ They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. ¹⁰ Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. ¹¹ And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” ¹² Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. ¹³ All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. ¹⁴ For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. ¹⁵ If I had said, “I will speak thus,” I would have betrayed the generation of your children. ¹⁶ But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, ¹⁷ until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. ¹⁸ Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. ¹⁹ How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! ²⁰ Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.

The psalmist recognizes that there will be eventual justice, but, again, on this side of heaven, the wicked often prosper. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus said the same:

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

The sun rises on the evil and good.

The rain falls on the evil and good.

However, we must also learn from Job’s errors. There is justice, though it often comes only after death. Many people reject this idea. They always have. For instance, the third century church father Tertullian wrote, “We get ourselves laughed at for proclaiming that God will one day judge the world.”[6] But that is actually the truth.

The classic statement on this is found in Hebrews 9.

²⁷ And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment

Here is a simple statement, but one from which Job could have benefited. We too must hold this truth dear to our hearts. Simply put, it means that while the wicked may avoid judgment in this life, they will not avoid it forever. There will be a reckoning.

Of course, this raises an unnerving truth: as sinners, we all have judgment coming to us. It is one thing to recognize that the wicked will face the wrath of God. It is quite another to face the much more difficult fact that we are among the wicked. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

But it is exactly at this point where we need to hear the rest of the Hebrews 9 passage quoted above.

²⁷ And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, ²⁸ so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

“So Christ…”

What beautiful words! All deserve the wrath of God but the grace and mercy of God are likewise now offered to all! For Christ has come and has “been offered once to bear the sins of many.”

Whenever we think of the righteous suffering, we must be aware that, in truth, only One is truly righteous and He chose suffering…for us! There is a story more perplexing than Job suffering, and it is Christ choosing to suffer. More than that, He chose to suffer for us. This means that our salvation is the greatest “injustice” against a righteous Sufferer to ever happen on the earth, but it was an “injustice” freely embraced by the Son of God so that we might be saved. We are saved because the innocent Christ suffered in our stead. We are saved because the Holy One of God stepped into the injustice of the world and shattered its corruptions with His own sacrificial love.

Praise God for the innocent, righteous Christ who embraced the injustice of the cross so that He might justly save all who come to Him!

 

[1] Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol. I. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973), p.178.

[2] Steven Chase, Job. Belief. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), p.143.

[3] J. Gerald Janzen, Job. Interpretation. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1985), p.85.

[4] Soren Kierkegaard. Attack Upon Christendom. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p.148.

[5] J. Gerald. Janzen, p.156.

[6] Jones, Brian (2011-08-01). Hell Is Real (But I Hate to Admit It) (p. 20). David C. Cook. Kindle Edition.